Saturday, August 31, 2019
Bad News For Brand USA: America's Slice Of The Global Tourism Pie Keeps Shrinking
"These are sobering times for the U.S. tourism industry. While international tourism is growing around the world, America’s slice of the pie has been shrinking.
America’s share of the global travel market dropped from 13.7 percent in 2015 to just 11.7 percent in 2018, according to the U.S. Travel Association.
That 2 percent drop is a very big deal. In 2018, international visitors to the U.S. spent $256 billion — so a two percent drop translates to around $5 billion annually. And the travel industry is a huge job generator. Last year, travelers spent $1.1 trillion in the U.S. and directly supported 8.9 million U.S. jobs, according to the U.S. Travel Association.
“When we met last year, I told you that the U.S. is losing international travel market share. Unfortunately, that is still the case,” U.S. Travel President and CEO Roger Dow told a crowd at IPW, the travel industry's premier inbound international conference, last week in Anaheim, California.
Dow noted that the U.S. Department of Commerce just put out figures showing that international travel to the U.S. grew by 3.5 percent last year. “That might sound pretty good — but not when you consider that globally, long-haul travel grew by 7 percent,” he said. “What that means is that the U.S. is still falling behind in the competition to attract international visitors. That’s the bad news.”
On one hand, Dow was reluctant to blame politics. “I know a lot of people want to lay this at the feet of our president. But we’ve come a long way helping the administration appreciate travel as a crucial U.S. export and job creator,” said Dow. “We certainly don’t think the president says often enough that he wants healthy numbers of visitors to come to the U.S. but there is an opening to talk to this administration about policies that help with visitation.”
To illustrate his point, Dow showed a clip from the 2019 State of the Union, where President Trump stated that the U.S. wants international visitors before making a crack about illegal immigration. The IPW audience reacted with cynical laughter.
But the same day Dow had to acknowledge that politics were contributing at least in part to the country’s tourism woes after the Chinese government issued multiple warnings to its citizens about traveling to the United States. Three of China’s ministries — Foreign Affairs, Education, and Culture and Tourism — issued separate warnings to business travelers, students and leisure travelers.
The Chinese government recently issued warnings to citizens about traveling to the United States.
GettyEven before these warnings, there was a drop in Chinese tourism numbers that appears to be connected to politics. After seven years of double-digit growth through 2016, it slowed to only 4 percent in 2017 and remained flat in 2018.
“This move would appear connected to the U.S.-China trade dispute,” said Dow in a statement. “While it's too early to know the impact this might have on inbound travel from one of our top source markets, announcements such as this can have a chilling effect.” Chinese tourists spend $6,700 per trip compared to an average of $4,200 for international tourists overall.
“We continue to urge both governments not to politicize travel for the reasons I have stated often: travel is incredibly valuable for both countries in terms of direct commercial activity and business relationships that have a broad downstream economic impact,” according to Dow’s statement.
“America can be — and should be — the most secure and the most visited country in the world,” said Dow."
Bad News For Brand USA: America's Slice Of The Global Tourism Pie Keeps Shrinking
Friday, August 30, 2019
Thursday, August 29, 2019
EPA's rollback of methane regulation is bad for the climate — and energy companies
"On december 19 of last year, Admiral Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met James Mattis for lunch at the Pentagon. Mattis was a day away from resigning as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, but he tends to keep his own counsel, and he did not suggest to Mullen, his friend and former commander, that he was thinking of leaving.
To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
But Mullen did think Mattis appeared unusually afflicted that day. Mattis often seemed burdened in his role. His aides and friends say he found the president to be of limited cognitive ability, and of generally dubious character. Now Mattis was becoming more and more isolated in the administration, especially since the defenestration of his closest Cabinet ally, the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, several months earlier. Mattis and Tillerson had together smothered some of Trump’s more extreme and imprudent ideas. But now Mattis was operating without cover. Trump was turning on him publicly; two months earlier, he had speculated that Mattis might be a Democrat and said, in reference to NATO, “I think I know more about it than he does.” (Mattis, as a Marine general, once served as the supreme allied commander in charge of NATO transformation.)"
EPA's rollback of methane regulation is bad for the climate — and energy companies
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
‘Take the land’: President Trump wants a border wall. He wants it black. And he wants it by Election Day.
"President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.
He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.
Trump has repeatedly promised to complete 500 miles of fencing by the time voters go to the polls in November 2020, stirring chants of “Finish the Wall!” at his political rallies as he pushes for tighter border controls. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed just about 60 miles of “replacement” barrier during the first 2½ years of Trump’s presidency, all of it in areas that previously had border infrastructure.
The president has told senior aides that a failure to deliver on the signature promise of his 2016 campaign would be a letdown to his supporters and an embarrassing defeat. With the election 14 months away and hundreds of miles of fencing plans still in blueprint form, Trump has held regular White House meetings for progress updates and to hasten the pace, according to several people involved in the discussions.
When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings.
“Don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,” he has told officials in meetings about the wall.
“He said people expected him to build a wall, and it had to be done by the election,” one former official said.
Asked for comment, a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Trump is joking when he makes such statements about pardons.
Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said Tuesday that the president is protecting the country with the addition of new border barriers.
“Donald Trump promised to secure our border with sane, rational immigration policies to make American communities safer, and that’s happening everywhere the wall is being built,” Gidley said. He called internal criticisms of the president “just more fabrications by people who hate the fact the status quo, that has crippled this country for decades, is finally changing as President Trump is moving quicker than anyone in history to build the wall, secure the border and enact the very immigration policies the American people voted for.”
“President Trump is fighting aggressively for the American people where other leaders in the past have rolled over, sold out, and done absolutely nothing,” he said.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper is expected to approve a White House request to divert $3.6 billion in Pentagon funds to the barrier project in coming weeks, money that Trump sought after lawmakers refused to allocate $5 billion. The funds will be pulled from Defense Department projects in 26 states, according to administration officials who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the matter.
Trump’s determination to build the barriers as quickly as possible has not diminished his interest in the aesthetic aspects of the project, particularly the requirement that the looming steel barriers be painted black and topped with sharpened tips.
In a meeting at the White House on May 23, Trump ordered the Army Corps and the Department of Homeland Security to paint the structure black, according to internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post.
Administration officials have stopped trying to talk him out of the demands, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is preparing to instruct contractors to apply black paint or coating to all new barrier fencing, the communications show.
Trump conceded last year in an immigration meeting with lawmakers that a wall or barrier is not the most effective mechanism to curb illegal immigration, recognizing it would accomplish less than a major expansion of U.S. enforcement powers and deportation authority. But he told lawmakers that his supporters want a wall and that he has to deliver it.
Trump talked about the loud cheers the wall brought at rallies, according to one person with direct knowledge of the meeting.
Former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly would often tell administration officials to disregard the president’s demands if Kelly did not think they were feasible or legally sound, according to current and former aides.
Replacement of existing barriers is underway on the U.S. border with Mexico on Aug. 23 near Calexico. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)During a conference call last week, officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection told Army Corps engineers that the hundreds of miles of fencing must be completed before the next presidential election, according to administration officials with knowledge of the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal communications.
“Border Patrol insists on compressed acquisition timelines, and we consent. Their goal is to get contracts awarded, not for us to get a quality contract with a thoroughly vetted contractor,” said one senior official who is concerned the agency has been hurried to hand out contracts as quickly as possible.
Military officials expect more contract protests because the arrangements have been rushed, the official added. The Army Corps already has had to take corrective actions for two procurement contracts, after companies protested.
The companies building the fencing and access roads have been taking heavy earth-moving equipment into environmentally sensitive border areas adjacent to U.S. national parks and wildlife preserves, but the administration has waived procedural safeguards and impact studies, citing national security concerns.
“They don’t care how much money is spent, whether landowners’ rights are violated, whether the environment is damaged, the law, the regs or even prudent business practices,” the senior official said.
CBP has suggested no longer writing risk-assessment memos “related to the fact that we don’t have real estate rights and how this will impact construction,” the official said.
While Trump has insisted that the barriers be painted, the cost of painting them will reduce the length of the fence the government will be able to build. According to the internal analysis, painting or coating 175 miles of barriers “will add between $70 million and $133 million in cost,” trimming the amount of fencing the Army Corps will be able to install by four to seven miles.
Sections of barrier being installed on the U.S.-Mexico border near Calexico. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)
In June, teams of U.S. soldiers painted a one-mile section of fence in Calexico, Calif., at a cost of $1 million. The coating, known as “matte black” or “flat black,” absorbs heat, making the fence hot to the touch, more slippery and therefore tougher to climb, according to border agents.
At Trump’s behest, the Army Corps also is preparing to instruct contractors to remove from the upper part of the fence the smooth metal plates that are used to thwart climbers. The president considered that design feature unsightly, according to officials familiar with his directives.
Instead, contractors have been asked to cut the tips of the steel bollards to a sharpened point. Trump had told aides this spring he thought the barrier should be spiked to instill a fear of injury.
The change in the bollard design is likely to reduce the overall length of the barrier by two to three miles, according to the administration’s cost assessments.
CBP has used a pointed design in the past, according to agency officials, either by installing a pyramid-shaped cap or making what the agency refers to as a “miter cut” in the metal.
Trump remains keen to tout incremental progress toward his wall-building commitments, and in recent weeks, top Homeland Security officials have taken to Twitter to promote the advances.
People walk on the Tijuana, Mexico, side of the border near the primary fence that separates the United States and Mexico in the San Diego Sector on Aug. 22. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)In recent days, DHS leaders including acting CBP chief Mark Morgan and the top official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli, have tweeted photos of border fence construction, echoing promises that 450 miles of new barrier will be completed by next year. Another senior administration official credited both men with injecting urgency, saying that “things are starting to crank away,” even though Cuccinelli’s agency is not involved in the project.
Dan Scavino Jr., the White House social media director, has asked for video footage and photos of equipment digging up the desert and planting the barriers so that administration officials can tweet about it, aides said.
Administration officials involved in the project also defended the president’s use of eminent domain laws to speed the process.
“There is no more constitutionally permissible public purpose for eminent domain than national defense,” said a current administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record about the contracting process.
“Our intention is to negotiate with every property owner, and every property owner will receive fair market value for the land,” the official said. “But the land that is needed is not replaceable land. This is not like building a hospital or even a school. There is no alternative land to the border.”
CBP and Pentagon officials insist they remain on track to complete about 450 miles of fencing by the election. Of that, about 110 miles will be added to areas where there is currently no barrier. The height of the structure will vary between 18 and 30 feet, high enough to inflict severe injury or death from a fall.
The Border Patrol’s strategic planning and analysis office has not made a final decision on the black paint or other White House design requests .
“Ultimately, we’ll do our assessment and determine what is the best for us operationally,” said Brian Martin, the office’s chief, adding that the agency is waiting to get border agents’ feedback on whether the coating would be beneficial.
Martin also said CBP would continue to install anti-climb panels on portions of the barrier already under contract, calling the design “very vital to overall effectiveness.” But he and other CBP officials said that some new portions of barriers will have the panels and that others will not, a determination that he said will be guided by necessity, not aesthetics.
Trump has recently urged the Army Corps to award a contract to a company he favors, North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, though the firm has not been selected. Fisher has been aggressively pushed by Trump ally Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who briefly held up the confirmation of a Trump budget office nominee last month in an attempt to put pressure on the Army Corps.
Cramer demanded to see the contracts awarded to Fisher’s competitors, lashing out at the “arrogance” of the Army Corps in emails to military officials after he was told the bidding process involved proprietary information that could not be shared. The CEO of Fisher Industries is a major backer of Cramer and has donated to his campaigns.
Cramer visited the El Paso area Tuesday to tour border facilities and view a span of privately funded border fencing Fisher built as a showcase for what it claims are superior construction techniques. Cramer posted videos of his tour to social media. He undertook the tour “to see the crisis at our border firsthand.”
The senator had asked Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the commander of the Army Corps, to meet him at the site, but Semonite is traveling in Brazil, where the Trump administration has offered to help fight wildfires in the Amazon.
In an email to The Post, Cramer said he met with CEO Tommy Fisher on Tuesday at a span of fencing the company built on private land; he said Army Corps officials joined them at the site.
“The agents on the ground said the walls have been very helpful in slowing illegal crossings,” Cramer wrote. “I’m not a wall-building expert, but at the pace of the last few years, it’s hard to see how 450 miles gets built with the same process. . . . I wish DHS would engage a whole bunch of builders and innovators rather than rely on the same decades old bureaucracy.”
Cramer said he shared the president’s “frustration” with the pace of progress.
Several administration officials who confirmed the White House’s urgency said they expect to be able to deliver on Trump’s demands because the actual construction of the barriers is typically the last step in the process.
“There is a long lead time to acquiring land, getting permits and identifying funding,” the official said. “I think you will see a dramatic increase in wall construction next year because all of the work over the past two years has primed the pump.”
A construction site for a secondary border fence follows the length of the primary border fence that separates the United States and Mexico in the San Diego Sector on Aug. 22, in San Diego (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)‘Take the land’: President Trump wants a border wall. He wants it black. And he wants it by Election Day.
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Hong Kong Officer Fires Shot, and Police Use Water Cannons at Protest - The New York Times
By
Raymond ZhongAustin Ramzy
nytimes.com
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"HONG KONG — Hong Kong police officers on Sunday drew pistols on protesters who were charging them with sticks, and one appeared to fire a warning shot into the air after another officer fell, as a weekend of violent clashes brought an end to nearly two weeks of restraint.
The police on Sunday also used water cannon trucks for the first time since protests began and fired rounds of tear gas and plastic bullets at protesters who threw bricks and firebombs.
The confrontations in the Tsuen Wan area followed a peaceful march by more than 10,000 people. But in a pattern that has been established for months, more aggressive protesters began building barriers on city streets using sidewalk railings and bamboo poles. Soon, large numbers of police officers in riot gear arrived.
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By early evening, the air was swirling with tear gas. The police unleashed water cannons against barriers and in the general direction of protesters.
“I don’t totally agree with what students do now, such as throwing bricks,” said Celine Wong, 38, a nurse at a private clinic who joined the march. “However, what they do is eclipsed by the violence performed by the government now.”
As the protest appeared to die down at night, a small group of demonstrators smashed up the entry way of a mah-jongg parlor they said had sheltered men who had attacked them weeks earlier. Then a group clashed with the police.
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Jay Lau, 30, an employee at Hong Kong’s airport, said he saw a small group of officers fighting with protesters wielding bamboo sticks and metal rods. The protesters were pushing the officers down Sha Tsui Road when, suddenly, Mr. Lau said, he heard a gunshot. He said he did not see who fired.
The episode mirrored a similar encounter in 2016, when a police officer drew his gun and fired into the air after a colleague was charged by protesters.
Earlier Sunday, people who said they were relatives of the Hong Kong police rallied under pouring rain to criticize the government for its inability to find a solution to the crisis that has left front-line officers clashing with protesters for weeks on end.
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The protests began in June over a bill that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China. Since suspending the legislationthat set off the protests, Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, has done little to respond to the protests, leaving the police force as the most public face of the government.
The protest by police supporters on Sunday was small, with about 200 people attending, and police officials said it did not represent the views of the whole force. But the organizers’ concerns that respect for the police force is eroding can be seen in confrontational protests, when officers are often bombarded with abuse from residents and bystanders.
Ivy Yuen, 40, works for a trading company in Hong Kong and has regularly attended this summer’s protests. But she came to the police families’ rally on Sunday because, she said, she could sympathize with the difficult position that officers had found themselves in.
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“There are still some good policemen working for Hong Kong,” she said. “Unfortunately, the government chooses not to do anything.”
“We are all so helpless in this moment,” she continued, “everybody in Hong Kong: those against the protesters, the protesters themselves, the police, everybody.”
A march on Saturday ended with the police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters who had thrown rocks and at least one gasoline bomb. That clash ended a nearly two-week period of relative calm that saw some standoffs, but not the use of tear gas.
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It also followed two large, peaceful demonstrations that showed the continued strength and unity of the protest movement: a march by hundreds of thousands one week ago and the formation of human chains, illuminated by cellphone lights, across miles of Hong Kong on Friday.
The police said that in Saturday’s protests, they arrested 19 men and 10 women, ages 17 to 52, during dispersal operations in the Kwun Tong, Wong Tai Sin and Sham Shui Po neighborhoods. A friend of Ventus Lau, the organizer of the Kwun Tong march, said he had also been arrested.
The rally by supporters of the police, organized under the slogan “We Are Not Enemies,” criticized the government’s use of the police force to manage a political crisis. Its organizers called for an independent committee to investigate the cause of the protests and the official response, and said that misbehavior by some officers was causing the relationship between police officers and the public to “fall into a tragic abyss.”
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Police commanders distanced the force from the event. Foo Yat-ting, a senior police superintendent, said, “It does not represent the police force or the four police associations at all.”
Mrs. Lam said on Saturday that she had met with a group of people, identified in local news reports as former officials and some prominent politicians, to hear ideas for building “a platform for dialogue.”
“I know that in the current predicament, the grievances of the community are deep,” she wrote on Facebook, adding that some people were “very unhappy” with the government’s unwillingness to respond to protesters’ demands, including a full withdrawal of the extradition bill.
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“I don’t expect conversations to easily untie the knot, stop demonstrations, or provide solutions to problems, but to continue to struggle is not a way forward,” she added.
Hong Kong’s subway operator said on Sunday that for the second day in a row it was closing stops in an area where a police-authorized protest was planned. Chinese state news media had been highly critical of the subway operator, the MTR Corporation, after special service trains were used to disperse protesters from a station in the satellite town of Yuen Long on Wednesday.
That special train service helped prevent a clash on Wednesday, but the subway operator was denounced by The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, as “working hand in glove with rioters.”
The MTR Corporation said on Sunday that it was closing three stations served by two lines in the Tsuen Wan area because of the protests, after closing four stations in the Kwun Tong area on Saturday. The closings were criticized not just for preventing participation in authorized protests, but also for inconveniencing other rail users. Graffiti in the Choi Hung station called the MTR “party rail.”
Adi Lau, the MTR operations director, said in a message posted Saturday on Facebook that the violence and vandalism in MTR stations in recent months had been “the biggest challenge that MTR had faced in four decades.”
He said the decision to close stations was done in conjunction with the police force and other government departments, and was made out of safety considerations, including concerns from employees who felt threatened.
The MTR also obtained a court injunction on Friday against anyone interfering with train operations, damaging property or causing disturbances. Two weeks ago the airport authority also obtained an interim injunction to restrict access after protests led to canceled flights, chaos and violence in the airport."
Hong Kong Officer Fires Shot, and Police Use Water Cannons at Protest - The New York Times
Opinion | Defenders of a Racist President Use Jews as Human Shields - The New York Times
Trump’s bigoted attack on four congresswomen of color has nothing to do with fighting anti-Semitism.
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"Sebastian Gorka, a onetime adviser to Donald Trump, wore a medal from the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian group historically aligned with Nazism, to one of Trump’s inaugural balls. Gorka was reportedly a member of the group, whose founder, the Hungarian autocrat Miklos Horthy, once said, “For all my life, I have been an anti-Semite.”
Max Berger is a Jewish social justice activist who has long been deeply involved in Jewish communal life. He’s the co-founder of IfNotNow, a group of American Jews devoted to ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, and recently joined Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign.
In a tweet this month, one of these men tarred the other as an anti-Semite. If you’ve been following the increasingly bizarre turn that American discussion of anti-Semitism has taken, you can probably guess which one.
That’s right, it was Gorka who called Berger an anti-Semite, for having once joined in an internet in-joke about a nonexistentgroup called “Friends of Hamas.” (Gorka’s tweet appears to have since been deleted.) It wasn’t the only time this month that Gorka accused a Jew of Jew-hating; he’s also charged the anti-Trump conservative writer Anne Applebaum with “standing with the anti-Semites,” demanding that she explain “how you justify this to the community.”
If this were just Gorka, you could dismiss it as trolling. But his tweets were only a particularly brazen example of how right-wing gentiles are wrapping themselves in a smarmy philo-Semitism to attack the left, even when that means attacking either individual Jews or the political interests of most Jewish Americans.
Such Christian appropriation of the fight against anti-Semitism reached its grim nadir this week. As Trump’s racist invective against Ilhan Omar and three other freshman Democratic congresswomen has dominated the news, the president’s defenders have used Jews as human shields, pretending that hatred of the quartet is rooted in abhorrence of anti-Semitism. On Tuesday, an evangelical outfit called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations accused the Anti-Defamation League — the Anti-Defamation League! — of siding with anti-Semites after the ADL called out Trump’s racism. The group even had the audacity to hurl a Hebrew denunciation — “lashon hara,” or “evil tongue” — at the Jewish civil rights organization.
Republicans are only a short step away from such shamelessness when they try to deflect from the president’s racism by accusing his foes of anti-Semitism. “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals,” Senator Steve Daines of Montana tweeted on Monday, proclaiming his solidarity with Trump.
It’s true that Omar has said things that were freighted with anti-Semitism, for which she has expressed regret. But it is grotesque to argue that that excuses racism against her, or that Trump’s taunts have anything to do with protecting Jews. This is a president who regularly deploys anti-Semitic tropes and whose ex-wife said that he slept with a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When speaking to American Jews, he’s called Israel “your country” and Benjamin Netanyahu “your prime minister,” suggesting that in his mind, we don’t fully belong here any more than Omar does.
When the right presents Trump as an enemy of anti-Semitism, it goes beyond hypocrisy. Jews have thrived here as they have in few other places in the world because America at least aspires to be a multiethnic democracy, not an ethnostate. If Trump succeeds in making citizenship racialized and contingent, that’s an existential threat to American Jews.
Trump and his accomplices are simultaneously assaulting the political foundation of Jewish life in America and claiming they’re doing it on the Jews’ behalf. As the Montana Association of Rabbis wrote in an open letter to Daines on Wednesday, “We refuse to allow the real threat of anti-Semitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white nationalist and anti-Semitic violence in this country.”
It’s worth thinking about how we got to a point where anti-Semitism can be exploited as it has been this week. What we’re seeing is the absurd but logical endpoint of efforts to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism with opposition to Israel’s right-wing government. Only if these concepts are interchangeable can Jewish critics of Israel be the perpetrators of anti-Semitism and gentiles who play footsie with fascism be allies of the Jewish people. Only if these concepts are the same can an evangelical group claim that Jews are being anti-Jewish when they protest Trump, because Trump loves Israel.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, puts part of the blame for this rhetorical derangement at the feet of the American Jewish establishment. Its leaders made an alliance of convenience with right-wing Christian Zionists, who support the state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a bulwark of Western values in the Middle East, but care little about pluralism in the United States.
The Jewish leaders, said Ben-Ami, “made a deal with the devil. And what they’ve done is they’ve laid down in bed with white nationalists and racists and bigots.” Now white nationalists and racists and bigots — and those politically aligned with them — feel entitled to use their backing of Israel as an alibi when their leader indulges in racist incitement.
“When they start asking people to go back where they came from, that’s the first line of attack on the Jewish people over centuries,” said Ben-Ami. It’s terrifying enough to have a president who says such things. It’s an almost incalculable insult for Trump and his enablers to act as if he’s helping the Jews when he adopts the language of the pogrom."
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