DAVID IGNATIUS COLUMN

Advance for release Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2020, and thereafter

(For Ignatius clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)

Updates throughout to reflect firing of Krebs

By David Ignatius

WASHINGTON - President Trump may be rattling our nerves with his baseless claims of fraud and his vindictive firings. But the two weeks since the election should give Americans greater confidence that our democracy can't so easily be subverted.

Trump on Tuesday evening launched yet another assault on members of his administration who have dared to speak up. In a tweet, he "terminated" Christopher Krebs as head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security. Krebs's supposed crime was that he had rebutted Trump's wild accusations of "massive improprieties and fraud" in the Nov. 3 election, as the president put it in the tweet firing Krebs.

When the history books about this election are written, Krebs will be one of the heroes. Last Thursday, when Trump was trying to spin his unsubstantiated claim that Dominion Voting Systems and other companies that provided election software had diverted votes to President-elect Joe Biden, Krebs delivered an emphatic rebuttal on behalf of his agency and the 50 state election monitors he had worked with.

"There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way comprised," said a statement issued by CISA. That was the latest of a series of warnings before and after the election that Krebs posted as part of his regular "Rumor Control" warnings about malicious election claims.

Krebs had even retweeted a caution against "wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they're made by the president." That may have infuriated the White House, but he spoke for a task force that included representatives of secretaries of state and state election directors in all 50 states - the people who administered the election.

Biden has sensibly taken a low-key approach to Trump's post-election sulks and tantrums. Such behavior is an embarrassment to the country, as Biden said Monday, but it won't stop the transition of power on Jan. 20. Biden should keep repeating this message: The departing president can demean himself and his party, but he can't change the result.

And as Trump's lawsuits collapse, one by one, the Nov. 3 outcome is being ratified - and reinforced - by the courts. If Trump tries to circumvent these legal judgments and take extralegal action (in other countries, we'd call it a "coup"), there are guardrails in place.

Krebs and other election security officials had months to prepare, because Trump has been so blatant about his intention to subvert a result that doesn't go his way. Back in July, the president refused to commit to accepting the outcome and, during the campaign, he made almost daily claims about the coming fraud. After losing by substantial margins in both the popular vote and electoral college, Trump knew he needed to allege a conspiracy that involved millions of votes. And so he has.

Trump's prime target was Dominion Voting Systems. Last Thursday,the president retweeted a baseless allegation that the company had deleted 2.7 million votes. The company immediately issued a "categorical" denial, but Trump doubled down on Saturday with a claim that Dominion was "a privately owned Radical Left company."

The charge was amplified by pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who argued bizarrely on Sunday that CIA Director Gina Haspel "should be fired immediately" because Haspel had disregarded claims about Dominion. Powell said evidence of fraud was "coming through a fire hose."

As these conspiracy theories rise like swamp gas, is the nation helpless? Thankfully not, because of monitoring systems put in place months ago by officials determined to protect our democracy.

With Trump's lawsuits falling short, some people fear he will turn to the military to resist a lawful transfer of power. The anxiety increased last week when Trump sacked Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and his top aides and replaced them with what looked like a war cabinet. But here again, there are protections in place.

The chief guardian of the military's integrity is Gen. Mark A. Milley, the barrel-chested chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He promised Congress in August that the military would play "no role" in post-election disputes. If anyone missed the message, Milley told his troops on Veterans Day: "We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king, or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. . . . We take an oath to the Constitution."

The president is the commander in chief, but the Pentagon operates under the rule of law. Robert S. Taylor, a former Defense Department general counsel, has cautioned officials that they could face legal risks if they try to interfere in the 2020 outcome. And Eugene R. Fidell, a military law expert at Yale, has created an "Orders Project" to advise soldiers who think they may have received illegal or improper commands.

Trump has the power to fire people, but not to rewrite history. During his remaining weeks in office, he will try to frazzle nerves and take every opportunity to counterpunch. But this reality show has been canceled - by the American public and the officials who protected the integrity of their votes.

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Contact David Ignatius on Twitter @IgnatiusPost

By DANA MILBANK

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RUBEN NAVARRETTE COLUMN

FOR IMMEDIATE PRINT AND WEB RELEASE.

(For Navarrette clients)

By RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.

SAN DIEGO - Former president Barack Obama's memoir - the first installment of which went on sale this week and weighs in at 768 pages - appears to be an interminable love letter. To himself.

Trouble is, as more and more people have come to realize since Obama left office, there is not much to love - or even like - about the 44th president's awful crackdown on immigration.

That's why I was stunned when Obama wrote, in his new book, about how politics can be driven by fear.

You see, it's fear that fuels the immigration debate.

Americans like to tell pollsters that their anxiety about who is coming to the United States is all about their respect for the concept of playing by the rules.

Nonsense. Most people don't really care about rules, especially those they find inconvenient. COVID-19 proved that definitively. People flout mask-wearing or social distancing policies, sometimes even violently lashing out when others try to enforce regulations. In Michigan, right-wing protesters were so outraged by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's orders to shut down schools and businesses that they challenged state troopers and tried to storm the state capital. Some even hatched a plot to kidnap and kill Whitmer. Not a good look for the follow-the-rules crowd.

What the immigration debate is really about is the same thing it has always been about, since way back in the 1700s when Benjamin Franklin hassled German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania: good ol'-fashioned fear.

Psychologically, it's fear of change, fear of the unknown, and fear of those who are different. Culturally, it's fear of a foreign language becoming the national language, and fear that immigrants won't assimilate. Economically, it's fear that immigrants might take jobs from U.S. workers, and fear that employers might hire immigrants as an excuse to keep wages lower than they should be. And politically, it's fear that immigrants, once naturalized as U.S. citizens, will register to vote against your party and your slate of candidates.

Obama understands fear. But - surprise - only as the concept relates to him and how he has been victimized by it.

In April 2008, during the Democratic primary, Obama told supporters at a San Francisco fundraiser that he would be doing better with White working-class Democrats in the Rust Belt if not for the fact that so many of them were fearful. In recorded remarks later seized upon by Hillary Clinton as an example of her opponent's "elitism," Obama said of these voters: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

And, in his new memoir, "A Promised Land," Obama surmised that it was fear that drove nearly 63 million Americans to vote for Donald Trump in 2016.

"It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted," Obama wrote. "Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started pedaling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety."

According to Obama, Trump detected this racist fear that many Americans harbored and exploited it to get elected.

Obama is spot-on about Trump. He's just not very self-aware. Do you know who else exploited racist fears to serve political ends? That's right. Barack Obama.

It was fear - specifically fear of undocumented immigrants who committed crimes - that allowed Obama to justify a heavy-handed immigrant crackdown that included more than 3 million deportations during his eight years in office. When pressed about the purge, Obama repeatedly - and, it turned out, falsely - claimed that he was only removing "criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community."

Why? Because he must have assumed that Americans would excuse his Draconian approach to immigration enforcement if they thought his policies protected them from scary brown-skinned foreigners.

In fact, as you may recall from attempts to analyze the 2016 election, there was a sizable swath of the electorate that voted for Obama's reelection in 2012 and then went on to vote for Trump four years later.

If Obama believes these voters backed Trump because of fear, why can't he wrap his head around the idea that, just a few years earlier, some of them may have backed him for the same reason?

Now there's a story worth writing.

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Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com. His daily podcast, "Navarrette Nation," is available through every podcast app.

KATHLEEN PARKER COLUMN

Advance for release Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2020, and thereafter

(For Parker clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)

By Kathleen Parker

Pity the poor authors whose books were released this week. Former president Barack Obama's post-presidential memoir, "A Promised Land," has rightly stolen the show.

Volume one, released Tuesday, is a 768-page doorstop apt for the moment, as history's door stands ajar. While we await recounts, a presidential concession and the dark orbit of the covid-19 pandemic, Obama's latest memoir reminds us of where we've been and how we arrived as this crucial, democracy-mocking hinge in American history. Yet, even as he means to clarify and contextualize his decisions for future readers, one suspects that he's trying to lend a moral order to his presidency for his own edification as well.

A lovely writer, Obama gives readers more than a mere recitation of events. He offers an insider's peek into his thought process perhaps to make his decisions seem more palatable in retrospect. If readers could peek over the rim of his skull and watch the wheels turn, they'd likely be rubbing shoulders with Obama himself. He wants to understand how he thinks, too.

Having a third-person relationship with oneself can be helpful to a writer, if it doesn't cripple him. Watching oneself do a thing can cause the thing to become something else -- and then something else -- and on and on, into paralytic infinity. Why, you can talk yourself out of most anything if you study it to its ultimate conclusion, which is, of course, nada. Obama's well-earned reputation as someone who could overthink almost anything is one reason fellow writers, especially in the media, found him so fascinating. It's also why progressives found him so maddening. Just do it!

We ink-stained wretches admired Obama's thoughtful ways around a subject, his meandering along pathways of implication and possibility, culminating in a formulation that, often as not, would be punctuated with an ellipsis rather than a period. One could often see his mind working as he spoke.

If his speech at times felt halting, it was because of his care with wording. Presidents can't afford a misspoken word for good reason - another one of those presidential memos Donald Trump never read. Trump's supporters found his "honesty" refreshing, by which they meant, he's saying what I'm thinking, no matter how ignoble my thoughts. When Obama speaks, he obviously chooses each word with great care. He understands his responsibility to the nation and the world by expressing himself so carefully that nothing is left to interpretation.

Obama is also well-read, which probably accounts for his skillful way with words. In his days as a candidate, columnist David Brooks interviewed Obama and waxed euphoric about his familiarity with Reinhold Niebuhr, the American philosopher-theologian.

Watching his recent "60 Minutes" book interview with Scott Pelley -- or reading an excerpt in the New Yorker -- felt like slipping into a warm bath. Obama's natural elegance, contrasted to Trump's bombastic bleats, provided a reawakening to our better angels and the higher truths that have been diminished or forgotten these past four years.

President-elect Joe Biden is no Obama, but he understands that the office of the presidency isn't for showmen. How he governs, assuming he takes office in January, remains to be seen. But we've learned that governance isn't only about policies; it's also about the persona embodied by the president of the United States.

Obama says he wrote his book for a younger generation, but I don't believe him. My guess is that he has many more chapters to write. Authors often say they write the books they themselves need to read. And for all his accomplishments and stubborn optimism, Obama is still haunted by his father's dreams. How do I know? Next to boy-meets-girl, it's the never-ending story of humankind.

Obama's early losses, of his father through abandonment and his mother from premature death, are what propelled him to the summit. I spotted both engines in him long ago because I share them.

Perhaps with his memoir, he can finally put the ellipsis to rest. But I doubt it.

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Kathleen Parker's email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

MEGAN MCARDLE COLUMN

Advance for release Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2020, and thereafter

(For McArdle clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)

By Megan McArdle

WASHINGTON -- Friends and I have been talking recently about how to make Thanksgiving celebrations safe.

"You already know what I'm going to say," I told one, whose enormous brood of Catholic siblings are now raising enormous Catholic broods of their own.

"It's not safe?"

"It's not safe," I agreed.

I hate playing the role of The Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving. Like you, I'm longing to see friends and family, and enjoy my favorite holiday. Those things make life worth living.

But that doesn't make it any safer to gather large numbers of people -- including out-of-towners -- in a small, poorly ventilated space. Especially not if the guests rip off their masks to eat, drink and talk as loudly as most families do when they congregate for holidays. And since a lot of Americans clearly don't realize how dangerous this is, I'm going to tell you what I've been telling my friends.

First, private gatherings are now a major force driving new infections. That's because the coronavirus loves small, enclosed spaces. Many people think they'll be safe as long as they're wearing a mask or spraying down surfaces with bleach or standing six feet away from others, based on guidelines developed last spring, when people thought the virus was spread mostly by large particles that fall to the ground quickly. Since then, it's become clear that the virus can stay airborne for a lot longer than initially thought. While masks and distance absolutely help to lower the risk of casual encounters, the longer you spend indoors with a sick person, the higher the chance that enough virus will build up in the air to infect you.

Second, tests fail. A lot. Many folks proudly tell me they're using tests to make sure their Thanksgiving is safe. But even the most accurate tests miss a significant number of infections, as President Donald Trump's White House keeps vividly demonstrating. In a covid-friendly environment such as Thanksgiving dinner, it takes only one false negative -- or, say, the uncle who didn't get tested because "covid is a hoax" -- to spark a superspreading event.

Third, these risks soar as community caseloads rise, and that background rate is worse than it was in the spring. Covid-19 is no longer mostly in hot spots near international airports. It is everywhere, and spreading fast. Yet many who escaped the first wave have a false sense of security, thinking they've had it already or that modest precautions suffice. And, mostly, they did work when background rates are low.

When there are lots of sick people in lots of closed spaces, however, viral loads climb, sometimes high enough to overwhelm whatever modest defenses you've erected -- such as wearing a mask in the grocery store, routinely washing your hands, solemnly vowing not to attend any more concerts.

Fourth, very high community spread makes it more likely an infection will kill you. Treatments have improved considerably since early spring. But that helps only if hospitals have the "space, staff, and stuff" to provide optimal treatment. Some hospitals have already breached their limit in one or more of those categories. And because the epidemic is nationwide, rather than regional, it will get harder and harder for overstretched health systems to draw emergency assistance from other areas, as New York did in the spring. So the risk is mounting that large Thanksgiving celebrations will be followed by small Christmas funerals, as the Mississippi Board of Health so pungently put it.

With a tidal wave of cases about to crash over hospitals, we should all do our best not to become that "young healthy patient" whose unexpected need for high-flow oxygen means that someone's grandmother dies alone. Or the asymptomatic spreader who infected Grandma in the first place. Or just one of thousands of covid cases that pushed the system to its limit, leaving more victims of car accidents, heart attacks and strokes without adequate treatment.

All these considerations become more urgent when two highly effective vaccine candidates might be available soon, possibly even by year's end, which should make us more cautious. If there were never a vaccine, and Mom died from the infection she caught at Thanksgiving -- well, what were we going to do, cancel Thanksgiving forever? But if Mom dies of an infection she could have avoided by waiting a few months to get a shot? That's not only a damn shame but is apt to make Thanksgiving rather fraught for years to come.

And that's why instead of suggesting nine handy tips to make your big family get-together safer, I'm suggesting only one thing: Maybe just don't. The turkey will still taste good in a few months, when everyone is vaccinated -- and next year's turkey will taste a lot better if everyone's still around to eat it.

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Follow Megan McArdle on Twitter, @asymmetricinfo.

ALEXANDRA PETRI COLUMN

Advance for release Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2020, and thereafter

(For Petri clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)

By Alexandra Petri

UNITED STATES -- Fans lined up outside bookstores in the hours leading up to midnight to lay their hands on the hot new bestseller, "A Promised Land," the latest in a series from mega-popular author Barack Obama, who is married to the writer of the runaway success "Becoming," set in the same universe. Some were even dressed in button-downs, khakis or tan suits, an homage to the style of their favorite characters from the series.

"I've been waiting for this so long!" enthused one fan, who said she was dressed as Triumphant Vision of Bipartisan Cooperation, a key figure from "The Audacity of Hope" she hoped would continue to play an important role as the series continued. "It ended on such a cliffhanger, and I kept wondering, you know, will Bipartisanship really win? Or will there be a twist that pulls the rug out from under us? What is the arc of history bending toward?" She said she and other fans had spent hours poring over their copies, searching for clues, and nursed many fan theories of what would happen next.

"To me, I think he has to become the president. 'Dreams From My Father' could have gone in any direction, but when you add 'The Audacity of Hope' to that, there's a shift in tone, more campaign-like. I think that is foreshadowing him to become the president," she said. "And I think if he does that, his first move would be to close Guantanamo. But I can't wait to read and find out!"

"There are some fan theories that really make me laugh," another fan said, "like, that this is actually going to turn out to be a sequel to 'Decision Points' and we'll wind up in that universe, and he's going to suddenly be dealing with all the problems left behind by George W. Bush and even take on Osama bin Laden, and his family and Bush's are going to be, like, buds later and hand each other mints and things -- I mean, if it's a sequel to 'Decision Points,' I'm really going to lose it."

Other fans disagreed. "I know that his serving as president is what happens in 'Becoming,'" one fan said of the book told from the perspective of the key female protagonist of the Obama series. "But I don't know if 'Becoming' is canon! I thought it was more of an exploration of themes. It's like, is 'Solo' really what happened to young Han Solo, or is it just what Disney thinks happened, you know?"

" 'Becoming' is absolutely canon," said a fan who had overheard. " 'What Happened,' though?" She indicated a book that is set in the Obama extended universe featuring Hillary Clinton, a character who in "Audacity of Hope" is a Senate colleague and fellow Democrat who makes several appearances, but who in "What Happened" has become first a rival, then an ally, then a would-be successor. "That's just way too dystopian, totally unrealistic. I think this Extended Universe is way off the rails. I'm just excited to get back to the main narrative."

Everyone agreed that the wait between books was too long. "It has been 14 years!" one fan said. "What has he been doing all this time? Who does he think he is, George R.R. Martin?"

Another fan complained that CNN, a TV show loosely based on the Obama saga, had been taking enormous liberties in the absence of any further plot from the original author. "I think he must have given them an outline? But they've gotten really mired down with this Trump plotline," they complained. "But it's because they don't have any new material. They just are trying to shock us every day with these horrible things. This is why I prefer books to TV. You can tell a story that makes sense."

"I just want another story of somebody who thinks this country can work, and manages to bring out what is best in us in the course of realizing his own dreams. Which - I have a feeling, in this one, he's going to get to do, largely unimpeded, with Bipartisanship at his side. I can't wait to see what the country looks like after this book ends."

A commotion began toward the front of the line as a spoilsport with a copy of the new book came running past, shouting, "MCCONNELL KILLS BIPARTISANSHIP!"

"What a jerk," one fan said. She shuddered. "I hope that isn't what happens."

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Follow Alexandra Petri on Twitter, @petridishes.