Get the best stories to your readers as they happen. The Washington Post News Service streams breaking news, enterprise and features with photos, graphics and video directly to you.

This chemist is unlocking the secrets of alchemy

By Ben Guarino
This chemist is unlocking the secrets of alchemy
A reconstruction of Basil Valentine's 3rd Key that hangs on a wall in the office of Lawrence Principe, professor of history of science and professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Ben Guarino.

BALTIMORE - An alchemical recipe, kept secret for 400 years, hangs on a wall in the history department at Johns Hopkins University. The message is hidden in a picture of a large and muscular dragon. On a hill behind the creature, three animals tussle in a mortal battle. A rooster pecks at the back of a fox, as if to eat it, while the fox is devouring another rooster.

This an alchemist's way of describing a chemical reaction. Understand it, and you will be able to transform gold.

Or you can simply ask Lawrence Principe to explain it to you. Principe, 55, is one of the world's foremost experts in alchemy. After he solved the cipher of the dragon, Principe commissioned the scene in ceramic and hung it in his office, a scholarly version of a big-game trophy. A historian and a chemist, Principe pores over old treatises, then pours what he learns into antique glassware.

His work shows that alchemy should not be dismissed as cheap tricks. Principe has replicated alchemists' ancient formulas, taking chemical reactions several steps beyond what skeptics thought possible. He has reproduced alchemists' unusual materials, such as a glow-in-the-dark stone that remained a mystery for centuries.

"He uses practice as a way to shed light on text and text as a way to shed a light on practice," said Jennifer Rampling, a Princeton University historian who also specializes in alchemy.

In his chemistry lab, a short walk from the history department, the cabinets are full of alembics, retorts and other bulbous glass devices. On the counter sits a large jar labeled "Phlegm of acidified urine." More than one alchemical recipe calls for human pee. Principe said an old Arabic text used the phrase "the secret is within you," probably meaning: Well, reader, you go figure it out.

"But some people took that more literally," Principe said, "so they ended up using vast amounts of urine." Urine was cheap and surprisingly useful. It was the crucial ingredient in the discovery of the element phosphorus by Hennig Brand, a 17th-century alchemist whose preferred urine came fresh from beer drinkers.

Alchemists, even when they were mucking about with pub waste, saw their work as a way to improve upon the natural world. They wanted to create more powerful medicines and stronger building materials and, yes, turn cheap metals into gold.

The alchemical practice began about 1,500 years ago in Hellenistic Greece. It came to Europe by way of the Middle East. Like the word algebra, alchemy wears its Arabic influences in its name. Alchemy flourished in Europe between the 13th and 18th centuries. "What happens in the Middle Ages is that alchemy is celebrated - and it might be one of the first disciplines that is celebrated this way - as the power it gives to human beings to control nature," Principe said.

By the 19th century, alchemists were branded as cheats or occultists. Or they were dismissed as crackpots, hunched over bubbling potions in smoky huts, on a quest for the philosopher's stone. Harry Potter fans might recognize the stone as a minor plot point in the first book. But 400 years ago, alchemists believed that the mythological object was real, and that it would let them transmute lead into gold. (A few people still pursue the stone. "Practical alchemy is by no means dead," Principe said. Though his preferred response to some living alchemists, he said, is to "run away.") Until about 1700, there was no practical division between chemistry and alchemy. In his academic work, Principe refers to both under the umbrella of an old phrase, "chymistry."

Four hundred years ago, Basil Valentine - not his real name - created a cipher, a copy of which is the trophy on Principe's wall. Valentine believed he was on the trail of the philosopher's stone. He designed 12 keys, or chapters, describing the steps required to find it. His later keys were conjecture. But his early ones can be replicated.

Valentine's third key depicts how to turn gold into a large red crystal, which he called the Flying Red Dragon. "The rooster represents gold, which, believe it or not, makes sense because the rooster crows at sunrise," Principe said. "And the sun ... represents gold in traditional alchemical analogies." The fox is "a particular kind of highly acidic liquid," which Valentine described in a previous key. If you add gold to the acid, it dissolves: The fox eats the rooster. Distill the liquid, and the gold reappears. The rooster eats the fox.

"As you keep doing this again, and again, and again, you're making a gold salt that, under just the right conditions, will actually sublime. It will rise in red crystals to the top of the distilling vessel," Principe said. "And that's the Red Dragon."

Turning gold into a vapor remains an unusual feat. "Even today, if you talk to most chemists, and you say, 'I want to volatilize gold,' they're like, 'What are you talking about?'" Principe said. But he was able to perform the trick.

Principe has been challenging and sometimes vexing other scholars since his thesis work. In 1989, he analyzed pages and pages of Robert Boyle's writings in the Royal Society of London. Boyle was a 17th century philosopher and chemist, sometimes characterized as one of the fathers of modern chemistry for his experimental observations.

References to alchemy littered Boyle's papers. "Everywhere I looked I could find attempts of him doing transmutation," Principe said. Boyle said he witnessed the transmutation of base metals into gold. His papers included phrases that Valentine and earlier alchemists would have used.

Boyle's modern fans did not take kindly to the revelation that he was actively engaged with alchemy. During one of Principe's first talks on the subject, at an international conference, a man stood up in the audience. He opened up a copy of Boyle's book "The Sceptical Chymist," and, with a preacher's fervor, began reciting passages at Principe. After all, how could a father of chemistry have been infatuated with a subject so foolish as alchemy?

The historian dismisses some criticisms of alchemy as "armchair science." On paper and in a pictogram, an alchemical text might seem outlandish or impossible. But time and again, Principe has followed these recipes to success, often producing odd, whimsical reactions.

Principe has shown "that the processes the alchemists described were made up of real laboratory steps, not just metaphors," said Mary Ellen Bowden, senior research fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia.

Italian and French scholars attempted alchemical reconstructions in the 1950s, Rampling said. But Principe was one of the first people who brought that technique into the mainstream of the history of science, she said.

To bring an alchemical text to life, Principe becomes a chemist of the gaps. Alchemists rarely wrote down the full necessary steps, perhaps because they were not aware that their environments often provided crucial ingredients. Principe was able to create white lead by realizing that it would be impossible to do in a modern lab. The chemical reaction needed to slowly heat up and cool down along with the ambient temperature of the day. An alchemist's workspace, after all, didn't have climate control.

Other times, the solution took Principe on a hunt for the same raw materials alchemists used. Consider the Bologna stone.

"It was discovered around 1602, and everybody wanted to make it," Principe said. Expose the stone to light, and it glows in the dark for several minutes. But only the alchemists living near the Italian city of Bologna could get it to work. So there Principe went.

Principe climbed through steep clay gullies looking for the raw Bologna rock, called barite. He soaked the stones in distilled wine and roasted them over oak charcoal, per the instructions of 17th-century chymist Wilhelm Homberg. The stones glowed. (They also began to stink of sulfur, a side effect of the chemical transformation.)

A natural copper impurity in the Italian barite was the key to making the object's luminescence last. Copper ions, once bathed in light, slowly released the stored energy.

When researchers recreate alchemy experiments, you gain a "very sensual, experiential feeling of what it's like to do this kind of chemistry," Rampling said. "You get a flavor of the emotional impact."

The results can be stunning. Heat a substance called the Black Dragon, a powdery form of lead, and a gliding fire ignites. "The lead turns yellow," Rampling said, "and the yellow floats above the surface of the lead like a tide. It's very beautiful and very strange."

Alchemy's earliest critics thought transmuted gold would destabilize the economy. "It may look like gold. It may act like gold," Principe said, "but it's got some property, because it's artificial, that we don't know about."

He said he saw echoes of these long-ago worries about things that are unnatural in current fears of science. "People still think that the vitamin C of a tablet is somehow different from what's in an orange. We're worried about genetically modified foods because," Principe said, lowering his voice to sound conspiratorial, "what is about them that we don't know?"

But alchemists "were using the best theories they could come up with to try to understand a very complex and very confusing world," Principe said. "And that's exactly what we're doing now." Not only are we following in the alchemists' footsteps, he said, we are also in their line of succession.

In Puerto Rico, living and learning in the dark as schools struggle to recover from Hurricane Maria

By Moriah Balingit
In Puerto Rico, living and learning in the dark as schools struggle to recover from Hurricane Maria
Rosaliz Fuentes, 12, has her hair braided by her sister, Keila, 21,as their family looks on in their Loiza, Puerto Rico home on the north coast. The children were returning to school in a couple days, which was the reason for the hair styling. They come from a family of 10 children many of whom are still in school. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Sarah L. Voisin

HUMACAO, Puerto Rico - On a warm January morning, 17-year-old Neida Ortiz Torres awoke in a tent pitched outside her mold- and mosquito-infested house. She walked inside, passing through the living room, where school portraits and academic medals still hang.

In pitch black, she pulled on her school uniform and Converse sneakers, relying on the glow of her cellphone. Then, it was off to the bus stop - past debris and wreckage, and an intersection where a desperate neighbor had scrawled in white paint, "S.O.S. NECESITAMOS AGUA/COMIDA" ("We need water/food") - and off to a high school still grappling with intermittent blackouts and water outages.

Neida and her 7-year-old brother, Julio, lost so much when Hurricane Maria struck in September - clothing and schoolwork, books and Neida's anime drawings and then, after the floodwaters receded, days and days of school. Julio did not return to class until late October, and Neida in mid-November. They were lucky. In other parts of the island, children did not return until December, missing nearly three months.

Even then, things were far from normal. Neida's English teacher left the island after the storm and was not replaced for weeks. Julio's school still has no power.

"Why can't I have my life back?" Neida asked.

Hurricane Maria devastated one of the nation's largest and poorest school systems, a district of about 347,000 students where nearly all qualified for free meals. Even now, the storm hampers the day-to-day operation of schools. By the time classes resumed after winter break, the island's education department had decided to close 21 schools because of damage or flagging enrollment.

Of the 1,110 that remained open, nearly one-third had no power. More than 25,000 students had fled the island - many without their parents - in search of more stable schooling in the continental United States. Nearly 200 educators joined them, exacerbating a teacher shortage and leaving scores of students unsupervised during parts of the school day. Teachers struggle to get the basic resources they need to do their jobs, shelling out their own money for food when cafeterias run out and for projectors and air conditioners.

"It's an injustice," said Aida Díaz, president of one of Puerto Rico's teachers unions. "We want to give [children] the best, but it's impossible."

- - -

The floodwaters that swept through Neida and Julio's home bled into Julio's school - Escuela Agapito Lopez Flores, a blocky concrete building sandwiched between a lake and the coast. In the storm's aftermath, teachers across the island were summoned to schools to clear mud and debris and make repairs.

Some converged on Julio's school, marshaling the support of out-of-work factory employees, firefighters and a National Guard unit. Sonia Vázquez, a kindergarten teacher, wept when she opened the door to her first-floor classroom. The educational toys, the books, the worksheets - all of the odds and ends a teacher accumulates over more than two decades in the classroom - were ruined. Mold had begun to sprout, and rust was eating into the legs of the tiny chairs and tables in her room.

"My classroom was devastated," Vázquez said.

She began to understand the real toll only when she attempted to track down students. When parents showed up at the school, seeking word of when it would reopen, she would heave a sigh of relief and make a note next to the children's names - they were coming back. Others arrived with news that they planned to leave the storm-devastated island. In the end, eight of her 22 students departed for the continental United States, and five more ended up elsewhere on the island.

It was a heart-wrenching exercise repeated by teachers and principals across Puerto Rico. Danette Quiñones, the principal of a high school in the city of Rio Grande, said students streamed into her office, lamenting that they planned to move off the island. One student arrived with "tears falling down her face."

"She didn't want to leave," Quiñones said.

- - -

Schools without power, such as Escuela Agapito Lopez Flores, mark the start of the day with a teacher ringing a hand bell - a relic that had to be resurrected because electronic bell systems remained inoperable. Puerto Rico is enduring the longest power outage in modern U.S. history, with every aspect of the school day affected on campuses that remain without power. Administrators draft official documents by hand in darkened offices, and students cluster near windows so they can read without straining.

For teachers in the continental United States, where some districts provide laptops and tablets to even their youngest students, conducting the school day without basic technology - or even overhead lights - seems unthinkable. Schools are expected to teach students how to wield technology in their daily lives - how to navigate and conduct research on the Internet, how to compose blog posts and emails, how to judge good information sources from bad. Textbooks and quizzes have migrated online.

None of that can happen in the hundreds of schools where the lights remain off. School computers and projectors are useless. To print out worksheets, teachers haul computers and printers to a nearby Burger King - one of the few spots with electricity and WiFi.

In Julio's dim classroom, doors and windows must be left open to allow in sunlight and air - but noise and mosquitoes invade, too. His teacher, Sonya Rosario, quizzed the class on what they did during their holiday break. One girl lamented that she did not get as many gifts for this year's Three Kings' holiday as the year before.

"In this crisis, when we don't have electricity," Rosario replied tenderly, "the most important thing is that we have a lot of love in our family."

The power outage means Rosario can no longer use her projector, so she used poster board when teaching a story about a boy who got a model train, and then had the children crowd around a pre-charged laptop to watch a video.

Vazquez, the kindergarten teacher, has had to overhaul how she teaches the school's youngest students. Her day typically involved songs and videos - research shows that 5-year-olds learn best when lessons involve multiple senses. Before the storm, she made regular use of a Smart Board - a projection screen with touch-screen sensitivity - to keep students engaged. One day in January, when she taught a lesson about families in her darkened classroom, she drew silhouettes of family members and had students use tape to affix them to the pricey device.

Trauma has also complicated school for many students, who grow fearful when it rains and have difficulty focusing. Teachers have addressed the storm head-on: Some are teaching the science behind hurricanes, and a high school in Rio Grande assigns students to work on a guide about recovering from a natural disaster, using their firsthand knowledge. Even for young students, the storm was something teachers could not ignore.

"When it rains, they get anxious the school will flood," Vázquez said. "You have to calm them."

- - -

In many schools, students linger in courtyards because there are no teachers - not even substitutes - for some subjects. That was a growing problem before Hurricane Maria, with schools in the continental United States turning to the island to find bilingual educators for difficult-to-fill English-language-learner positions, luring them away with higher salaries.

At the Rio Grande high school, about 30 minutes from San Juan, two special-education teachers have left, meaning there is just one to serve 90 students. Only 30 get services. So the rest who qualify for special-education services - such as extra tutoring - go without.

Vivian Toledo teaches a class at the school that helps students explore job possibilities. The island is in dire need of people who will stay to rebuild, and educators are hoping their lessons will prepare students to stay, rather than join the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Before the hurricane, Toledo had students scour the Internet for job advertisements, but without power, her students sat before darkened monitors and clipped ads from newspapers.

"What are the labor needs in Puerto Rico after Maria?" Toledo asked the class.

Her goal was to help them envision a life on the island, and to study accordingly.

"I hope they stay, of course," Toledo said.

- - -

On an island reeling from both a natural disaster and a long-standing financial crisis, the stakes for schools are high. Those that lost significant numbers of students worry they might close. Those fears were confirmed last week when Gov. Ricardo Roselló announced that he aims to shutter more than 300 schools amid expectations that enrollment will plunge 10 percent in the coming school year.

Many of those students who left landed in Florida, the epicenter of the exodus from Puerto Rico.

Schools in Orlando have enrolled nearly 3,000 students from the island in recent months. So many young people landed in the Central Florida city that school districts sent staff to the airport to enroll students and to recruit teachers who had left the island.

Oxzuen Casta Rodriguez, a 16-year-old from Rincón, was among those who made the agonizing decision to leave behind his mother and stepfather to live with his father in Orlando and attend school there.

"The pros being that I'm going to get a good education," Oxzuen said. "The cons being my family, my friends, the roots that I have in Puerto Rico."

He shares an immaculate condominium that, like so many in Florida, is hermetically sealed from the tropical heat. He attends Colonial High School, which has enrolled at least 100 displaced Puerto Rican students. The massive school is several times the size of the one he attended in Puerto Rico, and there are other differences: Classrooms are outfitted with the latest technology, every student gets a laptop - and no one worries about power outages.

Oxzuen, a senior, has already been accepted at a community college in Florida.

For those who stayed behind in Puerto Rico, the future seems dimmer.

Neida, who wants to be a gynecological nurse, frets about how she will fare on a critical college entrance exam in February. She's determined to keep her high academic standing but needs 60 hours of volunteer work. It's a difficult prospect when she has to rush to finish her homework before the sun goes down.

- - -

The Washington Post's Eileen Jimenez contributed to this report.

It's been a rough year for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke - and it's still January

By Darryl Fears
It's been a rough year for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke - and it's still January
Male greater sage grouse in mating display on rocky ground in Modoc County, California. MUST CREDIT: Dave Menke/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

WASHINGTON - The start of the new year has been rocky for Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke. He's on the hot seat for exempting Florida from the Trump administration's expanded oil and gas offshore drilling proposal without bothering to notify his boss, and for his failure to disclose an investment in a Montana gun company, a possible conflict of interest.

Those stumbles added to other missteps that have befallen the secretary during the 10 months since he took control of the department, which manages vast federal lands including monuments, parks, refuges as well as abundant natural resources. He booked a $12,000 flight home on a charter jet owned by an oil executive and other private flights to island-hop in the Caribbean. He billed taxpayers more than $6,000 for a helicopter trip he took to rush to a horseback ride with Vice President Mike Pence. Zinke said that criticism that the flights were a misuse of funds was "a wild departure from reality."

But his office admitted error last month after Newsweek revealed that Zinke used nearly $40,000 from a wildfire preparedness fund to pay for flights. The revelation came at a time when state and federal officials in California had just finished fighting two massive wildfires at enormous expense.

Zinke's approach to running Interior has raised eyebrows since his first days at the helm. The former Navy SEAL required an employee to raise a secretarial flag when Zinke entered the building and lower it when he went home. He adorned his large executive suite with the mounted head of a bison and a collection of military knives. And while other Interior secretaries have made and distributed commemorative coins, Zinke is the only one in recent memory to stamp his own name on his.

It was reported this month that President Donald Trump was deeply frustrated by Zinke's promise to Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott that new drilling leases would not be offered off the state's coast, but people in the White House with some knowledge of the situation say the secretary's job appears secure.

Zinke has vowed to execute the president's massive proposed budget cut at his own department, even if it means getting rid of 4,000 full-time positions. In a congressional hearing in June, Zinke defended the proposal, saying, "This is what a balanced budget looks like."

He is also in the midst of an effort to execute Trump's "energy dominance" agenda by expanding drilling in sensitive federal areas on land and at sea. Zinke also withstood a hailstorm of opposition to dramatically shrink two national monuments in Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears.

Zinke's office declined to respond for this article.

But the execution of the offshore drilling plan has not been flawless, and some actions could undermine the administration's ability to carry out its agenda. After the Florida exclusion, other Republican governors of coastal Atlantic states openly complained, asking for the same exemption, or at least a face-to-face meeting like the one Zinke granted Scott.

Not surprisingly, Democrats who lead coastal statesalso complained about Zinke's handling of the offshore drilling decisions. Governors in both parties said their states might resort to legal action to protect beaches.

The Atlantic coastline of North Carolina is longer than Florida's, and Virginia's is nearly equal. Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey rely on Atlantic beaches for tourism nearly as much as the Sunshine State does. The Republican governor of Massachusetts wants to protect state gems such as Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard.

Axios reported that Trump "turned on" Zinke for cutting the deal with Florida, which might have violated a law that calls for a multistep process that could take up to a year before making such decisions. And an official at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees drilling leases and regulation at Interior, appeared to backtrack from the secretary's action during a House subcommittee hearing.

Walter Cruickshank, BOEM's acting director, said "no formal decision" had been made on taking Florida off the table. Meanwhile, in an interview, Scott insisted the Florida coast will not be developed for oil and gas, saying Zinke gave him his word.

Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said Cruickshank didn't necessarily refute Zinke, explaining that he simply pointed out that Florida's portion of the outer continental shelf will be studied along with that of every other coastal state, regardless of whether drilling happens there.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Zinke said he planned to meet with every governor on the coast. But his deal with Scott might have given other governors ammunition for future fights over the legality of opening their states to offshore drilling.

Zinke is also under fire by once-friendly Republican governors inland. At least two are speaking against the Interior Department's plan to expand oil and gas drilling into the heart of an iconic bird's dwindling habitat, adding to a bipartisan chorus of governors who are concerned about Zinke's bid to expand energy exploration across federal lands despite environmental risks.

Interior is planning to auction hundreds of thousands of acres to the oil industry for leases on Wyoming land that is protected to conserve the greater sage grouse, a bird resembling a chicken that only exists in the western United States.

Under an existing plan that has been heralded as an example of multistate, bipartisan cooperation balancing conservation and development, officials are working to safeguard and improve the land sage grouse need to flourish. Zinke wants to undo the hard-won plan.

"We are concerned that this is not the right decision," Wyoming Republican Gov. Matthew Meade wrote in a letter to Zinke in May before reaffirming it in a statement weeks ago. Colorado Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper co-signed the letter, which stated "Wholesale changes to the land use plans are likely not necessary at this time." Nevada Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval has also criticized Zinke's proposed changes to the plan.

But governors who support more drilling have Zinke's back. They include Alaska Independent Gov. Bill Walker and Maine Republican Gov. Gary LePage on offshore drilling, and Utah Gov. Gary R. Herbert and Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter, two Republicans who believe the sage grouse management plan should be changed.

Herbert and Otter sued the federal government soon after the Interior Department under the Obama administration declined to list sage grouse as endangered or threatened in return for strict management of their habitat by 10 of the 11 sagebrush states. They claimed the management plan that set aside land to protect sage grouse had a worse impact than the endangered listing they worked to avoid. The oil and gas industry agreed, saying the deal was bad for Utah and Idaho and good for Wyoming.

As the year unfolds, Zinke has several unpopular policy decisions on his agenda. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under Interior must decide whether to lift a ban on shipping trophies of elephants shot in Zimbabwe, a plan Trump opposed. Interior may continue reassigning senior executives, which has drawn charges of retaliation. Zinke is proposing the most dramatic reorganization in Interior's history, shifting offices to points across the country and moving potentially thousands of federal positions. And he will continue the highly contentious process of reviewing some national monuments to determine if they should be downsized.

Pulitzer-winning opinion from the most respected voices in the world.

Trump’s conspiracy theories endanger democracy

By michael gerson
Trump’s conspiracy theories endanger democracy

WASHINGTON -- Just as Bill Clinton’s 1998 State of the Union address is known as the speech after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Donald Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address is likely to be remembered as the speech before Robert Mueller’s report arrived.

Clinton remains the gold standard in presidential scandal management: Stubbornly talk in public about “the people’s business.” Ruthlessly destroy the reputations of investigators and hostile witnesses. Tell delaying lies. And dismiss the controversy as a partisan matter -- even a partisan conspiracy -- in order to solidify support in your party and in Congress (the potential impeachment jury).

Little about Trump’s response so far deviates from this playbook. The goal is not to provide refuting evidence to potential charges of collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. It is to shift the grounds of the political debate -- making any charges against the president appear trivial, malicious and highly political.

The current president’s practice of this strategy, however, is more disturbing and damaging than his predecessor’s.

Trump’s sustained attack on the FBI’s credibility (”in tatters,” he claims) comes in the context of a broad assault on the integrity of American institutions. In a short political career, Trump has maligned the CIA (comparing it to the Nazis), the electoral system (”rigged”), the media (”fake news”), the federal judiciary (U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel is a “hater” and a “Mexican”) and the Justice Department (harboring the “deep state”). Any institution that checks him is smeared. In the current case, Trump has reportedly demanded loyalty from law enforcement officials, attacked them after they refused, and suggested to the country that everyone in Washington is as cynical as he is (praising, for example, former Attorney General Eric Holder because he “totally protected” President Obama).

When Trump is temporarily tamed by a teleprompter, there are political benefits in talking about national unity. But Trump has built his scandal strategy on a foundation of conspiracy theories, targeted by partisan media to the most receptive. “We have a coup on our hands in America, “ says Fox News host Jesse Watters.

Does Trump believe this? Who knows? In this matter, sincerity is downright scary. It means we have a conspiracy-minded, 71-year-old Fox viewer engaged in a strange feedback loop with conservative cable television -- each encouraging the delusions of the other. In the process, Trump is further alienating an already-alienated segment of the population, making them more open to suggestions that he is the victim -- not of his own ineptness and corruption -- but of sedition.

Why is this a danger to democracy? People who believe conspiracy theories cease to believe in the possibility of discourse and deliberation. When the whole game is rigged, debates can only be decided by power. At stake in our political moment is respect for the rule of law itself. A president who doesn’t like being subject to the rules is attempting to discredit the enforcers of the rules. This has been tried before, but seldom with a heavier hand.

Perhaps most frightening is how enthusiastically some GOP members of Congress have taken to Trump’s strategy -- and how quickly this has intimidated most others in the caucus. There is, according to some Republicans, a “secret society” at work in the FBI, in a plot that is “worse than Watergate.” In one of those shocking ironies that have become commonplace in the Trump era, law-and-order Republicans call on America’s leading law enforcement agency to be “purged” for political reasons. It is the triumph of partisanship over ideology. It is the triumph of partisanship over sanity.

No amount of presidential words can change the showdown that now seems inevitable. Based only on what we currently know, Trump’s presidential campaign desired to collude with the Russians. The case for obstruction by the president -- apparently demanding loyalty from then-FBI Director James Comey, pressing Comey to lay off of Michael Flynn, firing Comey, boasting that the firing had relieved “great pressure” on him, pushing other administration officials to publicly clear him -- seems strong. Actions by the special counsel also hint at the investigation of financial corruption.

What if Mueller comes out with a, say, 400-page report, along with five volumes of supporting material, detailing serious offenses in all these areas? Trump has made his response clear: If law enforcement does its job, it will be evidence of a conspiracy to abuse its power. One question, at that point, would dominate our politics: Will Republicans choose to live within this lie?

Michael Gerson’s email address is michaelgerson@washpost.com.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

A new Trump is not possible

By richard cohen
A new Trump is not possible

If, as it is said, an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce “Hamlet,” then sooner or later Donald Trump was going to deliver an inoffensive speech. By nearly universal agreement, he did so Friday at Davos, but the speech was highly notable in only one respect: It contained no bombastic lie.

Sometimes the thin air of the Swiss Alps can have an odd effect. The participants at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos inhaled and sank to their knees in obeisance to Trump. From all reports, he was treated with dignity, which is much more than he deserved. In a just world, he would suffer constant rebuke.

Apparently, there was no appropriate response from the nations Trump so recently insulted; y’know, the ones he likened to a “shithole.” Mexico, which he considers the home of so many rapists, was also officially mum. As for the Chinese, they were quietly eating Trump’s lunch, signing up the very businesses Trump was beckoning his way. “America is open for business,” Trump declared. This was a dim rehash of Calvin Coolidge’s declaration that “The chief business of the American people is business.” Not long after “Silent Cal” left office, that business went bust. The Great Depression hit.

Coolidge was a caricature of New England rectitude and so repressed that when he died, the humorist Dorothy Parker reportedly cracked, “How can they tell?” Trump has none of those qualities. But the speech he gave was in the Chamber of Commerce mode often favored by laissez-faire Republicans. It extolled business but was silent on the political movements swirling all around him in Europe -- the threat to human rights and the challenge of how to deal with immigrants and refugees.

This, of course, is an area where Trump has not been silent. He has, in fact, bristled his antipathy toward immigrant groups, riding a wave of xenophobia straight into the White House. He has denigrated certain immigrants -- Mexicans, in particular -- and too often shot the cuffs of a racism that is usually obscured. At Davos, he boasted of a low unemployment rate for African-Americans (6.8 percent), but it had already been descending under Barack Obama. Besides, even if the number were zero, Trump would hardly be beloved in the black community. He has an attitude problem.

Trump made no mention of Viktor Orban’s regime in Hungary, which is trending toward the despotic and, with its ugly attacks on American investor George Soros, the anti-Semitic. Trump also took no notice of Poland, which is gleefully resurrecting its authoritarian, intolerant past and airbrushing, in Stalinist style, the achievements of Lech Walesa, its Nobel laureate in peace. (The government should read another of Poland’s Nobel laureates, Czeslaw Milosz, whose poem about how the 1943 burning of Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto was watched with glee by many Poles.)

The Czech Republic, once gloriously personified by Vaclav Havel, is now obsessed with a supposed immigrant threat, and was not mentioned by Trump either. Silence, too, was accorded to the appalling human rights conditions of Yemen and Myanmar. The harsh fact is that Trump doesn’t have the moral standing to lecture anyone. As an American president, he’s not yet a failure. He is, though, a disgrace.

The leadership role Trump proclaimed in Davos is a chimera. The U.S. economy is growing no faster than those of other industrialized nations -- and slower than some, such as India and China. All in all, Trump acted as if he had not been preceded by eight years of Obama. The results he took credit for were largely the consequence of trends established by his predecessor. The now-chugging economy, the decline of unemployment -- all of this was due to Obama’s economic policies. So, too, is the virtual defeat of the Islamic State, which Trump mentioned at Davos.

No doubt the White House is capable of producing a speech that does not, like Trump’s inaugural, suggest it had been written by someone off his meds. And no doubt Trump can -- with almost life-threatening self-restraint -- deliver a speech and not, in some moment of heated inspiration, veer off-message into the gutter. But even a Lincolnesque address would not, at this point, redeem Trump. He is a thoroughly corrupt man -- a liar, a chiseler, a bully and an emotional infant. The praise he got at Davos from some journalists and others will soon seem silly. A New Trump is not possible. The speech was just a rhetorical comb-over.

Richard Cohen’s email address is cohenr@washpost.com.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

Trump is trying to Make America White Again

By eugene robinson
Trump is trying to Make America White Again

WASHINGTON -- President Trump’s immigration proposal reveals what he has been after all along: an end to family-based immigration and the “lottery visa,” which would mean fewer Latino, African and Muslim newcomers. And perhaps more Norwegians, if any want to come.

Yes, Trump is trying to Make America White Again. You’re probably not surprised.

The broad amnesty that the White House offers to 1.8 million people brought here illegally when they were children is just a diversion. The $25 billion Trump wants for his “border wall system” -- really more of an intermittent fence -- is mostly a sop to his base. Much more important in the long run is the fundamental shift Trump wants to make in the nation’s system of legal immigration.

The administration seeks to drastically curtail the ability of immigrants to sponsor family members for entry into the country. This can only be seen as an attempt to halt the “browning” of America.

Under current law, U.S. citizens -- including immigrants who are naturalized -- can petition to obtain entry for their spouses, parents, siblings and sons and daughters of any age. Immigrants who are not citizens but hold green cards -- meaning they are permanent residents -- can sponsor spouses and minor or adult children for entry.

Trump proposes a sweeping change: Both citizens and green-card holders would only be able to sponsor spouses and minor children. As far as parents, siblings and adult children are concerned: (BEG ITAL)Hasta la vista.(END ITAL)

It is, of course, ironic that Republicans, who yammer so much about family values, would even entertain a proposal that is so deeply anti-family. But the party nominated and elected a thrice-married man who bragged about his habit of sexual harassment and allegedly paid hush money to a porn star for her silence about a tryst, so I guess that horse has long since left the barn.

The idea of limiting family-based sponsorship -- championed by administration officials such as presidential adviser Stephen Miller and his former boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions -- is broadly supported by GOP immigration hard-liners. Since it is difficult to argue against bringing close relatives together, proponents use the clinical-sounding term “chain migration,” as if we were talking about links of metal rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.

Trump also wants to eliminate the diversity visa program, which allocates 50,000 visas each year to countries that otherwise send few immigrants to the United States. Applicants are selected by lottery but then are carefully vetted. White House claims that individuals are admitted “at random” in a program “riddled with fraud and abuse” are lies.

What is true is that the diversity lottery has primarily benefited migrants from African nations, which Trump has called “shithole countries.”

The net result of Trump’s plan -- the whole purpose, apparently -- would be to welcome fewer people of color into the United States. In an Oval Office meeting, Trump reportedly demanded to know why there couldn’t be more immigrants from countries such as Norway. Surely it is not a coincidence that Norway is one of the whitest countries in the world.

It should also be noted that while Trump’s proposal would provide a 10- to 12-year path to citizenship for 1.8 million undocumented immigrants who came into the country as children, it says nothing at all about the other 9 million or so here without documents. Presumably they would remain in the shadows.

There’s a simple question here: Do you believe in America or not?

Throughout its history, the country has accepted waves of mostly low-skilled immigrants -- German, Irish, Italian, Eastern European, now Latino. There are highly skilled immigrants, too; African newcomers, for example, are better-educated than the U.S. population as a whole, and an estimated 63 percent of people holding “computer and mathematical” STEM jobs in Silicon Valley are foreign-born. But most immigrants over the years have arrived bearing not much more than grit, ambition and a dream.

Does an influx of workers with entry-level skills tend to depress wages? That’s the wrong question. Instead, we should be asking why the federal minimum wage is so low as to be almost irrelevant.

And we should recognize that immigration gives the United States a tremendous competitive advantage. In other advanced countries, populations are aging rapidly. Immigration provides a steady stream of younger workers whose brain and brawn keep programs such as Medicare and Social Security viable.

The only coherent -- if despicable -- arguments for Trump’s plan are racial and cultural. The way they used to put it in the Jim Crow days was succinct: White is right.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

(c) 2017, Washington Post Writers Group

Are we hostage to the stock market?

By robert j. samuelson
Are we hostage to the stock market?

WASHINGTON -- The stock market is going gangbusters -- but whether this reflects the economy’s underlying strength or runaway speculation is a question that stumps many experts. Hence, the need for this column: a primer on the red-hot stock market. Will it sustain the economy or ultimately kill it?

The boom is undeniable. In 12 out of the first 15 trading days of 2018, stocks reached record highs, with an overall gain of 6 percent, worth about $1.9 trillion, according to Wilshire Associates. Since Donald Trump’s election on Nov. 8, 2016, stocks are up one-third, or $8.4 trillion.

Nor is there much quarrel that, at present levels, stock valuations are “stretched.” In layman’s language, this means that stock prices are high relative to company earnings (profits). Since 1936, the median price-earnings ratio for the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index is 17; the present P/E is about 24, says Howard Silverblatt of S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Or consider another measure, the “CAPE” index. This stands for “cyclically adjusted price-earnings” ratio. Devised by economists Robert Shiller of Yale and John Campbell of Harvard, it provides a longer view of market behavior. The CAPE averages 10 years of P/Es and corrects for inflation. This index, too, is historically high at 34, which is roughly double the long-term median of 16.

With evidence like this, some experts conclude that stocks are overvalued. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, economist Burton Malkiel -- author of the classic “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” -- asserts that “all asset classes appear overpriced.” Economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics says stocks could be overvalued by as much as 20 percent.

What these economists are saying is that euphoric investors are pushing prices higher because they believe everyone else is pushing prices higher. Herd mentality prevails. But sooner or later, this self-deception becomes obvious. Then, stock prices “correct” -- a modest decline of, say, 10 to 15 percent -- or “crash,” a much larger loss. Since the 1930s, there have been 13 full-fledged bear markets with declines exceeding 20 percent, according to Silverblatt’s figures. Their drops averaged 40 percent.

The counterargument is that something (examples: tax cuts, regulatory policies, new technologies, low interest rates) has brightened the economic outlook, justifying higher stock prices. Trump and his allies have taken this view, arguing that the economy is already strong and that his policies will make it stronger.

One skeptic is Shiller. Although conceding in a recent column for Project Syndicate that high U.S. P/E ratios are a “mystery,” he doesn’t credit “the Trump effect.” For starters, he says, the CAPE ratio has been high since 2013; Trump’s policies can’t explain this. The market’s upward march preceded his election. Nor do high P/Es reflect exceptionally rapid growth in profits, Shiller argues. Just the opposite: Adjusted for inflation, profits are only 6 percent higher than a decade earlier.

The reality is that stock market booms and busts are often driven by financial innovations that initially seem to make investing safer, argues financial consultant Scott Nations in his absorbing new book “A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns that Defined a Nation (1907, 1929, 1987, 2008 and 2010).”

For example: In the early 2000s, the “securitization” of mortgages -- the packaging of home loans in bond-like securities -- was supposed to reduce risk by informing investors of varying loan quality. Perversely, this lulled investors into a false sense of confidence that justified many dubious loans. When this became clear, the economy and stocks collapsed.

It’s an open question whether something similar is happening now. The infatuation with bitcoin symbolizes growing speculation, Nations says. Another source of potential instability could be index products -- exchange-traded funds (ETFs) or index mutual funds -- that allow investors to buy and track a basket of stocks, such as the S&P 500.

These index products have grown rapidly in popularity, reflecting low fees and a belief that most investors can’t “beat the market,” so why try? In November 2017, there were 1,828 ETFs and index funds worth a total of $3.3 trillion, up from 923 products worth $1 trillion in 2010, reports the Investment Company Institute (ICI), a trade group.

Although index products are investor-friendly, their effect on market trends is not clear. The need to buy and sell huge baskets of stocks may exaggerate swings in both directions, increasing gains in bull markets and losses in bear markets. Still, ICI economist Sean Collins doubts there’s much overall impact, noting that -- despite their growth -- index products represent only 13 percent of stock-market wealth.

What seems clearer is that the market remains vulnerable to unexpected economic or political shocks. A significant decline in stocks would undermine confidence and spending. Main Street is, to some extent, hostage to Wall Street.

(c) 2018, The Washington Post Writers Group

Hawaii and the politics of war jitters

By e.j. dionne jr.
Hawaii and the politics of war jitters

HONOLULU -- Gov. David Ige, who speaks in the quietly measured way of his engineering profession, likes to tout everything Hawaii is doing to battle climate change.

He lights up about the state’s Early College initiative that allows high school students to take enough college courses to earn associate degrees along with their secondary school diplomas. For good measure, he proudly stresses the state’s tolerance and openness (”Everybody’s a minority in Hawaii”) and argues the rest of the country can draw lessons from its more than four decades of nearly universal health care.

But for the moment, the main thing, maybe the only thing, that people back on the mainland know about him is that he’s the governor who forgot his Twitter password on the day his state was shaken by a false warning of an imminent missile attack. Ige learned two minutes after the announcement that the Jan. 13 alert was mistaken, but it took him another 15 petrifying minutes to tweet out: “There is NO missile threat.”

Perhaps because the Trump presidency has made lies and evasions so commonplace, there is something refreshing about Ige’s candid response to the fiasco.

During an interview in his office at the state capitol here last week he first performed yet another mea culpa for the entire mess: “The error was truly an unacceptable occurrence.” Then he explained that he, like many officials, does not pay much attention to his Twitter feed, leaving it to his staff -- another contrast with President Trump. Ige acknowledges not getting up to speed quickly enough.

“Obviously, I don’t do my own Twitter,” he said, “and it came up, and the question was asked, ‘Why did it take X minutes before we had posted on Twitter?’ and that’s the fact.”

Politicians face many challenges, but Ige may be alone in having to answer to a constituency in which every single member confronted the possibility of sudden death. “Who else has had the experience of thinking, I have 10 minutes to live?” wondered Brett Oppegaard, a journalism professor at the University of Hawaii.

The timing of the episode was particularly inopportune for Ige, a first-term Democrat who faces a tough challenge in this summer’s primary from respected U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa. In endorsing Hanabusa last week, Tulsi Gabbard, Hawaii’s other member of Congress, praised Hanabusa as “a strong, decisive, dynamic leader” and was not shy about invoking the false alarm.

“The failure of leadership that we saw throughout that entire incident further affirmed what I know,” Gabbard said.

Hanabusa herself doesn’t even have to bring up the subject. “The question is how we restore confidence,” she told me. “Bashing on the governor for the 38 minutes is not going to solve it,” referring to the time it took for the alarm to be called off officially.

And Ige will not be helped by reports last week that the still-anonymous “button pusher” who mistakenly sent out the alert is refusing to cooperate in three investigations of what happened.

Hawaii politics is distinctive in many respects, and not only for its exceptional ethnic pluralism. (There are not many places where analysts discuss the influence of the politically potent Japanese-American community’s Okinawan subset. It is likely to come to the defense of Ige, one of its own.) In no state is the Democratic Party quite so dominant. There is not one Republican in the state Senate and only five in the 51-member House of Representatives.

Bill Dorman, the news director of Hawaii Public Radio, says the state’s political system bears a certain resemblance to Japan’s. The long dominance of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party means that nearly all substantive battles are factional fights within the majority party. That’s what happens here, too.

Ige’s informal faction in the state legislature was called the Chess Club, a group of policy wonks. Ige explained that the bloc was named by the daughter of one its members who said their seriousness brought to mind the spirit of her high school’s chess club.

Ige conveys a sense of serenity about being the underdog in his re-election fight, but he is not so serene about Trump’s threats against North Korea. “We are very concerned with some of the statements made,” he said with characteristic restraint, adding: “We would look forward to the day when we don’t have to worry about sirens and warnings, and that everyone in the Pacific can live in peace.”

They were the words of a politician who has learned the high price extracted by rumors of war.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

When Trump leaves what will be left of us?

By dana milbank
When Trump leaves what will be left of us?

Someday, likely three years from now, perhaps sooner, perhaps -- gulp -- later, President Trump will depart the stage.

But what will be left of us?

New evidence suggests the damage he is doing to the culture is bigger than the man. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found that two-thirds of Americans say Trump is not a good role model for children. Every component of society feels that way -- men and women, old and young, black and white, highly educated or not -- except for one: Republicans. By 72 to 22 percent, they say Trump is a good role model.

In marked contrast to the rest of the country, Republicans also say that Trump shares their values (82 percent) and that -- get this -- he “provides the United States with moral leadership” (80 percent).

And what moral leadership this role model has been providing!

Soon after the release of this poll, we learned that Trump, in an effort to halt the Russia probe, planned to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, backing off only because his own White House counsel threatened to resign. So Trump obviously didn’t speak the truth when he said that he had never contemplated such a firing. And, at this writing, he is in Switzerland, responding by renewing his denunciations of the “fake news” media -- an attack on the free press now emulated by despots the world over.

In fairness, we learned of the proposed Mueller firing after the poll was conducted, so let’s see what else might have led 72 percent of Republicans to conclude Trump is a good role model:

His lawyer had arranged to make payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, a month before the election for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal.

He had used a vulgar word to describe African countries during a racist rant to lawmakers at the White House.

He was mounting a campaign to discredit the “corrupt” FBI, the Justice Department and the special prosecutor, just as he had previously sought to disqualify courts and judges.

He backed a credibly accused child molester for the Senate from Alabama.

And so on.

Yet so strong is the pull of tribalism that we’ve reached a point where partisanship outweighs morality. Republicans aren’t approving of Trump despite his behavior; in calling him a role model, they’re approving his behavior.

No doubt some of those Republicans now condoning Trump’s behavior will give the standard rebuttal: What about the Clintons?

Well, Quinnipiac didn’t poll nationally during the Clinton presidency, but Gallup, during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in January 1999, asked a similar question. The number of Republicans back then saying Clinton did not provide good moral leadership, 91 percent, was similar to the 96 percent of Democrats who say Trump does not provide moral leadership today.

The difference: Democrats disapproved of Clinton’s morality by 2 to 1 (65 to 33 percent), even as they overwhelmingly approved of his job performance. Only 16 percent of Republicans today say Trump does not provide moral leadership.

The triumph of partisanship over morality starts at the top. Franklin Graham excused Trump’s alleged sexual encounter, and Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, declared that Trump gets a “mulligan” -- a do-over -- for his behavior.

Such normalizing of Trump’s behavior makes the seediest elements feel safe to crawl out from under their rocks. The FBI reported in November that hate crimes were up again in 2016 after rising in 2015. And the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents were “significantly higher” through the first nine months of 2017 -- a time in which Trump said there were “very fine people” among a march of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville. (This month, as Trump was whipping up loathing of the “fake news” media, a young man was arrested for threatening to gun down CNN journalists.)

Even public officials feel emboldened to give voice to the basest impulses. In recent days:

A town manager in Maine was ousted for promoting racial segregation and “pro-white” views.

A pro-Trump Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Missouri posted a statement saying he expects his wife to have dinner waiting for him each night and denouncing “nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek” and have “nasty, snake-filled heads.”

A Republican state representative in Kansas alleged that marijuana was illegal because “the African Americans, they were basically users and they responded the worst off to those drugs.”

A Trump appointee to AmeriCorps resigned after CNN uncovered his past remarks saying “I just don’t like Muslim people” and similar statements.

Politicians have always behaved badly. What’s new is the willingness of so many not just to look the other way but to call bad behavior good.

Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter, @Milbank.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

The sharpest pens in the industry serve up points of view to chew on.

Bury your dead-tired strips and grab something fresh, meaningful and hilarious.

Serious therapy and serious fun to give readers a break from breaking news.