Maggie Smith, Grande Dame of Stage and Screen, Dies at 89

 

She earned an extraordinary array of awards, from Oscars to Emmys to a Tony, but she could still go almost everywhere unrecognized. Then came “Downton Abbey.”

 

By Anita Gates and Robert Berkvist

 Maggie Smith, one of the finest British stage and screen actors of her generation, whose award-winning roles ranged from a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” to the acid-tongued dowager countess on “Downton Abbey,” died on Friday in London. She was 89.

Her death, in a hospital, was announced by her family in a statement issued by a publicist. It did not specify the cause of death.

American moviegoers barely knew Ms. Smith (now Dame Maggie to her countrymen) when she starred in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), about a teacher at a girls’ school in the 1930s who dared to have provocative views — and a love life. Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times described her performance as “a staggering amalgam of counterpointed moods, switches in voice levels and obliquely stated emotions, all of which are precisely right.” It brought her the Academy Award for best actress.

She won a second Oscar, for best supporting actress, for “California Suite” (1978), based on Neil Simon’s stage comedy. Her character, a British actress attending the Oscars with her bisexual husband (Michael Caine), has a disappointing evening at the ceremony and a bittersweet night in bed.

In real life, prizes had begun coming Ms. Smith’s way in 1962, when she won her first Evening Standard Theater Award. By the turn of the millennium, she had the two Oscars, a Tony, two Golden Globes, half a dozen BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) and scores of nominations. Yet she could go almost anywhere unrecognized.

Until “Downton Abbey.”

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Ms. Smith on the set of the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” She won an Academy Award for best actress for the performance.Credit...Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

That series followed the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), his mostly aristocratic family and his troubled household staff at their grand Jacobean mansion as the world around them, between 1912 and 1925, refused to stand still.

A Breakout Star

After its premiere in Britain in 2010 and in the United States a year later, the show ran for six seasons. Its breakout star, from the beginning, was Ms. Smith, playing Lord Grantham’s elderly and still stubbornly Victorian widowed mother, Violet Crawley, the dowager countess. She disapproved of electric lights, was unfamiliar with the word “weekend” and never met a person or situation she couldn’t ridicule with withering imperiousness. When her daughter-in-law considered sending a younger relative for a stay in New York, Lady Grantham objected: “Oh, I don’t think things are quite that desperate.”

Suddenly, in her mid-70s, Ms. Smith was a megastar.

“It’s ridiculous. I’d led a perfectly normal life until ‘Downton Abbey,’” she told the arts journalist Mark Lawson at the B.F.I. and Radio Times Television Festival in 2017. She added later, “Nobody knew who the hell I was.”

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Maggie Smith on the set of the 1967 film “The Honey Pot.”Credit...Martin Mills/Getty Images

The closest Ms. Smith had come to such visibility was with the Harry Potter movies. She was Minerva McGonagall, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’s stern but fearless transfiguration teacher, in seven of the eight films, from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001) to “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” (2011).

McGonagall, wearing high-necked Victorian-style gowns, a distinctive Scottish brooch and upswept hair beneath a tall, black witch’s hat, was a striking onscreen presence. Yet Ms. Smith did not find herself constantly pursued in public, except by children.

“A lot of very small people kind of used to say hello to me, and that was nice,” she recalled on “The Graham Norton Show” in 2015. One boy carefully asked her, “Were you really a cat?”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on Dec. 28, 1934, in Ilford, which was a town in Essex at the time and is now part of the borough of Redbridge in London. Her father, Nathaniel Smith, was a public-health pathologist, and her mother, Margaret (Hutton) Smith, was a secretary who was born in Scotland.

When Maggie was 5, the family moved to Oxford, where her father taught. After studying at the Oxford School for Girls, she joined the newly formed Oxford Playhouse and made her acting debut in 1952 in “Twelfth Night.”

Driven to Perform

The urge to act had always been there. “It’s not even that you particularly want to be an actor,” she once said. “You have to be. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

Although Ms. Smith was in her early 20s when she appeared in her first movie (as a party guest in “Child in the House,” a 1956 drama) and made her London stage debut (in “Share My Lettuce,” a 1957 musical revue), it could reasonably be argued that she was never an ingénue.

Her early films included “The V.I.P.s” (1963), a Technicolor melodrama starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964), a marital drama written by Harold Pinter and based on a novel by Penelope Mortimer. In the first, she was the mousy, adoring secretary of a handsome tycoon (Rod Taylor). In the second, she was Anne Bancroft’s weird houseguest who wouldn’t shut up — or leave. Both films were made before her 30th birthday, but both characters were, in their own ways, already world-weary.

In “The Honey Pot” (1967), a glamorous murder-mystery comedy starring Rex Harrison, she was Susan Hayward’s nurse-companion.

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Ms. Smith with Alec McCowen in the 1972 film “Travels With My Aunt,” based on Graham Greene’s novel. She played Aunt Augusta, an amoral world traveler in her 70s, though she was just 37 at the time.Credit...Archive Photos/Getty Images

Ms. Smith was just 37 when she starred in “Travels With My Aunt” (1972), based on Graham Greene’s novel, playing Aunt Augusta, an amoral world traveler in her 70s. (Katharine Hepburn, 64 at the time, had been cast but dropped out because of a disagreement with producers.)

New York was never a significant factor in Ms. Smith’s career. After her Broadway debut, in the revue “New Faces of 1956,” she stayed away for almost two decades. Returning in 1975, she played the sophisticated Amanda Prynne in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” about a divorced couple who reconnect while honeymooning with their second spouses, then appeared in Tom Stoppard’s “Night and Day” (1979) as a mining magnate’s unhappy wife. She received Tony nominations for both roles.

In “Lettice and Lovage” (1990), Ms. Smith played a tour guide who makes up outrageous (and vastly entertaining) lies about the old houses she shows people through. Frank Rich paid tribute in his review for The Times: “Miss Smith’s personality so saturates everything around her that, like the character she plays, she instantly floods a world of gray with color,” he wrote. “This is idiosyncratic theater acting of a high and endangered order.”

That performance won her a Tony for best actress in a play. But Broadway was a blink of the eye compared with the British stage.

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Ms. Smith starred opposite Laurence Olivier in the film version of “Othello” (1965), bringing her the first of her six Oscar nominations.Credit...Warner Brothers

In the early 1960s, Ms. Smith starred opposite Laurence Olivier at the National Theater in “Othello,” as Desdemona, the devoted but doomed wife. (The 1965 movie version brought her the first of her six Oscar nominations.)

A British Stage Record

She won six Evening Standard awards (a record) for stage performances, beginning with “The Private Ear” and “The Public Eye” (1962), Peter Shaffer’s comedy double bill.

That was followed by the title role in “Hedda Gabler” (1970), the director Ingmar Bergman’s first production outside Scandinavia. In the 1980s, Ms. Smith won for Edna O’Brien’s “Virginia” (1981), in which she played the novelist Virginia Woolf, and for her role as the willful Millamant in “The Way of the World” (1984), William Congreve’s Restoration comedy about marriage and money.

In 1994, Ms. Smith won for playing the oldest of the title characters in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women.” Paul Taylor’s review in The Independent described her as “the person who hardened into a monster because she has had the burden of being strong for everyone in the family.”

After a 25-year break, Ms. Smith won for “A German Life” (2019), in which she portrayed the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s longtime secretary.

“What Smith captures brilliantly,” Michael Billington, the critic for The Guardian, wrote, “is the way, in old age, vagueness of memory coexists with moments of piercing clarity.”

Ms. Smith spent four seasons at the Stratford Festival in Canada, taking on a rich assortment of roles, including Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth and — in “Richard III” — a 15th-century queen of England.

Yet it was the film industry that made her an international star.

She appeared in some mainstream American hits, including “Sister Act” (1992), as the mother superior trying to tame a nightclub singer (Whoopi Goldberg) hiding out at the convent, and “The First Wives Club” (1996), as a soignée Manhattan divorcée who sympathizes with younger women’s travails.

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Ms. Smith played a suspicious, overprotective chaperone accompanying a young woman to Florence in “A Room with a View” (1985).Credit...Merchant-Ivory Productions

Cinematic Time Traveler

The rest of the time, Ms. Smith was something of a time traveler. “I’m always in corsets, and I’m always in wigs, and I’m always in those buttoned boots,” she told the film critic Barry Norman in a 1993 television interview. She added, “I can’t remember when I last appeared in modern dress.”

In turn-of-the-century films, she played a suspicious, overprotective chaperone accompanying a young woman to Florence in Italy in Merchant Ivory’s “A Room With a View” (1985); an unfeeling housekeeper at a Yorkshire mansion in “The Secret Garden” (1993); a dramatic New York auntie in “Washington Square” (1997); and a stylish Londoner who fancies the new priest (Michael Palin) in “The Missionary” (1982).

In “Quartet” (1981), Ms. Smith was an artsy British expatriate in 1920s Paris. (She would appear in an unrelated film of the same name in 2012, playing a retired opera diva.)

The 1930s must have felt like home. Both her Agatha Christie pictures, featuring the master detective Hercule Poirot, were set in that decade. In “Death on the Nile” (1978), she was the nurse-companion of a kleptomaniac (Bette Davis). In “Evil Under the Sun” (1982), she was a saucy Adriatic-island hotelier.

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Kelly MacDonald and Ms. Smith in a scene from Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park" (2001).Credit...Mark Tillie/USA Films

“Murder by Death” (1976), Neil Simon’s parody of Hollywood detectives, was set in a make-believe 1930s (the clothes and the cars) that somehow included informed references to television, World War II and Humphrey Bogart movies that hadn’t been made yet. Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Ms. Smith), like Nick and Nora Charles of “The Thin Man,” doted on a wire-haired fox terrier and multiple daily martinis.

Then there was Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” (2001), set in a 1930s English-country-house weekend and written by Julian Fellowes (before he created “Downton Abbey”). Ms. Smith was a marcel-waved countess who, much like Violet Crawley, had a gift for lethal put-downs. When a visiting Hollywood producer pleasantly declines to reveal the ending of his next movie for fear of spoiling it for his dinner companions, the countess responds just as pleasantly, “Oh, but none of us will see it.”

In “Tea With Mussolini” (1999), Ms. Smith was part of an expatriate quintet having lovely lunches in Florence as Italy fell to Fascism. “A Private Function” (1984), a comedy with Mr. Palin, took place just after the war. “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” (1987), a drama about a shy spinster, was set in the 1950s.

Ms. Smith did wear modern dress in some films, like “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (2011) and its sequel, about British retirees in India; and “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” (2002), about a group of American Southerners who have been friends since childhood.

On the other hand, “Becoming Jane” (2007), about the young Jane Austen, was set in the 1790s. In a BBC version of “David Copperfield” (1999), Ms. Smith was Betsey Trotwood, a grouchy but loving Georgian-Regency great-aunt. (Daniel Radcliffe, age 10, played the title role.)

Although television was a relatively small part of her résumé, she won four Emmy Awards. Her first was for HBO’s “My House in Umbria” (2003), in which she played a romance novelist; the other three were for “Downton Abbey.”

Her final films included “The Lady in the Van” (2015), in which she played a strong-willed homeless woman; “A Boy Called Christmas” (2021); “Downton Abbey: A New Era” (2022), the second of two “Downton Abbey” films, which introduced the Granthams to both Hollywood and the French Riviera; and “The Miracle Club” (2023), a comedy with Laura Linney and Kathy Bates.

In 1967, Ms. Smith married Robert Stephens, a British actor who was her frequent co-star, beginning with “Jean Brodie.” They divorced in 1974. In 1975, she married Beverley Cross, the playwright and screenwriter. He died in 1998.

She is survived by two sons from her first marriage, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, both actors; and five grandchildren, according to the family’s statement.

Ms. Smith developed Graves’ disease, an immune-system condition that affects the thyroid gland, in 1988 but recovered after radiotherapy and surgery. Two decades later, she fought off breast cancer.

She became a Commander of the British Empire in 1969, a dame in 1990 and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor in 2014.

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Ms. Smith in 2015. “What Smith captures brilliantly,” wrote a critic for The Guardian, “is the way, in old age, vagueness of memory coexists with moments of piercing clarity.”Credit...Tom Jamieson for The New York Times

Ms. Smith disliked watching her own performances. As recently as 2020, she said she had still never seen an episode of “Downton Abbey” — “It got to the point where it was too late to catch up” — not to mention the feature films the series inspired.

Behind the quick wit, though, lay the heart of an introvert. On the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2013, when it was suggested that she had no interest in celebrity, Ms. Smith said: “Absolutely none. I mean, why would I?”

She had long described herself as painfully shy. Much earlier, in a 1979 interview with The Times, she confessed, “I’m always very relieved to be somebody else, because I’m not sure at all who I am or what indeed my personality is.”

In the 2018 documentary “Tea With the Dames,” an interviewer asked Ms. Smith if the first days on a movie set were still scary for her.

“All days are scary,” she said.

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES

A MAGA Judiciary

 

In a second term, Donald Trump would appoint more judges who don’t care about the law.

by Adam Serwer 

Thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest dreams: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending affirmative action in college admissions, and potentially making most state-level firearm restrictions presumptively unconstitutional. That movement long predates Trump, and these goals were long-standing. But, like the rest of conservatism, much of the conservative legal movement has also been remade in Trump’s vulgar, authoritarian image, and is now preparing to go further, in an endeavor to shield both Trump and the Republican Party from democratic accountability.

The federal judiciary has become a battleground in a right-wing culture war that aims to turn back the clock to a time when conservative mores—around gender, sexuality, race—were unchallenged and, in some respects, unchallengeable. Many of the federal judges appointed during Trump’s presidency seem to see themselves as foot soldiers in that war, which they view as a crusade to restore the original meaning of the Constitution. Yet in practice, their rulings have proved to be little more than Trump-era right-wing punditry with cherry-picked historical citations.

The 2016 Trump administration was focused on quickly filling the judiciary with judges who are not just ideologically conservative but dedicated right-wing zealots. But that administration “didn’t have all of the chess pieces completely lined up” to get right-wing ideologues into every open seat, Jake Faleschini, of the liberal legal-advocacy group Alliance for Justice, told me. More restrained conservative jurists filled some of those seats. Trump and his allies will be better prepared next time, he said. “Those chess pieces are very well lined up now.”

The federal district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a former anti-abortion activist, is the prototypical Trumpist judge. He has publicly complained about the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, “very permissive policies on contraception,” and marriage equality, and has opposed nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community. And like many of his Trump-appointed peers, Kacsmaryk has predictably issued rulings flouting precedent when doing so is consistent with his personal morals.

One of the most egregious examples came in September, when he dismissed a lawsuit filed by students at West Texas A&M University after the school’s president, Walter Wendler, banned a drag-show benefit aimed at raising money for the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ-focused suicide-prevention organization. Wendler made clear his political objections to the show, referring to drag as “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.” But even Wendler himself recognized that the show, as expressive conduct, was protected speech; amazingly, he admitted that he was violating the law. He would not be seen to condone the behavior of the show’s actors, Wendler wrote in his message banning the event, “even when the law of the land appears to require it.”

The case landed on Kacsmaryk’s desk. And because Kacsmaryk does not like pro-LGBTQ speech, he simply ignored decades of precedent regarding free-speech law on the grounds that, by his understanding of history, the First Amendment does not protect campus drag shows. The drag show “does not obviously convey or communicate a discernable, protectable message,” Kacsmaryk wrote, and consists of potentially “vulgar and lewd” conduct that could, he suggested, lead to “the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.” (The confidence with which conservatives have accused their political opponents of child sexual exploitation in recent years is remarkable, especially because their concern applies almost exclusively to situations, like this one, that justify legal suppression of their favored targets. It is far easier to find examples of pedophilia in religious institutions—hardly targets of either conservative ire or conservative jurisprudence—than it is to find drag queens guilty of similar conduct.)

The key to Kacsmaryk’s ruling was “historical analysis,” which revealed a “Free Speech ecosystem drastically different from the ‘expressive conduct’ absolutism” of those challenging Wendler’s decision. Echoing the Supreme Court’s recent emphasis on “history and tradition” in rulings such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which struck down gun restrictions in New York State, Kacsmaryk simply decided that the First Amendment did not apply. If not for its censorious implications, the ruling would be an amusing example of some conservative beliefs about free speech: A certain form of expression can be banned as “nonpolitical”—nothing more than obscenity—even as those banning it acknowledge their disapproval of that expression’s political implications.

The invocation of “history and tradition,” however, is no joke. The prevailing mode of conservative constitutional analysis for the past half century has been “originalism,” which promises to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time of its writing. As the dissenters pointed out in Dobbs, the Founders themselves imposed no such requirements on constitutional interpretation, noting that the “Framers defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning.” And in practice, originalism has just meant invoking the Framers to justify conservative outcomes.

“It’s a very subjective inquiry,” the NYU law professor Melissa Murray told me. “This insistence on originalism as history and tradition ties you to a jurisprudence that’s going to favor a particular, masculine kind of ideology. Because those are the only people making meaning at that moment in time.”

In 1986, the late conservative legal scholar Philip B. Kurland observed, “We cannot definitively read the minds of the Founders except, usually, to create a choice of several possible meanings for the necessarily recondite language that appears in much of our charter of government. Indeed, evidence of different meanings likely can be garnered for almost every disputable proposition.”

“History should provide the perimeters within which the choice of meaning may be made,” Kurland wrote. “History ordinarily should not be expected, however, to provide specific answers to the specific problems that bedevil the Court.”

Right-wing justices have in all but name imposed this expectation, despite Kurland’s warning. It is no surprise that Kurland was not heeded—he testified against the nomination of Robert Bork, the father of originalism, to the Supreme Court, and cautioned that “he will be an aggressive judge in conforming the Constitution to his notions of what it should be,” one “directed to a diminution of minority and individual rights.” Now, with six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, every judge is slowly being forced to conform the Constitution to Bork’s notions of what it should be.

In Dobbs and Bruen, and in a later case striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, the conservative justices cited historical facts that strengthened their arguments while ignoring those that contradicted them, even when the evidence to the contrary was voluminous. In Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, ignored the history of legal abortion in the early American republic and the sexist animus behind the 19th-century campaigns to ban it. In Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas was happy to invoke the history of personal gun ownership but dismissed the parallel history of firearm regulation. In the affirmative-action case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Thomas’s imposition of modern right-wing standards of “color blindness” on the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment was ahistorical enough that it drew an objection from Eric Foner, the greatest living historian of the Reconstruction era.

Not every right-wing judge is as blatantly ideological in their decision making as Kacsmaryk, nor is every Republican appointee a Trumpist zealot. But those with ambitions to rise up the ranks stand out by how aggressively they advertise both qualities. And the proliferation of the language of “history and tradition” is turning originalism from an ideology of constitutional interpretation into something more like a legal requirement. Judges are expected to do historical analysis—not rigorous analysis, but the kind that a prime-time Fox News host will agree with. Conservative originalists seem to see themselves as the true heirs of the Founders, and therefore when they examine the Founders, they can see only themselves, as if looking in a mirror.

It is no coincidence that as conservatism has become Trumpism, originalism has come to resemble Trumpist nationalism in its view that conservatives are the only legitimate Americans and therefore the only ones who should be allowed to wield power. The results for the federal judiciary are apparent as right-wing appeals courts turn “fringe ideas into law at a breakneck pace,” as the legal reporter Chris Geidner has put it, in the hopes of teeing up cases for the Roberts Court, which can hide its own extremism behind the occasional refusal to cater to the most extreme demands of its movement allies.

It is not only the substance of the rulings that has changed—many now resemble bad blog posts in their selective evidence, motivated reasoning, overt partisanship, and recitation of personal grievances—but the behavior of the jurists, who seek to turn public-service roles into minor celebrity by acting like social-media influencers.

Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, a favorite of the conservative legal movement and a potential future Trump Supreme Court nominee, is one example. In 2022, Ho announced that he was striking a blow against “cancel culture” by boycotting law clerks from Yale after an incident in which Yale students disrupted an event featuring an attorney from a Christian-right legal-advocacy group. In 2021, the Trump-appointed judge Barbara Lagoa complained publicly that American society had grown so “Orwellian” that “I’m not sure I can call myself a woman anymore.” She later upheld an Alabama law making gender-affirming care for minors a felony, arguing, of course, that such care was not rooted in American “history and tradition.” In June 2023, in the midst of a scandal over Justice Thomas receiving unreported gifts from right-wing billionaires with interests before the Court, the Trump-appointed judge Amul Thapar went on Fox News to promote his book about Thomas, and defended him with the zeal of a columnist for Breitbart News.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, the appointment of far-right ideologues has meant a series of extreme rulings that have upheld speech restrictions and book bans; forced the administration to pursue the right’s preferred restrictive immigration policies; narrowed the fundamental rights of women, the LGBTQ community, and ethnic minorities; blessed law-enforcement misconduct; restricted voting rights; limited the ability of federal agencies to regulate corporations; and helped businesses exploit their workers.

[Read: Red states are rolling back the civil-rights revolution]

All of this and more will continue should Trump win a second term. Conservative civil servants who placed their oath to the Constitution above Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election were depicted by Trump loyalists not as heroes but as internal enemies to be purged. Republican-appointed judges will take note of which path leads to professional advancement and which to early retirement.

Already imitating Trump in affect and ideology, these judges are indeed unlikely to resist just about any of Trump’s efforts to concentrate power in himself. They will no doubt invoke “history and tradition” to justify this project, but their eyes are ultimately on a future utopia where conservative political power cannot be meaningfully challenged at the ballot box or in court.

THE ATLANTIC

With Israel’s Airstrikes, Beirut Plunges Into Panic

 

 

By Stefanie Glinski

Foreign Policy

 

 BEIRUT—In the early morning hours of Tuesday, thousands of people fleeing Israeli airstrikes in southern and eastern Lebanon poured into the capital of Beirut. Many of them slept by the roadside or in their cars before eventually finding shelter.

Zainab Fnesh, 38, arrived in the capital at 4 a.m. with her husband and six children after a 14-hour, traffic-jammed drive from their village just south of Tyre. All eight of them were crammed into a single car for a trip that usually takes just over an hour. Fnesh said it was the “most terrifying” trip of her life.

“Our apartment block was hit shortly after we left,” Fnesh said of Israeli airstrikes, which came after Iran-backed Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel in support of Hamas. “I was scared they would hit the road, too,” she said, explaining that the family didn’t receive any prior warning. “We left in a rush, barely taking any [belongings] with us. On our way out, we saw constant strikes in the distance. We saw injured on the main highway to Beirut. My children cried for hours. We were all so scared.”

A woman wearing a headscarf holds a young girl with wide eyes in a pink Minnie Mouse shirt.

Zainab Fnesh holds her daugher Rayhana, almost 2, just after their arrival in Beirut on Sept. 24, where they fled after bombings in southern Lebanon.

Monday marked the deadliest day for Lebanon since the 1975-90 civil war. Israeli airstrikes continued through Tuesday as the Israel Defense Forces reported hitting about 1,600 Hezbollah targets and Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said in morning remarks: “Hezbollah must not be given a break. … We will speed up the offensive operations today.”

But many of those killed and displaced have been civilians like Fnesh. She’s now sheltering in a school with her six children, while her husband raced back to their village to save older relatives left behind. Classes were suspended in Lebanon on Tuesday. Countless people across Beirut have opened up their homes to displaced families, sharing their phone numbers in WhatsApp groups, and many hotels and Airbnbs have lowered their prices to accommodate families forced to flee.

At least 569 people have been killed across the country, including some 50 children, according to Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad.

Thousands more were injured and displaced. U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said on Tuesday that “Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon are now relentlessly claiming hundreds of civilian lives.”

Beirut, too, plunged into a state of panic on Monday after scores of residents had received messages and calls warning them to move away from potential Hezbollah targets. By afternoon, Israeli fighter jets were seen flying overhead.

Businesses and restaurants across the city closed and streets emptied as residents braced themselves, uncertain of what would come next. The usually vibrant city turned eerily quiet. Outside, people greeted one another with reassuring smiles, but few words.

Standing outside a classroom-turned-shelter, Fnesh told Foreign Policy that her family had nowhere to stay long-term in Beirut. “All of our family lives in the south, but I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to return. We have no home to return to.” She was holding her nearly 2-year-old daughter, Rayana. The shelter is chaotic as more people arrive and a few classrooms have been turned into functioning shelters. Most people are exhausted; some sleep on the floor in corners, others on the few mattresses that have already been provided.

Women wearing all black dresses and head coverings stand outside of a shuttered building.

Women gather outside for the funeral in Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood on Sept. 18.

People sleep in small groupings on the bare floor of a classroom at a school.

People who fled southern Lebanon rest in a school-turned-shelter in Beirut on Sept. 24.

A woman in a headscarf and long dress holds a small child waring shorts and a t-shirt on her lap. Next to her is a teenage girl and a boy sitting on a bench. At her feet is a large plastic bag. Behind them is a barred wall.

A family that escaped southern Lebanon wait at a shelter in Beirut on Sept. 24.

As the flow of displaced people into the city continued into Tuesday, aid efforts were quickly ramped up, with government institutions, nonprofits, mosques, churches, and individuals pitching in.

“A few people arrived [Monday] night around 10 p.m. The majority came here in the morning. We now have hundreds of people staying in classrooms here, most of them are women and children,” said Ahmad Jaber, a medic working at the school where Fnesh and her family are staying. “We’re bringing mattresses, blankets, cooking utensils, clothes, and food. Most people fled with few belongings. They need all the help they can get,” he added, standing outside the school’s entrance to register new arrivals.

People open the doors of an ambulance outside a hospital. A soldier and medic are seen at left.

An ambulance arrives at a Beirut hospital on Sept. 18 after pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives exploded across the country.

Beirut, still reeling from last week’s attacks, was unprepared for this week’s influx of displaced people. Hospitals were already overwhelmed with patients injured when Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies exploded across the country; now the fragile health care system is gearing up to deal with scores of injured people evacuated from the south and east, where Israeli strikes have been most intense. While traffic jams still clog the roads into Beirut, few cars are heading south—except for ambulances racing that way to rescue the injured.

An airstrike that hit Beirut’s Dahiyeh district last Friday also killed at least 45 people. Among the dead were 16 Hezbollah militants. Scores more were injured.

Children and a woman in a headscarf look down on a funeral procession from a balcony.

People look down on a funeral procession for three men and an 8-year-old boy killed in the pager attacks, in Dahiyeh on Sept. 18.

A large crowd of people, some carrying yellow flags, fill the street for a funeral procession. A coffin can be seen in the middle of the scene. Powerlines criss cross over the crowd and people look out from windows above.

A large crowd of people, some carrying Hezbollah flags, take part in the funeral procession in Beirut on Sept. 18 for those killed in the pager attacks.

A boy holds a yellow flag on a short ple and looks at the camera. Seated around him are dozens of other people with buildings behind and around them.

5-year-old Hussain holds a Hezbollah flag at the funeral in Dahiyeh on Sept. 18.

On Tuesday, another airstrike hit the same area, killing six people and injuring 15—with Israel saying that the strike killed Ibrahim Qubaisi, the head of Hezbollah’s rocket unit.

Hezbollah continues to fire rockets into Israel, with the group issuing a statement on Tuesday claiming a drone attack on Israel’s Atlit naval base.

In his last address to the United Nations General Assembly, U.S. President Joe Biden warned against a “full-scale war” in Lebanon, saying that it wasn’t in anyone’s interest.

But across Lebanon, people are worried that the red line has already been crossed. “This war has already escalated,” said Khodr Mahmoud, a 55-year-old man who had just arrived in Beirut. Mahmoud sits in a wheelchair; a strike to his house during the 2006 Lebanon war injured him and left him paralyzed. “I’m worried we could be seeing this conflict escalate even more than it did back then,” he added. He paused and then lit a cigarette. “This feels familiar and very scary.”

A man in a wheelchair sits on a concrete surface. Two open doorways with tile inside are seen behind him.

Khodr Mahmoud, pictured in Beirut on Sept. 24, was injured and left paralyzed during the 2006 Lebanon war. He had to flee his house again this week when heavy bombardments hit his village in southern Lebanon.

 

 

What does it feel to be Palestinian now?

 

n o u r a  e r a k a t 

It’s the sound that guts me. the mama
grasping her baby boy wrapped in a white
shroud, moaning in shock. A little girl curled
up next to the wheels of a stretcher holding
her father. Between her cries, we hear her implore,
“Baba!” There is also the father with skinny
arms, still in his slippers, covered in ash, screaming
his children’s names one by one. He turns over a
piece of shattered concrete searching for his babies,
but there is nothing but wreckage.

Palestinians are certainly not the first people to
endure genocide, but they are most certainly the
first to have it broadcast in real time. How pathetic
that we can’t stop this. Every night I make a single
wish: Please let us wake to news of a cease-fire. But
in the morning, when I pick up my phone, I already
know what I see will keep me up another night.

I’m barely up, and my phone is already ablaze
with requests. I won’t be able to respond to all of
them. My title—human rights attorney—gives the
impression that I have a law practice. A Palestinian
family from Gaza has arrived in Cairo; 46 members
have been killed. They want to sue Israel and need 

help. A journalist friend writes from Gaza. His
employer is demoting him for being “anti-Israel,”
as he and his family scramble to find food and
shelter. What can he do? I frantically try to respond.
It never feels like enough.

Besides work and protests, I only leave home for my
daughter’s sake. She always asks me to put away my phone.
She explains her poor test score is a result of her baba and me
“talking about the war too much.”

I broke my self-imposed isolation
to take her to a school Halloween
party. I joked with one of the parents
that my costume was a Palestinian
pretending to be OK. She didn’t
laugh. Ever since 6-year-old Wadea
Al-Fayoume was stabbed 26
times by his family’s landlord,
I have been acutely
afraid for my daughter’s
safety and anxious that my
public-facing work could cause her harm. I stay in
costume and pretend everything is OK.
I marvel at the sky: How lucky we are it does not
fall and crush us without announcement.

The requests for comment from journalists and TV producers
start to pile up. I wade through them on my commute
to campus. I’m usually calm with the media, but these days
I’ve been livid about their coverage and exhausted by the cable
networks that have blacklisted me or refused to post my interviews.
A TV producer who invites me to appear on his show
several times but then never has me on writes to share that he

“trying to connect with Hamas leaders Ghazi Hamad and Osama Hamdan.” He
asks, “Do you have their contact info?” I am boiling.

In my pre-interview prep with the BBC, a producer asks me how Palestinians
feel about Hamas, and I snap: “You know that’s a racist question, right?”
“I’m just trying to help,” she says, “because not all Palestinians are Hamas.”
“What does it matter what Palestinians feel? Their ideas don’t alter their
civilian status; nothing justifies a genocide. You’ve never asked a single Israeli

what they feel about their government. You
didn’t even ask if Americans supported Bush
when his administration invaded Iraq…”
“OK, thank you. I’ll talk to the team and get
back to you.”

I know she won’t call back. So I send a text
suggesting other Palestinians she should call.
I’m so mad at myself that I may have lost this
opportunity for Palestinians to be heard.
In class, I walk a tightrope. I want my students
to ask me about what’s happening. I want
to tell them how lucky we are to have classrooms,
how hundreds of schools in Gaza have
been destroyed or turned into makeshift shelters
and 100 percent of the students don’t have
access to education, how “too much
reading”—their standard complaint—
is a wonderful problem to have. But no
one asks. They are reluctant to speak
in a charged environment. So I open
space for them to share. At the very
least, discussing Palestine will not be
a taboo.

In our critical race theory class, we’re covering
the last chapter of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s
Golden Gulag. My voice cracks as I read to them:
“If the twentieth century was the age of genocide
on a planetary scale, then in order not to
repeat history, we ought to prioritize coming to
grips with dehumanization.”

Though my university likes to boast about
its faculty in the news, it has avoided mentioning
me for the past three months. I’m grateful
it’s not worse. Despite 12,000 complaints
and congressional interventions, our teach-in
on “Race, Liberation, and Palestine” in early
December was not canceled. Meanwhile, at
UPenn, donors are calling for the resignation of

for freedom “from the river to the sea.” At Harvard, protesting students have been doxxed by roaming trucks plastered with their faces and names. Our Students for Justice in Palestine chapter became the first to be suspended at a public university. Suspensions, punishments, and threats mount at nearly every campus in the country.

After the last student leaves, I put down my mask. I pretend to be OK here, too.
On my commute home, I take calls: about a campaign to address the United Nations’ inefficacy from within; about a nascent effort to organize artists; about legal strategies to supplement and amplify our International Criminal Court petition… I’ll never be able to respond to everyone.
Once home, I rush to set up a makeshift studio for a live TV interview. Even before I am done, the angry e-mails are pouring in.

“Poor Hamas, right? You are a morally depraved black hole.”
“You are like poison…. Thank goodness my children are not exposed to you.”
“Go to Palestine so we can kill you too.”
I also receive remarkable messages. People around the world, enthusiastically supporting freedom, who ask over and over again: “What can I do?”

I’m late again. I rush to pick up my daughter, who is embarrassed by my tear-stained face. She likes to joke that I sound the same when I laugh and cry. That always makes me laugh. At the park, we find the sidewalk colorfully chalked with the words “Kids say no to genocide.” My heart pops with the promise of the generations to come.

The evening is filled with Al Jazeera Arabic, a refreshing reprieve from US media coverage. I tape a podcast, jump on an emergency Zoom. More e-mails come in, more speaking invitations, some that I know will be canceled. History didn’t begin on October 7, so why are we asked to teach everything from scratch again?

It’s past midnight. I get into bed and back on my phone. I witness and listen intently. I cry with my eyes shut, and I wish to wake to the news of a cease-fire.

eveNoura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an associate professor at Rutgers University. 

THE NATION

Israel Is Losing

 

TONY KARON AND DANIEL LEVY

Despite the violence it has unleashed on Palestinians,
Israel is failing to achieve its political goals.

It may sound daft to suggest that a
group of armed irregulars, numbering
in the low tens of thousands, besieged
and with little access to advanced weaponry,
is a match for one of the world’s
most powerful militaries, backed and armed by the
United States. And yet, an increasing number of
establishment strategic analysts are warning that Israel could lose
this war on Palestinians.

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 neutralized Israeli military installations,
breaking open the gates of the world’s largest open-air prison
and leading to a gruesome rampage in which up to 1,200 Israelis, at least
845 of them civilians, were killed. The shocking ease with which Hamas
breached the fortified border around the Gaza Strip reminded many of
the 1968 Tet Offensive. There are vast differences, of course, between
a US expeditionary war in a distant land and Israel’s war to defend an
occupation at home, fought by a citizen army motivated by a sense of existential
peril. But the usefulness of the analogy lies in the political logic.
In 1968, the Vietnamese revolutionaries lost the battle and much
of the underground political and military infrastructure they had patiently
built over the years. Yet the Tet Offensive was a key moment in
their defeat of the United States—albeit at a massive cost in Vietnamese
lives. By simultaneously staging dramatic, high-profile attacks
on more than 100 targets across the country on a single day, lightly
armed Vietnamese guerrillas shattered the illusion of success that was
being peddled to the US public by Lyndon Johnson’s administration.
It signaled to Americans that the war for which
they were being asked to sacrifice tens of thousands
of their sons was unwinnable.

The North Vietnamese leadership measured
the impact of its actions by their political effects
rather than by conventional military measures,
such as men and materiel lost or territory gained.
Thus Henry Kissinger’s 1969 lament: “We fought
a military war; our opponents fought a political
one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents

aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process,
we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of
guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
The conventional army loses if it does not win.”
That logic has Jon Alterman of the not-exactly-dovish
Center for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington, D.C., arguing that Hamas could
achieve many of its objectives:

Hamas sees victory not in one year or five, but
from engaging with decades of struggle that
increase Palestinian solidarity and increase
Israel’s isolation. In this scenario, Hamas rallies
a besieged population in Gaza around it in
anger and helps collapse the Palestinian Authority
government by ensuring Palestinians
see it even more as a feckless adjunct to Israeli
military authority. Meanwhile, Arab states
move strongly away from normalization, the
Global South aligns strongly with the Palestinian
cause, Europe recoils at the Israeli army’s
excesses, and an American debate erupts
over Israel, destroying the bipartisan support
Israel has enjoyed here since the early 1970s.

Forget “intelligence failures”—Israel’s failure to
anticipate October 7 was a political failure to understand
the consequences of a violent system of oppression
that leading international and Israeli human
rights organizations have branded as apartheid. Israel
could kill 1,000 Hamas men a day and solve nothing,
because Israeli violence would replenish their ranks.
The grinding structural repression that Israel expected
Palestinians to suffer in silence meant that Israeli
security was always illusory.

The weeks since October 7
have affirmed that there can be
no return to the status quo ante.
This was likely Hamas’s goal
in staging its attack. And even
prior to this, many Israeli leaders
were openly calling for the
completion of the Nakba, the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Israel’s military will likely oust Hamas from governing
Gaza. But analysts like Tareq Baconi argue
that Hamas has sought to break out of the shackles
of governing a territory sectioned off from the rest
of Palestine on terms set by the occupying power.
Hamas’s gambit may have been to sacrifice the
municipal governance of Gaza in order to cement its
status as a national resistance organization. Hamas
is not trying to bury Fatah, the ruling party in the
West Bank: The various unity agreements between
them—particularly those led by the imprisoned
members of both factions—and the list of prisoners
it seeks to exchange for hostages demonstrate
that Hamas seeks a united front. Led by Fatah, the
Palestinian Authority (PA) is unable to protect Palestinians
from the increasing violence of Israeli settlements
and entrenched control in the West Bank,
let alone to meaningfully respond to the bloodshed
in Gaza. Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians,
arrested thousands more, and displaced entire villages
in the West Bank, all the while escalating its
state-sponsored settler attacks. In so doing, Israel
has further undermined Fatah’s PA-governance
strategy in the eyes of the West Bank population.
The blue-chip polling organization the Palestinian
Center for Policy and Survey Research finds that
support for Hamas has tripled in the West Bank
since October 7, and support for armed resistance
to end Israeli occupation there stands at 70 percent.

For years, settlers protected by the Israel Defense
Forces have attacked Palestinian villages with
the aim of forcing their residents to leave and tightening
Israel’s illegal grip on the occupied territory—
but the escalation of this violence since October 7 is
causing even Israel’s Western accomplices to blanch.
Israeli violence against Palestinians outside of Gaza
also amplifies the connections between Gaza, the
West Bank, East Jerusalem, and even inside Israel.
Ironically, the US insistence on the Palestinian
Authority’s being put in control of Gaza after Israel’s
current war of devastation—and its belated, feeble
warnings over settler violence—reinforces the
idea that the West Bank and Gaza are a single entity.
Israel’s 17-year policy of cleaving a pliant West
Bank run by a co-opted PA from a “terrorist-run
Gaza” has failed.

Just weeks before Hamas’s attack, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu was boasting that Israel had
successfully “managed” the conflict to the point
that Palestine no longer featured on his map of a
“new Middle East.” With the Abraham Accords and
other alliances, some Arab leaders were embracing
Israel. As presidents, both Donald Trump and Joe
Biden focused on the “normalization” of relations
with Arab regimes that were willing to leave the

Palestinians subject to Israeli apartheid. October 7 served up a brutal
reminder that this was untenable and that resistance constitutes a form
of veto power over the efforts of others to determine Palestinians’ fate.
Israel has no clear plan for Gaza after the war. Its stated goal of
eliminating Hamas is widely recognized as a fantasy. But the destruction
Israel has wrought suggests an intention—bluntly stated by a
number of officials—to make the territory uninhabitable for most of
the 2.2 million Palestinians who live there. The United States has ruled
that out, but no smart gambler would discount the possibility that the
Israeli government will seek forgiveness of rather than permission for
more mass-scale ethnic cleansing in line with Israel’s demographic
goals of reducing the Palestinian population from the river to the sea.
US officials have reached for the prayer books of yore, speak-

ing hopefully of putting 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, the head of
the PA, back in charge of Gaza, with the promise of some renewed
pursuit of the chimeric two-state solution. But the PA has no credibility
even in the West Bank, because of its acquiescence to Israel’s
ever-expanding occupation. Then there’s the reality that preventing
genuine Palestinian sovereignty in any part of historic Palestine has
long been a point of consensus among the Israeli leadership.

Even if Israel were to kill Hamas’s top leaders (as it has done previously),
the country’s war has bolstered the group’s standing across
the region. It requires no approval of Hamas’s actions on October 7 to
acknowledge the enduring appeal of a movement that seems capable
of making Israel pay a price for the violence it visits upon Palestinians
every day, every year, generation after generation.

What comes next is far from clear, but Hamas’s attack has forced a
reset of a political contest to which Israel appears unwilling to respond
beyond using military force against Palestinian civilians. And as things
stand, months into the vengeance, Israel can’t be said to be winning
the war where it matters most: in the political arena.

Tony Karon is the editorial lead of Al Jazeera’s AJ+. Daniel Levy is the presi-
dent of the US/Middle East Project and a former Israeli negotiator.

THE NATION

 

Trump: Corruption Unbound

 

Donald Trump and his cronies left his first administration with a playbook for self-enrichment in a second term.

by Franklin Foer

In the annals of government ethics, the year 2017 exists in a bygone era. That September, Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, resigned in disgrace. His unforgivable sin was chartering private jets funded by taxpayers, when he just as easily could have flown commercial. Compared with the abuses of power in the years that followed, the transgression was relatively picayune. But at that early moment, even Trump felt obliged to join the criticism of Price.
During Trump’s first months as president, it wasn’t yet clear how much concentrated corruption the nation, or his own party, would tolerate, which is why Trump was compelled to dispose of the occasional Cabinet secretary. Yet nearly everything about Trump’s history in real estate, where he greased palms and bullied officials, suggested that he regarded the government as a lucrative instrument for his own gain.

A week and a half before taking office, he held a press conference in front of towering piles of file folders, theatrically positioned to suggest rigorous legal analysis, and announced that he would not divest himself of his commercial interests. Instead, he became the first modern commander in chief to profit from a global network of businesses, branded in gilded letters blaring his own name.
It didn’t happen all at once. Trump spent the early days of his presidency testing boundaries. He used his bully pulpit to unabashedly promote his real-estate portfolio. His properties charged the Secret Service “exorbitant rates”—as much as $1,185 a night, per a House Oversight Committee report—for housing agents when Trump or his family members visited. By the time Trump and his cronies left the White House, they had slowly erased any compunction, both within the Republican Party and outside it, about their corruption. They left power having compiled a playbook for exploiting public office for private gain.

That know-how—that confidence in their own impunity, that savvy understanding of how to profitably deal with malignant interests—will inevitably be applied to plans for a second term. If the first Trump presidency was, for the most part, an improvised exercise in petty corruption, a second would likely consist of systematic abuse of the government. There’s a term to describe the sort of regime that might emerge on the other side: a Mafia state.

T
The term was popularized by Bálint Magyar, a Hungarian sociologist and a dissident during Communist times. He wanted to capture the kleptocracy emerging in his country, which was far more sophisticated than other recent examples of plunder. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán didn’t need to rely on brute force. He operated with the legitimacy that comes from electoral victories. And he justified the enrichment of his inner circle in carefully crafted legalisms. His abuses of office were so deftly executed that Hungary remains a member of the European Union and a magnet for multinational corporations.

At the center of Orbán’s Mafia state is a system of patronage. When he finally won consolidated control of the government in 2010, he purged the nation’s civil service—a “bloodless liquidation,” as Magyar describes the tactic. In place of professionals and experts, Orbán installed party loyalists. This wasn’t a superficial shuffling of his cabinet, but a comprehensive remaking of the nation’s public sphere. It is testimony to the thoroughness of his conquest that his apparatchiks took control of the Hungarian Chess Federation and a state-funded project to develop dental tourism.

The party loyalists Orbán appointed became the capos of his crime family. Their job was to reward its friends (by sharing the spoils of government contracts) and to punish its vocal critics (with tax audits and denial of employment). The loyalists constituted, in Magyar’s memorable phrase, an “organized upperworld.”

The goal of the apparatus was to protect the apparatus. A small inner circle around Orbán guarded the spectacular wealth accrued through contracts to build infrastructure and the leasing of government-owned land on highly favorable terms. By 2017, a former gas-line repairman from Orbán’s home village had ascended to No. 8 on Forbes’s list of the richest Hungarians.

Orbán’s system is impressively sturdy. His loyalists need their patron to remain in power so that they can continue to enjoy their own ill-gotten gains. In pursuit of that goal, they have helped him slowly and subtly eliminate potential obstacles to his Mafia state, eroding the influence of local governments, replacing hostile judges, and smoothing the way for his allies to purchase influential media outlets.
[From the January/February 2022 issue: Anne Applebaum on the kleptocrats next door]

Corruption in the Trump administration wasn’t nearly sophisticated or comprehensive enough to rival Hungary’s. Compared with its kleptocratic cousins in other countries, it was primitive. Companies and other interest groups simply pumped money into Trump properties. As they sought government support for a merger, executives at T-Mobile spent $195,000 at Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel. When the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute wanted the administration to support an international treaty that helped its member firms, it paid more than $700,000 to host an event at a Trump golf resort in Florida. The Qatari government bought an apartment in a Trump-branded building in New York for $6.5 million.

Such examples were so commonplace that they ceased to provoke much outrage, which was perhaps the gravest danger they posed. Ever since the founding of the republic, revulsion at the mere perception of public corruption had been a bedrock sentiment of American political culture, one of the few sources of bipartisan consensus. But fidelity to Trump required indifference to corruption. It was impossible to remain loyal to the president without forgiving his malfeasance. By the end of Trump’s term, Republicans had come to regard corruption as a purely instrumentalist concept—useful for besmirching rival Democrats, but never applicable to members of their own party.

With the confidence that it will never face opposition from within its own ranks, a second Trump administration would be emboldened to hatch more expansive schemes. The grandest of these plans, at least among those that have been announced by Trump’s allies, mimics Orbán’s “bloodless liquidation,” where loyalists replace nonpartisan professionals and career civil servants. By instituting a new personnel policy, called Schedule F, Trump could eliminate employment protections for thousands of tenured bureaucrats, allowing him to more easily fire a broad swath of civil servants.

The mass firing of bureaucrats may not seem like a monumental opportunity for self-enrichment, but that will be the effect. The old ethos of the civil service was neutrality: Tenure in government deliberately insulated its employees from politics. But the Trumpists have plotted a frontal assault on that ethos, which they consider a guise for liberal bureaucrats to subvert their beloved leader. It doesn’t require much imagination to see what this new class of bureaucrats might unleash. Picked for their loyalty, they will exploit the government in the spirit of that loyalty, handing government contracts to friendly firms, forcing companies who want favors from the state to pay tribute at Trump properties, using their power to punish critics.

The United States isn’t a post-Communist state like Hungary. It doesn’t have state-owned firms that can be lucratively privatized. But the Biden years have remade the contours of the government, unwittingly generating fresh possibilities for corruption. With the infrastructure bill, there are enormous contracts to be distributed. With proposed new guidelines for antitrust enforcement, which aim to empower the Justice Department to aggressively block mergers, the government can more easily penalize hostile firms. (While in office, Trump reportedly experimented with this by pressuring an official to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner, out of his antipathy toward CNN, which would have been part of the new mega-firm.) These were policies designed to promote the national interest. In the hands of a corrupt administration, they can be exploited to enrich hackish officials and a governing clique.

Autocratic leaders of other countries will intuitively understand how to seek favor in such a system. To persuade the United States to overlook human-rights abuses, or to win approval for controversial arms sales, they will cultivate mid-level officials and steer development funds toward Trump-favored projects. Some might be so brazen as to co-develop Trump properties in their home countries. (According to an analysis of his tax returns, Trump’s foreign holdings earned him at least $160 million while in office.) Such buying of favors will not be particularly costly, by the standards of sovereign wealth. In aggregate, however, they could massively enrich Trump and his allies.

ATLANTIC

It was just such a scenario, in which the virus of foreign interests imperceptibly implants itself in the American government, that the Founders most feared. They designed a system of government intended to forestall such efforts. But Trump has no regard for that system, and every incentive to replace it with one that will line his own coffers. Having long used the language of the five families, decrying snitches and rats, Trump will now have a chance to build a state worthy of his discourse.

The Church of Trump: How He’s Infusing Christianity Into His Movement

 

 Ending many of his rallies with a churchlike ritual and casting his prosecutions as persecution, the former president is demanding — and receiving — new levels of devotion from Republicans.

 

By Michael C. Bender

 

Long known for his improvised and volatile stage performances, former President Donald J. Trump now tends to finish his rallies on a solemn note.

Soft, reflective music fills the venue as a hush falls over the crowd. Mr. Trump’s tone turns reverent and somber, prompting some supporters to bow their heads or close their eyes. Others raise open palms in the air or murmur as if in prayer.

In this moment, Mr. Trump’s audience is his congregation, and the former president their pastor as he delivers a roughly 15-minute finale that evokes an evangelical altar call, the emotional tradition that concludes some Christian services in which attendees come forward to commit to their savior.

“The great silent majority is rising like never before and under our leadership,” he recites from a teleprompter in a typical version of the script. “We will pray to God for our strength and for our liberty. We will pray for God and we will pray with God. We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation under God.”

The meditative ritual might appear incongruent with the raucous epicenter of the nation’s conservative movement, but Mr. Trump’s political creed stands as one of the starkest examples of his effort to transform the Republican Party into a kind of Church of Trump. His insistence on absolute devotion and fealty can be seen at every level of the party, from Congress to the Republican National Committee to rank-and-file voters.

Mr. Trump’s ability to turn his supporters’ passion into piety is crucial to understanding how he remains the undisputed Republican leader despite guiding his party to repeated political failures and while facing dozens of felony charges in four criminal cases. His success at portraying those prosecutions as persecutions — and warning, without merit, that his followers could be targeted next — has fueled enthusiasm for his candidacy and placed him, once again, in a position to capture the White House.

‘He’s definitely been chosen by God’

Mr. Trump has long defied conventional wisdom as an unlikely but irrefutable evangelical hero.

He has been married three times, has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault, has been convicted of business fraud and has never showed much interest in church services. Last week, days before Easter, he posted on his social media platform an infomercial-style video hawking a $60 Bible that comes with copies of some of the nation’s founding documents and the lyrics to Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the U.S.A.”

But while Mr. Trump is eager to maintain the support of evangelical voters and portray his presidential campaign as a battle for the nation’s soul, he has mostly been careful not to speak directly in messianic terms.

“This country has a savior, and it’s not me — that’s someone much higher up than me,” Mr. Trump said in 2021 from the pulpit at First Baptist Church in Dallas, whose congregation exceeds 14,000 people.

Still, he and his allies have inched closer to the Christ comparison.

Last year, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and a close Trump ally, said both the former president and Jesus had been arrested by “radical, corrupt governments.” On Saturday, Mr. Trump shared an article on social media with the headline “The Crucifixion of Donald Trump.”

Image

Mr. Trump has mostly been careful not to speak directly in messianic terms. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

He is also the latest in a long line of Republican presidents and presidential candidates who have prioritized evangelical voters. But many conservative Christian voters believe Mr. Trump outstripped his predecessors in delivering for them, pointing especially to the conservative majority he installed on the Supreme Court that overturned federal abortion rights.

Mr. Trump won an overwhelming majority of evangelical voters in his first two presidential races, but few — even among his rally crowds — explicitly compare him to Jesus.

Instead, the Trumpian flock is more likely to describe him as a modern version of Old Testament heroes like Cyrus or David, morally flawed figures handpicked by God to lead profound missions aimed at achieving overdue justice or resisting existential evil.

“He’s definitely been chosen by God,” said Marie Zere, a commercial real estate broker from Long Island who attended the Conservative Political Action Conference in February outside Washington, D.C. “He’s still surviving even though all these people are coming after him, and I don’t know how else to explain that other than divine intervention.”

For some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, the political attacks and legal peril he faces are nothing short of biblical.

“They’ve crucified him worse than Jesus,” said Andriana Howard, 67, who works as a restaurant food runner in Conway, S.C.

Image

An attendee waiting for Mr. Trump to arrive at a religious gathering in Washington in September. Many conservative Christian voters believe Mr. Trump outstripped his Republican predecessors in delivering for them. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

A political weapon and vulnerability

Mr. Trump’s solid and devoted core of voters has formed one of the most durable forces in American politics, giving him a clear advantage over President Biden when it comes to inspiring supporters.

Forty-eight percent of Republican primary voters are enthusiastic about Mr. Trump becoming the Republican nominee, and 32 percent are satisfied but not enthusiastic with that outcome, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll. Just 23 percent of Democrats said they were enthusiastic about Mr. Biden as their nominee, and 43 percent were satisfied but not enthusiastic.

The intensity of the most committed Trump backers has also factored into the former president’s campaign decisions, according to two people familiar with internal deliberations. His team’s ability to bank on voters who will cast a ballot with little additional prompting means that some of the cash that would otherwise be spent on turnout operations can be invested in field staff, television ads or other ways to help Mr. Trump.

But Democrats see an advantage, too. Much of Mr. Biden’s support comes from voters deeply opposed to Mr. Trump, and the president’s advisers see an opportunity to spook moderate swing voters into supporting Mr. Biden by casting Mr. Trump’s movement as a cultlike creation bent on restricting abortion rights and undermining democracy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a top Democratic ally of Mr. Biden, pointed to an increasingly aggressive online presence from the president’s re-election campaign, which has sought to portray Mr. Trump as prone to religious extremism.

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Supporters praying during a Trump rally in Warren, Mich., in 2022. Even more than in his past campaigns, Mr. Trump is framing his 2024 bid as a fight for Christianity. Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times

‘Does he really care about evangelicals? I don’t know.’

Mr. Trump’s braiding of politics and religion is hardly a new phenomenon. Christianity has long exerted a strong influence on American government, with most voters identifying as Christians even as the country grows more secular. According to Gallup, 68 percent of adults said they were Christian in 2022, down from 91 percent in 1948.

But as the former president tries to establish himself as the one, true Republican leader, religious overtones have pervaded his third presidential campaign.

Benevolently phrased fund-raising emails in his name promise unconditional love amid solicitations for contributions of as little as $5.

Even more than in his past campaigns, he is framing his 2024 bid as a fight for Christianity, telling a convention of Christian broadcasters that “just like in the battles of the past, we still need the hand of our Lord.”

On his social media platform in recent months, Mr. Trump has shared a courtroom-style sketch of himself sitting next to Jesus and a video that repeatedly proclaims, “God gave us Trump” to lead the country.

The apparent effectiveness of such tactics has made Mr. Trump the nation’s first major politician to successfully separate character from policy for religious voters, said John Fea, a history professor at Messiah University, an evangelical school in Pennsylvania.

“Trump has split the atom between character and policy,” Mr. Fea said. “He did it because he’s really the first one to listen to their grievances and take them seriously. Does he really care about evangelicals? I don’t know. But he’s built a message to appeal directly to them.”

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Mr. Trump’s supporters tend to describe him as a modern version of Old Testament heroes like Cyrus or David, morally flawed figures handpicked by God to lead righteous missions.Credit...Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

Support from local pastors

Trump rallies have always been something of a cross between a rock concert and a tent revival. When Mr. Trump first started winding down his rallies with the ambient strains, many connected them to similar theme music from the QAnon conspiracy movement, but the campaign distanced itself from that notion.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement: “President Trump has used the end of his speeches to draw a clear contrast to the last four years of Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency and lay out his vision to get America back on track.”

But the shift has helped turn Mr. Trump’s rallies into a more aesthetically churchlike experience.

A Trump rally in Las Vegas in January opened with a prayer from Jesus Marquez, an elder at a local church, who cited Scripture to declare that God wanted Mr. Trump to return to the White House.

“God is on our side — he’s on the side of this movement,” said Mr. Marquez, who founded the American Christian Caucus, a grass-roots group.

And at a rally in South Carolina in February, Greg Rodermond, a pastor at Crossroads Community Church, prayed for God to intervene against Mr. Trump’s political opponents, arguing that they were “trying to steal, kill and destroy our America.”

“Father, we have gathered here today in unity for our nation to see it restored back to its greatness,” Mr. Rodermond continued, “and, God, we believe that you have chosen Donald Trump as an instrument in your hands for this purpose.”

But some Christian conservatives are loath to join their brethren in clearing a direct path from the ornate doors of Mar-a-Lago to the pearly gates of Heaven.

Russell Moore, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy arm, said Mr. Trump’s rallies had veered into “dangerous territory” with the altar-call closing and opening prayers from preachers describing Mr. Trump as heaven-sent.

“Claiming godlike authority or an endorsement from God for a political candidate means that person cannot be questioned or opposed without also opposing God,” Mr. Moore said. “That’s a violation of the commandment to not take the Lord’s name in vain

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES