I grew up on the border between the United States and Mexico, near the boundary line that starts at the Pacific Ocean and weaves east toward the Gulf of Mexico. My parents, who are both from Tijuana, met in that city in the late 1970s while my father was home from California’s Central Valley, where he was a field worker. They decided to build a family across the border in San Diego, and that’s where I was born.

It was a time when such a relocation was less an international move and more a matter of switching neighborhoods. The border was one place. More than 100,000 of us crossed in either direction every day. My life was shaped by these comings and goings: During the week, we’d go to school and work in San Diego; on weekends and holidays we’d head south for a birthday or a wedding, or to have dinner with my grandmother Esperanza. She was a retired nurse who lived on the steep hillsides of Colonia Libertad, right alongside the boundary. From the front doorstep of my childhood home on Z Street, we had a view of San Diego Bay and its naval ships. We could also see Tijuana in the distance, its lights like multicolored stars at night.

Crossing the border was made possible by my privilege. On my family’s returns into San Diego, all we had to do was smile and declare “U.S.!” when a border agent asked our citizenship. We were brown-skinned Americans, and no other proof was needed. This was the 1980s, and others crossed just as easily with the shopping and tourist visas that were readily handed to Mexicans born in the region. Back then, there was nothing to fear on the border if there was nothing to hide.

But in 1994, just before I turned 14, this began to change. That October, the Clinton administration reinforced the border near San Diego with more fencing and more agents; the number of immigrants from Mexico was increasing due in part to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Then came September 11, 2001, and the resulting frenzy over border security and deporting criminal foreigners. I was in college by that time, and I resisted the notion of a tightening line, going back and forth as I always had. I’d picked up bar-hopping, and because there was nothing remotely as purifying as a long boozy night in downtown Tijuana, I ventured with friends or cousins to Plaza del Zapato, a city block full of techno and alternative clubs. We’d drink beer after beer while dancing to Depeche Mode and Maldita Vecindad. Sometimes I’d bump into Tijuana-side cousins doing the same, and our parties would merge.

And yet, crossing back, I couldn’t escape how the border was being militarized right under our noses. A few years later, we watched as a triple-layer fence went up around parts of San Diego; in 2006 we’d hear on the news about George W. Bush’s plan to extend the fence all the way through Texas. Agents now dressed in heavy vests, with earpieces and gloves. Tall floodlights shone into Mexico along the Tijuana River, sometimes illuminating groups of men huddling in concrete channels. IDs became mandatory for re-entry. The vehicle lines at the San Ysidro port grew exponentially, snaking into Tijuana’s side streets—sometimes into Colonia Libertad, in fact.

There were deeper costs. The fence influenced our daily plans. Cousins of mine in Tijuana trained themselves to wake up at 4 a.m. to accommodate the lengthening wait times at the border and arrive for the morning bell at their schools in San Ysidro or Chula Vista. It also imposed quiet but prolonged divisions in my family. Relatives who had made their lives in San Diego, raising American children, could not travel to Tijuana because they had not become U.S. citizens and might not be allowed re-entry. Others lost their U.S. visas—for, say, a run-in with the law as teenagers—and moved to Tijuana, unable to secure the paperwork to return to San Diego. The border became a knife, slicing through the region, changing how we related, how we thought about the future. We adapted by creating parallel events on each side—dual baby showers, dual birthdays, dual weddings—sometimes even on the same day. For the most part, this worked well. But for someone like me, who had been born in the U.S. and whose parents had become U.S. citizens, the wall remained an almost comical idea. How could any sort of fence cut through who we were?

For many of us, there was one place where these wounds could be salved. Friendship Park, located west of the San Ysidro entry port, is a plaza that surrounds Monument 258, the white obelisk that marks the western end of the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. Also known as Friendship Circle, the park was inaugurated by first lady Pat Nixon in August 1971, back when the border was barely defined by a barbed-wire fence, and it was intended to serve as a symbol of binational fraternity. “May there never be a wall between these two great nations, only friendship,” Nixon declared at the park’s dedication. Even after the barbed wire was replaced by gigantic steel bars, the area remained a place of connection. For years, those who had loved ones stuck “on the other side,” north or south, could meet at the plaza, touch through the bars, and gossip or laugh or share news.

I did not visit Friendship Park myself until 2011, when I attended a 40th anniversary celebration of the plaza with my mother. The Department of Homeland Security, citing a need to make the fence even more secure, had closed the space in 2009, reopening it only for this one-day event. The park is where Southern California meets Baja California, so of course it is a beautiful place—the breeze sweeps onshore over the rocks, waves crash up against the fence that stretches into the sea. But perhaps I should have expected that Friendship Park would have lost its hospitable sheen by then. To reach the plaza, visitors had to ride in a shuttle for about a mile over a largely submerged mud lane. Once there, the triple fencing created a sort of no man’s land; at the boundary with Mexico, an imposing metal mesh—preventing all physical contact except for the skin of a fingertip—had been installed on the bars.

The U.S. Border Patrol had designated a sort of corralled-in space for us to see into Tijuana, and my mother and I stood there, with a handful of other families and some border activists. We listened to U.S. officials make a speech or two. The space was small and uncomfortable, and I felt as if we were cattle left out to bake in the heat. On the other side of the mesh, an entirely different scene was playing out. In Tijuana’s half of the park—an open, unmonitored stretch of beach—we could hear roaming musicians playing trombones and tamboras, smell shrimp being grilled in stalls along the boardwalk, and see people dancing—actually dancing—in the sun. Mexican officials had set up a tent and a podium, and a few city council members from Tijuana waved hello. My mother and I shared a glance.

And then we decided to make use of our privilege.

We got back in the car and headed south on Interstate 5 so we could join the party on the other side. After a quick curvy right over the Tijuana River, and then a drive along the fence in Mexico, we arrived at the Tijuana beach in about 25 minutes. We parked near the old bullring overlooking the shore, and approached the fence. On this side, the boundary was painted with bright murals, and marked with crosses bearing the names of people who had died trying to cross. We peered through the fence again. We could hear a few speakers but not much. The mesh made it hard to see. A couple of people on the U.S. side recognized us from minutes earlier and waved with half-hearted smiles. They looked trapped.

Later I would think about how easy it was for me to exercise both sides of my identity like this—and how my mother, who received citizenship in the Reagan administration amnesty of 1986, was able to return home that same night, to watch the Tijuana evening news from the comfort of her living room in San Diego. There are so many families for which this isn’t true. Maybe certain loved ones have crossed illegally or overstayed a visa, and now are forced to remain in place as they await citizenship papers. Maybe relatives in Mexico cannot visit because they have been denied a tourist visa or do not have the means to travel. Or maybe a family member has been deported, with no way to re-enter. These deportations have increased over the past decade, leading to the removal of about 3 million people. The number of parents who were deported between 2003 and 2013 but have children who are U.S. citizens falls somewhere between 740,000 and 925,000, according to a report from the Urban Institute and the Migration Policy Institute. That’s a lot of separated families—roughly the population of Austin or San Francisco. And the one place where any of them have a hope of seeing each other again is Friendship Park.

The documentary “Monument/Monumento,” by filmmaker Laura Gabbert, shows one such reunion, between members of the Ascencio family. Friendship Park reopened to the public in 2012, but access on the U.S. side remains restricted to a few hours on the weekends. The family’s patriarch, who sits in a wheelchair, has traveled some 1,500 miles from Mexico City to be there; his children and grandchildren have driven seven hours from the Central Valley. They have not seen each other in person for two decades.

To enter this impersonal and fortified space, under the watchful gaze of border sentries and cameras, is to willingly lay yourself bare: your love, your longing, your pain. And yet that vulnerability only gets you so close. The intimacies you crave—to smell your daughter’s hair, to squeeze your father’s hand—are impossible. All the questions you have, accumulated over years, are unanswerable in a mere few minutes. And those minutes are precious, so instead you search for your loved one’s eyes through the tiny gaps in that mesh. You smile wide so he or she can see. Here you are at last, face to face, but not together.

Inside The NFL's Tobacco-Style Strategy To Hook Your Kids

They were supposed to die in prison. But thanks to an ingenious discovery, they were given a second chance.

And since then, at least 811 people have lost their lives in jail.

One of the greatest enigmas of 2016, explained.

Over the next 24 hours, the tuition plan received only perfunctory coverage. “The calls just never came,” recalls Gene Sperling, another one of Clinton’s advisers. “It was all Kelly-Trump, 24/7.” Even many professional policy types didn’t grasp the full scope of her proposal; I didn’t realize it myself until I began researching this article. As primary season wore on, her scheme was overshadowed by a bolder, shinier promise from Senator Bernie Sanders: free public college for everyone. The episode was typical of how this election has unfolded. Clinton’s policy operation has churned out more than 60 papers outlining plans for everything from housing for people with serious mental illness to adjusting the cap on loans from the Small Business Administration. The agenda includes extremely big items, like a promise to ensure no family pays more than 10 percent of income on child care, and extremely small ones, like investing in smartphone applications that would make it easier for military families living in remote locations to receive services available only on bases. Some of these ideas are more fleshed-out than others. The childcare plan, for example, is missing crucial details, like a price tag. And because the multitude of initiatives doesn’t cohere under a galvanizing theme, the whole of the agenda can seem like less than the sum of its many, many parts. Even so, Clinton’s plans are as unambiguously progressive as any from a Democratic nominee in modern history—and almost nobody seems to have noticed. The peculiar political dynamics of this election are largely to blame. In Sanders, Clinton drew an opponent whose ideas were even more grandiose than hers. Pretty much anything that Clinton wanted to do, Sanders also wanted to do, but on a bigger scale. Then, after Clinton clinched the nomination, policy dropped out of the conversation almost completely.^[1]“She's got people that sit in cubicles writing policy all day,” Trump told a reporter. “It's just a waste of paper.” In early September, the Washington Post reported that Trump’s policy advisers had quit en masse because not only had the campaign failed to pay them, but he had also made it clear he wouldn’t be requiring their services to prepare for the presidential debates. ^{1. A rare exception was the childcare policy Trump released in September, which was almost comically geared to benefit the rich. He has also issued three completely different versions of his tax plan.} This summer, I stopped by Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, where the policy team occupies prime real estate. The three senior advisors—Jake Sullivan, Maya Harris and Jacob Leibenluft—share an office steps away from those of campaign manager Robby Mook and chairman John Podesta. (O’Leary is now leading the official transition operation in Washington.) About a dozen more policy aides occupy nearby cubicles, below a sign that says “Nerds” and “Wonks for the Win.” This team manages more than 30 outside working groups that include academic heavyweights^[2] think tank experts and trusted advisers like Sperling and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress. It’s an impressive crew, but perhaps over-qualified when it comes to some of the matters that have convulsed this particular election, like the size of Trump’s hands or the semiotics of Pepe the Frog. “It’s not exactly clear what to do with all of that horsepower,” says a person familiar with the process. “There is just this mismatch between capabilities they have and what’s actually required in this campaign.”^{2. Many of her academic advisers were first reported in a series by Jim Tankersley of the Washington Post. They include economists Joseph Stiglitz, Christina Romer, Simon Johnson, Laura Tyson, Betsey Stevenson, Roland Fryer, Alan Krueger, and Aaron Chatterji; and political scientists Jacob Hacker and Robert Putnam.} People on the campaign assured me that the policy staffers work “the same insane hours as everyone else.” It's just that they’re focusing on November 9, and what Clinton would do if she manages to make it to the White House—where she would face an even less habitable political environment than Obama did. Unlike him, she’ll be entering office without a huge reserve of personal popularity to draw on. She’ll be hemmed in by Republicans on one side and a newly emboldened progressive wing of the Democratic Party on the other. With almost no room to maneuver, Clinton has to find a way to do something good for America. It almost makes the election look like the easy part.

# 2. What She Wants One of Jake Sullivan’s favorite stories about Clinton comes from August 2011, when she was still at the State Department. The recession was over but employment was sluggish, and Obama had asked his Cabinet secretaries to pass along ideas they might have for boosting job creation. Most sent short notes. Clinton submitted a 12-page single-spaced memo,^[3] complete with references. (“Classic Hillary,” was one reaction from within the White House.) ^{3. Among the ideas Clinton suggested were an infrastructure bank, speeding up the retrofit of buildings to make them energy efficient, and taking more aggressive steps to curb currency manipulation by China.} To map out her 2016 agenda, Clinton created a process akin to a college seminar, complete with required reading. She hauled around issue binders and cross-examined the experts who rotated through Brooklyn to brief her. These included Raj Chetty, a Stanford professor and MacArthur “Genius” fellow who is one of the world’s most influential economists. At a lunch session that lasted several hours, Chetty presented his research about the effects of inequality on children. He spoke about an old federal program that had proved more successful than researchers initially realized, and Clinton “got really excited,” Chetty recalls. She told him she had followed the debate over the program since her time as first lady.^{[4]4. Chetty’s work is based partly on “Moving to Opportunity,” a 1990s initiative in which the government gave families the chance to win lottery vouchers that allowed them to move to more affluent areas. At the time, it was deemed a failure. Using new data, Chetty and his colleagues showed that the young children in families who moved were more likely to attend college and had higher earnings as adults, and were less likely to end up as single parents.} When it came to formulating her own ideas, Clinton wasn’t starting from scratch, obviously. But since her last run for the White House, the Democratic Party had undergone a minor metamorphosis—and in ways that didn’t seem like a natural fit for Clinton, at least as she was perceived by most voters. The progressive wing was clearly ascendant, with groups like Occupy Wall Street and Fight For 15 harnessing populist anger at the financial system, and Black Lives Matter turning an unrelenting spotlight on racial injustice. Minority voters had come to represent a larger proportion of both the party and the population, giving Democrats an electoral-college advantage whose influence was still unclear when Obama ran for office. And there was another trend at work—one that was less obvious, but no less important: In just a few years, the Democratic elite had quietly gone through a once-in-a-generation shift on economic thinking. For most of the past quarter-century, a fight over economic policy has divided the party. It’s helpful to think of it as an argument between two ideological camps that shared basic values, but differed substantially over how to uphold them. On one side, you had liberals, who were convinced that without major government action, people would fall through the cracks of even a healthy economy. They pushed for tougher regulations on business and efforts to reduce inequality, and in some cases demanded stronger protections for workers in trade agreements. On the other side you had centrists, who also supported a strong safety net. But they were more likely to worry that regulations would hamstring businesses. They wanted to liberalize trade and cut government spending to encourage growth, which they thought would ultimately benefit Americans more than big new government programs.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the centrists mostly got their way—not least because his more progressive initiatives quickly withered in Congress. By the time Clinton left office, he had recast the Democratic Party as one that saw a role for markets as well as government in solving social problems. The centrists continued to shape policymaking well into Obama’s first term—their influence clearly visible when, in 2010, Obama turned from job creation to what Paul Krugman described as an “obsessive concern” with deficits. Economist Jared Bernstein, whom Vice President Joe Biden enlisted to hold up the liberal end of policy discussions inside the Oval Office, remembers it as a lonely time. “On numerous occasions when I was in the White House,” he told me, “I would make an argument and there would be typically five to seven people on the other side.” Outside Washington, though, the assumptions underpinning the centrists’ theories were crumbling. The Great Recession did a lot of work by utterly discrediting the notion that Wall Street functioned best when left to its own devices. In addition, some of the biggest names in academia were demonstrating that it wasn’t enough to assume that if the economy was ticking along nicely, everyone would be more or less OK. French economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty showed that inequality had deepened in the U.S. even as the economy grew. David Autor from MIT showed that trade with China had benefited the American economy overall—but that the long-term damage to manufacturing communities was worse than previously assumed. The arguments that liberal economists had been making for years—that active steps must be taken to prevent inequality, that it affects the economy in structurally corrosive ways—were finally gaining broad currency. This “new liberal economics,” as it has been termed by the policy writer Mike Konczal, has now emerged as the orthodoxy within the Democratic Party. And so, in an unexpected turn of events, Hillary Clinton’s economic agenda now stands as a correction of sorts to her husband’s. In speeches, Clinton often says that it’s time to “rewrite the rules” of capitalism—language injected into the debate by the Roosevelt Institute. She talks about the need for the Fed to encourage full employment, not just hold down inflation. “I’m having conversations with people who are on the campaign, with her policy staff, and finding myself on the same page where that wasn’t always the case,” says Bernstein, who has been advising Clinton. That’s partly because there are more liberals in key positions than in Democratic campaigns past—and partly because the centrists sound more like liberals these days. “We’ll see if it sticks,” Bernstein says, “but this is a little inspirational to me.” This new thinking underpins Clinton’s entire domestic platform, which can be roughly divided into three areas. On the economy, her initiatives would pour $275 billion dollars into public works, more than the Recovery Act did. She has endorsed various measures to help unions recover at least some of their lost bargaining power. She has also called for changes to regulations governing both corporations and banks, on the theory that there are too many incentives throughout the system that encourage short-term thinking and risky behavior. The second area may be the most innovative. Clinton has developed a slate of policies to address the fact that as women have moved into the workforce, society has failed to keep pace with the resulting changes in family life. These include guaranteed paid leave, so that workers can take time off to care for a new child or sick relative. She’s also offered measures to improve the quality of childcare and make it a lot more affordable.^{[5]5. Clinton hasn’t specified exactly how this would work, but has indicated it would be through the tax code, It’s widely assumed that she means something like a scheme suggested by the Center for American Progress in which families would be eligible for tax credits that vary based on income. Unlike the tax deductions proposed by Trump, this scheme would be worth more to people on lower incomes and would not exclude those who have no tax burden.} The third area focuses on the protection of marginalized groups, from African-Americans and Latinos to the LGBT community. Clinton plans to make a major push for comprehensive immigration reform, in a plan that essentially picks up where Obama left off. On criminal justice, she wants to cut mandatory minimum sentences in half, and limit the types of offenses that trigger them. Again, this reflects the party’s shift away from its ‘90s-era incarnation, bolstered by conclusive data that showed that that mandatory minimums put huge numbers of African-American men in jail, undermined families and imposed crippling financial strain on government—without actually reducing crime. “There has been a sea change in the conversation, a change long in the making,” says Harris, the senior policy adviser. The price tag for all of this comes to some $1.6 to $1.7 trillion in new spending over the next decade, according to an independent assessment by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Clinton intends to pay for this by increasing taxes on the wealthy (the assessment found her accounting convincing.) Her plan is less expansive than the one offered by Sanders,^[6] and there are some places where Clinton didn’t go as far as she could have. Instead of a sweeping tax on financial transactions, for instance, she called for a narrow one, relinquishing a potentially huge source of revenue. Still, Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a longtime dissenter from the centrist consensus, told me he was struck by its direction: “Her agenda would have to be seen as more complete, more focused on generating wage growth and jobs than I’ve seen from other candidates [since the 1980s]—and therefore I think it’s more progressive.” And yet this realization hasn’t traveled very far beyond the small world of policy experts and activists. Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist who served in Bill Clinton’s White House and is now advising Hillary, told me: “I don't fully think people are wrapping their heads around the ambition of what she is proposing,” ^{6. Sanders wanted the government to take over health insurance by effectively creating a version of Medicare for everybody, while Clinton has proposed tweaks to the Affordable Care Act that would make its insurance offerings moderately more affordable. Another example is drug pricing. Sanders wanted the government to directly negotiate prices with drug-makers. Clinton has offered a series of mechanisms that would reduce prices but without the same blunt impact. Clinton's plan would cost hundreds of billions of dollars; Sanders' would be well into the trillions.} One explanation for this is Hillary Clinton’s reputation as a serial compromiser, or worse, a sellout—the politician who echoed warnings about “super predators” in the 1990s, voted for a bank-friendly bankruptcy bill as a senator and has raked in millions of dollars giving secret speeches to Wall Street. Among her detractors, there are those who acknowledge that her agenda is a squarely progressive one, but they say she is simply bending to the power of the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders wing out of political necessity, and could reverse course when in office.

Clinton’s defenders argue—with no little frustration—that she has always been more progressive than people realize. They cite her lifelong advocacy for children and poor families and recall the ugly attacks on her openly professed feminism. “When [Clinton] was first lady back in the 1990s, progressives went to her on issue after issue to advocate for progressive causes inside the White House,” Neera Tanden says, “from saving Social Security to health care to minimum wage to children's issues.” More than one person pointed out that her policy views are often incorrectly assumed to be identical to her husband’s. “Hillary is not Bill,” Bernstein says. “I don’t think she has ever been where he is on trade.” He adds: “I remember talking to her in the 1990s. She recognized that these trade agreements are often just handshakes between investors. I don’t think her husband would have said that.” One longtime Clinton aide told me, “The idea that she's some kind of conservative and not progressive is ridiculous.” Of course, it’s possible for both of these things to be correct. A close reading of her record over the years supports the argument that her instincts in certain areas of domestic policy are genuinely left-leaning. But it’s equally true that she is inclined by nature to work within the bounds of what is politically doable, and that she spends large amounts of her time in the company of the corporate elite. What’s different about 2016 is that, for the first time in her political career, she is facing more concentrated pressure from the left than the center. Her advisers were eager to point out to me that, even though it would have been easy for her to court Republicans by signaling that she would dilute her agenda, she still hasn’t “pivoted.” “What she was for in the primary is what she stands for today,” one aide told me. “There is no change in tone or content.” ## The Seven Pillars Of Hillary Clinton's first term. ### ECONOMY - $500 billion for public works, half to be funded by private investors through an “infrastructure bank.” - Raise federal minimum wage to $12. - Change rules for capital-gains taxes to reward long-term investing, not short-term gains. - Appoint officials who will aggressively enforce labor and consumer regulations. ### WORK AND FAMILY - Up to 12 weeks of paid leave to care for a baby or relative, or to recover from illness. - Tax credits and subsidies to ensure no family spends more than 10 percent of income on childcare. - Matching funds for states that create preschool programs. - Seed money for states to invest in programs that raise salaries for childcare providers. ### EDUCATION - A federal-state program that would allow anybody to study at a four-year public college debt-free. - Free community college. - Debt relief for entrepreneurs and people who pursue public service. - A three-month student-loan repayment moratorium for federal borrowers—via executive action—so debtors can explore options for relief. ### CRIMINAL JUSTICE - Cut mandatory sentence periods in half for nonviolent drug offenses. - Change the definition of offenses that require mandatory sentences so they apply to fewer cases. - Help every police department to purchase body cameras, via matching funds. - $10 billion over 10 years for addiction treatment and recovery. ### HEALTH CARE - Fix Obamacare’s “family glitch,” which makes coverage on the exchanges prohibitively expensive for some low-income families. - More financial assistance for people with private insurance who face high premiums or out-of-pocket costs. - Demand drug companies give Medicare the same discounts that they give Medicaid. - Allow imports of high-cost drugs (or their generic equivalents) from countries where they are cheaper. ### FINANCIAL REFORM - Increase capital requirements for the largest banks and place new rules on the activities of “shadow banks” that engage in the riskiest behavior. - Plug loopholes in the “Volcker Rule” to limit high-risk activity by big banks. - Apply a “risk fee” to the largest financial institutions. - Impose a tax on certain transactions to discourage high-speed traders. ### IMMIGRATION - Comprehensive reform that would allow undocumented immigrants to work legally if they pay taxes and pass a background check. Includes beefed-up border security and a path to citizenship. - Close all private detention facilities - Relief from deportation for more groups—like parents of DREAMers—through executive action if necessary. - Better legal representation for children in deportation proceedings - Allow women and children seeking asylum to stay with relatives. # 3. Why She Might Not Get It Clinton and her team are not delusional—they know that passing her agenda would get very messy, very fast. Even if she manages to pull off a decisive victory, Democrats almost certainly won’t take the House. They may not even regain the Senate. Still, Clinton has identified two top priorities that she believes could plausibly become law early in a first term. The first is a jobs bill that includes some version of her infrastructure proposal. This passes for an “easy” option, since it polls well even with Republicans and is favored by business and labor. The second priority, immigration reform, is the opposite of easy. The political logic is that after Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the Senate was able to pass a bipartisan immigration bill because the GOP wanted to improve its standing with Hispanics. A Trump loss, the theory goes, might motivate the House to do the same. One Clinton confidant described the broader calculation like this: “Do they decide their strategy is, OK, our problem was just this guy and now we’ve rid ourselves of him, so all we have to do is crush Hillary for four years and then we will win the presidency? Or do they decide we have to fundamentally reconstitute things … [that] we can’t just be the party of no, let’s figure out some things we can get done. It will be a huge difference whether they choose door number two or door number one.” > On cooperating with Clinton, a senior House GOP aide said: “I just don’t see where any optimism comes from.” Clinton’s team believes she has several advantages when it comes to Congress. “Part of the optimistic view for me is that Hillary Clinton has a history of actually working across the aisle to get big things done,” says Harris. “She jokes that [Republicans] really like her when she is not running for office.” Harris told me she “strongly believes it is possible to move forward” on key issues like immigration and criminal justice, pointing out that that as First Lady, Clinton teamed up with Senator Orrin Hatch to pass an expansion of children’s health care, and with House majority whip Tom DeLay to pass a bill improving foster care for children. John Podesta observed: “Just being willing to sit in the same room with [DeLay] ought to earn you a merit badge. But she actually got something done.“ (Both Hatch and DeLay have since said that Clinton overstates the extent of their cooperation.) Clinton's inner circle is also placing high hopes on the man who could end up becoming her chief antagonist: Paul Ryan. Last year, the Republican House speaker worked with the White House and Democratic leaders to pass an omnibus spending bill that gave both parties something to smile about in the tax policy department. To one Clinton ally, this signaled that “Ryan and the Republicans, even in the context of an election campaign, are prepared to do business on not-insignificant matters.” This person went on: “The optimistic storyline … is that it’s a precursor to future cooperation and, after an election when you have some kind of wind at your back as a new president, it’d be very difficult for them not to work with you on some of these kinds of things.” Obama, too, once imagined a similar scenario. His 2008 pitch leaned heavily on his willingness to bridge partisan divides. In the run-up to the 2012 election, he mused that an emphatic win might finally cure Republicans of their “fever” for shooting all Democratic initiatives down on sight. The fever never broke. Take Obama’s own attempts to pass an infrastructure bill. Throughout his second term, he pushed for legislation very similar to Clinton’s plan. All he got was some highway and surface funding which Congress was due to reauthorize anyway. The big public works package went nowhere.

People familiar with both leaders insist that Clinton could still succeed where Obama hasn’t. They describe Clinton as both more realistic about the prospects for cooperation with Republicans than Obama was, but also better-equipped to work with her opponents. She’s more willing to sit through arguments she thinks are nonsense, and less likely to assume her adversaries are arguing out of bad faith. She is particularly good at finding common cause even with people who have demonized her. “Her natural style is much more inclined to persistent, relentless engagement with the Hill, trying to lift up the thing they care about, and fold them into a large initiative,” one Clinton ally says. It’s a great theory, until you talk to actual Republicans. If they are more amenable to working with Clinton, they aren’t sharing it, not even in whispers. “I just don’t see where any optimism comes from,” says one senior House Republican aide. “She essentially wants to continue working on the unfinished items on Obama's list, and I don’t see why anybody thinks she’ll have more success in the next four years than he did in the last six.” On infrastructure, the senior aide noted that last year’s transportation bill funds roads until 2022. “We just did a six-year, big-ass highway bill,” the aide says. “I don’t see a whole lot of urgency to do another infrastructure bill.” The aide was even blunter when it came to immigration reform: “I can’t fathom how that would come together.” Pretty much all of the major items on Clinton’s list require new spending, which she plans to fund by boosting taxes on the wealthy. For the GOP, that’s essentially a non-starter. As for the possibility that Democrats could attack Republicans for obstructionism, the senior aide basically shrugged. “That’s baked into our brand already,” the aide said. “What are they going to say about us that they haven’t already said?” It’s not only Republicans who will be giving Clinton headaches—she’ll get plenty of those from Democrats, too. To pass anything at all, she needs to be able to compromise with the GOP without alienating progressives. Inside the Capitol, the consensus is that the only way to get an infrastructure bill is to package the new spending with corporate tax cuts that Republicans covet—for instance, lowering taxes on U.S. companies with operations abroad. Such a move will meet intense skepticism from Sanders or Warren, who basically see it as an invitation for U.S. companies to shift jobs off-shore. (“That is nuts,” Warren wrote in a New York Times op-ed in September.) “I think the politics are now going to be harder from the left,” says one person who has been privy to recent tax reform negotiations in Congress. “I am worried that anything that is attractive enough to Paul Ryan on the corporate side is going to be really hard for the Warren-Sanders side.”

Warren in particular is keenly aware that she has a great deal of leverage in this situation, and so far has proven shrewd at using it. She and her allies find a lot to like in Clinton’s agenda. “They have taken seriously the need to keep the reform-oriented wing of the party happy enough,” one Warren ally says, “and for now they seem to have succeeded.” But it would be a stretch to say that they trust Clinton. In order to ensure that she follows through on her promises, they intend to keep up the pressure.^{[7]7. Top priorities include making sure Clinton opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership and pushes for a higher minimum wage.} Progressives are also laser-focused on executive branch appointments and staffing. As Warren put it to a gathering at the Center for American Progress in mid-September, “personnel is policy.” If Clinton's legislative agenda stalls, the administration’s best hope of realizing its goals will be through the rules that federal agencies issue and how they choose to enforce them. According to Politico, progressive activists are already circulating a list of appointees they would fight, such as Morgan Stanley vice chairman and former State Department official Tom Nides. “He’s the whisperer to Wall Street, and goes around saying she’s not a crazy person, you don't have to worry about her,” says one operative. (Associates of Nides bristle at this description, arguing that some of Washington’s toughest regulators once worked on Wall Street.) Progressives were heartened to see Heather Boushey, a liberal economist who has championed generous work-family policies, join the transition team. And they want more appointees like Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who made use of a decades-old statute that could be used to change overtime rules and make several million more workers eligible for extra pay. People around Clinton are optimistic that they can bring Warren and Sanders into the fold early. “I think she’s going to have to have a lot of conversations with Warren about what’s doable,” one ally says. The idea is to make them feel invested not just in Clinton’s policy agenda, but in the success of her presidency. “Look, Bernie Sanders won 10 million votes. From my personal perspective, that entitles you … to a voice in what the party is trying to accomplish,” one adviser says. “I think that’s an exercise we began in the platform process, through the convention and will continue as we go through the transition if we win.” # 4. Is That All There Is? The Democratic convention in Philadelphia in July was unlike any of the five others that I’ve attended. Over and over, I was struck by the fact that Democrats were proudly showcasing aspects of their agenda or members of their coalition that in previous years they would have sought to downplay. Even in 2008, I couldn’t envision the DNC featuring an undocumented immigrant in primetime, or members of Black Lives Matter, if it had existed then. On the last night, when Clinton took the stage to give her acceptance speech, I perched in the stairwell of a section reserved for some of her special guests. Gabby Giffords was there; and so was Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO; and Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, where Clinton began her career in public policy four decades ago. At one point I felt some scratchy fabric brushing against my hand: It was the sequined dress of Katy Perry, who was slipping past me to reach her seat. The person I was there to watch was policy adviser Ann O’Leary, who has worked with Clinton for many years. The speech, she told me, had been undergoing revisions until 4 a.m. and then final tweaks during the day. O’Leary teared up a bit during the introductory biographical movie, and cheered when Clinton mentioned mental health, an issue O'Leary had worked hard on. When Clinton got to the line, “I sweat the details of policy,” O’Leary reached over to tug at my sleeve. “That’s my favorite part,” she said. As somebody who obsesses over policy, I appreciated it, too. But during this election, and especially as Clinton’s position in the polls has started to slide, I’ve found myself experiencing the wonk’s version of a midlife crisis. Exactly how important is it for a presidential candidate to show off a deep knowledge of policy, to grapple with the complications and trade-offs and come up with something that could work in the real world? Do all those binders matter? The political benefit of an extensive agenda is that it convinces voters the candidate is serious about governing. And Clinton has surely done that. But her platform is so hyper-detailed, so painstakingly constructed to be financially and politically practical that it can obscure something more important: what she stands for. Her agenda lacks the kind of bigger vision or narrative that voters need to be convinced that a candidate is on their side. It’s one reason she finds herself struggling against a candidate who is so unashamedly ignorant and whose agenda would be disastrous for the people he champions. This September, a poll showed nearly half of millennial voters thought Trump would be no different or better than Clinton on student loan policy—despite the fact that Clinton mentions her tuition plan constantly and Trump has barely said a word on the subject.

What all this comes down to, in the end, is the best way to govern in an intractable political moment. In my conversations with Democrats who have worked with both Clinton and Obama, that subject came up a lot. People often remarked that for both politicians, their greatest strength was also their main vulnerability. Obama, people told me, was more likely to set an overarching goal and stick to it no matter what. This turned out to be invaluable in the fight for health care reform and many of his second-term successes, but it limited his overall effectiveness at doing deals with Congress. Clinton, they said, is better at the grind of coalition-building. But at times she can become so immersed in this messy process that she loses sight of her larger aims. If she’d been in Obama’s place when healthcare reform hit the rocks, it’s an open question whether she would have shown the same perseverance. If the worst-case scenario comes to pass, and Clinton can’t enact any big pieces of legislation, that’s when her more incremental style could prove the most useful. Like Obama, Clinton would look to advance her agenda through rules and regulations—in fact, she has a list of executive actions at the ready.^[8] She would also look for opportunities for small legislative wins—tacking an amendment onto a must-pass bill, for instance. Given her greater tolerance for this kind of horse trading, it’s conceivable that she could get further with this approach than Obama did. ^{8. These include the moratorium on student loan repayment and closing all private immigration detention facilities.} The danger here for Clinton is also the danger for liberalism itself—that a lack of major progress on the nation’s core economic challenges will leave voters even more convinced that government cannot, or will not, solve their problems. In 2012, Obama could at least run on the legislation he passed while he still held a congressional majority: health care reform, Dodd-Frank, the auto bailout and the Recovery Act. Come the fall of 2020, Clinton is unlikely to have such a resume. The people in Clinton’s close orbit understand all this. They know that their boss has been preparing herself for this job for much of her adult life. They are confident that she will achieve progress in the White House by drawing on the qualities they admire about her the most: her belief in the potential of public policy to change lives, her tenacity. And they believe that advancing her agenda piece by hard-fought piece, laying the foundation for bigger legislation at some future point when the politics permit it, is a deeply meaningful accomplishment. And yet even her most dedicated allies don't talk about the next four years in terms of a transformative presidency. “Realistically what the secretary has to try to do if she is elected is to generate some momentum—to do enough so people don’t believe Washington is just completely broken and nothing is ever going to happen,” one confidant told me. “Give enough relief to families and communities so they think, ‘OK, it’s not all great but it’s headed in the right direction.’ I think that is achievable.”

]]

The best thing I heard experts say about Belsomra was that it was no worse than any of the other drugs out there. The first marketing efforts for Belsomra appeared not long after the FDA had approved the medication, in the summer of 2015. Anyone who saw them might not have realized what was being sold, since many didn’t mention Belsomra—or any sleep drug—at all. There was a website, WhySoAwake.com, which focused on sleep science, and a related Twitter feed, which now has more than 60,000 followers. Merck also worked with the nonprofit National Sleep Foundation to develop [BeyondTired.org](https://beyondtired.org/), a site where people with insomnia talk about their experiences. And there was an iPhone app called SleepGuru, which allowed users to monitor their sleep activity. For pharmaceutical companies, the great advantage of such “unbranded” advertising is that, since the ads don’t make claims about specific drugs, they aren’t legally required to talk about side effects, either. Like the fuzzy animal commercial, the unbranded campaign for Belsomra told a compelling story about new developments in the field of sleep research. Older insomnia drugs try to induce sleep by making the brain more receptive to chemical signals that make people drowsy. Over the last two decades, scientists have developed an understanding of a separate set of chemical signals that make people alert. The WhySoAwake site gives a cartoonish version of this story, and a link on one page takes visitors to the Belsomra site, which explains that it is the only drug that acts to quiet the wake signals. In Merck’s last quarterly earnings call for 2015, Adam Schechter, the president for global human health, linked the drug’s sales success directly to these marketing efforts. “With regard to Belsomra, I think we started off with a really good launch and we had nice growth,” he said. “It then flattened a little bit. We ran direct-to-consumer advertising and we saw an increase again in … volume.” When drug companies defend their use of advertising, they often argue that it performs a valuable public service. A much-aired commercial might prompt patients to discuss conditions they never knew they had, the logic goes, or reduce the stigma around certain diseases. If you see ads for depression or irritable bowel syndrome every night while eating dinner, you might feel less embarrassed asking your doctor about it. Critics of direct-to-consumer advertising acknowledge these benefits. But when the people raising awareness about a condition are the same people selling a drug to treat it, some rather obvious problems arise. Ads rarely provide the kind of context consumers need to make good decisions about their health—about how often a drug actually works or whether an alternative treatment might be better. I asked Dominick Frosch, a senior scientist at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute who has published widely on how patients make decisions, to review the Belsomra television spot with the fuzzy animals. “The ad promotes a very clear story as to what causes insomnia … that somehow insomnia is a problem of your neurotransmitters,” Frosch said. “They are giving you a very one-sided explanation of what causes insomnia, and of course into that cause fits this particular drug.” > Policymakers in Europe and Australia have decisively rejected proposals that allow American-style drug advertising. There’s a well-established body of research showing that advertising plays a critical role in a drug’s popularity. In one of the most famous studies of direct-to-consumer advertising, a team of researchers from Canada and the U.S. studied consumer behavior in two demographically similar cities: Sacramento and Vancouver. The U.S. consumers, deluged with ads for prescription drugs, were more than twice as likely to ask for a drug they’d heard about as the consumers in Canada, which doesn’t allow such ads. In another study, researchers trained actors to seek medical help for symptoms that resembled depression at different levels of severity. The good news was that most people with symptoms warranting medication received drugs. The bad news was that most people without symptoms warranting medication also received drugs. Just over half of that latter group came away from their physician’s office with a prescription for a drug they’d asked about after seeing an ad on TV. Companies like Merck point out that their ads always instruct patients to consult a physician. And it’s true that doctors aren’t supposed to prescribe medication unless they think it makes sense clinically. But as multiple studies have shown, doctors often give patients the particular brand-name drugs they ask for, even when a cheaper generic version is available. Pharmaceutical companies are eager to exploit this fact, because promoting drugs to doctors has become harder than it used to be. In 2002, the federal government prohibited pharmaceutical companies from providing financial incentives or other “tangible benefits” to physicians who prescribe their drugs. In the last few years, it has begun prosecuting apparent violations through anti-kickback statutes. “In the old days, pharmaceutical representatives were always taking docs out to dinners, bringing them Cuban cigars, taking them to Yankee games in the box seats,” said Stephen Hoelper, a veteran drug marketing executive and vice president for sales and marketing at MediSolutions. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services “doesn’t like that and says that if you induce a physician to prescribe a product, then you are potentially making health care more expensive.” Meanwhile, the employers and insurers who pay most of America’s medical bills have been looking for ways to discourage excessive prescribing in an attempt to rein in costs. Most private insurance plans have formularies, or lists of approved drugs, managed by special companies called “pharmaceutical benefit managers.” These firms negotiate with drugmakers over prices and divide medications into tiers, forcing patients to pay more out of their own pockets for certain expensive drugs. Brand-name sleeping pills frequently end up in the tiers requiring higher co-pays, which means the pharmaceutical companies must work even harder to convince consumers that the drugs are worthwhile. Finally, during the past decade, drug companies have simply had fewer genuine game-changing drugs coming onto the market. With the exception of occasional breakthroughs for diseases like hepatitis C, it is becoming harder and harder to find drugs that offer clear-cut clinical advantages over existing treatments. Between 2003 and 2011, the success rate for clinical trials fell, the time from trial to approval rose, and the ratio of approved drugs to trial drugs declined. These are all signs that the drug pipeline is drying up. Innovation could pick up again, but in the meantime, drug companies have been spending much of their time pushing drugs of questionable clinical advantage, or persuading viewers to seek medication for “a disease that may be hard to distinguish from normal behavior in most cases,” according to Aaron Kesselheim, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who focuses on the drug industry. In his field, the tactic is known as “disease mongering.” And to critics of consumer drug advertising, Belsomra is a perfect example of these practices at work.  The insights about separate sleep and wake mechanisms represent real scientific advances, as Ian Parker documented in a [2013 account](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-big-sleep-2) of Belsomra’s development for The New Yorker. Someday, the discovery might even lead to major advances in treatment. But those advances have not yet been made. All of the sleep medicine experts I interviewed emphasized that therapy and behavioral changes remain the best treatments for insomnia. Like most other sleep drugs, Belsomra provides only mild relief. “Clinically meaningless” is the way one sleep expert, Gregg Jacobs from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, [described](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sleeping-pills-belsomra-side-effects_us_55ef38eee4b093be51bc7b0f) Belsomra’s effects. “Almost none of the patients I see are taking Belsomra because it does not work,” Jacobs said. The best thing I heard experts say about Belsomra was that it was no worse than any of the other drugs out there. In response, a Merck spokesperson pointed out that in one of its trials, Belsomra patients slept half an hour longer than people taking the placebo. However, the sample for that trial was just 62 people. Larger, more predictive trials found that Belsomra had much weaker effects. In a January 2016 report, the nonprofit Institute for Safe Medication Practices [analyzed](https://www.ismp.org/quarterwatch/pdfs/2015Q2.pdf) more than 1,000 consumer complaints that the FDA had received about Belsomra between February and July 2015—a number the institute described as “substantial.” A large number came from patients who complained that the drug was ineffective. Others reported that they had experienced side effects including sleep paralysis and next-day drowsiness. There were also reports of suicidal thoughts and attempts, two of which were successful. Merck correctly points out that the side effects correspond to the ones the company included on the warning label. There is also no way to definitively prove a link between these particular complaints and the drug, particularly when it comes to the suicides. Still, in its report the institute noted that the trials of Belsomra had not tested the drug’s effect on people taking antipsychotics or antidepressants, even though insomnia is a “key symptom” of depression and anxiety. It concluded, “The preapproval trials of [Belsomra] had so many limitations that it was challenging to draw any valid conclusions about what might happen when a new kind of hypnotic is marketed to a patient population measured in tens of millions."  “We all want consumers … to be highly engaged in their health care, and certain advertisements can do that. But it can also lead to a lot of overtreatment,” said David Grande, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who has written extensively on drug advertising, “It’s not as if we live in an imaginary world where messages in advertising are being driven by what’s important, rather than what makes more money.” On multiple occasions, policymakers in Europe and Australia have considered and decisively rejected proposals to allow companies to advertise specific drugs there. In 2002, the European Parliament voted down legislation that would have allowed the direct advertising of medications to treat HIV/AIDS, asthma and diabetes. "If we open the door to direct advertising it is a slippery slope down the American road where pink pills on television advertisements offer a miracle solution to everything from baldness to chronic fatigue,” Catherine Stihler, a Labour Party representative from Scotland, said at the time. “Medicines are like no other product. The aim must not be to maximise sales but to ensure that the product is used appropriately." In the U.S., a similar ban on ads for specific drugs would face a slew of First Amendment challenges in the courts. But there are plenty of other remedies available. Democrats in Congress have [proposed](http://delauro.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2211:delauro-introduces-the-responsibility-in-drug-advertising-act&catid=2&Itemid=21) prohibiting advertising until a drug has been on the market for a few years, giving health care professionals more time to see how the drug worked in the wider population. Another possibility, which Hillary Clinton has endorsed, would be to make advertising less attractive to drugmakers by barring them from writing off the associated costs on their tax returns. The FDA could seek to review all ads before they air and reject those that make false or misleading claims. It could also require ads to include more information about how often a drug is effective or whom it actually helps. Lisa Schwartz has been working with the FDA and consumer advocates to develop a better model for presenting this kind of information. Along with her husband and fellow researcher, Steven Woloshin, she started a company that is creating “drug facts boxes” for different medications. The idea is to translate the gobbledygook that appears in prescription package inserts or those fine-print full-page magazine ads into language that average consumers can understand. After Belsomra hit the market, Consumer Reports asked Schwartz to create a label for it. Her version [presents](http://static2.consumerreportscdn.org//content/dam/cro/news_articles/health/PDFs/CR-DrugFactsBox-Belsomra.pdf) the data on the drug in an even-handed way, noting that its ability to aid sleep is “modest” at the highest approved doses. “Short track record means that new, unexpected side effects are possible,” it explains. “Since this drug has a different way of acting than other insomnia drugs, the experience with it is particularly limited.” The label gives brief details on alternative remedies for insomnia, like cutting down on caffeine. Finally, it lists Belsomra’s known side effects. Not included on the list but probably warranted: skepticism.]]

We’re used to hearing stories of sexual harassment in the Army, the Navy, or within the police force; 25 years after the Tailhook scandal, when scores of Marine and Naval officers allegedly sexually assaulted some 83 women and seven men at a military convention, there’s a general cultural understanding of what women face in traditionally male-dominated public institutions. The agencies that protect America’s natural heritage enjoy a reputation for a certain benign progressivism—but some of them have their own troubling history of hostility toward women. In 2012 in Texas, members of the Parks and Wildlife Department complained about a “legacy” of racial and gender intolerance; only 8 percent of the state's 500 game wardens were women. In 2014, in California, female employees of the U.S. Forest Service filed a class-action lawsuit—the fourth in 35 years—over what they described as an egregious, long-standing culture of sexual harassment, disparity in hiring and promotion, and retaliation against those who complained. (That lawsuit is still pending.) And this January, the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General announced that it had “found evidence of a long-term pattern of sexual harassment and hostile work environment” in the Grand Canyon’s River District, a part of the Park Service. Ever since the U.S. created institutions to protect its wilderness, those agencies have been bound up with a particular image of masculinity. The first park rangers in the U.S. were former cavalrymen, assigned to protect preserves like Yellowstone and Yosemite from poachers and fire. The public quickly became enamored by these rugged, solitary figures. In the early 1900s, as the Park Service was created, a new breed emerged: naturalists who endeavored to teach the public the principles of conservation. As the historian Polly Welts Kaufman has written, the earlier generation of rangers resented the intrusion of “pansy-pickers” and “butterfly chasers.” Also controversial was the presence of a small number of women at the agency. Male naturalists worried that their job would be seen as effeminate, instead of, as one put it, “the embodiment of Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, the Texas Rangers, and General Pershing.” In the 1930s and ‘40s the ranks were mostly filled by returning veterans attracted by the ranger corps’ quasi-military culture. Until 1978, female rangers weren’t permitted to wear the same uniform or even the same badge as the men, but instead wore skirts modeled on stewardesses’ uniforms.  Park ranger or Pan Am stewardess? (National Park Service)  Enid Michael, a park ranger in the 1920s, overdressed for her dance with a bear. (National Park Service.) The other major institution tasked with preserving and managing the American wilderness, the Forest Service, developed on a similar trajectory. Although the Forest Service comes under the direction of the Department of Agriculture (while the Park Service falls under the DOI), its employees perform similar work and its culture is also modeled along military lines. By the 1970s, women held only 2 percent of full-time professional roles in the service nationwide. In California—whose lands are the crown jewel of the national forest system— female employees filed a class-action lawsuit known as _Bernardi v. Madigan_. The case was settled in 1981 with a court-enforced “consent decree” that required the Forest Service’s California region to employ as many women as the civilian workforce—at least 43 percent in every pay grade. The decision ultimately saw hundreds of “Bernardi women” enter the service, to the disgruntlement of many male employees. Lesa Donnelly is a former Forest Service administrator who worked for the agency from 1978 to 2002. In 1994, she filed a complaint charging that three of her male colleagues were harassing her. After word spread (incorrectly) that she planned to file a class-action lawsuit, she received dozens of calls. She heard from women who claimed they were being threatened with physical and sexual assault, and women who said they’d been punished for making complaints. One said the men on her crew joked about raping her in her sleep and had tied her blood-stained underwear to the antenna of their fire truck. Two women told her that a notice in their office about the Bernardi consent decree had been defaced with a scrawled reference to the “cuntsent decree.” She realized her own complaint was “nothing compared to what I found out was happening.” Eventually, Donnelly compiled claims from 50 women, and in 1995 she filed a class-action suit against the Forest Service, including declarations from many of the woman who had reached out to her. The agency negotiated a settlement that allowed for continued court oversight of California’s Forest Service. But when the monitoring period ended in 2006, the old problems soon resurfaced, as Donnelly would describe in testimony to Congress two years later. One dispatcher reported that she’d been sexually assaulted and stalked by a manager. He was made to resign, but after six months the Forest Service tried to work with him again. In 2008, a male supervisor at the same forest said that he hated a black female employee and wanted to shoot subordinates he hated. When the employee reported the comment, the district ranger told her to ignore him. This year, I met Donnelly, who is 58, in El Dorado Hills, outside Sacramento. Now the vice president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, a civil rights group, she has the demeanor of a friendly bulldog. She told me that nearly every year for the last 15 years, she has traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby the USDA, Congress, and the White House to protect women in the service. She managed to enlist the help of representatives Jackie Speier of California, Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who in 2014 petitioned the USDA to investigate, without success. Each time Donnelly comes to D.C., she added, she brings details of 20 to 25 new allegations. But while her fight against the Forest Service has persisted for more than two decades, in the Grand Canyon, similar questions about the treatment of women have only started to surface. “On the river, the boatman is god,” Cheyenne Szydlo told me. In the Grand Canyon, river guides enjoy an almost exalted status, revered for their ability to “read water.” Boatmen have almost total responsibility for their passengers—they keep the food and determine when and where to sleep, explore, or go to the bathroom. They also control the satellite phone, the only means of contact with the outside world. But within the Park Service, boatmen were more important still. Men like Dave Loeffler guided visiting officials or VIPs on adventures within the canyon, undertook rescue missions, and were featured in travel stories in newspapers and magazines. They “made it seem [to park management] like the river was the surface of Mars,” one boatman for a private company recalled. The administration saw them as irreplaceable. In the early 2000s, three men turned the boat shop into a small fiefdom. There were the “two Daves”—Loeffler and his supervisor, Dave Desrosiers—and Bryan Edwards, the boat shop manager. In addition to this small core of permanent staffers, the park periodically hired intermittent boatmen. One, Dan Hall, worked in the canyon during this period and was friendly with the trio. Hall is garrulous and not remotely prudish. “I have offended people I’ve worked with,” he told me. “I do my best to apologize and not let it happen again …. But with the Daves, it had this very dark side to it.” He remembered the three talking about who could sleep with the most women on the river. “They were always on the make,” he said. In a written response sent via Facebook, Edwards said that “no competition ever existed.” Rafting on the Colorado has always had a bit of a party vibe, and that attitude held for Park Service trips, too. Boats sometimes carried a large quantity of alcohol. Participants sometimes hooked up. But during the early 2000s, Hall told me, it seemed short-lived river affairs were almost expected of female employees. According to one former employee, veteran female staffers warned new hires to make sure they set up tents with a friend rather than sleeping on the boats, as the boatmen usually did. Sometimes, Hall said, boatmen would lobby supervisors to send women from completely unrelated park divisions—an attractive new hire at the entry booth, for instance—on trips. Often, though, the targets were from science divisions that required river access, such as vegetation and wildlife. The field leader of the vegetation program from 2002 to 2005, Kate Watters, said that she complained to her supervisor about the boatmen’s behavior. In October 2005, an expedition was planned to see if the two groups could overcome their difficulties. The trip was led by Bryan Edwards. Participants included Watters, who was married to Dan Hall at the time, and her new intern, a biologist I’ll call Anne. >“I did flash a camera below her skirt as she stood next to me,” Edwards said. “It was intended for shock value only.” The expedition coincided with Halloween week, and one night most of the participants put on costumes. Many were drinking. Anne—dressed as a butterfly, in wings and a dress—was in the camp’s kitchen area, when Edwards—dressed as a pirate—came up behind her. He grabbed the camera she’d left on the table. “The next thing I knew, his hand was between my legs,” she said. Then Edwards shot a picture up her skirt. Watters observed aloud that Edwards’ behavior was unacceptable. Loeffler, who was attired as “a hillbilly axe murderer” and carrying a real axe, demanded that Watters talk it out with Edwards instead of filing a report. She recalled that he bellowed at her, axe in hand, “Fuck you, Kate Watters. You can’t have control over people’s jobs.” Loeffler told me that he was unable to answer questions since he is still a park employee. Edwards wrote in his response, “I did flash a camera below her skirt as she stood next to me. It was intended for shock value only” as Anne had been drinking, he explained. Watters said that in a meeting after her return with Edwards and Desrosiers’ boss, Edwards glared at her and cleaned his nails with a 6-inch buck knife. (Edwards called this description “entirely false.”) In 2006, he received a 30-day suspension over the incident, after which he resigned. Edwards confirmed this to me, but wrote in another message, “I suspect nearly everything you have been told is at least either ‘misrepresentation’ or outright lie.” He felt that he had done “a lot of good in my 12 yrs in Grand Canyon,” he went on. “Because of my abilities, I did things people dreamed about doing but simply could not on that River and dealt with their envy and accusations constantly.” Edwards added, “But as the joke goes: ‘ ... ach, you fuck one sheep!’” Following Edwards’ resignation, relations between the boat shop and vegetation devolved into a cold war. On trips, according to multiple sources, some of the boatmen withheld food or avoided taking volunteers to work sites. Watters complained to the director of the science division and to regional Park Service authorities. After getting nowhere, she quit in frustration and Anne eventually assumed her place. According to Anne and Hall, Loeffler later showed up at a campsite where Anne was working to harangue her about Edwards. He and Desrosiers made it so difficult for her to schedule trips that sometimes she had to use a helicopter, at great expense. These acts of sabotage “became an art form for the two Daves,” recalled Hall. The pair even erected a memorial to Edwards in the boat shop, said two former employees: a crude bust of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns with Edwards’ name written on the base in Sharpie. The implication was clear: Edwards had been martyred. It was around the time of Edwards’ departure that Szydlo took her boat trip with Loeffler. After the scare in the rapids, she said, the uneasy balance between them shifted. Szydlo stopped laughing at his come-ons. Loeffler would sleep in late and then tell her they didn’t have time to visit her next work site. “This person was in complete control of everything I needed to survive,” she said. “I was terrified.” She began to formulate a plan to get out of the canyon if she needed to. “Even if there were trails to take, which in most places there were not, they'd land me in the middle of nowhere, in the desert, up on the rim,” she said. “I didn't have enough food or water to attempt that.” She could try to hike out on the Bright Angel Trail when they reached the halfway point at Phantom Ranch. But doing so would mean missing the nesting sites on the lower half of the river—and, she feared, abandoning any hope of being hired back next season. The day before they reached Phantom Ranch, Szydlo said she felt as if some kind of assault was inevitable. Loeffler slowed the motorboat to a crawl, stopping at nearly every beach. Finally, in the middle of a channel, she heard the motor go quiet. Loeffler came up behind her, grabbed her shoulders and asked her to describe her sexual fantasies so he could act them out. “I broke down crying,” Szydlo said. “Saying, ‘Get off me, stop harassing me.’ As soon as I used the word ‘harassment,’ he was like, ‘Whoa, stop. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’” He revved the engine and sped to Phantom Ranch. For the last five days, she said, they barely spoke, and at meals, Loeffler gave her minuscule portions. After she returned, she emailed her then-boyfriend and told him what had happened. Szydlo worried for months about whether she should file a report. When she finally contacted an HR representative almost six months later, she said, she received a brief response informing her she’d need dates, times and witnesses in order to pursue a complaint. She let it drop, not wanting to start a “huge, ugly fight.” Much as she suspected, other women in similar situations have discovered that taking formal action can bring on its own host of problems. The Eldorado National Forest is a mountainous expanse of nearly 1,000 square miles that stretches from east of Sacramento to the crest of the Sierra Nevada. Denice Rice has worked here for 15 years as a firefighter—on engines and fire crews and as a prevention officer. These days, she likes to operate by herself, driving a truck with a small reserve of water through the hundreds of miles of back roads that cut into the Eldorado. She is often the first on the scene at a fire, helping direct in crews of “hot shots,” the firefighting elite who clear the tree line. On slower days, she might serve as “Smokey’s wrangler,” accompanying the unlucky staffer who has to don the sweaty mascot costume and make safety presentations to kids. Many women in the Forest Service told me that “fire is a small world,” and that they repeatedly had to fight the perception that they were only there to meet men. Rice, who exudes a no-bullshit air of competence, prided herself on her toughness. When I visited her at her home in January, she drove to meet me on a four-wheeler, flanked by two bulldogs. “When you work in fire, you have to have a really thick skin,” she said. Around 2008, Rice was a captain being groomed for promotion when she was befriended by her boss’ boss, a division chief named Mike Beckett. After about a year, their interactions took on a different tone. By Rice’s account, Beckett would describe sexual dreams he’d had about her and comment on her body. When they texted about work, he responded with crass double entendres. He cornered her in the office, followed her into the bathroom, and tried to touch her or lift her shirt. She said he groped or touched her inappropriately at least 20 times. Even when she was out in the field, Rice felt as if there was no escape. Sometimes Beckett would wait late for her to return to the office. He took to radioing in to ask her location and seemed to monitor the line for word of her whereabouts: He’d appear, unannounced, when she was in some remote location—say, a tower lookout high in the Sierras. “He was paying a lot of attention to an employee three to four pay grades below him, which is uncommon,” recalled Rice’s former direct supervisor, who still works at the Forest Service. “He was constantly going around me.” It became so uncomfortable that Rice stopped calling in her location—a significant safety risk. Eventually, Beckett arranged for her to be moved out of the office she shared with a colleague and into a room on her own. It was more of a storage area, recalled the former supervisor, tucked in the back of the building. During this time, her oversight duties were stripped from her one by one, Rice later said in a signed affidavit, and the former supervisor confirmed in an interview. (Beckett declined to answer any questions, and the Forest Service said it couldn’t comment on specific allegations.) Still, Rice was reluctant to take formal action. She didn’t want to be “one of those women,” she explained. “You don’t cry in front of the guys, you don’t show weakness in front of them. And you don’t file. You just don’t file. You suck up and deal.” But one day in 2011, she said, after three years of harassment, Beckett came into her office and, with a letter opener, poked her repeatedly on her chest, drawing a circle around her nipple. She filed. Randy Meyer, the Eldorado union steward, said he got a phone call from Rice “that scared me to death. She was highly emotional and beside herself.” He told a senior forest manager that he was prepared to alert the police—and “then everybody and his brother got involved in this mess.” In the ensuing investigation, some 30 of Rice’s and Beckett’s colleagues were interviewed about humiliating details that Rice hadn’t even confided to her husband. “Everybody knew that he took me in the bathroom, tried to take my clothes off, things that he would say to me: ‘I want to watch you pee.’ They all knew,” she said. “And I still work with these people.” Rice said she got sick from the stress. The supervisor added that once, after he went to check on Rice, Beckett threatened him with disciplinary action. In 2012, at the district ranger’s request, Rice’s supervisor called an all-hands meeting. Rice was certain that Beckett would be on the agenda. She begged not to have to attend, but said she was required to show up. (Rice’s former supervisor couldn’t verify this, but said the meeting was handled insensitively: “Nobody took into consideration that maybe she was still feeling like the target in the case.”) The situation with Beckett was discussed in front of at least 50 colleagues; Rice walked out in tears. “I think that was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” she said. When we spoke, Rice was jumpy and broke down several times. “I can’t go anywhere without wondering, ‘Do people know who I am?’” she said. One male firefighter who has worked with Rice for five years told me, “It changed her whole life. People know Denice’s story on the forest, so she has this cloud around her. I’ve seen it for four years. I see Denice ‘trigger’ all the time: in classroom settings, out in the woods.” Ultimately, the ranger in charge of the investigation recommended that Beckett should be fired. But Beckett retired before any action could be taken. Meanwhile, Rice’s career has effectively stalled. The firefighter who worked with Rice requested anonymity, explaining, “If the powers that be tie me to her in any way, I’ll never promote here again.” Rice’s ordeal wasn’t unique. Lesa Donnelly said that in her capacity as an advocate, she has been contacted by scores of women in the service in California who allege they’ve been punished for pursuing sexual harassment complaints. One 22-year-old forestry technician filed a claim, and, several days afterwards, was visited by officials who searched only her side of the barracks with a drug dog. According to a subsequent complaint she lodged with the Forest Service, her roommate told her that one official had remarked, “You guys must have pissed someone off.” The woman left the service soon afterwards. Elisa Lopez-Crowder, a 34-year-old Navy veteran, was hired as a firefighter in 2010. She ran 45-pound sections of hose into the forest and cleared live trees to create fuel breaks. In her first months on the Eldorado, she said, an assistant captain asked her whether she’d been a “bitch” or a “slut” in the Navy, and whether her skin was really that color or just dirty. One day while she was clearing brush, she claimed, he hoisted her by her line gear and threw her to the ground; according to a male coworker’s account, he held her down with his foot. The coworker intervened, and later joined her to report the matter to their captain. The assistant captain was briefly placed on administrative leave. (In a court declaration he said Lopez-Crowder had “tripped” and that “before I helped her up, I jokingly placed my foot on her pack.”) While an investigation was still underway, he was assigned to the same work sites as Lopez-Crowder. About a year later, she traveled with Donnelly and other Forest Service women to bring their concerns to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack in Washington, D.C. Lopez-Crowder said Vilsack apologized and assured her that the assistant captain had been removed from his position; it fell to Lopez-Crowder to tell the secretary that he was still on the Forest Service payroll. A short time later, the assistant captain left the force. Lopez-Crowder transferred out of the firefighting division anyway, fearing that she had become a target. “In the years I served in the military,” she said, “I never encountered such discrimination and harassment as I have working for the U.S. Forest Service.” Alicia Dabney, a mother of three who lives on the Tule River Indian reservation, became a firefighter, like her father and uncles before her, at the age of 26 in the Sequoia National Forest. According to Equal Employment Opportunity complaints she filed in 2011 and 2012, Dabney claimed that coworkers made disparaging remarks about her Latina and Comanche heritage and joked about sexually assaulting women. She said a male supervisor instructed her and another female firefighter to tell him when they began menstruating. At a training academy, other participants left lewd sexual propositions on her [voicemail](http://www.marshacoleman-adebayo.com/women-whistle.html). One day she arrived at work to find the floor of the engine house strewn with printouts that read “Alicia Dabney The Whore.” (She provided a photo of the printouts.) Some of the harassment was physical. Once, a male coworker jumped on her neck, “riding me like a big horse,” she recalled. On an assignment in Texas, she said, a supervisor put her in a chokehold and threw her on his hotel bed. A USDA investigation substantiated the first of those incidents but denied that there had been a “pattern of harassment.” In 2012, Dabney was informed that the Forest Service was initiating her termination, claiming she had omitted part of her criminal record—a misdemeanor vandalism charge—and failed to disclose federal debt on her application. (Dabney maintains that she disclosed both.) In 2013, Dabney left and signed a settlement agreement with the Forest Service. In 2011, the USDA put the Forest Service into temporary receivership for its failure to adequately respond to sexual harassment claims. For the next year, all EEO complaints were handled by the secretary’s office in Washington. Tom Tidwell, the chief of the Forest Service, explained in an email to staff that the change would allow the agency “to better process a series of EEO complaints within the Forest Service that, frankly, we have not handled well.” In the Canyon’s River District, the problems had continued unabated since Cheyenne Szydlo’s 2006 trip. Certain boatmen were repeatedly accused of harassing or assaulting women in strikingly similar scenarios. One young boatman covered his Park Service boat hatch with pictures of topless women and boasted to coworkers, including Dan Hall, about a side gig recruiting college women for Girls Gone Wild-style videos. Hall said that half a dozen intermittent boatmen who, like him, objected to the boat shop’s culture, found themselves blacklisted from river assignments. And even in the rare cases when management did take swift action, the targets weren’t always the people you’d expect. In 2011, Mike Harris, a contract hire then in his late 50s, was training a 40-year-old river ranger named Chelly Kearney to operate a new boat. She said that he directed her to pull to the shore, away from their group, and announced that he was going to take a bath. Then, she said, he removed all of his clothes and invited Kearney to join him in the water. When Kearney asked if they could leave, he put on his life jacket and climbed back on the boat naked. He “stood there with his penis completely exposed,” Kearney later wrote in a detailed letter to park leadership. “I stated to Harris, 'Do not get on this boat until you put your clothes on.' He stated to me that he needed to dry his clothes out. I said, 'No, do not get on this boat without your clothes.' He finally put on a pair of long underwear pants." Harris confirmed to me that he climbed onto the front of the boat naked: “I just wanted to sit in the sun and dry out,” he said. However, he said he thought he had permission from Kearney to bathe and didn’t ask her to join him. Upon Kearney’s return, she said she told a supervisor about the incident. The supervisor, she alleged, joked that they “used to not call it sexual harassment until the guy whipped out his penis and slapped you across the face with it.” Kearney didn’t take the matter further. The next year, on another trip, a biologist I’ll call Lynn said Harris repeatedly asked her to sleep in his tent when hers started leaking during a rainstorm. After she refused, he set up his tent directly next to hers. Harris told me that he only asked Lynn to join him in his tent once, and hadn’t meant the invitation as a come-on. “It wasn’t to have sex,” Harris said. “I think I said something like ‘We could snuggle and that’s all.’” Lynn said she emailed her supervisor about the episode. After a third female employee filed an EEO complaint about his behavior in 2013, Harris resigned. Lynn’s complaint was supposed to be confidential, but she noticed that boatmen she’d been friendly with began to act coldly toward her. And matters only escalated from there. > The supervisor, Kearney alleged, joked that they “used to not call it sexual harassment until the guy whipped out his penis and slapped you across the face with it.” In February 2014, Dave Loeffler led a joint Park Service-private sector trip. Both Anne and Lynn were apprehensive about being on the river with him. At one point, Lynn said, a passenger inquired about a boatman who’d been let go and Loeffler ranted about “complainers” who had ruined boatmen’s lives. The following day, as the group approached a campsite, Lynn was standing in the bow of her boat when Loeffler pulled her out roughly by her life jacket—a shocking breach of river norms. Anne came up to Lynn on the beach to find her concealing tears behind her sunglasses. Lynn wanted to leave, but at that point there was no way for her to hike out. On the last night, the party celebrated with dinner and drinks. A woman who worked for a private boat company produced a novelty penis-shaped straw she’d received at a bachelorette party and dropped it in a colleague’s drink. People laughed and passed the straw around. At one point, Lynn was holding it when Loeffler tried to take her picture. Then, someone put on music. It was an eclectic playlist, and people danced accordingly: interpretive dance, head-banging, two-stepping. A hip-hop song came on, and the group started talking about twerking. Lynn gave a comically awkward demonstration in her heavy canvas Carhartt pants, puffy down jacket and rubber boots. Two days later, Anne and Lynn were called into the offices of upper management and informed that they’d been accused of sexual misconduct. In written statements, Loeffler and two of his friends claimed that Anne and Lynn had shoved the penis straw in Loeffler’s face, danced provocatively in short skirts, and, as one complainant put it, behaved “coquettishly” throughout the trip. "I felt I needed to remove myself from this increasingly hostile work environment," Loeffler wrote in his statement. “They were being so rude and inappropriate to myself and others.” According to notes from the manager assigned to look into the situation, Loeffler said he wanted Anne and Lynn to be “treated similarly” to other employees accused of harassment—that is, with the Park Service deciding not to renew their contracts. Both women protested to the managers that they were being retaliated against for their previous reports of sexual harassment. Nonetheless, the park launched an investigation, although both Superintendent David Uberuaga and Deputy Superintendent Diane Chalfant would later acknowledge in an official report that it may not have been thorough enough. In particular, the investigators weren’t made aware of the history between Anne, Lynn and the boatmen. In a meeting, Lynn said Chalfant told her that Loeffler’s charges couldn’t be retaliatory, since Lynn’s previous sexual harassment complaint was confidential. Both Lynn and Anne were informed that their contracts would not be renewed. In Lynn’s termination letter, Chalfant wrote, “We cannot afford to have team members in our employment who are not on board with management’s expectations and requirements.” “What happened to [Lynn] was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen,” said Chelly Kearney, who had made her own efforts to draw attention to the treatment of women on the river. About a year after she resigned in 2012, she wrote a 29-page letter to Grand Canyon Chief Ranger Bill Wright documenting multiple instances of harassment, assault and retaliation and describing a culture that protected male harassers while allowing victims to be targeted for retaliation. The Park Service requested a formal EEO investigation, but the final report was never distributed beyond the uppermost level of park management and no disciplinary actions were taken. Following Lynn and Anne’s dismissals, Kearney tried again. She forwarded her letter to Uberuaga, writing that she had witnessed a “disturbing and pervasive level of hatred” toward Anne and her boss and that Anne should be protected by federal whistle-blower laws. She received a brief response from Uberuaga thanking her for her concern.  Denice Rice  Cheyenne Szydlo  Alicia Dabney Some former park employees now ruefully refer to the fateful party as “The Night on Cock-Straw Beach,” and the incident became an unlikely rallying point. Hall sent around an email asking a core group of former park employees and colleagues in private rafting companies to gather names of other women who’d been harassed or run out of the River District. With Donnelly’s help, 12 women and Hall wrote to Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, requesting a formal investigation into the “pervasive culture of discrimination, retaliation, and a sexually hostile work environment” in the River District. Where Donnelly had tried for decades to get federal authorities to intervene more decisively in the Forest Service, the DOI responded quickly. In October, its Office of Inspector General launched an investigation that grew from the 13 initial complainants to include multiple interviews with more than 80 people. Their final report would identify 22 additional victims or witnesses. It included accounts of Cheyenne Szydlo’s 2006 trip with Loeffler, the Halloween party where Edwards took the photo up Anne’s skirt, the twerking incident that led to the complaint against Anne and Lynn, and several allegations involving a boatman that a former employee identified as Mike Harris. The women’s complaints, the investigators said, were “extremely credible.” The investigators also determined that Chalfant, the deputy superintendent, had allowed the complaint letter signed by the 12 women and Hall to make its way to some of the accused boatmen, in violation of policy. In an interview, the lead investigator, Greg Gransback, criticized the park’s handling of the accusations against Anne and Lynn. “If you compare what had happened to these two in the past and what they were accused of, I mean there’s just no comparison. It’s apples and oranges,” he said. “The park got it wrong where they went overboard.” In a February response to the investigation, the Park Service’s Intermountain Region didn’t contest any of the details in the report, and admitted that, in many instances, appropriate action hadn’t been taken. In the OIG report two boatmen whose actions are clearly consistent with those of Loeffler and Desrosiers deny all allegations made against them. (I was unable to reach Desrosiers directly despite contacting the Park Service, former colleagues, and two family members.) Boatman 3—whom a former employee identified as Loeffler—told the OIG that he “acknowledged making sexual remarks to women, but said that he did so only when he sensed a ‘mutual attraction.’” James Doyle, the communications chief for the Intermountain Region, said he couldn’t discuss individual allegations against employees and added, “We maintain a zero tolerance for sexual harassment and hostile workplace environment.” During the year and a half that the investigation was underway, the park made some changes. After Bill Wright transferred out of the district, his role was filled by a woman. The policy for staff boat trips was revised. There would be no alcohol permitted and an outside supervisor would be required on all expeditions. Dave Desrosiers retired in May 2015. According to its response to the OIG, the Park is introducing a detailed plan to improve its sexual harassment policies, and considering disciplinary action against managers who mishandled complaints. All employees are now required to wear “standard uniforms” on river trips. The OIG team was more than familiar with sexual harassment cases: Gransback had worked on the inquiry that resulted from the 1996 Aberdeen Proving Ground scandal, when 12 Army officers were charged with assaulting female trainees. Still, Gransback told me that even he and his seasoned colleagues teared up when they heard Grand Canyon women describe the fine line they had to walk to do their jobs, “between not being hated and not being desired.” In the Tailhook case, he noted, the accused military members had developed a “Top Gun” mentality, believing they were too important to be taken down. He observed the same dynamic at work among the boatmen. “They became almost untouchable,” he said. But the military, Gransback pointed out, has made “drastic changes,” including evidence-based sexual harassment and assault prevention programs. So far, neither the Park or Forest Service has proposed anything so extensive. (Since June 2015, the Forest Service’s California region has strengthened its protocols for sexual harassment training and reporting, a spokesperson said.) In my conversations with the women, they expressed great pride in their strength. For years, they had performed dangerous, physically demanding jobs. Many of them had faced life-threatening situations. All of them had operated within environments in which women had very little room for error. The harassment they described had not only brought about personal humiliation or the loss of a job or even a career. It had shaken their entire perception of themselves—as tough and resilient, able to handle anything that man or nature could throw at them. They lost other things, too. After her boat trip with Loeffler, Cheyenne Syzdlo found herself avoiding the river. “When I’d hear people talk about how much they loved river trips, I’d be like, ‘Oh God, I hated them, I hated them,’” she told me. Then, in the course of our conversations, she came across an email she’d written to a friend after her second time in the Grand Canyon, before she’d ever met Dave Loeffler. In her message, Syzdlo described the thrill of riding huge rapids in the bow of an inflatable boat. She remembered how even the most experienced guides would pause and become tense, studying the water before steering them in. She recalled the night her group camped on a sliver of beach when a thunderstorm suddenly erupted, sending loose boulders tumbling down the sheer cliff face. She and her colleagues had huddled in their tents and contemplated the possibility that they might die, and then, when the morning dawned damp and bright, laughed as they fished their supplies out of the river. “I’d never thought about that second trip again because the third trip did change everything. It was magical,” she told me. “It’s so primitive and you feel so free. You never experience that in life.” She’d forgotten about it for nearly a decade, but that morning on the river, she hadn’t wanted to leave.]]

It's tempting to say capitalism perverts philanthropy, full stop, and advise Zuckerberg to go back and form a foundation. But that's not right either. The primary appeal of Bridge, especially to investors like Zuckerberg, is the $6 per month it says it charges its students. Operating as a business rather than a charity gives each school an incentive to deliver a decent education and ensures that it’s not going to wither away when development agencies or donors move on to the next idea. But the problem with dispatching private companies to supply basic services is that they replace the public systems already tasked with providing them. Last year, 116 African NGOs signed an open letter to Bridge International Academies and the World Bank, pointing out that $6 per month is in fact a lot of money for a lot of Kenyans. Bridge schools charge extra for uniforms and lunch. Its teachers earn around $90 per month, teaching classes as large as 70 students. Those pass rates 11 percent higher than the national average are great, but the letter also noted that Bridge, with 400 schools, has attracted more than $100 million in international investment. Meanwhile, Kenya's public system, with almost 20,000 schools, has gotten just $88 million. Lucy Bradlow, Bridge's global director of public relations, counters that the majority of Kenyan kids already attend private schools, many of which cost even more than Bridge and provide even less. In public schools, teacher absentee rates are so high that the average kid only gets two hours of instruction per day. She’s right: Bridge is a little bit better than what's already there. But the troubling part about the company isn't the service it provides now, but the one it wants to provide later. Bridge sees itself as a “model,” one that its backers believe can be spread across the entire developing world. It plans to be profitable once it serves 500,000 students. Eventually, it hopes to reach 10 million. Bridge's own marketing materials describe it as “a scalable Academy-in-a-Box solution.” But the history of philanthropy is littered with projects that helped the poor at a small scale, then made them worse off at a larger one. Microfinance started out small, too. The early trials were non-profit, and revenues were invested back into services that would help borrowers pay back their loans. Then, in the late 2000s, responding to donor pressure to be “sustainable,” microlending went private. Citibank, Barclays and Deutsche Bank established microfinance divisions. In 2007, one of the largest microlending banks, Mexico’s Compartamos Banco, even had an IPO, its executives earning millions loaning out money to women and poor farmers and charging interest rates as high as 195 percent. Since most loans were capped at a few hundred dollars, borrowers could only get enough money to set up informal businesses, stuff like selling fruit on the side of the road or giving rides on a scooter. As microloans flooded the market, small-scale services flooded entire economies. In Bangladesh, nearly 25 percent of the population took out a microloan. In Mexico, Compartamos’ customers were taking out new microloans to pay back the ones they already had. By scaling up too fast, microfinance ended up trapping people in the exact cycle—informal work, bottomless debt, low productivity—from which it was designed to free them. ## How Microfinance Traps the Poor ### *As illustrated by someone we’ll call Joey  It's tempting to stop there, to say capitalism perverts philanthropy, full stop, and advise Zuckerberg to just go back and form a foundation. But that's not right either. One of the most successful private-sector development projects of the last 10 years is M-PESA, the mobile-money system that allows people in Kenya to transfer money via their cell phones. Before the system launched, Kenyans sent money to each other by mail, or by giving envelopes full of cash to bus drivers. Replacing an inefficient, expensive system with a regularized one made everybody better off. That's not as easy to argue, in the long run, about education. So, when Zuckerberg hears pitches from companies seeking to solve the world's problems, he shouldn't ask them if they have a plan to grow, or an ambition to exist in perpetuity. He should ask himself whether he really wants them to replace the systems that already exist, or simply make them better. Because successful companies don't just disrupt other companies—they disrupt economies, governments and the people who depend on them. That's not something that Zuckerberg ever had to worry about, but he has to start. # Go Beyond Giving Directly In 2009, four grad students came up with an audacious idea: Instead of giving poor people the things we think they need—bags of food, stacks of clothing, a pair of goats—what if we gave them enough money to decide for themselves? They called their charity GiveDirectly, and in 2011 they started doing exactly that. They went to villages in Kenya, found the poorest people living there and transferred $1,000 straight to their cell phones. Later, they came back to ask the villagers what they did with the money. Mostly, it turns out, the villagers spent it on better roofs, better food, paying off debts, starting up businesses. All the stuff the development system used to buy for them—but without any overhead. At first, no one wanted to fund an idea this outlandish. But then, GiveDirectly went to Silicon Valley. Google got in early, awarding the charity its Global Impact Award and dispatching the head of Google.org to sit on GiveDirectly’s board. Since then, GiveDirectly has grown like a Y Combinator startup, its budget ballooning from $700,000 in 2012 to $17.4 million in 2014. In 2013, Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate and Facebook co-founder, hosted a coming-out party for the charity with the heads of Dropbox and General Catalyst Partners. Dustin Moskovitz, Zuckerberg's other Harvard roommate and Facebook co-founder, just handed GiveDirectly $25 million. At five years old, GiveDirectly is the most buzzed-about charity in Silicon Valley. What all this hype ignores, though, is that GiveDirectly's audacious idea has been around for decades. Post-disaster charities have been experimenting with cash transfers since the 1990s. In 2010, when floods deluged one-third of Pakistan, aid workers handed out 1.7 million debit cards pre-loaded with $230. As early as the 1980s, Latin American countries were handing out "conditional" cash grants, paying parents to send their kids to school or feed them balanced meals. Even the World Bank, not exactly a laboratory of revolutionary thinking, has poured more than $25 billion into "social safety nets"—unemployment and pension benefits, basically—in developing countries. "Welfare" sounds a lot less “break shit” than transferring money to people via their cell phones, but it is, sorry everybody, the same thing. And that's exactly why Zuckerberg should be excited about giving money directly to poor people: Not because it is a new and revolutionary idea, but because it is an old and effective one—that’s only fulfilling a fraction of its potential. The challenge with direct cash payments, says Owen Barder, the director of Europe for the Center for Global Development, is getting them to all of the people who need them. The places where this strategy has worked well already had functioning banking sectors and national identification systems in place before a disaster struck. In Pakistan, humanitarian agencies used government data to identify the areas with the worst damage, then checked IDs to make sure the debit cards got to the people living there. Most poor countries, though, don't have these pipes laid down. Kenya's Hunger Safety Nets program, which gives cash to people at risk of starvation, took months to establish because payouts were distributed through local agents, whom people didn't trust, or ATMs, which people had never used before. Barder describes a scenario where, 10 minutes after an earthquake hits Nepal, all the people within five miles of the epicenter get $500 on their cell phones. That's a great idea. But it is, he says, a lot harder than it sounds. After the 2005 tsunami, low-caste populations in India were almost entirely excluded from cash transfers because they weren't registered in the national welfare system. In Indonesia, cash transfers were distributed through community leaders who had to come to a central planning center, then travel back to their constituencies with an envelope full of cash. In at least one case, bandits were waiting for them on the bus. The need for modernizing these systems is obvious. In 2009, India launched an ambitious—and largely unheralded—project to issue a 12-digit identification number to all 1.3 billion of its citizens. So far, it has spent around $880 million and registered 970 million people. The numbers are already being used to distribute unemployment checks and disaster relief. But as this effort moves to more remote populations, registering them gets harder. Some farmers have hands so worn the scanners can’t read their fingerprints. Laying down the pipes to get cash transfers to the first 75 percent of a population, the people who have birth certificates and cell phones, is relatively easy. Getting to the last 25 percent, the people one charity could never reach, is technical, slow, expensive and absolutely critical—a perfect project for Zuckerberg. These aren't, of course, the only ideas I heard for how Zuckerberg should give away his money. Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development says Zuckerberg should invest in global public goods, things no single government wants to pay for but the world needs nonetheless—like a vaccine for malaria, or making renewables cheaper than fossil fuels. Hauke Hillebrandt of the Centre For Effective Altruism says Zuckerberg should prevent "global public bads" like international pandemics or aggressive artificial intelligence—Skynet, basically. In the end, though, Zuckerberg’s greatest impact might be in the model he sets for other philanthropists. The Giving Pledge, which encourages billionaires to donate the majority of their wealth to charity, has attracted more than 142 commitments totaling more than $400 billion. The Founders Pledge has convinced 151 startup executives—most of them [look about 19](http://thefounderspledge.org/members/)—to devote a portion of their exits to philanthropy. Charitable giving in the United States has nearly quintupled since 1994, and shows no signs of reverting back to opera houses and Harvard. Zuckerberg’s money alone is not enough to change the world, but his influence on this generation of givers might be enough to change philanthropy. If he’s successful, he’ll show them the value of going slowly. He'll hire people who come from the places he is trying to save and who have been affected by the problems he's trying to solve. He will ignore NGOs that promise to "flip" anything, and he will distrust anyone whose Twitter bio includes the words “thought leader.” If Zuckerberg really wants to get ambitious, he should challenge the Silicon Valley notion that giving money away is an activity unrelated to how it is earned. Last year, Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, started allowing users to add a $5 donation to their ride for No Kid Hungry. In the UK, the company urged riders to donate old clothes to Save the Children. Kalanick would have a better impact on the planet if he stopped asking us for our clothes and, instead, started allowing his workers to unionize. Similarly, one of Zuckerberg's values for his philanthropy is “empowering communities.” He does the opposite when Facebook turns its data over to dictators. Now that the Giving Pledge is off and running, why not establish a Stop Routing Your Profits Through Tax Havens Pledge? I know, I know, he's running a public company. Shareholder pressure, quarterly returns, impact on innovation, blah blah blah. But perhaps Zuckerberg should ask himself why it is impossible, as a CEO, to apply the same values he aims to embody as a philanthropist. If he really wants to change the world, Zuckerberg can start by changing his own.]]

One former Marine infantry officer described Trump as a “fake-bake-ing chicken hawk.” “He completely misunderstands the military profession that he would head if he were the president,” said Robert Killebrew, a retired colonel who served in the Army for more than 30 years. Others were less polite. In a pair of ads produced by the American Future Fund, a retired Special Forces commander named Michael Waltz calls Trump a draft-dodger who “hasn’t served this country a day in his life,” and a Vietnam veteran, Tom Hanton, says that Trump’s quip about POWs was “the most infuriating comment I think I’ve heard from a politician in my entire life.” One former Marine infantry officer described Trump to me as a “fake-bake-ing chicken hawk” whose “knowledge of the Middle East could be trumped (sorry) by your average Georgetown sophomore.” Trump’s chosen foreign policy advisers—which include a 2009 college graduate who touted his experience in the Model U.N. on his online résumé and another who used Kanye West lyrics to make arguments on his foreign policy blog—have only stoked these anxieties. “Weirdo nobodies,” was how one military historian characterized them to me. “They’re probably the least qualified group of foreign policy and national security advisers I’ve ever seen or even heard of,” said Richard Kohn, an expert in civil-military relations and retired professor at the University of North Carolina. A source with firsthand knowledge told me that Trump’s campaign pursued retired General David Petraeus, Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, but all three men declined. In a TV appearance not long afterward, Trump said he wouldn’t hesitate to replace the members of his military team if they didn’t agree with him. (Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.) For even the savviest of presidents, the relationship between a commander in chief and his military is famously fraught, an intricate dance of egos and agendas, worldviews and bureaucracies. A President Trump, however, could usher in a clash of historic proportions. “If you take the man at his word,” said Michael Breen, the president of the Truman National Security Project and a decorated former Army officer, “we have a presidential candidate who seems to have committed himself to triggering what would probably be the greatest crisis in civil-military relations since the American Civil War.” One of the first tasks of a new president is finding the right people to surround himself with. His cabinet members are there to enact his agenda, and if they fail to do so, he can pressure them to resign or fire them. The president’s relationship with his military leaders is fundamentally different. While he gets to appoint both the secretary of defense as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the latter is an apolitical figure, not a partisan official. The incoming White House typically inherits the previous administration's chair of the Joint Chiefs (the leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force, National Guard and Marines) and combatant commanders. The president cannot control what his generals say to Congress. And while he technically has the power to remove three- and four-star generals from service, it’s far riskier to dismiss a general than a cabinet member gone rogue. “If a military official resigns, it’s a crisis in civil-military relations,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and former executive officer under Petraeus. “If a cabinet position does that, it’s just politics.” Probably the most famous example of such a crisis was when President Harry Truman canned Douglas MacArthur—and that didn’t end well for Truman. MacArthur was revered for his leadership in WWII. (One of his aides praised him as “the greatest man since Christ.”) But after Truman named the 70-year-old general the supreme commander of Allied forces in the Pacific during the Korean War, MacArthur started ignoring orders, withholding information about his operations, and publicly questioning Truman’s policy. So Truman removed him from his post, effectively ending his military career. It was a deeply unpopular decision. Letters poured into the administration demanding Truman’s impeachment and calling him “a Judas” and “the pig in the White House.” Meanwhile, when MacArthur returned to the United States he was greeted with parades and endless praise. The Senate held hearings on MacArthur’s dismissal, during which the general blasted his president’s foreign policy. Truman, who privately said MacArthur’s testimony was “a bunch of damn bullshit,” never recovered, and in March 1952, he announced he would not run for re-election. The military leadership’s independent nature gives it considerable power to fight back against a president it doesn’t like. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1990s, for instance, Colin Powell nearly derailed President Bill Clinton’s administration in its first year. The military brass was skeptical of Clinton long before he arrived at the White House. He was the first antiwar president, having avoided the Vietnam War and once writing of “loathing” the military. During the 1992 campaign, he’d pledged to rewrite the military’s laws to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly. Powell had no intention of letting this happen. The four-star general viewed the new president and his team as “children,” as diplomat Richard Holbrooke later recalled. Powell was a charming operator with an inspiring life story who had spent most of his nearly 35-year career in Washington and knew how to work the levers of power. (“You show me a general in Washington who ain’t political and I’ll show you a guy who ain’t going to get promoted again, and probably should not be a general in the first place,” he once said.) Shortly before Clinton’s inauguration, he told a class of Naval Academy midshipmen that if they found Clinton’s policy “completely unacceptable and it strikes to the heart of your moral beliefs, then I think you have to resign.” Five days after Clinton’s inauguration, Clinton met with Powell and the rest of the Joint Chiefs in the Roosevelt Room. “[Homosexuality] is a problem for us,” Powell informed the new president, according to a notetaker. One by one, the rest of the generals flatly opposed the president’s plan. Furthermore, as former White House aide George Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir, the Joint Chiefs had already lined up congressional support for their position: “Their message was clear: Keeping this promise will cost you the military. Fight us, and you’ll lose—and it won’t be pretty.” And that’s essentially what happened. Powell did little to quash rumors that the entire Joint Chiefs would resign if Clinton went through with the policy. During the next nine months, the battle over the issue cost Clinton dearly. Eventually, he agreed to Powell’s proposed compromise, which we now know as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” “The new president had been rolled,” wrote historian Matthew Moten in his book _Presidents and Their Generals._ The Bush administration, meanwhile, provided a disturbing preview of the damage that can be done when a civilian leadership pushes the armed services to adopt policies of dubious legality. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defense secretary, was regarded as uninterested in the military’s advice and dismissive of the Joint Chiefs. After September 11, 2001, Rumsfeld authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—practices that exposed the U.S. to charges of violating the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act. The decision set off years of turmoil within the armed services. Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell, who was by then secretary of state, said that there were numerous instances of individuals in the chain of command sitting on the order to introduce abusive—and, some thought, illegal—interrogation methods in December 2002. “There was never a collective agreement to do the things that Rumsfeld told people to do in that memo,” Wilkerson recently told me. “There were certain leaders that passed on and gave orders based on those documents, but there are lots and lots of people who walked away from it and refused to do it.” > Former CIA general counsel John Rizzo predicted an employee “exodus” if Trump became president and followed through on his proposals. Alberto Mora, the Navy's general counsel, memorably fought to ban any use of enhanced interrogation techniques, which he believed were torture. Mark Fallon, the deputy commander of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, similarly argued that allowing his agents to witness the acts described in Rumsfeld's order, let alone implement them, would be disastrous. "Either they'll watch the law being broken, or, as sworn law enforcement officers, seeing laws being broken, they may try to arrest the military interrogators,” he told his boss, CITF Commander Colonel Brittain Mallow, as recounted in ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan’s book, _The Black Banners_. “Nothing good can come of this." Retired military officers told me that the effect of this kind of internal dissension can be crippling. "You have usually an enormous decrease in morale because you sense that there's nothing you can do about it," Wilkerson told me. "Your values are being disrupted; you feel powerless." Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and military historian, said that "any policy that is inconsistently applied creates confusion and consternation in a hierarchical organization." On some occasions, the military has been able to use the tools at its disposal—the press, Congress, calculated leaks, endless bureaucratic maneuvering—to reshape a president’s entire policy. President Barack Obama, for instance, arrived in office determined to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he encountered two formidable opponents in Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command, which coordinates military activities across the Middle East and Central Asia, and Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, who the new president had named the top commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s effort began with a 66-page classified review of the war effort that reached the opposite conclusion to the one favored by Obama. In McChrystal’s assessment, he argued that he needed at least 40,000 more troops in order to succeed in Afghanistan. Petraeus, the respected architect of the surge who was being talked about as a future presidential candidate, stumped for additional troops in the media. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, tacitly endorsed McChrystal’s plan in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Then the classified McChrystal report was leaked to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. On September 21, 2009, the Post ran Woodward’s story on the front page: “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’” The impact of this leak is hard to overstate. It essentially forced Obama to take ownership of the Afghan War—a move he and his aides had resisted. If he stuck with his preferred option, he would be contradicting a respected general in the field who was predicting near-apocalyptic consequences unless additional troops were dispatched. At a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, McChrystal was asked if a more modest approach could work. “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a shortsighted strategy,” he said. Obama was furious, according to Woodward’s book _Obama’s Wars_, telling his aides: “We’ve got to stop this.” In the end, he couldn’t. In a December 1 speech at West Point, Obama ordered 30,000 new troops into Afghanistan. McChrystal could—and did—find another 10,000 soldiers from the ranks of the coalition forces, which meant he got his 40,000. The generals had won. In the many books by and about Trump, and in interviews given by his employees past and present, a clear picture emerges of his leadership style. Trump prides himself on his unpredictability—“My moves are totally uncalculated,” he boasted to one biographer. He’s known as a micromanager who insisted on personally signing company checks and calling people his employees had already contacted to check their work. By his own admission, he gets “bored too easily” and relishes shaking up a company or an industry. “My attention span is short and probably my least favorite thing to do is maintain the status quo,” he has written. “Instead of being content when everything is going fine, I start getting impatient and irritable.” The culture at Trump’s company has been described as Darwinian. “He really believed that having people fighting and in conflict for approval made them work harder,” Trump’s former executive secretary, Rhona Graff, once recounted.  American heroes (plus Trump and Piers Morgan.) (Getty Images.) The military leaders that Trump would inherit are, by all indications, less forceful personalities than Powell, Petraeus or McChrystal, but it’s hard to imagine them responding well to this kind of behavior. The current Joint Chiefs chairman, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, is known as an especially skillful operator able to bridge the diplomatic and military worlds, with a low-key demeanor that helped to win over Obama. And in recent months, Dunford has found subtle ways to signal disapproval of Trump’s statements. When he was asked during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing about Trump’s support for torture and attacking the families of suspected terrorists, Dunford didn’t mention Trump by name, but observed that such orders would have an “adverse effect” on “the morale of the force” and “aren’t legal for them to do anyway.” He also pushed back against Trump’s assertion that NATO was “very obsolete” by telling reporters, “In my mind, the relevance of NATO is not at all in question.” In an indication of how much Trump’s statements on national security have triggered intense debate within the military, Defense Secretary Ash Carter has made it clear he doesn’t want officials weighing in on campaign politics. The nation’s intelligence agencies have also been gripped by similar anxieties about the prospect of a Trump presidency. CIA Director John Brennan recently told NBC News that he would refuse to execute orders from a future president to use waterboarding. John Rizzo, the former CIA general counsel who worked at the agency for 35 years, told me that the employees he still spoke with were “terrified” at the prospect of reopening the debates over the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques. “Deep concern is a mild way of putting the prospect of their commander in chief basically ordering them to go down this road again given all the trauma,” he said. If Trump won and followed through on his proposals, Rizzo predicted an employee “exodus.” “At a minimum,” he went on, “people would refuse to participate in anything resembling the former interrogation program and insist on a transfer to another part of the agency where they wouldn’t be involved in these things.” Meanwhile, with Trump still in a strong position to clinch the Republican nomination, some current members of the military bureaucracy are starting to game out exactly what they would do if he were elected. There are some who think Trump’s brash persona might actually be an asset. Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel, told me he’d recently spoken to an active-duty colonel who thought Trump might force through welcome changes to the military establishment. “If Trump comes in and shakes up these graybeard idiots,” Wilkerson said the colonel told him, “I’m all for it.” But such sentiments seem very much the minority view. Earlier this year, Bryan McGrath, a defense consultant and former Navy officer of 21 years, watched in shock as Trump climbed to the top of the Republican field. He dusted off an anti-Trump manifesto he’d written the previous fall and sent it to Eliot Cohen, a former State Department adviser and professor at Johns Hopkins University. McGrath and Cohen polished up the letter, sent it to their contacts in the foreign policy community, and on March 2 published it on the website War on the Rocks with nearly 100 signatories. The letter charged that Trump would “make America less safe” and was “utterly unfitted to the office.”  Trump avoided the draft, but called his sex life in the 1980s “my personal Vietnam.” Citing his fear of sexually transmitted diseases, he said, "I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” (Getty Images.) After the letter was published, McGrath said, he heard from numerous active-duty officers voicing disgust for Trump. One junior officer said he would be duty-bound to resign his commission if Trump were elected. A more senior officer wrote to say, in McGrath’s words, that “if [Trump] thinks that I am going to carry out an unlawful order, he has another thing coming.” Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me in an email that he had also heard from an officer who said “he’d retire sooner than serve under President Trump.” I recently spoke to a 32-year-old Army reservist named John Ford, a captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Ford told me that he hadn’t taken Trump seriously as a candidate at the start of the year. But then Trump’s victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina solidified his first-place slot in polls for the GOP primary, and Ford started thinking in some detail about the unthinkable. “I would probably not resign right away” if Trump were elected, he told me. “I would see to what extent Congress can keep him in check.” Ford believed many other servicemen and servicewomen were grappling with this question: “They’re basically thinking to themselves, ‘How do I finesse this? What are the odds I personally would actually be asked to do something illegal or unconscionable?’” The choice, as Ford saw it, would come down to two options: Quit before you’re asked to do something illegal, or remain in the service and fight back against unlawful orders. Neither option was particularly appealing. The problem with quitting, Ford pointed out, wasn’t only that it meant giving up his career and letting down his fellow officers. It would mean a U.S. military dominated by the type of people who would go along with an off-the-rails Trump administration. “If everybody who disagrees shows up on January 21 and says we all resign, well, who’s left?” he asked. “It’s the people who are not going to provide any pushback and who aren’t going to sit on actions that are illegal.”]]

These three campaign gurus for Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have had some time to reflect on this nightmare of a campaign. And do they ever have stories to tell.

Hercules Williams described his building as “clean, laid-back. A man can chill. Some fresh old ladies.” Then he shook his head and added, “I’m an old man, I’m not trying to get with anyone.” _Unger v. State_ doesn’t say that these prisoners should be freed, only that they can ask to be retried. In practice, though, there’s a strong incentive to settle cases where the defendant has a clean prison record. Re-trying a case that’s 30 or 40 years old can be tricky: the witnesses have moved away, the detectives are dead and the case file is skeletal, or missing, or destroyed. Since the decision came down, 142 of 231 prisoners have negotiated their freedom, almost all of them getting probation. One was acquitted at a new trial. Another eight have died behind bars before they could get a hearing. There are still about 70 prisoners with open cases, which means that even more may yet go free. But Merle Unger Jr. is not one of them. In 2013, Talbot County prosecutors tried him a second time for the murder of Donald Kline, relying on the original 1976 trial transcript in the absence of living witnesses. A jury found Unger guilty once again and sentenced him to life. Now he lives alone in a five- by 10-foot cell, making [fine-art cards](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100011643750446 "fine-art cards") that feature paintings and colored-pencil drawings of deer, elk and eagles. He sells them for around $10 apiece on Etsy. In a phone call from prison, Unger told me he’s still fighting his case, filing appeals to win his freedom. “When you get old,” he said, “you look back at all the things you did and you regret them. … I want to prove that I can do something good.” When I asked him how it felt to still be in prison after springing so many others, he tried to be gracious. “I’m happy for all them,” he said, “because they all deserved a second chance. That’s something the American prison system got away from: giving people second chances.” For the first time in a generation, American politicians actually agree that we put too many people in prison and that this is a bad thing. (The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 716 people per 100,000 behind bars; the comparable rate is 475 in Russia and 121 in China.) And yet the most commonly proposed solutions tend to focus on nonviolent federal drug offenders: relaxing sentences, rescheduling drugs, diverting addicts into treatment programs. These steps barely address the larger problem. The vast majority of U.S. prisoners are in state prisons, not federal, and the majority of those have been convicted of violent crimes (54 percent) as opposed to drug crimes (16 percent). To reduce the American prison population in a meaningful way, states will have to liberalize sentences and parole for some violent offenders—a terrifying prospect for politicians. In Maryland, though, the politically impossible has been happening for three years now. Unger v. State is essentially a natural experiment in the controlled release of violent offenders. And because the experiment is so new, nobody knows how it will end up—not the lawyers, the judges, the social workers, the families of the ex-offenders, the families of the victims, the citizens of Maryland or the former prisoners themselves. Thanks to a legal lightning strike, almost 150 people who were supposed to disappear in prison are now living on the outside. Are they ready? Are we?  Nzinga Amon (left) has been trying to help Donald Shakir fit back into the world. “It just sort of developed,” Nzinga Amon told me of her relationship with Donald Shakir. We were sitting on a stoop across from their old place in West Baltimore, watching Shakir and the other guys lug desks and drawers into the U-Haul. She said she met her husband by chance in 2013—just two people waiting for a bus. She wasn’t looking for a relationship at the time. She had a job as a reading tutor at an elementary school and was enjoying her independence. Still, she was drawn to Shakir. She liked his calmness, his seriousness. She liked that he shared the poetry he had written in prison and that he talked to her about his regrets: the son he didn’t raise, the mother who died while he was away. And she liked how he kept finding ways to surprise her. Shakir had this beautiful singing voice, a high, sweet falsetto that seemed unconnected to his big body. “We all change, we all grow up,” she said. “I can appreciate the man he turned out to be.” It wasn’t until they moved in together that Amon realized how hard it is for lifers to re-enter the world. These are not unskilled people; in prison they learned masonry and welding and other trades, and the ones approved for work release regularly earned promotions and even managed crews. But the only job Shakir could land at first was as a minimum-wage dishwasher at Pizza Hut. He felt as though his manager was constantly testing him, giving him all the crappy assignments, like cleaning the drains, to see if he could take it. He ultimately quit because his arthritis made it too painful to spend hours on his feet. At home he seemed scared a lot of the time. He was afraid of the night. The kids on the street and the way they dressed and talked, the vacant blocks where people used to live when he was young—he didn’t feel safe. “I’ve never seen so many drug users in my life,” he told me. “I’ll never get over seeing so many empty houses.” When Amon has meetings after dark, Shakir calls repeatedly to make sure she’s O.K. One time he waited for her on the stoop of their place, in his pajamas. “We lived in a world that had rules,” Shakir told me. “And we came out into a world without rules.” For many of the released, it was unsettling to move through public space, a series of little jolts. They found roads where buildings used to be, buildings where parks used to be. Banks spewed money out of a wall, 24 hours a day; there were no ATMs in the early ’70s. Crazy people walked down the street holding loud conversations with themselves; friends had to explain what Bluetooth was. The city had reconfigured itself while they were away. And in a lot of cases, so had their families, or what was left of them. Shakir’s friend Larry Owens didn’t have a spouse or a sibling or a child to come home to. The last time he saw any of his kin was in 1992. “I look at it like this,” he told me. “They got their life to live.” He ended up moving in with his 62-year-old cousin, Barbara Lotts. She and Owens were never close, but her reason for housing him was simple: “Wasn’t nobody else,” she said. “It is what it is.”  Larry Owens taught himself to paint portraits while incarcerated and got so good at it that he became a mentor for a bunch of other guys in there and now teaches a community art class. He’s still living in a spare bedroom in her house, and they basically get along. She accepts that he’ll moan and talk to himself in the night and that he’ll continue to wake up every day at 6 a.m. “Larry,” she wants to say, “you’re free, you can sleep in.” Owens doesn’t like to be a burden, so he takes out the trash and kicks in a little money when he can. “I love her,” he says, “but I want my own.” Owens and Shakir are lucky in the sense that they have each other. They’ve been close since they were 9 or 10, having grown up in the same housing project in the neighborhood of Fairfield. They fell into drugs at the same time, and for the first year of their incarceration, they shared a cell at the Maryland Penitentiary. They’re basically inseparable now. They get together every weekend and talk on the phone during the week, and they also hang out with other ex-lifers released thanks to Unger v. State, like Hercules Williams, and another friend, Kareem Hasan, who was locked up at 17 after a fatal neighborhood dispute. (His co-defendants testified against him in exchange for shortened sentences.) Now 57, Hasan has achieved a lot in the short time he has been out: a steady job with the city of Baltimore, a car, a marriage to a registered nurse named Annette, a business plan for a youth mentoring nonprofit. He functions as a constant positive presence in the group, a connector and a joker. Just before his release, he called Annette and said, “Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmmm. I hope your shit is in order. I’m coming home.” She was elated. “I’m at peace of mind with him, you know?” she says. “I never gave up on him.” The men seem to share a bond that’s reflected in language. Often they refer to themselves as part of “the Unger family,” or sometimes just as “Ungers.” More than one of them told me, “I’m an Unger.” They realize they’re a part of something bigger than themselves. And they are. Digging them out of prison took an unprecedented effort by the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, which worked with professors and students at the University of Maryland law school to help prisoners file petitions to reopen their cases. Early on, the attorneys also realized there needed to be a major social-work component: if the Ungers didn’t have help adjusting to life on the outside, they were more likely to fail. So teams were mobilized to snag the Ungers in a safety net. These social workers still travel across the state to prepare prisoners for re-entry. They are there on the day of release to hand the client a personal hygiene kit, a binder of information on government programs, and a $20 bus pass. And in the weeks and months after release, they help Ungers with challenges large and small, everything from obtaining health care and I.D. cards to finding independent living situations. One of the first Ungers to win his release was James Richardson, a stocky 71-year-old with cataracts in both eyes and two bum knees. He lived with his daughter for eight months until UMD social workers helped him get his own apartment in a Baltimore building that caters to seniors and sets the rent as a percentage of income. (UMD asked me not to name the building because there are only a few complexes that accept residents with criminal records and the school doesn’t want to create “negative backlash” for the management company.) Five other Ungers live there, including Hercules Williams. They see each other in the elevators, check in, sit on their balconies and talk. Williams described the building as “clean, laid-back. A man can chill. Some fresh old ladies. We got the run of them.” Then he shook his head and added, “I’m an old man, I’m not trying to get with anyone.” One afternoon Richardson showed me the panoramic view of the city from his upper-floor balcony. Life after prison has been “way more than I really expected,” he said. “I was met with open arms, and people willing to help in any way they could help.”  "Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmmm": Kareem Hasan with his wife Annette at their home. Maybe the most important strands of the safety net are the two monthly meetings in Baltimore where the men gather as a group—25 to 40 people saying hello, snacking on carrot sticks and pretzels. These aren’t fancy events, but they give the guys a place to see their friends and get help if they need it. The social workers set up a presentation or two: a pitch by a nonprofit leader looking to train black men in computer programming, a class on nutrition and health benefits delivered as a “Jeopardy!”-style game show. (“Let’s try Social Security for $1,000.”) Often a man named Walter Lomax speaks about justice reform. Lomax spent 39 years in prison on a wrongful conviction, and since winning his freedom in 2006, he has been organizing on behalf of older prisoners. Another elder who speaks is a lanky Baltimorean named Karriem Saleem El-Amin, who did 42 years on a murder conviction. El-Amin told me he tries to get people to share their struggles by poking fun at his own. One time, he went to use a public toilet and couldn’t find the flush lever; he started to panic, until the toilet sensed movement and flushed itself. He didn’t know toilets could do that. “Don’t nobody tell you these little _delicate_ things that have changed,” he explained. There is only one woman in the Unger family. Her name is Etta Myers. She went to a few of the meetings, but people kept mistaking her for someone’s spouse, so she stopped. Myers is attractive, with short yellow hair. She smokes cigarettes and sips tea from a mug that says “Woman of God.”As tough as some of the men have had it, she has probably had it worse. The state locked her up in 1977, when she was 22 and struggling with a heroin addiction. Police said that Myers and her ex-boyfriend shot and killed a man during a robbery. The only evidence linking her to the scene was the testimony of three men who thought they saw her walk away and who admitted to being on drugs that day. She swore she was never there. The jury found her guilty of first-degree murder. Myers spent 36 years in a women’s prison. Over the decades she became a leader there, the co-founder of a therapy group and a manager in the sewing shop, a multimillion-dollar business that made flags and uniforms. The Maryland Parole Commission tried to release her twice, but governors blocked the commission both times. When she finally got out in 2013, she was given a bed in a Catholic halfway house for women. She now rents a small place in North Baltimore, which she shares with a white and orange cat named Ya-Ya. When I met her there a few months ago, the TV was tuned to a children’s station showing a cartoon about the Bible. Myers said she watches children’s shows because there are a lot of precocious kids at her church and she wants to understand them better. She’s astonished by her great-niece Chloe, who is 3 years old. “She had a little bump on her head. And I said, ‘How did you bump your head, Chloe?’ And she said, ‘Well, I don’t think we have time for that, that’s really irrelevant right now.’ And I said, ‘Who says irrelevant at 3 years old?’” The last decades of her incarceration were marked by a spreading loneliness, her loved ones dying one after the other—her mother, her brother. “I was like, there’s nothing else, there’s nothing else for me.” And then she came home and realized that for the first time in her life, she was finally in a position to have a healthy relationship. Before prison, her boyfriend beat her. After they were convicted, she didn’t see him again until the day they were both released—36 years later. He used to be a specimen, a beautiful, muscular man, but he rolled into court in a wheelchair. Later she saw him at an event and reached down to hug him. She didn’t want to waste her time being angry. What she wanted was to meet a “nice older man” and feel less alone. But the rules of courtship had changed since 1977. “Guys don’t come after girls,” she says. “That was amazing to me. And I guess it had to do with the fact that I was much older. And then the challenge was, O.K., well, where do you go to meet nice old men at? ... I’ve been to several bingo places, and it’s usually a bunch of old biddies, and I don’t consider myself an old biddie.” Grocery store? Church? “You don’t find a whole lot of single men in church. You see them there, they have a wife right beside them. Then their wives are looking at you trying to make sure you’re not trying to hit on them or something crazy.” After a while, she stopped trying to find a partner. She now spends her time volunteering at her church and with nonprofits that work on criminal justice issues. In March, after the Maryland legislature restored voting rights for ex-offenders, she registered to cast the first [vote](http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/03/09/first-time-voter-felon-age-62-maryland-column/81535722/ "vote") of her life, at 62. “I put my trust in the God that I worship, and believe He’ll send me a companion if it’s meant to be,” she said. “And if not, I guess I just won’t have one.”  Forty-five years ago, Thomas Magrogan was shot in the heart by one of the Ungers. In 2013, when 89-year-old Shirley Rubin heard that her husband’s killer was about to be released from prison, she felt physically sick. The couple had owned a small grocery store in southwest Baltimore until one day in 1972, when a teenager walked into their store and shot them both during a robbery attempt. Shirley’s husband died; she survived. She ended up losing the store and struggled to raise the kids on the little money she had left. The gunman “ruined my life,” she told the [_Baltimore Sun_](http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-07-10/news/bs-md-murder-releases-20130710_1_new-trials-court-ruling-southwest-baltimore "Baltimore Sun" ). “The only thing that kept me going in these last 41 years was the fact that [he] was in prison.” Antonio Gioia, as the deputy state’s attorney for major crimes in Baltimore, has the unenviable task of calling people like Rubin and telling them that their loved one’s killer may soon be walking around. He’s been doing it for three years, and he still dreads it. “The most prominent emotion is one of disbelief. ‘Why are you calling, Mr. Gioia?’” he told me. “They just cannot accept the fact that this very painful episode that’s left a terrible hole in the lives of the family is being reopened.” In April I went to see Kevin Magrogan, whose only sibling, Thomas Magrogan, was shot in the heart 45 years ago by a teenage drug addict named Bryant Lee Goodman. Magrogan now lives in the farm country west of Baltimore, where he works as a tax preparer. Sitting behind a desk piled with returns, he told me that his brother’s murder made him “the new head of the household, because my father just never recovered.” His father was a fleet superintendent for a linen company in Baltimore. Before the murder, he worked 12 or 14 hours a day, but afterward, he could only muster 4 or 5 hours, and Kevin had to help out after school to make sure the linen trucks got in at night. His father stopped going out in public because people were always talking to him about Tom. He stopped going to Irish dances with Kevin’s mother. “He would just come home and sit,” Magrogan said. Family members of victims have a right to speak at Unger settlement hearings, and when Goodman’s came up, Magrogan opposed his release, arguing that because Goodman had been given a drug infraction in prison, he was still potentially dangerous. “Where’s he going to get the money for drugs when he goes back on them?” Magrogan told me. “He’s going to revert back to crime. And if he gets in a pressure situation again—we know he’s already killed once. Why not kill again? He’s got nothing to lose.” Goodman, who is now in his 60s, also exercised his right to speak during the hearing—one of the few Ungers to do so. He said he was “truly sorry” for what he had done, according to the Sun. He went free. The process left Magrogan feeling as if the state just wanted to save the cost of incarcerating elderly prisoners. “It was all show and tell,” he said. “I’m sure that if I was very rich and powerful, he would have been retried.” This feeling that the system is rigged is common among the families of Unger victims. The sister of a Johns Hopkins medical student killed by a 16-year-old in 1979 told me she thinks the idea of a life sentence has been devalued. “What message are we sending to other possible criminals, that we’re getting kind of soft?” she asked. She said she recently read a story about a former lifer eating a lobster with his family. How did that make her feel? “How would it make anybody feel? You know what I mean? What are you doing eating a lobster?” Generally, the defense attorneys and social workers trying to ease the Ungers’ transition into post-prison life don’t dispute the damage their clients have done. “You can’t ignore the tragedy of homicide,” says UMD’s Michael Millemann. “You can’t escape from that.” But when he receives an anonymous voicemail that says, “I hope one of these guys kills you,” or when an Internet commenter assumes he must be a Communist, he thinks people aren’t getting the full picture. Millemann has been working with prisoners since the late ’60s. A judge once called him “the LeBron James of lawyering for poor people.” In 2013, he put together a team of law students and social workers to analyze the earliest Unger cases, and pretty soon, a familiar pattern emerged: poor black defendants convicted by all-white juries after paltry or nonexistent police investigations. A large number of the petitioners weren’t murderers the way most people think of them. In Maryland, you don’t have to pull the trigger to be charged with felony murder; the non-shooter in a fatal robbery is just as guilty of murder as the shooter. That was the situation with a significant number of the Ungers, including Karriem Saleem El-Amin. They were drunk and armed at 16 or 17 or 18 and robbed someone with a group of friends. They didn’t shoot, but they got life. Meanwhile, in some cases, the actual gunmen cut deals with the state and went free after a few decades—so why was the non-shooter still in prison, still bearing the burden of society’s judgment? > Of the 143 Ungers who have been released, not a single one has been convicted of anything more serious than a minor traffic offense. Even some of the social workers had been skeptical at first. But that changed quickly. Almost to a person, the prisoners spoke with insight about the people they used to be, expressed remorse for their crimes and described the programs they’d completed in prison to better themselves. They were like living remnants of an earlier, rehabilitative era in corrections, when Maryland lifers could go out on work release (ended in 1993) and take college classes through Pell Grants (ended by Congress in 1994). A forensic social work fellow named Elizabeth Smith interviewed dozens of men all over the state. She told me that she “would get pulled up by [corrections officers], and they’d say, ‘Get this man out of here. He should die at home with his grandchildren.’” It seems counterintuitive, but murderers can be good bets for parole. A [study](http://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/child-page/164096/doc/slspublic/SCJC_report_Parole_Release_for_Lifers.pdf "study") by the Stanford Criminal Justice Center found that between 1995 and 2010, 48.7 percent of all paroled prisoners in California went on to commit new crimes. But among murderers, the rate was a tiny 0.58 percent, “and none of them recidivated for life-term crimes.” Data from New York shows similarly low recidivism rates for paroled murderers. The likeliest reason for this is age. According to figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, people who murder, rape or rob tend to be in their late teens and early 20s. By the time murderers are eligible for release, they are usually way past their criminal primes. The average age of the freed Ungers is 64. I told Millemann that out of all these people, there had to be a few who still posed a threat. “If prosecutors think there are [Ungers] who are too dangerous to be released,” he pointed out, “they’ve got an option: Re-try them and convict them.” (Prosecutors took this route with Merle Unger and a man who killed his wife with a shotgun in 1972. In the case of a notorious petitioner who murdered an 11-year-old girl in 1969, Baltimore city prosecutors fought to keep him in prison, and he died behind bars this past December.) For all these reasons, the people fighting for the prisoners feel they’re doing the right thing. So far, the results have justified their faith. According to the Office of the Public Defender, of the 143 Ungers who have been released, not a single one has been convicted of anything more serious than a traffic offense. There has only been one probation violation, a technical infraction that resulted in a stern talking-to. Zero of the Ungers have violated parole. Zero have been sent back to prison. These numbers didn’t surprise me. After meeting a range of Ungers, and seeing them interact with their families and each other, and talking to them about the horrific things they saw in prison—guys losing it in weak moments and slashing their wrists with razor blades, hanging themselves in their cells, keeling over from sudden aneurysms—it seemed obvious that the last thing anyone wanted to do was go back. Although they didn’t perform their remorse for me, sometimes falling back on cliché (Shakir: “Don’t nobody have a right to take a life, period”), they also didn’t evade questions about their original crimes and the people they used to be. They caused pain to other families and to their own, and now that they can sit on their balconies or go to an Orioles game or eat a meal with their wives, they would rather not blow it up, for themselves and for their friends who are still in prison, the 70 Ungers with pending cases. The experiment is young and tenuous. The state of Maryland is looking to prevent future releases and recently filed the latest in a series of legal challenges to _Unger v. State_ in appellate courts. If a single member of the Unger family fails in a big way—and even advocates recognize there’s a risk of that—everyone could be affected. The guilt would be a lot to bear. “You don’t mess up so you don’t mess up the chances of the guy behind you comin’ out,” Kareem Hasan told me. “That’s one of the things we stress when we get everybody together. That’s why we try to grab them right when they come out the door.”  "It means stability": Donald Shakir (right) outside his new home with Owens and Hasan. Every month or two, a few more Unger petitioners are released. I went to Baltimore in February to see three of these men, all serving sentences for first-degree murder, sign settlement agreements. A crowd of about 30 family members, legal staff and social workers watched with me from the courtroom’s wooden benches. Walter Lomax, wearing a black pinstripe suit and a scarf, sat right where the guys could see him. They’re usually nervous when they walk in, Lomax explained, and he wanted them to recognize a friendly face. “Murphy’s Law,” he said. “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” The prisoners wore blue Department of Corrections jumpsuits and were handcuffed with their arms in front, chains circling their waists. Antonio Gioia stood at the prosecutor’s table and read their names one by one: Tyrone Toliver, Leroy Brunson, Carl Marine. They looked solemn, standing absolutely still, staring forward or at the ground. Eventually, each was asked some questions to ensure that he was competent to sign the deal. Was he currently under the influence of drugs or alcohol? Did he understand that he was forfeiting his right to a new trial under _Unger v. State_, along with all innocence claims, in exchange for a suspended sentence and probation? No victims’ representatives were part of the proceedings; Gioia told the judge that in two of the cases, no surviving family members of the victim could be located, and in the third, the family member did not respond to a letter. After Marine signed his deal, Gioia said, “Your honor, that does conclude our business with the court,” and the men were led downstairs to a holding cell while some final paperwork was processed. The whole thing took 31 minutes. Following the hearing, the 30 supporters went to a Dunkin Donuts across the street to wait for the men to emerge from a side door of the courthouse. The guards always release the Ungers last, after the rest of the day’s defendants are packed into vans and returned to prison. I tried to talk to Carl Marine’s twin sister, but she smiled shyly and put her head down on the table. “I’m too excited,” she said. Kareem Hasan had driven here from his job at the city’s wastewater treatment plant, and Donald Shakir and Larry Owens had arrived together. They all said they remembered going through this process themselves, and how strange it felt to be suddenly deposited on a sidewalk. “All these guys who are being released, we have history,” Shakir told me. “They’re family. They may be closer to us than our own family.” After two hours and many coffees, people got restless and went outside to stand on the sidewalk. The air grew colder. Hasan had to leave for a family function. Shakir started singing a Motown song to himself. It was fully dark outside when two of the three Unger men appeared across the street in civilian clothes—Brunson and Marine. A cry went up from the sidewalk. “_My man_!” Marine’s family rushed over. “Look at you, boy!” A guy mock-punched Marine in the chest and then threw his arms around him and burst into laughter. They grinned and said he was too skinny and needed to fatten up. “Believe me,” he told them, “that won’t be a problem.” He whirled around, overwhelmed, trying to acknowledge all of his people. “Thank you and thank God,” he said. “We gonna make y’all proud. I’m home now. This is my team.” Brunson’s people were more subdued. They waited to the side as he spoke to three female social workers from UMD, who gave him their usual release packet—the binder, the hygiene kit, the bus pass and their business cards. Then the UMD team and the family of the third client, Toliver, went over to the courthouse door to ask a guard why he was being kept inside. The guard said that one of the clerks had gone home for the day before completing Toliver’s paperwork. He would have to spend one more night behind bars. The guard said he was sorry. While all this was happening, Owens and Shakir hung back, not wanting to get in the way. When it seemed as if Brunson was getting ready to leave, Shakir went over to embrace him. “Hey brother, we gotta hook up,” Owens said. He and Shakir gave Brunson their numbers and made sure he knew he could call if he wanted to talk. Brunson nodded and thanked them. Over at the courthouse door, a set of metal gates spread open, and Toliver, still in chains, walked the couple of yards to the last blue van. It drove away, and Owens and Shakir walked off together, into the city.]]

Now We're Talking

He was arguably the most famous criminal lawyer of the 20th century—a barrel-chested Marine with a wise-guy smirk and a growling baritone who flew private jets to Hollywood parties, graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, hosted his own television programs and stole the spotlight in celebrity trials of the Boston Strangler, Patty Hearst and O.J. Simpson.

For F. Lee Bailey, the 21st century hasn't been so kind. As he approaches his 86th birthday next week, he is barred from practicing law in several states and owes millions to the IRS; he has withdrawn to a small town in Maine, where he runs a consulting firm. But in many ways, we live in a world that Bailey helped create. At a time when the line between reality and television has evaporated—when everything is graded on optics, when blowhards audition for Cabinet positions on cable, when the airwaves are suffused with legalistic chatter about obstruction, collusion and impeachment—the cultural impact of America’s first camera-ready lawyer is unmistakable.

I reached out to Bailey a few months ago for his thoughts on the televised spectacle he left behind. In a series of abrasive and illuminating conversations, which have been edited and condensed for clarity, he expounded on the Mueller report, the incompetence of court reporters, his simmering anger about the Simpson case—and how much he still hates Marcia Clark.

What do you think of Dershowitz defending Trump?
But he said it would be a “thought crime” to accuse Trump of trying to obstruct justice, as if there’s no such thing as criminal intent.

What's your opinion on Mueller’s refusal to make a call on obstruction?
You're saying Barr lied to Mueller?
Do you agree with Nancy Pelosi that Barr lied to Congress?

Bailey at home on New Year's Day, 1967. ROBERT PETERSON/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Does the media do a good job covering these legal distinctions?
Why do you say that?
But in terms of his reporting, you believe he gets the facts wrong?
As a young lawyer, you were famous for befriending journalists like Toobin who covered your cases. If you were starting out now, would you still woo the media?
Are you thinking of O.J. Simpson there?
You still believe O.J. was innocent?
Would you admit that he had a pattern of domestic violence toward Nicole?
Sure he did. There were multiple allegations before the murders.
So you don't believe O.J. was abusive with her? Bob Shapiro "intended to fire me at the last minute and take over the Fuhrman cross-examination. ... Only problem was: Bob Shapiro couldn't cross-examine a toad."
Well, who do you think killed her?
Wouldn’t hit men use a gun?
Do you think the conflict between members of your defense team hurt the case?
You wouldn't say things were great between you and Bob Shapiro?
A dive?
Why would he do that?
How did O.J. react to the idea of a plea deal?
You would have liked that?

The photo in question. MYUNG J. CHUN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Is it true that Shapiro tried to stop you from getting paid for the case?
Did you get along with the prosecutors better than you did with Shapiro? "Nobody mistreated [Marcia Clark] in a way that she didn't bring upon herself."
That and your cross-examination of Fuhrman were probably the most dramatic moments in the trial.
One focus of the recent series “The People v. O.J. Simpson” was all of the sexism toward Marcia Clark. Looking back, do you regret the way she was treated?
But she was treated in such a demeaning way. The defense team called her “whining” and “overly emotional.” The judge told jurors not to be distracted by her short skirts, and he interrupted her opening statement. Johnnie Cochran even called her “hysterical.”
Why are you still so invested in this case?
How do you explain that?
Are you still in touch with him?
Would you have represented O.J. if you thought he was guilty?
At the same time, you’ve defended some of the most notorious men who have brutalized women.
I didn't say they were sexual cases. I said that you defended some of the most notorious men who killed women, like the Boston Strangler.
You also defended Charles Schmid, who murdered teenage girls, and George Edgerly, who was accused of decapitating his wife, and Sam Sheppard, who was accused of bludgeoning his wife to death.
OK, but you chose to defend all the others. Would you defend Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby?

We feel you, Bailey. MARK FOLEY/AP

You also represented Ernest Medina. Do you still question whether he gave the order to shoot civilians?
Is it true that after the trial, you gave him a job at a company you owned?
Didn’t he murder a woman who was trying to surrender?
Were you and Medina still in touch when he died a couple years ago?
Did you go to his funeral?

The press had a very romantic sense of you in those days. There were glowing profiles in The New York Times and a 28-page story in The New Yorker by Mary McCarthy. Did you like being famous?
Were there any F. Lee Bailey groupies?
Did you ever feel like the fame was getting out of control?
Had you always wanted to be famous?
It’s been reported that your IQ was measured at 162 as a kid. Is that true?
How did you do in school?
I picture you arguing with teachers.

Bailey with Froma Portney, his second of four wives, outside of the Supreme Court building in Washington. AP PHOTO

Were you more disciplined in college?
What was the service like?
Were you a hotshot?
Right after law school, you represented George Edgerly in that notorious decapitation case. How did you get such a big client?
Well, it sounds like you eviscerated the polygraph examiner.
I thought her headless torso was found in a stream.
How did you end up giving the closing argument in that case?
I heard that while you waited for the verdict, you went out and got drunk. You’ve also joked in the past that “heavy trials make me thirsty,” and you’ve said that alcohol “is my fuel.” Has your drinking ever gotten in the way of work?
But you were famous for being a rascal who was always drinking whiskey and smoking.
Didn’t Patty Hearst accuse you of being an “ineffective counsel”?
How so?
Is there anything you wish you had done differently in that case?
It seems like your relationship with the press sometimes got in your way. A court in Massachusetts censured you for complaining about a case on “The Tonight Show,” and the New Jersey Supreme Court blocked you from practicing in the state for a year.
Well, they were two different judges in two different states.
But you went on national television to pressure a judge about an open case. Don’t you think it’s fair to catch heat for that?
Do you think prosecutors targeted you in 1973 because you were famous?
Was your drunk-driving arrest in 1982 affected by fame?

Bailey hopping into his private plane after being released from federal prison in 1996. MARK FOLEY/AP

When you look at celebrity lawyers like Gloria Allred, do you see them as part of a tradition that you started?
Is it frustrating not to practice law these days? Are there cases that you wish you were involved in?

More young women are being called to the religious life than at any point in the past 50 years. Eve Fairbanks explains what millennial nuns are searching for.

THE PLANETʼS DENSEST EMBODIMENT of international cooperation lies in the heart of Geneva, in the few square miles around the lake. From the lakeshore, a brief walk through a park will bring a visitor to the Palace of Nations, built in the 1930s as the seat of the League of Nations, and now the United Nations’ office in the city. To the east, the World Trade Organization; to the north-west, the World Health Organization; an amble away, the headquarters of the Red Cross, the International Labour Organization, the International Telecommunications Union, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, among dozens of others. Also nearby is the InterContinental Hotel, where in November 2013, Iran agreed to dilute its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief—the first edition of the pact that President Donald Trump abandoned last year.

It’s entirely fitting that just down the road from the InterContinental is the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, which occupies a complex named Maison de la Paix, its six buildings arranged like strewn flower petals. The InterContinental is of particular interest to Thomas Biersteker, a political scientist at the Institute, who has made a career studying sanctions. Biersteker, an American who taught at Brown University until 2007, is prone to discussing the antics of nation-states in a tone of wry curiosity, as if relaying the activities of ant colonies in his backyard. He lives for part of the year in a house in the Swiss Alps, where he hosts so many discussions on his preferred topic that his colleagues call it the “Sanctions Chalet.” Typically, Biersteker’s case studies deal with bad actors: states gone rogue, dangerous leaders thumbing their noses at the world. Increasingly, though, these descriptions seem to fit not just autocracies flush with oil or tinpot dictatorships but also the United States of America.

Under Trump, America is in the business of actively creating or deepening threats to the world: capsizing the climate; pardoning U.S. soldiers and military contractors convicted of war crimes; supplying arms to Saudi Arabia, so that the kingdom can bombard Yemen. For a while, it looked as if Trump might attack North Korea; it’s still possible that he will start a war with Iran. In recently leaked memos, Kim Darroch, the former British ambassador to the U.S., worried that Trump would wreck world trade. Along the way, his administration has trashed so many diplomatic rules and norms that the entire edifice of postwar multilateralism is at risk. Two years ago, Mary Robinson, a former UN special envoy on climate change, called the U.S. “a rogue state” for quitting the Paris accord. It’s common now for foreign policy professionals from America’s traditional allies to murmur brokenly about the “rules-based order,” as if they were standing at the bedside of a dear, dying friend.

Everyone on the front lines of foreign policy has stories to tell of chaos and breakdown. In one minor but telling exemplar of the genre, UN officials were shocked last summer when the U.S. abruptly decided to stop contributing $300 million—less than 0.6 percent of its foreign aid spend—to the Relief and Works Agency’s budget for Palestinian refugees. The agency began its work in 1949, to assist Palestinians who’d newly been rendered homeless; with successive generations, its beneficiaries have swelled to around 5.4 million, many of whom still live in or near refugee camps. “The U.S never had a problem with that number, until last year,” one UN official told me. “Then they made the argument that the funding should be pegged to the original number of some 800,000 refugees.” The U.S. refused to budge, despite multiple meetings, including one in mid-August that lasted 15 hours—so long that, after the building’s cafes shut at 5:30 p.m., delegates had to leave the premises altogether to find food. These gatherings rarely conclude without some sort of consensus, or at least some ambiguous language to project unanimity, the official said. But in this case, even that wasn’t an option; America’s dissent had to be recorded in a footnote before the meeting could move on.

There are so many “egregious examples” of this kind, Wendy Sherman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs during the Obama administration, told me. “To the point that our allies, European leaders, are looking elsewhere for solidarity.” A Canadian political scientist who advised her country during last year’s NAFTA renegotiations was sickened when Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum using a provision for national security considerations. “What that meant to Canadians was: We are a threat to the national security of the U.S.” She described Trump’s actions as “brutal” and “an enormous betrayal” and added: “There was a growing sense that we were foolish to believe in the trust between the two countries.”

This is an unfamiliar situation for everyone. David Sylvan, a political scientist and one of Biersteker’s colleagues, compared the present incarnation of the U.S. to “a large, powerful, overgrown child with a handgun. How do you deal with that?” The U.S. has never hesitated to make up the rules for itself, but after the end of World War II, it was largely cast as a hegemon maintaining a global order. Now, it is a hegemon that scorns that order. More and more, the world fears that Trump is only a symptom of a much deeper problem, said James Davis, an American political scientist at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. European politicians in particular, he said, worry that deep social trends in America—towards chauvinism, insularity and coercion—will keep blooming even after Trump leaves the White House. Other governments “aren’t going to be willing to deal with you on the same terms again,” Davis added. “They won’t trust the system. They’ll worry that in a few years, there will be another explosion.”

So the question is worth asking: How much longer will it be before the rest of the world thinks about punishing the U.S. for its misdemeanors? And how would they even go about disciplining a country as mighty as the United States?

On a rainy April day, in a conference room in one of the petals of the Maison de la Paix, Biersteker convened for me a roundtable of a dozen or so sanctions scholars: practitioners, academics, researchers, economists. Few of them agreed to be quoted by name. Some worked with multilateral institutions and were attending in their personal capacities; a couple were Iranian, and unwilling to be linked to criticism of the U.S. Together, they proposed scenarios in which America’s misbehavior might pose genuine threats to the world, and speculated about how the international community could respond with sanctions, in the very widest sense of that word.

Through the spring, I spoke to other experts as well, in Geneva, London, Hamburg, New York and Washington D.C. The world is changing, they all said. The American unipolar moment is ending. The economies of China and India will soon outgrow America’s. New networks of power, trade and wealth are emerging. Countries are forming alternative arrangements of finance that fall outside American influence. These developments will eventually leave the U.S. vulnerable to levers of pressure in a way it hasn’t been in the past. In the corridors of power in Brussels, Paris and Berlin, the idea of pushing these levers is beginning to sound less and less outlandish by the day.

THE MODERN SANCTION, as Biersteker thinks of it, is a device born of the 20th century’s multilateral system. He described it broadly: “a restrictive measure—not necessarily economic—applied with some political purpose.” It was a key tool in the kit of the League of Nations, as envisioned by Woodrow Wilson. A hundred years ago this fall, Wilson toured the U.S. to sell Americans on the League’s potential to preserve peace and order. In a speech in Indianapolis, he explained that if one state’s actions threatened the welfare of the international community, other countries in the League could install boycotts of trade, travel and communication. “Apply this peaceful, silent, deadly remedy,” he said, “and there will be no need for force.”

Despite Wilson’s optimism, the UN imposed sanctions just twice between 1945 and 1990: against Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. But since the end of the Cold War, the sanction has been the instrument of choice for coercive diplomacy. When I first met Biersteker, in New York, he pulled out his phone to show me an app he’d helped develop, which holds histories and analyses of all the sanctions the UN has issued since 1991. (“You can download it, if you want, and play around with it,” Biersteker said. I thought he was kidding, but the app allowed me to select from varying theoretical scenarios of threat and conflict, to then recommend sanctions programs that were effective in analogous episodes in the past. Still, Candy Crush Saga it is not.) In the first decade after the Soviet Union collapsed, the Security Council voted 12 times for economic sanctions, and there are now 14 extant UN sanctions regimes. Countries have deployed their own sanctions as well, the U.S. most of all. At the moment, the U.S. has nearly 8,000 sanctions in place—so many that experts worry that the tool is blunting from overuse.

Sanctions experts like to speak the language of pain. A sanction-sender will study the anatomy of the receiving country, then pinch it in the places that hurt most, said Richard Nephew, the lead sanctions expert on the U.S. team that negotiated with Iran during the Obama administration. Assessing “how pain translates into action” is a delicate and imprecise exercise, he writes in his book “The Art of Sanctions.” Inflicting pain on the citizens of a country might spark internal dissent, leading to an overthrow of the government. But it might also bind citizens closer to their government and to each other—a “rally ’round the flag” effect. Sometimes, the impacts of sanctions can be unexpected, as in Iran’s great chicken shortage of 2012. Right around the time of the biggest Iranian holidays, U.S. sanctions caused inflation that tripled chicken prices. It was as if the cost of turkey in America had tripled just before Thanksgiving, Nephew said. This sparked more frustration among Iranians against their government than years of financial constraints might have achieved.

For sanctions upon a country to be most effective, its economy must be tied tightly and in manifold ways into the global web of trade and commerce, so that exile from this web causes true pain. This partly explains the dominance of the U.S. as a sender of sanctions. Other interconnected blocs, such as the Arab League and the African Union, have used their collective power to sanction one of their own. But only the U.S. has been able to unilaterally enforce sanctions in a consistent way, punishing not only receiving countries but other states and corporations that deal with them.

The most practical reason for this power is the might of the dollar, the world’s reserve currency. The U.S. dollar lies on one side or the other of 88 percent of foreign exchange transactions, which means that the world’s banking networks all home in on America as well. “If you go to an ATM in Bangalore, or anywhere else, it’s very likely that some of those bits of data will, at some point, go through New York,” Jarrett Blanc, a senior fellow in the geo-economics and strategy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. “And with larger transactions, you’ll have to have recourse to the U.S. in a meaningful way.” Only a few major currencies—those that banks and countries most commonly hold in reserve—can swap into each other without first being exchanged for the dollar. “Maybe you could convert euros into yen without going through the U.S.,” said Blanc. “But dirhams into euros—no. It’s like the financial system is a sewer, and all the pipes run through New York.”

For companies and banks, being banished from the U.S. pipes is a fate akin to death. In 2015, the French bank BNP Paribas paid a penalty of nearly $9 billion for violating U.S. sanctions on Cuba, Sudan and Iran. “And if you look at their plea, they basically said: ‘Yes, we did it. We did it all,’” Biersteker said. (Eventually, BNP Paribas earned a one-year suspension of its U.S. dollar clearing operations through its New York branch for certain lines of business.) Biersteker explained: “Their main focus in negotiating their plea was not the size of the penalty, but the length of time they were afraid they’d be frozen out of the U.S. banking system.”

The gravitational pull that the U.S. exerts over the world’s finances, like a black hole bending space-time, is also the reason it has historically been so difficult to sanction. But it isn’t just finance. Consider, for instance, that Amazon and Microsoft hold nearly half of the cloud storage used by companies and institutions around the world. If American companies came under the kind of sweeping blacklist that applies to Iranian firms, the BBC., Fujitsu, Novartis, Samsung, Maersk, Lufthansa, HSBC., the London Tube and the European Space Agency would all have to find other cloud providers in a hurry.

The U.S. economy is threaded too tightly into everyone’s lives to be unwound easily. Every expert I interviewed began with this caveat; indeed, some couldn’t get far enough past it even to game out speculative situations in which the U.S. finds itself sanctioned by its peers. But others, particularly those in Europe, were eager to play. For all its primacy, Nephew said, the U.S. economy still resembles “a big plate spinning on a tiny axis. It doesn’t necessarily take much to knock you off that axis.”

THERE WAS ONCE A SANCTION that severely wobbled the plate on its axis. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Arab states levied an oil embargo upon America to punish it for arming Israel. The embargo only lasted a few months, and it didn’t stop America from selling arms to Israel. But denying America access to Arab oil caused genuine pain. Cars lined up at gas stations, truckers went on strike and the inflation rate sped upwards. The shock helped to touch off a two-year recession. The U.S. even briefly considered invading Saudi Arabia to restore its supplies of oil.

At the roundtable in Geneva, one speaker argued that the Arab oil embargo remains the best example of surmounting “the classic collective action problem.” Not every country in the world has to unite to constrain the U.S. What made the embargo possible was that a small set of states controlled a commodity that America relied upon, making a sanction easier to coordinate, he said. “So the question becomes: What’s the structural weakness of the U.S. that you need to target, and what’s the coalition of actors that you then need to put together?”

Identifying the pressure points of America’s anatomy isn’t easy. After the 1973 embargo, the U.S. government set about making itself self-sufficient in oil—and has largely succeeded. One potential liability for the U.S. is the enormous financial leverage that China theoretically holds over it, in the form of $1.12 trillion in U.S. securities—more than a quarter of U.S. debt held by foreign governments. Dumping even a portion of that into the market would depress U.S. bond prices, make borrowing costly for Americans, and slow the economy. But China is unlikely to actually use this leverage—the resulting fibrillations in financial markets would pose risks to every country, China included.

Richard Nephew ran through some of the more audacious options for me. (He prefaced this by sticking out his chin and saying: “Obviously I don’t want to be like: ‘Hey, hit us right here!’”) Say the five countries that host the most U.S. direct investment—the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Ireland and Canada—enact regulations that prohibit their markets and businesses from accepting funds from American companies and individuals. Domestic banks in these countries would turn away U.S. money that seeks, for example, a stock market to invest in, or a manufacturing plant to buy, or a subsidiary to fund. Say, additionally, that returns on existing investments were not permitted to be sent back to America. The U.S. would lose billions in national income. Using 2013 data, Nephew has calculated that America earned $439 billion from its international investments—a figure larger than all but the 28 biggest economies in the world. “The impact in terms of inflation, employment, housing markets—all that gets serious.”

Or, as with the oil embargo, the U.S. could be denied supplies of other foreign commodities it urgently requires, such as rare earth metals. Roughly 90 percent of the global trade in rare earths is controlled by China, and U.S. companies import around $160 million worth of these elements to use in technology. In May, an editorial in the state-controlled People’s Daily unsubtly noted that by imposing tariffs on Chinese products, the U.S. “risks losing rare earth supply.” And then, ominously: “China has plenty of cards to play.”

One form of sanction against the U.S. has already come in for serious discussion. In late 2017, months after Trump announced his withdrawal from the Paris agreement, a French climate policy analyst was invited to the office of an economic adviser for President Emmanuel Macron. The adviser asked how the EU could impose a carbon border tax upon countries that weren’t meeting their climate change commitments. In this meeting and another one in early 2018, the analyst told me, the adviser presented the government’s own ideas on, for example, what the EU might do with the revenue from such a tax. “This was very much against the Americans, although it wasn’t said in those words,” the analyst said. “They were very enthusiastic. They thought this was a way to rebalance the relationship with the U.S. and uphold the Paris agreement at the same time.” Macron called such a tax “crucial” in a speech two years ago.

Since at least 2003, economists have gamed out how a border carbon tax might work. First, the EU would tighten its cap on emissions, making it more expensive for its own companies to buy or trade carbon permits. It might also introduce a domestic carbon tax on its transport, energy and manufacturing sectors. Then, to keep the playing field of trade level, the European Commission would recommend carbon border taxes on imports manufactured in countries that are reckless about their carbon footprint. At the most immediate level, these taxes could apply to materials such as steel, aluminium or cement, whose production is highly emissions-intensive and whose carbon cost is simple to calculate. The tax could be directed towards countries that impose no carbon prices at all. (Only 46 countries have any kind of national carbon pricing scheme.) Or it could be directed at the only country refusing to abide by the Paris agreement: the United States.

The U.S. would almost certainly lodge a complaint with the WTO, arguing that the tax is discriminatory. But the EU could counter that it is merely extending its domestic climate policy to all imports. It could even reasonably argue that the U.S. is deriving an unfair trade advantage through its irresponsibility. “Not paying the cost of damage to the environment is a subsidy, just as not paying the full costs of workers would be,” Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist, wrote in 2006. One of the WTO’s chief functions is to prohibit just these kinds of subsidies.

Brussels has another line of defense as well—one provided by the U.S. itself. In the mid-1990s, the American government banned imports of shrimp from four Asian countries, claiming their harvesting methods were hazardous to endangered sea turtles. The resulting ruling specified that environmental concerns are a legitimate reason to restrict trade. That ruling, Stiglitz wrote, sets a precedent for the imposition of measures like a carbon border tax.

Anthony Gardner, the former U.S. ambassador, told me that after the initial burst of discussion, the notion of a carbon border tax became marooned in “limbo land.” Macron’s presidency grew ensnarled in other worries, the climate analyst explained, “and the U.S.’ volatility went from just Paris to this madness today.” Still, as recently as May, Macron repeated the proposal; the same month, Spanish ministers urged the EU to consider it as well. The first section of a manifesto by the incoming president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, features a carbon border tax. “If Trump wins a second term,” Gardner predicted, “there’s going to be even more pressure.”

It is in France that Karen Donfried, the president of the German Marshall Fund, senses the most intense currents of exasperation with the U.S. “I touch down in Paris and start talking to people, and I see it. They’re now preaching from the gospel of strategic autonomy”—of trying to shrink Europe’s dependence on America. “That has been a longstanding French position, but they’re arguing it more vehemently today because they think America has gone bad.” Last year, France led eight other European countries in forming an “intervention initiative”—a military coalition outside NATO that has now swelled to 13 members. Macron has also suggested not making trade deals with the U.S. at all because of Trump’s rejection of the Paris agreement—a point he reinforced last week at the UN. And it is France that has pushed hardest for the European Defence Fund, a multibillion-dollar project to improve the EU’s ability to conduct its own security and defense operations, Donfried said. “The French see the U.S.’ role as having changed over time, and that it’s not going back to what it was.”

SAY IT HAPPENS. Say a clutch of determined countries decide upon some form of sanction to inflict upon the U.S. They will find that, in the event of American retaliation, their first order of business will be to figure out a way around the U.S. dollar. But undermining the dollar can also be a sanction in itself, a way to censure the U.S.. In a café in Geneva, I met Ramon della Torre, an economist and one of Biersteker’s former students, who laid out for me, in animated fashion, methods to do that.

One strategy, he said, would be for the largest oil-producing nations—or even for OPEC, the cartel that binds these nations together—to stop denominating the price of crude in dollars. At least 60 percent of the world’s annual oil production is paid for in dollars; oil futures and options worth trillions are priced in dollars as well. “Oil-producing nations could say: ‘We don’t want to take part any more in this petrodollar regime,’” della Torre said. “Arab countries might say this. Or Russia, which would be more interesting. And China might decide that it doesn’t care if it buys oil in dollars or euros.” That would rattle the dollar, he said. “I’m actually wondering why it hasn’t happened yet.”

Some countries under U.S. sanctions have actually attempted to do this. Venezuela launched a petro-cryptocurrency to sell oil, and Iran began to accept euros for oil in 2006. But the game needs big players. Last year, China, the world’s largest importer of crude, introduced the first oil futures contract denominated in its own currency, and major oil producers such as Nigeria, Russia and Indonesia announced that they would accept payments in yuan. In April, faced with the prospect that OPEC might newly be subject to American antitrust laws, Saudi Arabia started to consider selling oil in non-dollar currencies. “The Saudis know they have the dollar as the nuclear option,” Reuters quoted a source as saying. If the world’s largest exporter of oil prices its barrels in euros or yuan, another source said, “it would be the U.S. economy that would fall apart.”

Another way to diminish the dollar is to build an alternative set of what Jarrett Blanc calls “pipes”: channels of international finance that aren’t forced to rely upon U.S. banks to execute transactions. Examples of such systems are just beginning to emerge—ironically, because of the pressures of U.S. sanctions on countries such as Iran and Russia. Earlier this year, the EU formed a special purpose vehicle called Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges, or Instex, which bypasses dollar payment channels to continue doing business with Iranian companies. Instex clears trade only in food and medicines at the moment, although the EU wants to open it up to countries such as China, India and Japan, and to have it facilitate Iran’s oil exports as well. Separately, Russia and China have developed their own transfer networks that function as an alternative to SWIFT, the most common banking protocol, which is based in Belgium but complies with U.S sanctions on other countries and corporations. Biersteker told me that NGOs eager to funnel aid into Syria, stymied by U.S. sanctions, are working with the Swiss government to set up cryptocurrency detours around the dollar.

All these initiatives may well end in defeat; indeed, a new raft of sanctions on Iran, unveiled by Trump on September 20, already threatens to cripple Instex. As Blanc points out, there’s no one button that you can press to challenge the dollar. The euro is subject to the EU’s internal tensions; the yuan is controlled tightly by the Chinese government. Many Americans think there’s no way around the dollar’s supremacy, Blanc said. “They mistake the fact that it hasn’t happened with a prediction that it can’t happen.” So far, it has been too costly and difficult to try to circumvent the dollar. But the cost and difficulty of dealing with a heedless America may outweigh that of renovating the financial system, Blanc explained. “Only now are we testing what happens if the U.S. acts in a genuinely unilateral manner.”

FOR THE FULL THEATER OF SANCTIONS to be revealed, America will have to commit a deed so flagrant that it goads the international community into action. “It has to be something very visible,” said Julia Grauvogel, a senior research fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg. A nuclear strike against North Korea or Iran might do it, she said. Military intervention, say in Venezuela? “It would have to depend on the nature of the intervention,” she said. “Would they send troops on the ground? Would they use their nuclear capacity as a threat? There needs to be a very unambiguous case where the U.S. has broken international law.”

Climate change delinquency may or may not cut it. When I first started asking around about climate-related penalties, I was invariably told that the pace of deterioration in the climate, while fast enough to cause alarm, was too slow to provoke sanctions. But last month, at the G-7 summit in Biarritz, France, a test case presented itself. With the Amazon rainforest aflame, leaders of the EU threatened to withhold ratification of a new trade agreement with the South American bloc Mercosur unless Brazil took steps to douse the fire. It was the first major instance of a sanction-like threat being held over a country over climate change.

Even so, it will be difficult to extend the model to states breaking out of the Paris agreement or failing to curb emissions. The most critical provisions of the Paris agreement, dealing with emissions targets and financial commitments, are not legally binding. Even the resolve to reduce emissions varies across the world. “You need to have a norm which is equally shared,” Christian von Soest, Grauvogel’s colleague, said. “Think of Russia. Would they issue environmental sanctions? I don’t think so. It’s not a key norm for them.”

But climate events will inevitably begin to cascade: freak storms, droughts, floods, migration, crop loss, conflict. “Maybe ten years from now, when the global economic balances change, if the U.S. has had ten years of Trump and Trump-like policies,” Nephew said, lesser things may serve as triggers. “They could be military actions, intensified use of drone strikes and the human rights violations associated with them, or withdrawal from international agreements.”

In the short term, perhaps the most realistic option is for countries to adopt measures of civil disobedience. Already, European countries are doing this by withholding military collaboration. David Sylvan, the political scientist, referred to Trump’s short-lived plan last December to pull America out of Syria. “Normally the U.S. would get other countries to send in troops to replace them. They did that in Iraq and Afghanistan. This time, when they went knocking on doors, no one was home.” Britain and France, America’s two European partners on the ground, flatly refused to remain. “It is totally out of the question,” a French government official told AFP. “It’s just no.”

As a result, the U.S. had to keep half of its two thousand soldiers in Syria, risking more American lives than it wished, even as it continued to seek help from Europe. James Jeffrey, the U.S. Special Representative for Syria, visited Germany in July to ask for ground troops but was turned down. Britain and France eventually agreed to send a far smaller contingent than the Trump administration had requested. Other countries asked the U.S. for payment in return for military support, a Trump administration official told Foreign Policy. Late in July, Germany also declined to participate in a joint naval mission led by the U.S. against Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. This was, Sylvan said, “one way to quarantine the U.S.—to say: ‘We’re not playing.’” These quarantines act as a sort of stealthy sanction, thwarting the U.S. from achieving its foreign policy objectives.

IN “YEARS AND YEARS,” A BBC-HBO MINISERIES, a glimpse of a dangerous new era is available — and in the universe of the show, it doesn’t go well. At the end of the first episode, set in 2024, the Trump administration nukes a Chinese missile base, killing 40,000 people. The U.K. then levies sanctions against the U.S. Banks crumble, a financial crisis sets in, the UN threatens to relocate its headquarters — and America, swinging even further to the right, elects Mike Pence president. “We’re making it worse,” an expert says in alarm. Even in a make-believe universe, sanctioning the U.S. is an enterprise laced with peril.

The wisdom of scholars has it that sanctions work better when applied against democracies, where the pressure might mobilize voters to throw out their wayward government. The truth is, though, that in the matter of sanctioning a functional Western democracy, the number of case studies in the literature is precisely zero. It’s possible that some form of international shunning will prompt citizens to vote Trump out, or even prompt Republicans to rein him in. But it’s also possible that the showrunners of “Years and Years” have it right: that Americans will double down on their choices—the old “rally ’round the flag” effect—and that their government will strike back.

And so even an old friend like EU will have to exercise caution. “They know they will not be able to escape getting burned if they pour fuel on the fire,” said Karen Donfried. If the U.S. imposes new tariffs on cars imported from Europe, as Trump has threatened to do, the EU will hit back with tariffs on Caterpillar trucks, Xerox copiers, Samsonite luggage, and several other U.S. exports, their total value an estimated $39 billion. Cecilia Malmström, the European Trade Commissioner, told a parliamentary committee in Brussels in late July that this “rebalancing list” was ready to go. “I would hope we do not have to use that one,” she said.

In reaction to European sanctions, Trump could lash out by following through on another of his threats: pulling the U.S. out of NATO. This would plunge the Western world into the kind of instability last seen in the 1940s. Macron’s European Intervention Initiative and the European Defence Fund have been planning for this scenario; so has PESCO, or Permanent Structured Cooperation, an agreement between 25 EU states to better integrate their armed forces. Without the U.S., Europe’s eastern borders would be exposed once again to a newly empowered Russia, raising the specter of annexations, skirmishes or outright wars. Europe would have to find vast amounts of money to plug the gap left by America. One analysis envisions a Russian occupation of Lithuania and part of Poland, and concludes that Europe would have to spend $288-$357 billion to build the capacity to respond to that aggression. For comparison, in 2018, the 28 member states of the EU collectively spent $364 billion on defense. The consequent conflicts over budgets might disintegrate Europe rather than unite it.

The end result of these escalating retaliations is havoc. “What does that world even look like, where...every country decides what it wants to do, with no rules?” Gardner said. “That is a global free-for-all, which won’t be good for anyone.” And yet Trump’s America continues to turn more deeply into a mirror image of the kind of state it has always wished to punish: not just a sullen loner, not just out to grab wealth for itself, but a real, live, loudly ticking risk to the world. Its dangers don’t feel imminent; they feel as if they’ve arrived. And according to the U.S.’ own gospel, tact will fail to coax such menaces to mend their ways. Negotiations will yield nothing. The only leverage to be gained then will be by hobbling the faculties that America prizes most, the faculties it is already worrying about losing: its economic might, its moral authority, its outsized influence in the world.

CREDITS

Story - Samanth Subramanian,

a journalist living in Cambridge, has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian and WIRED. His biography of the scientist and communist J.B.S. Haldane will be published by W. W. Norton in 2020.

Creative Direction and Design - Una Janicijevic

is an art director in Toronto.

Illustration - Zach Meyer

is a Long Beach based illustrator, known for his detailed portraits and narrative works.

Research - Ben Kalin,

formerly of Vanity Fair, is a veteran fact-checker and the founder of Fact-Check Pros, a full-service fact-checking agency.

Development & Design - Gladeye

is a digital innovations agency in New Zealand and New York.

IN THE TWO YEARS AND 308 DAYS THAT DONALD Trump has been president, he has constructed zero miles of wall along the southern border of the United States. He has, to be fair, replaced or reinforced 76 miles of existing fence and signed it with a sharpie. A private group has also built a barrier less than a mile long with some help from Steve Bannon and money raised on GoFundMe. But along the 2,000 miles from Texas to California, there is no blockade of unscalable steel slats in heat-retaining matte black, no electrified spikes, no moat and no crocodiles. The animating force of Trump’s entire presidency—the idea that radiated a warning of dangerous bigotry to his opponents and a promise of unapologetic nativism to his supporters—will never be built in the way he imagined.

And it doesn’t matter. In the two years and 308 days that Donald Trump has been president, his administration has constructed far more effective barriers to immigration. No new laws have actually been passed. This transformation has mostly come about through subtle administrative shifts—a phrase that vanishes from an internal manual, a form that gets longer, an unannounced revision to a website, a memo, a footnote in a memo. Among immigration lawyers, the cumulative effect of these procedural changes is known as the invisible wall.

In the two years after Trump took office, denials for H1Bs, the most common form of visa for skilled workers, more than doubled. In the same period, wait times for citizenship also doubled, while average processing times for all kinds of visas jumped by 46 percent, even as the quantity of applications went down. In 2018, the United States added just 200,000 immigrants to the population, a startling 70 percent less than the year before.

Before Trump was elected, there was virtually no support within either party for policies that make it harder for foreigners to come here legally. For decades, the Republican consensus has favored tough border security along with high levels of legal immigration. The party’s small restrictionist wing protested from the margins, but it was no match for a pro-immigration coalition encompassing business interests, unions and minority groups. In 2013, then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions introduced an amendment that would have lowered the number of people who qualified for green cards and work visas. It got a single vote in committee—his own. As a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security observed, “If you told me these guys would be able to change the way the U.S. does immigration in two years, I would have laughed.”

Senior adviser Stephen Miller is usually regarded as the White House’s immigration mastermind, but his maneuvering is only a sliver of the story. The most fine-grained and consequential changes would never have been possible without a group of like-minded figures stationed in relevant parts of the government—particularly the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service, the agency within DHS that administers visas. Early in Trump’s presidency, said the former DHS official, there was a “strategic sprinkling” of people who “shared a common vision and were ready to outwork everybody.” They included Gene Hamilton, Miller’s “terrible sword at DHS” (his actual title was senior counselor to the secretary), and Francis Cissna, the soft-spoken former head of USCIS whom colleagues describe as “an encyclopaedia of immigration law” and “a total immigration nerd.” “If you said to him, what’s on page 468, second paragraph” of the Immigration and Nationality Act, another former DHS official marveled, “he would quote it to you.”

Amidst the chaos at DHS, the restrictionists have already radically scaled back America’s asylum and refugee programs for years to come. But no category of immigrant has escaped the uptick of denials and delays—not the Palestinian student with a Harvard scholarship who was deported upon landing in Boston, or the Australian business owner forced to leave after building a life here. Not the Bolshoi Ballet stars who somehow failed to meet the criteria of accomplished artists, or the Iraqi translators who risked their lives for the U.S. military and whose annual admissions went from 325 to just two after the change in administration. Then there are the consequences that are harder to capture in headlines or statistics: the couples whose marriages broke down when the foreign spouse was forced to wait far longer than usual in their home country, and the unknown number of people who have abandoned the attempt to stay because of financial hardship or the strain of living with a level of uncertainty that becomes untenable.

“What became clear to me early on was that these guys wanted to shut down every avenue to get into the U.S.,” the first former senior DHS official said. “They wanted to reduce the number of people who could get in under any category: illegals, legals, refugees, asylum seekers—everything. And they wanted to reduce the number of foreigners already here through any means possible.” No government in modern memory has been this dedicated to limiting every form of immigration to the United States. To find one that was, you have to go a long way back, to 1924.

“ANATION OF IMMIGRANTS”—THESE FOUR WORDS, genius in their concision, mask the messiest of histories. People like to recall that George Washington wanted America to “be an Asylum to the persecuted of the earth.” Less often praised: Ben Franklin’s contention that immigrants are “the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation.” Americans have been having some version of this argument ever since. And for much of the country’s existence, public opinion towards immigration has ranged from tepid to hostile. As Daniel Tichenor, author of the comprehensive history, “Dividing Lines,” puts it, “We love the immigrant past and dread the immigrant present.”

One rare exception came after the Civil War, when the country was desperate to replace the men who had died on the battlefield. A flourishing postwar confidence revived the idea that the country could absorb a never-ending stream of foreigners and fuse their best characteristics into that superior being, an American.

The turn began in the 1880s. Extremes of wealth had sparked massive labor strikes; out West, people fretted that the land was running out. Now, newcomers were a threat, and the more foreign they seemed, the more threatening they were. An early warning was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first-ever prohibition of all people of a specific race. Over the next decade, a surge of European migrants accounted for 40 percent of population growth. From the 1890s, this wave was dominated not by English, Scandanavians, Germans or Irish, but by poorer southern and eastern Europeans and Russian Jews. As the country slid into a long depression, the new immigrants became the source and the target of a tinderbox anxiety. There were lynchings of Italians in New Orleans; attacks on Jewish farmers by Mississippi nightriders; a riot against Russian Jewish factory workers in New Jersey.

For decades, nativists in Congress tried and failed to translate this hostility into new immigration laws. It wasn’t until the early 1920s, after Warren Harding was elected president on an “America First” platform, that two Republican lawmakers, Representative Albert Johnson and Senator David Reed, finally realized a restrictionist dream: a comprehensive racial quota system devised to keep American bloodlines pure. “[T]he country would never be the same,” wrote John Higham in his definitive account of American nativism, “Strangers in the Land”—“either in its social structure or in its habits of mind.”

To build the public case for their legislation, Johnson and Reed teamed up with the leading eugenicists of the day. Johnson enlisted Harry Laughlin, who in 1936 received an honorary degree from a German university for his contributions to the “science of racial cleansing,” to conduct research for the House Immigration Committee. Johnson also worked closely with Madison Grant, whose manifesto, “The Passing of the Great Race,” is a deranged codification of white men into three “races” of descending desirability—Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans. Grant’s conclusion, drawn from spurious analyses of skull shape and nose width, was that the new immigrants should be scientifically excluded from the definition of whiteness. They were “human flotsam … breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword.”

In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act, which accorded with his own belief that that “America must be kept American.” The law would ultimately shut down most immigration except for a meager inflow dominated by people Madison Grant would have called Nordics. Everyone else faced waitlists of 10 to 75 years, depending on the quota allotted to their country of origin. The law also birthed a national immigration bureaucracy—what Tichenor calls “an increasingly elaborate immigration control system of racist design.”

Until this point, nearly everyone who arrived at a port of entry like Ellis Island was admitted to the United States. There was no requirement for a visa. Johnson-Reed was deliberately engineered to prevent most immigrants from ever boarding a steamship, by requiring them to obtain visas from U.S. consulates abroad. The State Department, which ran the consulates, was notoriously anti-Semitic: In 1921, the chief of the Consular Service supplied a report to Congress describing Jewish people as “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.” By the 1930s, as Hitler launched his assault on the Jews of Europe, the new visa system was perfectly calibrated not to help the growing ranks of refugees, but to keep them out.

In 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered consulates to give Jewish refugees “the most humane and favorable treatment possible under law.” After that, admissions actually went down. Mere presidential preference was no match for the immigration bureaucracy, which erected, in the words of historian David Wyman, a formidable “paper wall.”

The paper wall’s architect was Samuel Miller Breckinridge Long—Breckinridge Long to the public. Thin and rangy, intermittently beset by nervous ailments, Long was born to a family that was practically Confederate aristocracy. He’d glided through Princeton, married into money and spent a good deal of his career as a bureaucrat of middling talents. Thanks to his old pal “Frank” Roosevelt, in 1939 he was put in charge of refugee admissions, though he had no relevant experience. From then on, Roosevelt essentially abdicated refugee policy to Long because he was so spooked by the politics: In 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, 86 percent of Americans opposed an emergency increase of refugee admissions.

From the nativists' perspective, Long was the best possible man for the moment. He believed the overwhelming majority of refugees were propagandists, subversives, freeloaders and derelicts. And he knew exactly how to protect his country from the “alien influx”—with the merciless application of rules, regulations, procedures and forms.

In 1940, Long issued a memo instructing subordinates to avoid granting visas to European refugees for a “temporary period of indefinite length.” From today's vantage point, his methods are eerily familiar. “We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas,” he explained. Later, he would crow in his diary: “The cables practically stopping immigration went!”

Consular officials had enormous latitude in determining a refugee’s fate. In France, you had to obtain an exit visa, a transit visa, an entry visa for the U.S., moral and political affidavits of support, certificates of good behavior and a paid ticket for the ship. You couldn’t get a visa without a ticket, which were sold out months in advance, and you couldn’t get a ticket without a visa, which were only valid for four months, and if just one of your documents had expired on the day of departure, you had to start all over again.

One of the most powerful tools employed by visa officials was the public charge rule—a component of federal law which states that a person can’t be admitted to the United States if they are likely to become a burden on the state. Although the rule had been on the books since 1882, it was barely observed until the Depression. Under Long, consulates wielded it with abandon. To Jewish refugees of Nazi Germany, the rule must have seemed like a sadistic joke, since throughout the 1930s they had been forced to relinquish up to 90 percent of their capital when they left the country. Even if they were lucky enough to have American financial sponsors, the standards of proof were constantly shifting. As a result, there were multiple years after Hitler seized power in which the U.S. did not fill its annual quota of just under 30,000 immigrants from Germany. In 1938, for example, the State Department admitted 19,552 former residents of the Third Reich, not all of whom were Jewish.

And yet Breckinridge Long wasn’t satisfied. Convinced Germany was infiltrating America with spies disguised as refugees, he created, for the first time, a centralized immigration processing system based in Washington. Applicants submitted letters of support, financial records and character testimonies. Sponsors were scrutinized. Five committees from different agencies reviewed every application. After that, the flow of refugees nearly stopped altogether. In a speech, Representative Emanuel Cellar blamed Long for the “gruesome bottleneck.” He observed: “It takes months and months to grant the visas and then it usually applies to a corpse.”

In January 1944, Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau demanded a meeting with Roosevelt and Long to discuss the situation. He came armed with an investigative memo, which he titled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” It documented Long’s machinations in devastating detail. Roosevelt immediately agreed to create a War Refugee Board outside Long’s control. Its work during the remainder of the war demonstrated just how many more lives could have been saved: According to Wyman, it managed to rescued around 200,000 people in 18 months.

Long fumed at his demotion, raging to his diary that he had been “thrown to the wolves.” One of his great regrets was that he no longer enjoyed the favor of his old friend Frank. The loss of status gnawed at him. He retired by the end of 1944, and after writing a memoir that failed to find a publisher, mostly concentrated on breeding race horses, which usually lost. To the end of his life, according to his biographer, Neil Rolde, he never acknowledged, or apparently even realized, the magnitude of what he had done.

And yet even after the horrors of the Nazi regime were fully revealed, Johnson-Reed wasn’t overturned for another two decades. The law that replaced it, the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, is often celebrated as the moment that America opened its doors to the world. At the time, though, its authors had more modest goals. Shamed into action by the civil rights movement, they planned to abolish the racial quotas and create a merit system allowing for limited immigration from outside of Europe.

It was only a last-minute nativist intervention that turned the law into something very different. An antsy Democratic congressman named Michael Feighan secured a provision allowing people to qualify through family ties as well—reasoning that since most immigrants were white, it would protect the racial status quo. “The bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” President Lyndon Johnson promised. “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society,” Senator Ted Kennedy agreed.

Instead, the law changed the composition of America by accident. Among other things, Feighan completely failed to consider that people from non-European countries would qualify under the merit system and then sponsor their relatives, the process restrictionists term “chain migration.” The foreign-born population grew from 9.6 million in 1965 to 45 million in 2015, with 90 percent of those new arrivals coming from outside Europe—mostly from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The United States became, wrote historian Aristide Zolberg, “the first nation to mirror humanity.” To restrictionists, the 1965 reforms are the original sin, the moment when America betrayed its workers, sacrificed a mythic social cohesion and placed the country’s heritage and its future at mortal risk. And ever since, reversing those reforms has been their overriding goal.

BACK WHEN JEFF SESSIONS WAS A U.S. SENATOR, HE routinely selected a few staffers to join him in his office for a seminar-style discussion of whatever happened to be on his mind that day. Increasingly over the years, the subject was immigration. These conversations could last for hours. Some staffers surreptitiously tried to work on their phones while the senator dialed up an academic or wended his way through an idea as if preparing to argue a case before a jury. But Sessions’ communications director, Stephen Miller, was invigorated by the intellectual exchange. “They kind of fed off each other,” said one regular attendee. Late in the day, Sessions often took Miller along to his hideaway—the unmarked nook each senator has near the chamber. There, Sessions would decant that day’s conversation into a speech written on a legal pad and deliver it on the floor. “I don’t know how many people listened,” a former staffer said.

Miller, though, was paying close attention. He’d been railing against immigrants since his high school days as a minor conservative talk radio celebrity in Santa Monica, but his vitriol tended towards the generic—immigrants shouldn’t speak Spanish; their communities were incubators for terrorism and crime. By contrast, Sessions’ desire to curb immigration was part of a wider set of concerns about Americans who had been shut out of the modern economy, underpinned by a cohesive historical argument. On numerous occasions, he praised Johnson-Reed, ignoring its explicitly racist motivations and painting it simply as an effort by Coolidge to raise wages, as well as the sole engine of America’s postwar prosperity.

Similar historical references were cropping up in Miller’s private emails, too. In a series of messages from 2015 obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Miller pinged Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh with ideas for stories celebrating “the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge” and lamenting the damage done by the 1965 legislation. The culmination of the Miller-Sessions mindmeld was a 25-page primer hand-delivered to every Republican congressional office that year. Written by Miller, it lauded the 1924 reforms for ushering in “a sustained slowdown that allowed wages to rise, assimilation to occur, and the middle class to emerge.” It would become a foundational document for the Trump campaign’s immigration platform.

The day after Trump’s election victory, Gene Hamilton started assembling a team to develop an immigration roadmap for the transition and beyond. Hamliton, then a legal adviser to Sessions in his thirties, relied heavily on staffers for Sessions and Senator Chuck Grassley, whose offices had for years been a lonely beacon for restrictionist groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR; the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA. From the outset, according to “Border Wars,” by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear, Hamilton’s small braintrust knew they had to fight on two fronts—against liberal-minded career staffers and mainstream Republican appointees wedded to the status quo.

Hamilton himself had a deep knowledge of DHS and a knack for the inside game, both of which became valuable assets when he joined the department. “He would take the pen on a lot of things,” the former DHS official said—meaning he’d assume responsibility for writing a document, giving him the power to set the terms of the debate and the process. “He was sort of the political commissar,” another former senior DHS official explained. “You had to work with him to make sure you weren’t going to get your legs chopped out underneath you.”

For USCIS director, Hamilton recommended Cissna, a DHS lawyer who’d spent the past two years detailed to Grassley’s office. “Our family is literally a product of our nation’s legal immigration system,” Cissna said at his confirmation hearing, explaining that his grandparents were Peruvian, his wife’s family was Middle Eastern and that he only spoke Spanish to his kids at home. Although he largely shared Miller’s policy goals, his position on immigration “wasn’t a race thing,” the second former DHS senior official told me. Instead, the official said, Cissna saw himself as a “steward of the law,” which he believed should be enforced according to the narrowest interpretation. Quiet and not overtly political, he was nonetheless a canny operator. When he took over at USCIS, “he knew which small things could change to have a big effect,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “He couldn’t be bamboozled by bureaucrats. He knew their job in a way a lot of political appointees don’t.”

Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, a veteran Grassley staffer, was put in charge of the USCIS policy office a couple of weeks after her former boss recommended her to Trump via tweet. (“@POTUS If u want a real expert on fixing H1B a former staffer of mine just moved to HomelandSecurity Call my office I will tell WHO SHE IS.”) She brought in Robert Law, FAIR’s governmental relations director, as her senior adviser. Law was smart but rigid. “You couldn’t convince him of anything he didn’t already believe,” said a person who worked with him at USCIS. Along with other alumni of restrictionist groups, Law became a resource for some DHS officials who lacked an immigration background but found the issue consuming their jobs. “They could tell you, this is the law, this is the history of it. It was fascinating,” said one. “They had been following this for decades.”

At first, things didn’t move as nearly quickly as Miller and Hamilton wanted, mostly because of Trump’s first DHS Secretary, John Kelly. “He was a difficult guy for people to mess with. Even Stephen Miller,” recalled the former DHS official. It wasn’t until Kelly became White House chief of staff in July 2017, another former official explained, that Miller was able to “consolidate his strength.”

A couple of months later, a meeting was convened at the department, with the acting secretary, Elaine Duke, the most senior figure present. According to a person who was there, Hamilton abruptly took control of the gathering, cutting Duke out of the conversation completely. “Everyone was looking at each other. We’d never seen anything like this—a guy with no standing [taking over the meeting].”

Hamilton informed the group they needed to produce memos outlining how to enact 10 White House policy priorities, including how to get rid of a 20-day limit on holding children in detention and how to use family separation to discourage migration. He wanted the memos within days.

The DHS policy office started work according to normal operating procedure—gathering information and assessing the legality and merits of the proposals. Normally, this would take months. “It drove the White House crazy,” said the former DHS official. “Duke’s chief of staff kept asking, ‘Dude, where are the memos?’ He was getting pounded by the White House.” Many of the memos were never produced, the official added, because “some of the [ideas] were so clearly bad.” (Hamilton didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

At USCIS, the pressure to scrap old policies and roll out new ones was relentless. In theory, the chief counsel’s office was supposed to conduct thorough legal analyses of all new initiatives. Sometimes the office was cut out of the loop; sometimes lawyers were informed of a new memo the day before it dropped, requiring them to scramble till midnight or later to ensure it met basic legal standards. Comment skirmishes broke out within draft documents, with career staff inserting concerns and political appointees stripping them out. The political appointees “really didn’t care about the operational impact of different policies or litigation concerns,” recalled a former agency lawyer. Hamilton himself has essentially confirmed this. “That sounds like the craziest policy you could ever have,” he said in a deposition when asked if DHS had assessed the litigation risk of ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. “You could never do anything if you were always worried about being sued.”

Kovarik and Law also pushed staffers to dig up evidence for their preferred policies, even when the facts didn’t oblige. For instance, they insisted on advancing the termination of temporary protected status for several “shithole countries”—the president’s term—even when experts at State and USCIS recommended extensions. The problem with the official analysis for Haiti, Kovarik explained to a career staffer in an October 2017 email, “is that it reads as though we’d recommend an extension because we talk so much about how bad it is.” The staffer replied, carefully, "We can comb through the country conditions to try to see what else there might be, but the basic problem is that it IS bad there.” Later that month, Law assigned an “important research project” to a low-level employee. “I need positive data on the current status of Haiti to bolster the recommendation to terminate TPS. Improvements or the like that I can plug in,” he wrote. “Be creative.”

In a separate exchange, Cissna complained that staffers hadn’t done a very elegant job of massaging the facts in order to end TPS status for Sudan. "The memo reads like one person who strongly supports extending TPS for Sudan wrote everything up to the recommendation section and then someone who opposes extension snuck up behind the first guy, clubbed him over the head, pushed his senseless body of out of the way, and finished the memo,” he wrote.

Even though USCIS had announced plans to kill DACA and end TPS for six countries, the political appointees were being bombarded by Miller to go faster. One of his obsessions was a regulation for a far tougher version of the public charge rule, which had to go through a mandatory administrative process. In June 2018 emails obtained by Politico, Miller berated Cissna for the “unacceptable” timeframe, writing, “I don't care what you need to do to finish it on time.” Cissna stuck to his principles. “He believed,” said the former DHS official, that “this could all get done through the rule of law.”

OVER AND OVER, IN PUBLIC AND TO HIS STAFF WITHIN USCIS’s boxy beige headquarters on Massachusetts Avenue, Cissna insisted that his mission was simply to enforce the law as it was written. At an event last year, he brought along his copy of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a brick of a book stuffed with yellow post-it notes, and patted it almost affectionately. “Everything we do at the agency should be guided by that, not by, you know, any other thing,” he said in his halting manner. “That’s our Bible.”

It was an effective claim, and a disingenuous one. So much of America’s immigration code is open to interpretation. There’s no objective test for whether a concert violinist meets the legal standard of “exceptional;” whether a full-stack Java developer is a “specialized” occupation; whether a certain type of kidney condition technically qualifies as a “hardship.” Many decisions inevitably come down to the judgement of individuals, which means they’re susceptible to the peculiar psychology of the immigration bureaucracy.

“In my own office, I am queen,” one former visa adjudicator told me. What she meant was that the guy down the hallway might require a lot more evidence than she did, or interpret the legal criteria more stringently, and that it wouldn’t be remotely strange if they each reviewed the same case and reached opposite conclusions. Within processing offices, “people get reputations,” she said. There are the officers inclined to give applicants the benefit of the doubt and those hunting for a reason to deny. Many aren’t ideological at all, but are swayed by the preferences of their supervisors. “Everyone learns to write for the teacher,” one officer observed.

All this variability gives each USCIS office a distinct culture. It’s why lawyers regard the Vermont processing center as reasonably fair and efficient and the one in California as more of a crapshoot. You can sense these distinctions as an immigrant, even if you don’t understand them. You file one application and it goes through smoothly; then a subsequent one gets snagged on some unseen impediment. A new boss, maybe, or a big immigration controversy, or some directive that causes the culture within the agency to change.

A few months after Cissna was confirmed, in February 2018, he removed the phrase “nation of immigrants” from USCIS’s mission statement. Less noticed but more significant was his decision to strip references to “customer service” from internal manuals. Staffers knew exactly what this meant. USCIS started referring to applicants as “customers” during the Obama administration, and the change was detested by more skeptical employees, who preferred terms like “foreign nationals” or “aliens.” León Rodriguez, the agency’s director from 2014 to 2017, explained that the deletion of the word “customer” could reshape every aspect of an officer’s work: “It’s a statement that your performance will not be judged based on how you treat the people with whom you’re interacting. Your courtesy, transparency, care in explaining things, compassion. Over time that changes what people prioritize.”

The new priority was visa fraud. There had long been a subset of staffers, including upper-level employees, who were convinced that most immigrants were trying to cheat the system in some way. They were mostly kept at bay because the agency’s own statistics showed consistently low levels of fraud. Under Cissna, that all changed. “There was a sense of urgency across the agency that was palpable,” said Spaulding, who worked as an investigator for the fraud unit in Philadelphia from 2006 until 2019. He described the new mandate as: “Your job as adjudicator is to ferret out fraud. Good adjudicators find fraud. Bad ones don’t.” Adjudicators were also trained in more adversarial styles of interviewing, Spaulding said, “like a Customs and Border Protection officer.” (USCIS spokesperson Matthew Bourke said adjudicators regularly receive training to detect fraud but are not instructed to be adversarial.) Across the agency, there was a pronounced shift to what Rodriguez called a “law enforcement model—the sort of culture change very much driven from the top.”
Meanwhile, the political appointees under Cissna were churning out memos announcing administrative changes to visa processing that were devastating in their banality. “If you go through the statistics [for visa approvals] for the last decade, they were relatively consistent,” Spaulding said. “Then about two years ago, all hell broke loose.”

The first memo, issued in October 2017, eliminated something called “prior deference.” Previously, if a person had been greenlit multiple times for certain visas, the adjudications officer would check the circumstances that had changed since the last one. Now, every petition has to be reviewed as if the person was a first-time applicant—a vastly more time-consuming exercise. A former USCIS lawyer told me the memo was very much motivated by the new emphasis on fraud: Excavating old applications provided an opportunity to “get that gotcha moment.” Publicly, though, the agency couldn’t cite that as the justification, “because the stats didn’t back it up. So we had to say something else.”

The administration, Miller included, often insisted that its policies weren’t anti-immigrant, that it wanted to prioritize high-skilled workers over family-based migrants. And yet the changes coming out of USCIS seemed designed to make it difficult for those workers to come to the United States, too. Denials for first-time H1B applicants, who need a bachelor’s degree, jumped from 6 percent in the 2015 financial year to 32 percent in the first quarter of 2019. And even those numbers don’t tell the full story. An H1B visa typically lasts three years, but lawyers report a pattern of approvals for durations so short they are effectively useless—a week or even a day. In a hearing in D.C. district court, the judge asked the lawyer representing USCIS whether a one-day approval was “as good as a denial.” The government’s lawyer admitted: “There's little practical difference, I would agree with that.”

For immigrants trying to navigate the rapidly changing rules, everything just kept getting harder. The length of most forms has doubled or tripled or worse. Fees are going up for many visas. Under a new policy of mandatory in-person interviews for employment green cards, the average processing time has gone from around 10 months to more than two years in multiple cities. Yet another memo enabled the government to reject applications without giving the person a chance to correct errors, even incredibly trivial ones. ProPublica found a case that was rejected “because the seventh page, usually left blank, was not attached.” Another was denied “because it did not have a table of contents.” (USCIS has since said it does not intend to reject petitions for “innocent mistakes.”) Meanwhile, the agency has barricaded itself from communication. It is in the process of shuttering 16 of its 23 international offices. Where lawyers could once call or email the office that was handling a case, now they spend hours on hold in a Kafkaesque game of phone tag with a national customer service center. If they miss a return call, they have to start the inquiry from the beginning.

Inside USCIS, the new restrictions and requirements created a “pattern of chaos,” Spaulding said, as adjudicators struggled to “respond to what they think their superiors want.” For instance, the agency is issuing far more RFEs, or requests for additional evidence. “RFEs used to be common sense under Obama—if you can show the evidence, you get approval,” said Matt Cameron, a Boston lawyer who handles both employment and asylum cases. Now, they’re used as a stalling device. Lawyers are routinely asked for basic documents they’ve already submitted. One attorney was told to prove that the client’s mechanical engineering degree was relevant to his job as a mechanical engineer. Another was instructed to provide additional evidence that her client’s marriage was genuine. “I’m like, are you high?” the lawyer said. “Two people who have adopted a child together eight years ago have a fake marriage?”

More often, though, attorneys say they simply receive the same vague, boilerplate questions for multiple clients. For an officer behind on his caseload, Spaulding explained, an RFE is “one of the best ways to buy time.” While the applicant prepares a response, the case is no longer counted as open on the officer’s docket. By the end of 2018, USCIS’s total backlog of pending cases was a record 5.7 million.

Still, Stephen Miller wasn’t satisfied. He kept pushing Cissna to rush out the public charge regulation before it had been fully vetted. When word started to spread that Cissna could be forced out, restrictionist groups told reporters his ouster would be a “colossal mistake.” But it was too late. On May 24, Cissna resigned at Trump’s request in a Miller-driven purge that also claimed DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. (Cissna didn’t respond to requests for comment.) For the past two years, one USCIS career staffer recalled, she and her demoralized colleagues kept telling themselves that “it could be worse.” Then, in June, Ken Cuccinelli was named the agency’s acting director—“and it did get worse.”

LATE THIS SUMMER, KEN CUCCINELLI INSTALLED A lumpy human-sized replica of the Statue of Liberty in USCIS headquarters, by a window overlooking Massachusetts Avenue. It was a very on-brand bit of trolling: About two weeks earlier, he had finally announced the public charge regulation at a press conference at the White House. There, Cuccinelli suggested that the famous Emma Lazarus poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty (the real one) would be more accurate if it read: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.” The poem, he added, was about “people coming from Europe.”

Cuccinelli is a very different political animal from Cissna, one far more suited to Trumpworld. One of his conditions for accepting the job, according to a source, was that a government car ferry him every day to Washington from his home an hour and a half away in rural Nokesville, Virginia. A conservative purist with a showman’s instinct, he tweets a lot, often about Immigrations and Customs Enforcement or CBP operations that seemed to excite him more than the work of his own agency. Some of the tweets are transparently bespoke for an audience of one. In September, he posted an image of a framed photograph of Trump next to a giant stack of paper, which was a new USCIS policy changing all uses of “foreign nationals” to “aliens.”

He also shares his boss’s impatience with the slow pace of policy-making. “It seems like everybody in government defers to DOJ,” Cuccinelli told Mark Krikorian at a recent panel discussion. “I don’t operate that way. Lawyers advise and they can deal with my decision as best they can. They may not be [happy].” A former DHS official who worked with Cissna told me Cuccinelli “respected what Cissna did. But where Cissna would have to get something to 98 percent to make him feel good, I think Ken Cuccinelli is much more of a 60 or 70 percent kind of guy.”

Some DHS leaders, though, felt Cuccinelli’s Trumpian pronouncements were getting in the way of Trump’s agenda. Exhibit A was the outrage provoked by his comments on the Statue of Liberty. “There was concern at DHS that you had an extremely complicated rule, the public charge, which deserved a full policy discussion,” said one former official. “It was fettered by this discussion of the poem, which bore no relevance to the issue.” Asked whether Cuccinelli had ignited the controversy by accident or on purpose, the official paused for an uncomfortably long time and finally said, dryly, “He thinks of himself as a very talented communicator.”

Out of all the administration’s immigration reforms, the public charge rule has been the most ambitious by far. In the past, the term was defined to mean anyone who was primarily dependent on government assistance. Restrictionists pointed out that only cash benefits were counted—excluding major entitlements like food stamps, Medicaid and housing subsidies. But the new definition is aggressively broad. Most new immigrants aren’t actually eligible for welfare. But the rule grants officers vast discretion to determine whether the applicant might become a public charge at any point in the future. They would be empowered to collect reams of personal financial information and reject any applicant whose income is lower than 250 percent of the poverty line, even if that person has a financial sponsor.

In essence, the rule would create a backdoor mechanism to alter the composition of immigrants to the United States. Low-income legal immigrants tend to be nonwhite, and they also tend to come here via family-based green cards. According to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, the new definition would potentially exclude more than half of all family-based green card applicants. That is, 71 percent of applicants from Central America, 69 percent from Africa, 52 percent from Asia—but only 36 percent from Europe, Canada and Oceania. The regulation, said Ur Jaddou, chief counsel of USCIS during the Obama administration, “fundamentally changes who gets to use our legal immigration system by race and class without an act of Congress.” (In October, a few days before the rule was due to go into effect, it was temporarily halted by three federal judges. The government is expected to appeal.)

Cuccinelli’s other priority was asylum, one of two major humanitarian categories of legal immigration. (The other is the refugee program, for people requesting protection while in a foreign country rather than at the U.S. border.) Miller had long been incensed that around 90 percent of people pass the “credible fear” screening—the initial interview that determines whether a claim will go before an immigration judge. People explained to him in meetings that the first hurdle was set intentionally low by Congress, to ensure asylum seekers get a fair hearing, and that only a minority (28 percent) eventually succeed. But Miller was convinced the screenings were an outrageous loophole and demanded they be made more restrictive. Cissna pointed out that the agency couldn’t change the requirements without breaking the law. At one meeting, when Miller kept hounding him about it, Cissna finally erupted. “Enough. Enough. Stand down!” he shouted, according to The New York Times. Cuccinelli had none of these qualms. On his second day on the job, according to Buzzfeed, he sent the division an email scolding officers for failing to prevent “frivolous” claims.

Within USCIS, asylum officers have always been a band apart. They work in a separate office from visa adjudicators and wear plain clothes, no badges. When the division was launched in the 1980s, it was something of a scandal to visa officers when it was staffed with human rights lawyers and refugee workers. Today, the asylum corps is especially resented by border patrol agents, a longtime officer said. “In their view, we’re a bunch of hippies letting in people they try to keep out.”

But there’s nothing hippie-ish about the work they do. Asylum officers go through hundreds of hours of rigorous training, learning to distinguish the person who has assumed a false identity because they’re fleeing a violent gang from the person assuming a false identity because they’re a member of that gang. Vetting an applicant can take anywhere between two and five years. “I have to make sure I’m not getting the wool pulled over my eyes by a war criminal,” the officer explained. Since Congress isn’t likely to overhaul the asylum criteria anytime soon, Cuccinelli set about changing the culture of the division itself. Under a DHS pilot program, around 60 border patrol officers are now conducting credible fear screenings. According to government data obtained by Buzzfeed, they have approved less than half of applicants so far. The agency is also hiring 500 new asylum officers, targeting people with law enforcement or military backgrounds, who, according to USCIS spokesperson Matthew Bourke, are “uniquely equipped to support the agency’s improved vetting procedures and fraud-detection efforts.” In a particularly unsubtle move, the division’s head, John Lafferty, was replaced by the director of the fraud unit.

When you put all of this together, it’s clear that the Trump administration has fundamentally altered the nature of humanitarian immigration to the United States—initiatives that are supported by both parties and have been an essential component of foreign policy since the end of World War II. In 2017, Gene Hamilton and Stephen Miller tag-teamed to reduce annual refugee admissions from 110,000 to 45,000. Since then, the number has been slashed to an all-time low of 18,000. In October, the administration started implementing a regulation ordering that asylum seekers be turned away from the southern border if they have passed through another country without seeking asylum there first. What this means, in practice, is that the only people able to seek asylum at the border are Mexican citizens.

And yet the restrictionists still aren’t satisfied. After all, the administration hasn’t come close to their goal of halving legal immigration. “Any real changes”—such as ending birthright citizenship or the visa lottery—“are the kind of thing Congress would have to approve,” said Krikorian. FAIR’s governmental relations director, RJ Hauman, told me Trump “botched” his first year with a flawed rollout of the travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries. “It tainted everything,” he said, especially the president’s chances of getting more ambitious reforms through Congress.

In response, the administration is doing its utmost to appease its most hardcore supporters. For 13 years, FAIR has held an annual convention in Washington D.C. to connect conservative talk radio hosts and anti-immigration personalities. Under previous presidents, it was a niche affair, but this September’s event might as well have been sponsored by the Trump administration. FAIR flew in nearly 200 sheriffs, who received a briefing at the White House from Kellyanne Conway, as well as a photo op with Trump. Afterwards, they made their way back to the Phoenix Park Hotel, just around the corner from DHS. Some 70 radio hosts were crammed into a couple of conference rooms. “We’re in the heart of the swamp, up to our knees in muck,” FAIR’s communications director, Dave Ray, remarked to a talk show host named Tom Roten, who has blamed immigrants for his West Virginia county having “the highest concentration of HIV in the country, maybe even the world.” (This is not true.) Ray went on to discuss the “human carnage caused by criminal aliens and drugs;” at one point, Roten asked, “What if we cut the snake off at the head at the border?”

Cuccinelli spent an entire morning powering through eight back-to-back interviews, fueled by his usual cup of McDonalds sweet tea. He talked about family separation with Roten who complained that “the media only shows these kids crying.” Children were constantly crossing the border with different adults, pretending to be related, he stated. “You’re exactly right, Tom. They’re being recycled,” Cuccinelli agreed. (Greg Navano, ICE’s assistant director of investigative programs, said that among other methods, the agency sometimes conducts DNA tests of family units, and that around 15 percent of the tests uncovered an adult falsely claiming to be a child’s biological parent.)

In November, Cuccinelli was promoted to DHS deputy acting secretary. Kathy Nuebel Kovarik became acting deputy at USCIS and Robert Law, the former FAIR lobbyist, ascended to the head of the policy office. The agency has promised a new flurry of major policy changes before the end of the year. And in what is perhaps the purest expression of the administration's intentions so far, it started sending Central American asylum seekers to Guatemala with no access to an attorney, no review by an immigration court, far away from the border infrastructure of activists and reporters and lawyers or any form of help at all.

IT’S EASY ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THAT BECAUSE NONE of the Trump administration’s reforms are entrenched in law, they can be overturned as quickly as they were introduced. And yet even though, in theory, the policy memos can all be withdrawn, the “sheer number of both significant and less significant changes is overwhelming,” said Jaddou, the former USCIS chief counsel. “It will take an ambitious plan over a series of years to undo it all.” Formal regulations, like the third-country asylum rule and public charge rule, if it succeeds, will be especially hard to unravel.

The institutional implications run deeper. The backlog of delayed cases will likely take several years to get under control. The administration has promoted six judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates to the Justice Department’s immigration appeals court, including one who threatened to set a dog on a 2-year-old child for failing to be quiet in his courtroom. Those appointments are permanent.

The refugee program, too, will take years to rebuild. The plunge in admissions caused a plunge in funding to the nine resettlement agencies, which have closed more than 100 offices around the country since 2016. That’s a third of their capacity, according to a report by Refugees Council USA. “The whole infrastructure is deteriorating,” said Rodriguez, the former USCIS director. Because the application process is so lengthy, even if a new administration raises refugee admissions on day one, it would take as long as five years before increased numbers of people actually make it to the United States. Consider that in January 2017, the State Department briefly paused in-bound flights for refugees who had finally made it through the gauntlet of health, security and other checks. As of this summer, some of those refugees were still waiting to leave. While the flights were grounded, they missed the two-month window during which all of their documents were current. When one document expires, it can take months to replace, causing others to expire and trapping the refugee in what the report called “a domino effect of expiring validity periods.”

Even harder to repair is the culture shift within USCIS. New visa adjudicators will remain in their jobs long after the political appointees have gone—kings and queens of their own offices. Employees who were promoted for their skeptical inclinations will stay in those positions, setting priorities for subordinates. The multitude of changes at USCIS are the product of an administration that regards immigration as its political lifeblood. There’s no guarantee—or indication—that any of the potential Democratic nominees would apply the same obsessive zeal to overturning them.

Back in 1924, Johnson-Reed’s supporters never anticipated the Holocaust, and yet they expanded its horrors. We don’t know where our own future is headed, but we live in a time of metastasizing instability. Last year, the United Nations’ official tally of refugees passed 70 million, the highest since World War II. Mass migrations, whether because of violence or inequality or environmental calamity or some murky blend of factors that don't conveniently fit existing laws, are the reality and challenge of our era. There aren’t any easy solutions. But already, what started as a series of small, obscure administrative changes is resulting in unthinkable cruelty. If left to continue, it will, in every sense, redefine what it means to be American.

CREDITS

Story - Rachel Morris

is Highline's executive editor.

Research - Adam Przybyl

is a freelance researcher and editor at the South Side Weekly.

Creative Direction and Design - Una Janicijevic

is an art director in Toronto.

Development & Design - Gladeye

is a digital innovations agency in New Zealand and New York.

OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, nearly every institution of American life has taken on the unmistakable stench of moral rot. Corporate behemoths like Boeing and Wells Fargo have traded blue-chip credibility for white-collar callousness. Elite universities are selling admission spots to the highest Hollywood bidder. Silicon Valley unicorns have revealed themselves as long cons (Theranos), venture-capital cremation devices (Uber, WeWork) or straightforward comic book supervillains (Facebook). Every week unearths a cabinet-level political scandal that would have defined any other presidency. From the blackouts in California to the bloated bonuses on Wall Street to the entire biography of Jeffrey Epstein, it is impossible to look around the country and not get the feeling that elites are slowly looting it.

And why wouldn’t they? The criminal justice system has given up all pretense that the crimes of the wealthy are worth taking seriously. In January 2019, white-collar prosecutions fell to their lowest level since researchers started tracking them in 1998. Even within the dwindling number of prosecutions, most are cases against low-level con artists and small-fry financial schemes. Since 2015, criminal penalties levied by the Justice Department have fallen from $3.6 billion to roughly $110 million. Illicit profits seized by the Securities and Exchange Commission have reportedly dropped by more than half. In 2018, a year when nearly 19,000 people were sentenced in federal court for drug crimes alone, prosecutors convicted just 37 corporate criminals who worked at firms with more than 50 employees.

With few exceptions, the only rich people America prosecutes anymore are those who victimize their fellow elites. Pharma frat boy Martin Shkreli, to pick just one example, wasn’t prosecuted for hiking the price of a drug used to treat HIV from $13.50 to $750 per pill. He went to prison for scamming investors in a hedge fund scheme years before. Meanwhile, in 2016, the CEO whose company experienced the deadliest mining disaster since 1970 served less than one year in prison and paid a fine of 1.4 percent of his salary and stock bonuses the previous year. Why? Because overseeing a company that ignores warnings and causes the deaths of workers, even 29 of them, is a misdemeanor.

Construction magnate Bruce Karatz provides an infuriating case study of how the criminal justice system treats wealthy defendants. In 2010, Karatz was convicted of failing to disclose in a financial statement that he had secretly “backdated” his stock options (think Biff with the Sports Almanac in “Back to the Future II”) to boost his pay by more than $6 million. Prior to his sentencing hearing, his lawyer submitted letters of support from former mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordan and billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad. Prosecutors recommended six-and-a-half-years in prison; the judge gave Karatz five years’ probation and eight months of house arrest in his Bel Air mansion. After two years, the judge terminated the remainder of the sentence. Karatz later received a civic award from The Malibu Times for volunteer work he did to make a good impression for his sentencing hearing.

Country-club nepotism and Gilded Age avarice are nothing new in America, of course. But the rich are enjoying a golden age of impunity unprecedented in modern history. “American elites have become more brazen than they were even five years ago,” said Matthew Robinson, a professor at Appalachian State University and the author of several books on “elite deviance”— all the legal and illegal social harms caused by the wealthy.

Elite deviance has become the dark matter of American life, the invisible force around which the country’s most powerful legal and political systems have set their orbit. Four members of the Sackler family, the owners of Oxycontin maker Purdue Pharma, have retained the services of former SEC head Mary Jo White as their personal lawyer. Epstein’s dinner party guest lists included Harvard professors, billionaire philanthropists and members of political dynasties in at least two countries. In 2017, the pharmaceutical company Novartis spent about 14 percent of its annual lobbying budget on payments to a shell company controlled by ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

And this clubbiness has human costs. Tax evasion, to pick just one crime concentrated among the wealthy, already siphons up to 10,000 times more money out of the U.S. economy every year than bank robberies. In 2017, researchers estimated that fraud by America’s largest corporations cost Americans up to $360 billion annually between 1996 and 2004. That’s roughly two decades’ worth of street crime every single year. As the links between corporations and regulators become increasingly incestuous, the future will bring more crude-soaked coastlines, price-gouging corporate behemoths and Madoff-style Ponzi schemes. More hurdles to suing companies for poisoning their customers or letting bosses harass their employees. And more uniquely American catastrophes like the opioid crisis and the price of insulin.

Perhaps the greatest myth about white-collar crime is that Americans struggle to understand it—as if chemical companies toxifying rivers or insurance executives gouging their customers fail to stimulate our moral intuitions. In fact, surveys consistently show that the vast majority of the population considers white-collar crime more harmful than street crime and powerful offenders more odious than common criminals.

Those intuitions are correct: An entrenched, unfettered class of superpredators is wreaking havoc on American society. And in the process, they've broken the only systems capable of stopping them.

EVERY YEAR, AT BRANDED COCKTAIL receptions and bloated buffet breakfasts, government agents spend two days hobnobbing with the tax-haven attorneys they spend the rest of the year investigating.

The Offshore Alert conference takes place in Miami each spring, in London each fall and in “key offshore jurisdictions” all year round. Officially, participants come to discuss “wealth creation, preservation and recovery.” Less officially, the tax lawyers come to learn what the feds will crack down on next year. The government investigators come to fish for future jobs. Imagine a yearly picnic where sheriffs give drug dealers tips on hiding baggies from pat-downs and leave with a new set of endorsements on LinkedIn.

In person, the conference is even more surreal than it sounds. From across a cologne-scented hotel lobby, I watched tanned attorneys fresh off flights from the Caribbean mingle with ashen IRS agents who bring business cards from Kinko’s because the agency won’t pay to get them printed anymore. I listened to officials from the FBI and SEC lay out enforcement priorities as cryptocurrency investors and Russian bankers took notes. At lunch, I talked “Game of Thrones” with a Senate advisor, a government auditor and a Bahamanian lawyer who later offered to set me up a shell corporation for $5,000.

The finance types were frosty during the day—an investor who appeared to be wearing monogrammed slacks wouldn’t tell me his first name—but they loosened up at the happy hours. An offshore tax advisor bragged that he could take his clients’ tax rates from 49 percent to 15 percent and complained that they were constantly pushing him to go lower. Another told me that most of his clients aren’t trying to hide money from the government but from their second or third wives. “The first one raised their kids so they feel like she’s entitled to something,” he explained. “It’s the trophy wives they want to lock out.”

Jack Albertson is a government investigator—that’s not his real name and he won’t let me get more specific about his job description—who has been coming to Offshore Alert for years. When I ask him how this cops-and-robbers conflagration even exists, he tells me I’m thinking about it the wrong way. He, like all the other investigators here, knows that many of the lawyers who attend are hiding their clients’ money sketchily or outright illegally. He even knows how they’re doing it. The tactics for hiding money from tax authorities are not particularly sophisticated and have barely changed in the last 50 years. Set up a shell company and buy an appreciating asset—Iowa farmland, a London apartment, a New York pizzeria, something common enough that it won’t attract attention.

Contrary to the “Catch Me If You Can” myth, Albertson said, solving financial crimes is not a cat-and-mouse game between cunning investigators and slippery con artists. Most of the time it is simply the blunt application of resources to a series of unimaginably tedious tasks. “Investigators can already crack almost any offshore account if they have enough time and money,” he said. “The problem is that they only get that for a few cases a year.”

Over the last four decades, the agencies responsible for investigating elite and white-collar crime—roughly speaking, the IRS, SEC, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and FBI—have seen their enforcement divisions starved into irrelevance. More than a third of the FBI investigators who patrol Wall Street were reassigned between 2001 and 2008. Enforcement funding at the IRS has fallen by 23 percent over the last decade. And, worst of all, every time a scandal exposes the government’s inadequacy, Congress steps in to squeeze the regulators even harder.

The most instructive case of this deliberate stunting is the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Founded in 1972, the CPSC’s job is to make sure the things you buy won’t pierce, poison or burn you. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan slashed its budget as part of his crusade against bureaucratic waste. In the 1990s, Clinton instructed the agency to produce more data as part of his push for government accountability. No matter which party was in power, every administration gave the CPSC more to do and less money to do it with. By 2007, it had shrunk from its initial 786 employees to just 420.

That same year, Mattel announced a recall of more than 1 million⁠ of its children’s toys that had been contaminated with lead paint. Despite the company’s sophisticated international operations and billions in revenues, it had never bothered to inspect the Chinese sub-contractors. By then, the CSPC had fewer than 100⁠ inspectors to monitor all imports to the United States. The Los Angeles-area ports where a chunk of the tainted toys arrived was overseen by a single part-time inspector.

Congress responded to the scandal by compounding the mistakes that had caused it. Lawmakers agreed to double the CPSC’s budget and increase its staff, but also obligated the agency to carry out dozens of new activities, including the creation of a public database to track safety hazards for every single product sold in the U.S.

The new mandate swallowed up all the agency’s new funding and more. Soon, the CPSC was dedicating nearly all of its time to lead abatement in children’s toys, neglecting millions of products that posed far greater risks to children, like flammable blankets or dangerous table saws. The product database filled up with unconfirmed complaints and spammy comments. Mattel, meanwhile, faced no consequences for manufacturing the lead-tainted toys beyond a $2.3 million fine—roughly 0.006 percent⁠ of its net income. According to Rena Steinzor, the author of “Why Not Jail? Industrial Disasters, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction,” the same cycle has repeated itself across every form of elite deviance, from tax compliance to financial regulation to environmental protection. In 2010, following a series of tax-haven scandals, the IRS set up a “wealth squad” to investigate the ultra-rich —but only staffed it with enough agents to perform 36 audits in its first two years.

After the Enron-led avalanche of corporate bankruptcies in the early 2000s, Congress gave the SEC enough funding to hire 200 new auditing staff. At the same time, however, lawmakers obligated the agency to review the filings of every publicly traded U.S. financial firm every three years—a mandate far larger than the agency’s new staffing levels. Then, after the financial crisis, it happened again: The Dodd-Frank act tasked the SEC with monitoring even more companies and trillions of new assets while increasing its enforcement staff by less than 10 percent.

This cycle has left America’s regulators with no choice but to engage in an increasingly desperate pantomime of white-collar law enforcement. On the outside, they report impressive performance statistics to avoid even more budget cuts. Behind the scenes, they’ve retreated to investigating only the defendants they know are guilty and the crimes they know where to find.

The primary beneficiaries of this shift are American elites. Rich people generate mountains of financial data. Millionaires can have over 100 bank accounts; billionaires’ tax returns run to 800 pages long. For people who earn most of their income from working (i.e. almost everyone), the IRS has an automatic system that compares individuals’ reports to the records submitted by their employers and banks. For the wealthy, who make much of their income from interest and investments, the agency has nothing to compare their reports against. The only way to tell if a rich person is cheating on their taxes is to sit down and go through them line by line.

“Let’s say you get a tip that some billionaire is hiding a bunch of money offshore and not paying taxes on it,” said Arthur VanDesande, who spent 25 years as a criminal investigator for the IRS. “And you manage to narrow the tax evasion down to 20 of his bank accounts. OK, now you have to prepare 20 subpoenas, get them signed by a judge and deliver them to the banks. But when you go to Bank of America, they say, ‘We don’t accept subpoenas at this location, you have to go to our authorized representative in Orlando.’ So then you go to Orlando and and you find out the money is linked to an offshore account. So then you have to write to the embassy...’”

Due to the IRS' lean resources, VanDesande did most of this legwork himself. “You type your own shit, you make your own copies, you write every single affidavit. Sometimes you feel like, ‘I’m a senior-level person with a college degree. Why am I calling Wells Fargo and sitting on hold for 45 minutes?’”

Only some of this drudgery can be outsourced to lower-level staffers. White-collar cases involve understanding arcane laws, absorbing thousands of pages of documents, traversing international jurisdictions and coordinating a vast array of agencies from the Secret Service to the Post Office. They require investigators to be Jack Ryan, Magnum P.I. and Leslie Knope all at once. Even though auditing millionaires and billionaires is one of the most cost-effective government activities imaginable—an independent report estimated in 2014 that it yielded up to $4,545 in recovered revenue per hour of staff time—the IRS investigated the returns of just 3 percent of American millionaires in 2017.

In addition to reducing their caseload, America’s white-collar enforcement agencies have started prioritizing crimes they can prosecute in bulk. In 2017, the Department of Justice took on 889 prosecutions for identity theft (which, according to a 2010 survey, is estimated to cost individuals $371 out-of-pocket) and just 24 for antitrust violations. According to a ProPublica report, 43 percent of all tax filers audited by the IRS earn less than $56,000 per year. Roughly one in six of the SEC’s enforcement actions in fiscal 2019 were against financial firms for filing paperwork late—a six-fold increase since 2004.

Helen Richmond, a paralegal in a white-collar prosecutor’s office (that’s not her real name), said most of the defendants her office pursues are “either dumb or unlucky.” She’s worked on cases against money launderers who named stolen items on their wire transfers and fraudsters who sent emails with recipe-like details of their schemes. Criminals with even a scrap of sophistication, Richmond said, mostly avoid detection.

Another bargain-hunting strategy is to try cases in administrative proceedings rather than civil courts, an innovation that reduces hearings from months to hours. The downside, though, is that these cases largely play out in secret, resulting in fines rather than prison time and don’t compel defendants to testify, turn over evidence or admit guilt. In 2007, the SEC filed 60 percent of its settlements in civil courts. In 2015, that proportion was 17 percent. In 2014 and 2015, the agency didn’t file a settlement against a single U.S. Wall Street firm.

According to former OSHA assistant secretary David Michaels, these strategies are designed to achieve the all-consuming yet unstated goal of every regulation agency in America: Make yourself look more powerful than you are. The best way to do this is to focus on the cases that will yield the maximum deterrence for the lowest cost. At OSHA, Michaels said, “we would issue press releases announcing waves of random inspections so employers would look at their hazards. We never told them we only planned to do a few inspections.”

Similarly, the IRS has explicitly instructed agents to prioritize cases likely to generate headlines. (Ever wonder why so many B-list celebrities get busted for tax evasion?). Federal investigators go after media punching bags like Martin Shkreli, Martha Stewart and Fyre Festival scammer Billy McFarland to make the public think criminal prosecutions are routine. They’re not: In a case-by-case analysis of the 216 alleged large-scale corporate frauds discovered between 1996 and 2004, researchers found that the media uncovered twice as many as the SEC.

And so, after decades of operating in survival mode, white-collar enforcement agencies are better at reporting success than producing it. In a 2016 study, a Georgetown University School of Law professor named Urska Velikonja discovered that while the SEC reported a steady rise in prosecutions between 2002 and 2014, most of the increase was statistical padding. When a trader was charged with fraud and then lost her license to trade securities, for example, the SEC logged the sanctions as two separate cases. When the agency was in danger of posting sluggish performance stats for the year, investigators filed dozens of slam-dunk cases in September to catch up. As Velikonja put it, “they’re engaging in their own version of accounting fraud.” (The SEC declined to comment.)

For the agents charged with cracking offshore tax schemes and protecting consumers from lead-painted Elmo collectibles, this charade is profoundly demoralizing. “We killed a generation of agents,” VanDesande said. “If you investigate mom and pop grocery stores for 20 years, you lose the ability to do Bernie Madoffs.”

VanDesande has spent months building cases only to have the DOJ toss them with little explanation. Richmond, the paralegal, tells me federal and state prosecutors have been playing hot potato with one of her cases for months because they can’t justify an expensive prosecution for a fraud that adds up to the low six digits. During his first year on the job, Lewis Winters, an SEC examiner (and another government employee who couldn’t use his real name), had an investigation of a shady CEO rejected by the agency's enforcement division. Even though he had found plenty of violations, the crimes just weren’t … grand enough for the agency to pursue.

“It felt personal,’” Winters said. “Why did I spend three months examining this guy if enforcement just goes, ‘meh’?”

ENRON USED TO BE CONSIDERED the capstone to the Golden Age of white-collar prosecutions, a shining example of the system working like it’s supposed to. Weeks after the company filed America's then-largest corporate bankruptcy, federal agents searched its headquarters and discovered a $63 billion game of three-card monte. Using an intricate network of off-the-books shell companies, Enron executives made loans look like income and debt look irrelevant. The year before the company collapsed, its leaders had falsified 96 percent of its net income and 105 percent of its cash flow.

Between 2002 and 2006, the FBI’s Enron Task Force filed charges against more than 30 architects of Enron's fraud. Investigators discovered a “shred room” at the company’s financial auditor, Arthur Andersen, and convicted the company of obstruction of justice. Four Merrill Lynch bankers were found guilty of helping Enron falsify its financial returns by purchasing three Nigerian barges. Task force agents convinced the company’s chief financial officer to testify against his higher-ups by threatening to charge his wife with a felony. He flipped; they convicted her of a misdemeanor.

Eventually, after a five-year investigation, Enron founder Ken Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling were convicted of securities fraud and a meal deal of lesser charges. Though Lay died at a rented mansion in Colorado shortly afterwards, Skilling got 24 years in prison. At the time, it was one of the longest white-collar sentences in U.S. history. Prosecutors called it a victory. Skilling’s lawyers called it just the beginning.

As soon as the nation turned its attention elsewhere, Skilling’s lawyers began quietly dismantling his sentence. They filed appeals objecting to the statutes used to convict him, the trial’s Houston location and the questionnaires filled out by potential jurors. In 2013, citing the “extraordinary resources” it had spent prosecuting and defending Skilling’s conviction, the Department of Justice agreed to cut ten years off Skilling’s sentence if he promised not to file any more appeals. He was released in February 2019 after serving less than half his original sentence.

The rest of the FBI’s victory has crumbled under the same blitzkrieg of high-priced lawyering. The Supreme Court overturned Arthur Andersen’s conviction in 2005. The convictions of three of the Merrill Lynch bankers were vacated after they convinced an appeals court that they were merely trying to “solidify business relationships” rather than acting for personal gain. In the end, just 18 people served prison sentences (by comparison, more than 500 served time for the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s). Fourteen of them served fewer than four years. Andrew Fastow, the mastermind of Enron’s network of shell companies, now makes his living lecturing business school students and fraud investigators about how he did it.

Nearly every high-profile corporate scandal has the same overlooked epilogue. The wealthy have always attempted to spend their way to lighter sentences, but in the last two decades, the American judicial system has become increasingly willing to let them.

“We’ve seen a concerted effort to define deviance downward,” said Paul Leighton, a professor at Eastern Michigan University and the co-author of “The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison.” “We’ve made felonies into misdemeanors, misdemeanors into torts and torts into regulatory offenses.”

Honest services fraud, for example, is the subsection of mail and wire fraud that prohibits companies from lying to customers to get their business and CEOs from lying to investors after they’ve already been hired. Think of a mechanic telling you that your perfectly functional transmission is busted, then telling you it will cost $2,000 to fix it. He hasn’t defrauded you exactly—he really will replace your transmission—but he used his position of authority to scam you into paying for something you didn’t need.

Since 1909, prosecutors have used the honest services fraud provision to go after companies that lie to boost their stock price and politicians who give golfing buddies lucrative procurement contracts. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff, a former white collar prosecutor, once referred to the statute as “our Colt 45, our Louisville Slugger, our Cuisinart.”

But over the last three decades, the Supreme Court has taken the law apart piece by piece. In 1987, the Rehnquist Court ruled that the statute should never have been used to protect the so-called “right to honest services.” In 2010, the court restricted its application to public-sector bribery and kickbacks. From now on, the lying mechanic is breaking the law only if someone else is paying him to scam you.

Based on that ruling, several white collar criminals—including, wait for it, Jeffrey Skilling—had their sentences or convictions vacated. This year, two former Chris Christie underlings will tell the Supreme Court that orchestrating the "Bridgegate" conspiracy, in which they deliberately orchestrated traffic jams to get revenge on a Democratic mayor, is no longer illegal under the new, narrowed definition. If the Supreme Court agrees, the law will get even weaker.

Other white collar statutes have suffered the same slow strangulation. In 2006, a district court judge reaffirmed the right of companies to pay the legal fees of their executives, effectively giving every C-suite defendant the same deep pockets as their corporate employer. Since 1996, the Supreme Court has consistently blocked plaintiffs from receiving punitive damages, arguing that large punishments deprive corporations of their due process rights. In 2016, the court ruled that federal bribery law only applies to politicians who traded official acts for personal benefit—the kind of immediate, explicit kickback that rarely happens outside of corporate HR training videos.

“Criminal law used to be more closely aligned to our moral intuitions,” said Will Thomas, a University of Michigan professor who studies corporate liability. “We still talk about it like it’s a guiding moral force, but it’s a much more administrative process now.”

Today, Thomas explained, judges are more willing to disregard the consequences of their rulings (like, say, an Enron-scale fraud going unpunished) in favor of resolving obscure procedural ambiguities. In 2017, for instance, a case against New York financier Benjamin Wey was dismissed after he successfully argued that the search warrant used to gather evidence against him was overly broad and vaguely worded.

The confounding thing about these challenges is that they often highlight real weaknesses in the criminal justice system. American law is a contradictory jungle of century-old statutes and arbitrary definitions. Lying to government investigators, for example, is prohibited by at least 215 separate laws, each with their own standard of proof. Mens rea, the concept of “guilty mind” central to establishing criminal liability, has more than 100 definitions across various statutes.

So of course wealthy defendants win cases by arguing that fraud statutes and insider trading rules are poorly written. They are. But so are the rest of the laws. (Numerous state anti-gang statutes, for example, define "gang" so imprecisely that they could apply to most sororities.) The only difference is that white-collar defendants have the ability to dispute every step of the process used to convict them—and a judicial system all too happy to oblige.

One of the most conspicuous aspects of white-collar cases is the doting, near-veterinary care with which judges try to prevent defendants from facing harsh punishment. In 2014, a Colorado judge ruled that two farm owners whose tainted cantaloupes caused a listeria outbreak and killed 33 people couldn't be sent to prison because it would interfere with their ability to earn income for their families. As he announced a sentence of five years probation, the judge explained, “I must deliver both justice and mercy.”

According to a study by the Federal Judicial Center, four out of five judges in federal courts (where the vast majority of white-collar cases are decided) are white. A 2010 survey found that they have an average age of nearly 70. Their base salary is $210,000 per year.

It is, as one of those high-priced lawyers might say, improbable that these demographic and economic facts exert no influence whatsoever on judges' rulings. In a 2012 review of sentencing data in Florida, researchers found that “high-status” white collar criminals, such as doctors scamming Medicaid, were 98.7 percent less likely to receive prison terms than welfare fraudsters. A 2015 study found that judges showed increasing mercy as fraud offenders moved up the income scale: Criminals who stole more than $400 million got sentences that were less than half of the minimum recommended by federal guidelines. Criminals who stole $5,000 or less served sentences well over the minimum.

“When you zoom out, you see all the ways that bias accumulates throughout the system,” said Justin Levinson, a University of Hawaii professor and the editor of “Implicit Racial Bias Across The Law.” Sentencing guidelines prescribe lighter punishments for first-time offenders and criminals who can afford to pay restitution. Evidence rules make it nearly impossible to seize records or computers from corporations. Jury selection weeds out the poor, the less educated and minorities.

And then there’s the matter of criminal liability. For many low-level crimes, prosecutors have to prove that a defendant should have known a crime was taking place. If a renter deals drugs out of her apartment, her landlord can be prosecuted. If you loan your friend your car and he commits a murder while driving it, you can be charged with murder, too. For executive-level crimes, however, the bar of criminal liability is set impossibly high: Prosecutors have to prove that defendants knew their actions were illegal and did them anyway. This myopic focus on intent means that white-collar trials often come down to the question of whether the defendant was the kind of person who would commit a criminal act.

John Lauro, an attorney who has represented healthcare and financial executives, said he always emphasizes the complexity of white-collar crimes to the jury—financial disclosures are so technical! How could my client possibly know that stock wasn’t going to pan out? He also plays up the upstanding-citizen angle. The first thing he does when he lands a new client, he said, is visit their homes and meet their families.

“I bring in things like their marriage, their kids and whether they coach little league,” he said. “The prosecution always wants to dehumanize them. They call my client ‘the defendant.’ I’ll call him by his first name until a judge tells me to stop.”

The only way to get around this, said Sarah Larkin, a securities fraud prosecutor in Manhattan (she couldn’t speak on the record, so that’s not her real name), is to make every crime seem as simple as possible. It’s lying, it’s cheating, it’s stealing. She structures every trial like a crash course, spending days explaining how the stock market works and what acronyms like SEC, CDO and GAAP stand for. Before she can convince jurors that the defendant lied on a financial statement, she has to do a week-long “Big Short” interlude to teach them what a financial statement even is—without the help of Margot Robbie in a bathtub.

“And after all that,” she said, “you still have to make the case for why this person who looks very upper-middle-class and has a family sitting in the back row should be branded a criminal. It’s a heavy lift.”

The near-impossibility of establishing white-collar defendants’ motives combines with the high standard of reasonable doubt to create a paradox. Most Americans have a visceral aversion to greedy executives in general. Introduce them to a single banker and a specific crime, however, and their moral outrage often melts away. As Sam Buell, a Duke University law professor, told me: “Put people on a jury and they’ll say, ‘Gee, it seems like this guy was doing his job, so I don’t think it was a crime.’”

Take the case of Brian Stoker, a Citigroup employee who was charged in 2011 with marketing risky investments (one trader called them “dogsh!t” in an internal communication) as safe bets. According to the SEC, the bank made $160 million while investors lost $700 million. In his closing argument, Stoker’s attorney showed the jury an illustration from a “Where’s Waldo” book. Their client was a nobody, he suggested, a scapegoat for the culture of high-stakes gambling that had taken over the entire financial sector. Why make him a patsy when everyone else was doing the same thing?

The jury declared Stoker not guilty. But in the same envelope as their decision, they included a handwritten note. “This verdict,” it read, “should not deter the S.E.C. from continuing to investigate the financial industry.” In other words: Keep trying to lock up greedy bankers. Just not this one.

And this is it, the Rosetta Stone for understanding why judges are so comfortable explaining away the misconduct of corporate executives; why Congress never strengthened the castrated white-collar statutes; why so few pharmaceutical executives have been imprisoned for the opioid crisis and only a single banker went to prison for the financial crash. American law is incapable of prosecuting crimes in which elites use their legitimate power for nefarious ends.

“The way businesses harm people is the same way they interact with them normally,” Albertson said. Banks collect debts and foreclose on homes every day. Banks give out home loans every day. When they entice customers into unaffordable mortgages or foreclose on borrowers tricked into signing loans they can’t afford, the courts can’t tell the difference.

This insight also explains why the legal system applies the opposite logic to organizations run by the rich and organizations run by the poor. Teenage gang members who argue that they committed crimes due to the culture of the Crips or the Latin Kings receive harsher sentences—stealing money for yourself is bad; stealing money for a criminal organization is worse. Corporate defendants who claim they committed crimes due to the internal culture of Goldman Sachs or HSBC, on the other hand, get lighter sentences—how could an individual possibly be held accountable for something everyone else was doing?

And so, as they lose the ability to prosecute high-level crimes and elite offenders, many of America’s criminal justice institutions have simply stopped trying. Of the 649 companies prosecuted by the Department of Justice since 2015, only eight were convicted in court. The rest either took settlements or negotiated themselves a deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreement.

These arrangements, like so many other aspects of America’s white-collar enforcement apparatus, represent the cynical perversion of a benign idea. Deferred prosecution agreements were created in the 1930s to allow first-time juvenile offenders to avoid jail time if they followed probation rules and didn’t reoffend. Since the early 1990s, prosecutors began extending the principle to corporations: If you agree to investigate your own crimes, turn over evidence against your employees and change your internal policies, we won’t take you to court.

Since then, deferred prosecutions have become one of the primary engines of American impunity. They don’t require companies to explicitly admit guilt and don’t apply steeper punishments to repeat offenders. While courts often appoint independent monitors to make sure corporations comply with the terms of their probation, these reports aren’t released to the public. Since 1999, only three companies have ever been prosecuted for violating the terms of their agreements.

“Criminal law isn’t just about deterrence, it’s about moral education,” said John Coffee, the director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. “You show the public that a crime occurred and how terrible its impact was. We’re missing that catharsis now.”

FOR MULTINATIONAL GROCERY STORE CHAINS, self-checkout kiosks are a no-brainer. They save space, cut costs and speed up lines for shoppers. There is, however, one downside: Allowing customers to scan their own groceries dramatically increases the proportion of people who shoplift.

What self-checkout kiosks provide, researchers have found, is plausible deniability. If a security guard spots you slipping a pack of Tic-Tacs into your pocket, there’s no way to cast yourself as anything but a thief. If he catches you keying in a $10 bag of trail mix as a $2 bag of lentils, you can call it a mistake—oops, I must have typed in the wrong code! Perpetrators, especially middle-class white ones, know that if they get caught, everyone from the store manager to a small-claims court judge is likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. Self-checkouts turn shoppers into shoplifters by providing them with an opportunity to steal and a ready-made excuse to get away with it.

Nearly all criminological research indicates that crime rates depend more on environments and incentives than the intrinsic morality of offenders. It’s why shootings spike on hot days and drivers speed up on wider streets. People aren’t good or bad; they drift into good or bad behavior when one or the other is rewarded.

You can see where I’m going with this. Since the 1980s, Wall Street, Congress and the courts have systematically encouraged American elites to commit more and larger graft. “Corporate culture warps people,” said Mihailis Diamantis, a University of Iowa professor who specializes in corporate crime. “They’ve been placed in institutions that facilitate lawbreaking and predispose them to break the rules.” Since 2009, the percentage of employees at large companies who report that they’ve been pressured to commit ethical breaches has doubled. In a 2015 study, more than half the auditors for the country’s largest companies said they had been asked to falsify internal audit reports. In Ernst & Young’s 2016 Global Fraud Survey, 32 percent of American managers said they were comfortable behaving unethically to meet financial targets.

And just like those shoppers standing in front of that unmanned kiosk, the scriptures of corporate America discourage white-collar criminals from reckoning with the reality of their crimes. Larkin, the Manhattan prosecutor, said that when she used to prosecute murderers, they would strike a plea deal and then immediately open up—here’s why I stabbed him, here’s where I hid the knife. Once she switched to elite criminals, she was floored by their utter refusal to take responsibility. “They minimize and make excuses,” she said. “They believe in their own brilliance. They keep saying what they did wasn’t really wrong.”

Jack Blum, a former staff attorney for the U.S. Senate, calls this impunity “the most urgent issue in America.” In Russia and Ukraine, as government capacity deteriorated during the 2000s, oligarchs increased spending on bribes, lobbying and parallel systems of power—their own private security forces, their pet media institutions. The same thing is already happening here: According to a 2016 analysis, political lobbying and regulatory maneuvering have eclipsed research and development as the primary reason for rising corporate profits. In a country of declawed regulators and untouchable executives, dishonest companies will increasingly drive out honest ones.

So how do we stop this? The obvious temptation is to bring back the glory days of white-collar prosecutions, to lengthen the sentences for CEO dirtbags and finally arrest the bankers that got us into the financial crisis. It felt good to hear that Martin Shkreli cried at his sentencing hearing, damn it. America deserves the catharsis of overdue consequences.

But retribution has been the government’s approach for decades. Every corporate scandal since the savings and loan crisis has produced a wave of prosecutions and a sprint to strengthen white-collar punishments. The maximum penalty for the most common securities fraud charge is already 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine. Bernie Madoff is 120-odd months into a 150-year sentence. It might feel good, but there’s little indication that handing out life sentences for the bankers who caused the last crash will prevent the next one.

That’s because criminologists have consistently found that increasing the likelihood of punishment works better than increasing its severity. In a study of wastewater discharge from chemical plants, researchers noticed that managers who received large but inconsistent fines actually started emitting more toxic chemicals. The harsh penalty may have made them resentful for being singled out for something everyone else was doing—and the low probability of getting caught twice encouraged them to increase their lawbreaking to catch up with their competitors. Locking up one corporate criminal out of a million might make the other 999,999 feel even more entitled and invincible than they do now.

And yet elites, like everyone else, do change their behavior after experiencing immediate, reliable consequences. Three independent studies have found that when the wealthy get their taxes audited, they cheat less the following year. In 2008, Norway offered a “tax amnesty” to its richest residents. If they reported their overseas wealth and paid taxes on their hidden income, they would be immune from prosecution. For the next four years, the targets of the amnesty reported a 60 percent increase in their net worth and paid 30 percent more in taxes.

“If you follow a company over its life cycle, studies have found that most of them engage in some kind of lawbreaking and almost all of them reoffend,” said Sally Simpson, a University of Maryland professor and the author of “Understanding White-Collar Crime: An Opportunity Perspective.” “The way you get deterrence is by showing them they’re being watched.”

In a 2016 review of dozens of studies on corporate crime and deterrence, researchers found that nearly every individual strategy for punishing companies and executives had little to no deterrent effect on its own. The only thing that consistently worked was to combine them— warnings from government agencies, surveillance of the worst actors, harsher punishments for repeat offenders and, yes, at the top of the ladder, criminal prosecutions for corporations that refused to shape up.

This is hardly some exotic, untested concept. When it comes to every other form of crime, law enforcement agencies are perfectly comfortable cracking down on offenses at every level. This is the country that invented three-strikes laws and “broken windows” policing. When it comes to street gangs and drug distribution networks, the criminal justice system has no problem simplifying complex criminal liability questions into four simple words: You should have known.

“The law is just a way of saying that an immoral act is something we’re not going to tolerate anymore,” said Robinson. “It’s up to us to decide what’s a crime and what isn’t. We do it all the time.”

We’ve just never done it for the immorality of elites.

CREDITS

Story - Michael Hobbes

is a senior enterprise reporter for HuffPost and the co-host of You're Wrong About. He previously wrote for Highline about millennials, obesity, gay loneliness and sweatshops. He lives in Seattle.

Research - Matt Giles

is a freelance writer and the head of research and fact-checking at Longreads.

Creative Direction and Design - Una Janicijevic

is an art director in Toronto.

Illustration - Rebecca Yanovskaya

is a Toronto based illustrator whose focus is decorative and narrative works in a signature ballpoint pen and gold leaf style.

Development & Design - Gladeye

is a digital innovations agency in New Zealand and New York.

I have met Trump haters before, lots of them, the kind who seize upon every conspiracy theory and refuse to give him any benefit of any doubt. The four people I recently spent the morning with at Solly’s Tavern in D.C. (sans booze, don’t worry) were not Trump haters. They were, however, Trump quitters.

All of them, at some point over the course of the last nine months, had left their posts within the current administration, having decided that they could better serve their country from outside the government than from within. They weren’t happy about quitting, either. They were civil servants who wanted to remain civil servants, who, except for one, had worked under presidents of both parties. They had disagreed with superiors over the years, they had been fearful of new regulations and wary of political appointees, but they stayed on because that’s the nature of career work in government. This was different.

When they came together for this discussion two weeks ago, the rapport was instantaneous. The vibe was as convivial and familiar as a reunion, except for the fact that they had been strangers five minutes before. They hailed from different parts of the bureaucracy, they ranged widely in age and background, but they had undergone such similar mental calculations since Trump’s election. Would their friends at work feel betrayed by their quitting? Would they be opening up their job to someone with views antithetical to their own? Having spent most of their lives in back offices, did they really feel comfortable taking such a public stand? Once we got into the interview proper, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, they were candid, funny and furious. They may not work for the government anymore, but they all still see themselves as public servants.

All right, Sharon, you were the first to flee. Let’s start with election night. What were you thinking? What did it feel like?

You had no doubt you had to go?

Walt, you stuck around until July. Talk to me about the moment when you realized your world had fundamentally changed.

“Whenever someone would talk about the government as The Man, I always used to joke that, well, apparently the man is a 5-foot-3 lesbian from Queens.” Sharon McGowan

Mike, civil servants at the Environmental Protection Agency have long struggled with political appointees. Why do you think the situation is so much worse now?

It’s a hard habit to break.

Was there a specific thing that made you decide this is it, I’m putting in my papers, I’m done?

Ned, like Walt, you worked for an institution that’s supposedly above politics. But tension with a new administration is not necessarily a new thing at the CIA. How was this different?

So fast-forward to January. What was that experience like?

When did you start thinking about getting out?

“I became concerned that I would be window-dressing for corruption.” - Walter Shaub

What are commonalities in all the stories we’re hearing?

Walt, I heard you had a mental checklist that helped you decide whether to stay or go.

What are relationships with your former colleagues like now?

“I wish I would’ve stayed because even though I don’t think I would’ve made a huge impact, I still feel like I could’ve been a voice.” - Mike Cox

“I was more than content to be a bureaucrat for the rest of my life. And, frankly, I hope to go back into public service when the coast is clear.” - Ned Price

Were you at least able to engage in some good gallows humor before you left?

I wonder if this is all going to have a chilling effect on young people aspiring to go into public service.

FML

Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.
by Michael Hobbes

Like everyone in my generation, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to be scared about the future and angry about the past.

I am 35 years old—the oldest millennial, the first millennial—and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.

What’s a millennial anyway?
Unless otherwise noted, we mean anyone born between 1982 and 2004

We’ve all heard the statistics. More millennials live with their parents than with roommates. We are delaying partner-marrying and house-buying and kid-having for longer than any previous generation. And, according to The Olds, our problems are all our fault: We got the wrong degree. We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need. We still haven’t learned to code. We killed cereal and department stores and golf and napkins and lunch. Mention “millennial” to anyone over 40 and the word “entitlement” will come back at you within seconds, our own intergenerational game of Marco Polo.

This is what it feels like to be young now. Not only are we screwed, but we have to listen to lectures about our laziness and our participation trophies from the people who screwed us.

But generalizations about millennials, like those about any other arbitrarily defined group of 75 million people, fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. Contrary to the cliché, the vast majority of millennials did not go to college, do not work as baristas and cannot lean on their parents for help. Every stereotype of our generation applies only to the tiniest, richest, whitest sliver of young people. And the circumstances we live in are more dire than most people realize.

We’ve taken on at least 300% more student debt than our parents

We’re about 1/2 as likely to own a home as young adults were in 1975

1 in 5 of us is living in poverty

Based on current trends, many of us won’t be able to retire until we’re 75

But it’s not just the numbers.

What is different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is minor. What is different about the world around us is profound. Salaries have stagnated and entire sectors have cratered. At the same time, the cost of every prerequisite of a secure existence—education, housing and health care—has inflated into the stratosphere. From job security to the social safety net, all the structures that insulate us from ruin are eroding. And the opportunities leading to a middle-class life—the ones that boomers lucked into—are being lifted out of our reach. Add it all up and it’s no surprise that we’re the first generation in modern history to end up poorer than our parents.

Glossary for Grandpa
Terms to know but never say out loud
FML Fuck My Life
FTW For The Win
TFW That Feeling When

This is why the touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us, is not helicopter parenting or unpaid internships or Pokémon Go. It is uncertainty. “Some days I breathe and it feels like something is about to burst out of my chest,” says Jimmi Matsinger. “I’m 25 and I’m still in the same place I was when I earned minimum wage.” Four days a week she works at a dental office, Fridays she nannies, weekends she babysits. And still she couldn’t keep up with her rent, car lease and student loans. Earlier this year she had to borrow money to file for bankruptcy. I heard the same walls-closing-in anxiety from millennials around the country and across the income scale, from cashiers in Detroit to nurses in Seattle.

It’s tempting to look at the recession as the cause of all this, the Great Fuckening from which we are still waiting to recover. But what we are living through now, and what the recession merely accelerated, is a historic convergence of economic maladies, many of them decades in the making. Decision by decision, the economy has turned into a young people-screwing machine. And unless something changes, our calamity is going to become America’s.

Never-ending Job Insecurity FTW

What Scott remembers are the group interviews.

TFW They Broke The Safety Net

Becoming poor is not an event. It is a process.Like a plane crash, poverty is rarely caused by one thing going wrong. Usually, it is a series of misfortunes—a job loss, then a car accident, then an eviction—that interact and compound.

I heard the most acute description of how this happens from Anirudh Krishna, a Duke University professor who has, over the last 15 years, interviewed more than 1,000 people who fell into poverty and escaped it. He started in India and Kenya, but eventually, his grad students talked him into doing the same thing in North Carolina. The mechanism, he discovered, was the same.

We often think of poverty in America as a pool, a fixed portion of the population that remains destitute for years. In fact, Krishna says, poverty is more like a lake, with streams flowing steadily in and out all the time. “The number of people in danger of becoming poor is far larger than the number of people who are actually poor,” he says.

We’re all living in a state of permanent volatility. Between 1970 and 2002, the probability that a working-age American would unexpectedly lose at least half her family income more than doubled. And the danger is particularly severe for young people. In the 1970s, when the boomers were our age, young workers had a 24 percent chance of falling below the poverty line. By the 1990s, that had risen to 37 percent. And the numbers only seem to be getting worse. From 1979 to 2014, the poverty rate among young workers with only a high school diploma more than tripled, to 22 percent. “Millennials feel like they can lose everything at any time,” Hacker says. “And, increasingly, they can.”

Here’s what that downward slide looks like. Gabriel is 19 years old and lives in a small town in Oregon. He plays the piano and, until recently, was saving up to study music at an arts college. Last summer he was working at a health supplement company. It wasn’t the most glamorous job, lugging boxes and blending ingredients, but he made $12.50 an hour and he hoped he could step up to a better position if he proved himself.

Then his sister got into a car accident, T-boned turning into their driveway. “She couldn’t walk; she couldn’t think,” Gabriel says. His mom wasn't able to take a day off without risking losing her job, so Gabriel called his boss and left a message saying he had to miss work for a day to get his sister home from the hospital.

The next day, his temp agency called: He was fired. Though Gabriel says no one had told him, the company had a three-strikes policy for unplanned absences. He had already missed one day for a cold and another for a staph infection, so this was it. A former colleague told him that his absences meant he was unlikely to get a job there again.

So now Gabriel works at Taco Time and lives in a trailer with his mom and his sisters. Most of his paycheck goes to gas and groceries because his mom’s income is disappearing into the family’s medical bills. He still wants to go to college. But since he can barely keep his head above water, he’s set his sights on an electrician’s apprenticeship program offered by a local nonprofit. “I don’t understand why it’s so hard to do something with your life,” he tells me.

The answer is brutally simple. In an economy where wages are precarious and the safety net has been hacked into ribbons, one piece of bad luck can easily become a years-long struggle to get back to normal.

Over the last four decades, there has been a profound shift in the relationship between the government and its citizens. In The Age of Responsibility, Yascha Mounk, a political theorist, writes that before the 1980s, the idea of “responsibility” was understood as something each American owed to the people around them, a national project to keep the most vulnerable from falling below basic subsistence. Even Richard Nixon, not exactly known for lifting up the downtrodden, proposed a national welfare benefit and a version of a guaranteed income. But under Ronald Reagan and then Bill Clinton, the meaning of “responsibility” changed. It became individualized, a duty to earn the benefits your country offered you.

Since 1996, the percentage of poor families receiving cash assistance from the government has fallen from 68 percent to 23 percent. No state provides cash benefits that add up to the poverty line. Eligibility criteria have been surgically tightened, often with requirements that are counterproductive to actually escaping poverty. Take Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which ostensibly supports poor families with children. Its predecessor (with a different acronym) had the goal of helping parents of kids under 7, usually through simple cash payments. These days, those benefits are explicitly geared toward getting mothers away from their children and into the workforce as soon as possible. A few states require women to enroll in training or start applying for jobs the day after they give birth.

The list goes on. Housing assistance, for many people the difference between losing a job and losing everything, has been slashed into oblivion. (To pick just one example, in 2014 Baltimore had 75,000 applicants for 1,500 rental vouchers.) Food stamps, the closest thing to universal benefits we have left, provide, on average, $1.40 per meal.

In what seems like some kind of perverse joke, nearly every form of welfare now available to young people is attached to traditional employment. Unemployment benefits and workers’ compensation are limited to employees. The only major expansions of welfare since 1980 have been to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, both of which pay wages back to workers who have already collected them.

Back when we had decent jobs and strong unions, it (kind of) made sense to provide things like health care and retirement savings through employer benefits. But now, for freelancers and temps and short-term contractors—i.e., us—those benefits might as well be Monopoly money. Forty-one percent of working millennials aren’t even eligible for retirement plans through their companies.

And then there’s health care.

In 1980, 4 out of 5 employees got health insurance through their jobs. Now, just over half of them do. Millennials can stay on our parents’ plans until we turn 26. But the cohort right afterward, 26- to 34-year-olds, has the highest uninsured rate in the country and millennials—alarmingly—have more collective medical debt than the boomers. Even Obamacare, one of the few expansions of the safety net since man walked on the moon, still leaves us out in the open. Millennials who can afford to buy plans on the exchanges face premiums (next year mine will be $388 a month), deductibles ($850) and out-of-pocket limits ($5,000) that, for many young people, are too high to absorb without help. And of the events that precipitate the spiral into poverty, according to Krishna, an injury or illness is the most common trigger.

“All of us are one life event away from losing everything,” says Ashley Lauber, a bankruptcy lawyer in Seattle and an Old Millennial like me. For most of her clients under 35, she says, the slide toward bankruptcy starts with a car accident or a medical bill. “You can’t afford your deductible, so you go to Moneytree and take out a loan for a few hundred bucks. Then you miss your payments and the collectors start calling you at work, telling your boss you can’t pay. Then he gets sick of it and he fires you and it all gets worse.” For a lot of her millennial clients, Lauber says, the difference between escaping debt and going bankrupt comes down to the only safety net they have—their parents.

But this fail-safe, like all the others, isn’t equally available to everyone. The wealth gap between white and non-white families is massive. Since basically forever, almost every avenue of wealth creation—higher education, homeownership, access to credit—has been denied to minorities through discrimination both obvious and invisible. And the disparity has only grown wider since the recession. From 2007 to 2010, black families’ retirement accounts shrank by 35 percent, whereas white families, who are more likely to have other sources of money, saw their accounts grow by 9 percent.

The result is that millennials of color are even more exposed to disaster than their peers. Many white millennials have an iceberg of accumulated wealth from their parents and grandparents that they can draw on for help with tuition, rent or a place to stay during an unpaid internship. According to the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, white Americans are five times more likely to receive an inheritance than black Americans—which can be enough to make a down payment on a house or pay off student loans. By contrast, 67 percent of black families and 71 percent of Latino families don’t have enough money saved to cover three months of living expenses.

And so, instead of receiving help from their families, millennials of color are more likely to be called on to provide it. Any extra income from a new job or a raise tends to get swallowed by bills or debts that many white millennials had help with. Four years after graduation, black college graduates have, on average, nearly twice as much student debt as their white counterparts and are three times more likely to be behind on payments. This financial undertow is captured in one staggering statistic: Every extra dollar of income earned by a middle-class white family generates $5.19 in new wealth. For black families, it’s 69 cents.

The median white household will have 86x more wealth than the median black household by 2020.

Want to get even more depressed? Sit down and think about what’s going to happen to us when we get old. Despite all the stories you read about flighty millennials refusing to plan for retirement (as if our grandparents were obsessing over the details of their pension plans when they were 25), the biggest problem we face is not financial illiteracy. It is compound interest.

In the coming decades, the returns on 401(k) plans are expected to fall by half. According to an analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a drop in stock market returns of just 2 percentage points means a 25-year-old would have to contribute more than double the amount to her retirement savings that a boomer did. Oh, and she'll have to do it on lower wages. This scenario gets even more dire when you consider what's going to happen to Social Security by the time we make it to 65. There, too, it seems inevitable that we’re going to get screwed by demography: In 1950, there were 17 American workers to support each retiree. When millennials retire, there will be just two.

There’s one way that many Americans have traditionally managed to build wealth for themselves, to achieve some kind of dignity and comfort in old age. I’m talking, of course, about homeownership. At least we’ve got a shot at that, right?

RIP Your Chances Of Affording A Home

Whenever Tyrone moves into a new apartment, he lies down naked on his living room floor.

It’s a ritual, a reminder of the years he spent without a floor underneath him or a ceiling above. He was homeless for four years in Georgia: sleeping on benches, biking to interviews in the heat, arriving an hour early so he wouldn’t be sweaty for the handshake. When he finally got a job, his co-workers found out that he washed himself in gas station bathrooms and made him so miserable he quit. “They said I ‘smelled homeless,’” he says.

Tyrone moved to Seattle six years ago, when he was 23, because he’d heard the minimum wage there was almost double what he made in Atlanta. He got a job at a grocery store and slept in a shelter while he saved. Since then, his income has gone up, but he’s been pushed farther and farther from the city. First stop was subsidized housing in Kirkland, 20 minutes east across the lake. Then a rented house in Tacoma, 45 minutes south, sharing a bedroom with his girlfriend and, eventually, a son. The breakup is why he’s now in Lakewood, even farther south, in a one-bedroom right next to a freeway entrance.

And it’s already such a strain. Tyrone earns $17 an hour as a security guard at a building site, his highest wage ever. But he’s a contractor (of course), so he doesn’t get sick leave or health insurance. His rent is $1,100 a month. It’s more than he can afford, but he could only find one building that would let him move in without paying the full deposit in advance.

Since rent is due on the 1st and he gets paid on the 7th, his landlord adds a $100 late fee to each month’s bill. After that and the car payments—it’s a two-hour bus ride from the suburb where he lives to the suburb where he works—he has $200 left over every month for food. The first time we met, it was the 27th of the month and Tyrone told me his account was already zeroed out. He had pawned his skateboard the previous night for gas money.

Despite the acres of news pages dedicated to the narrative that millennials refuse to grow up, there are twice as many young people like Tyrone—living on their own and earning less than $30,000 per year—as there are millennials living with their parents. The crisis of our generation cannot be separated from the crisis of affordable housing.

More people are renting homes than at any time since the late 1960s. But in the 40 years leading up to the recession, rents increased at more than twice the rate of incomes. Between 2001 and 2014, the number of “severely burdened” renters—households spending over half their incomes on rent—grew by more than 50 percent. Rather unsurprisingly, as housing prices have exploded, the number of 30- to 34-year-olds who own homes has plummeted.

Falling homeownership rates, on their own, aren’t necessarily a catastrophe. But our country has contrived an entire “Game of Life” sequence that hinges on being able to buy a home. You rent for a while to save up for a down payment, then you buy a starter home with your partner, then you move into a larger place and raise a family. Once you pay off the mortgage, your house is either an asset to sell or a cheap place to live in retirement. Fin.

This worked well when rents were low enough to save and homes were cheap enough to buy. In one of the most infuriating conversations I had for this article, my father breezily informed me that he bought his first house at 29. It was 1973, he had just moved to Seattle and his job as a university professor paid him (adjusted for inflation) around $76,000 a year. The house cost $124,000 — again, in today’s dollars. I am six years older now than my dad was then. I earn less than he did and the median home price in Seattle is around $730,000. My father’s first house cost him 20 months of his salary. My first house will cost more than 10 years of mine.

Which prompts the question: How did housing in America become so freaking expensive?

Here’s your city. Here’s downtown. That’s where lot’s of the good jobs are.

Most people want to live fewer than 30 minutes from work. So, for much of the 20th century, big cities built housing close to jobs.

When the inner ring of suburbs filled up, cities built freeways to whisk workers to the next.

But then those suburbs filled up. Traffic got worse. Thirty-minute commutes became 45-minute commutes.

Demand for houses close to downtown exploded.

There's a simple fix for this problem: Build more housing close to jobs.

For a long time, that’s what cities did. They built upward, divided homes into apartments and added duplexes and townhomes.

But in the 1970s, they stopped building. Cities kept adding jobs and people. But they didn’t add more housing. And that’s when prices started to climb.

So much of this can be explained by one word:

ZONING

At first, zoning was pretty modest. The point was to stop someone from buying your neighbor’s house and turning it into an oil refinery.

But eventually people realized they could use zoning for other purposes.

In the late 1960s, it finally became illegal to deny housing to minorities. So cities instituted weirdly specific rules that drove up the price of new houses and excluded poor people—who were, disproportionately, minorities.

Houses had to have massive backyards. They couldn’t be split into separate apartments. Basically, cities mandated McMansions.

We’re still living with that legacy. Across huge swaths of American cities, it’s pretty much illegal to build affordable housing.

And this problem is only getting worse.

That’s because all the urgency to build comes from people who need somewhere to live. But all the political power is held by people who already own homes.

For homeowners, there’s no such thing as a housing crisis.

Why?

Because when property values go up, so does their net worth. They have every reason to block new construction.

They do that by weaponizing environmental regulations and historical preservation rules…

They force buildings to be shorter so they don’t cast shadows. They demand two parking spaces for every single unit.

They complain that a new apartment building will destroy “neighborhood character” when the structure it’s replacing is… a parking garage. (True story.)

All this extra hassle means construction takes longer and costs more.

Which means that the only way most developers can make aprofit is to build luxury condos.

So that’s why cities are so unaffordable. The entire system is structured to produce expensive housing when we desperately need the opposite.

The housing crisis in our most prosperous cities is now distorting the entire American economy. For most of the 20th century, the way many workers improved their financial fortunes was to move closer to opportunities. Rents were higher in the boomtowns, but so were wages.

Since the Great Recession, the “good” jobs—secure, non-temp, decent salary—have concentrated in cities like never before. America’s 100 largest metros have added 6 million jobs since the downturn. Rural areas, meanwhile, still have fewer jobs than they did in 2007. For young people trying to find work, moving to a major city is not an indulgence. It is a virtual necessity.

But the soaring rents in big cities are now canceling out the higher wages. Back in 1970, according to a Harvard study, an unskilled worker who moved from a low-income state to a high-income state kept 79 percent of his increased wages after he paid for housing. A worker who made the same move in 2010 kept just 36 percent. For the first time in U.S. history, says Daniel Shoag, one of the study’s co-authors, it no longer makes sense for an unskilled worker in Utah to head for New York in the hope of building a better life.

This leaves young people, especially those without a college degree, with an impossible choice. They can move to a city where there are good jobs but insane rents. Or they can move somewhere with low rents but few jobs that pay above the minimum wage.

This dilemma is feeding the inequality-generating woodchipper the U.S. economy has become. Rather than offering Americans a way to build wealth, cities are becoming concentrations of people who already have it. In the country’s 10 largest metros, residents earning more than $150,000 per year now outnumber those earning less than $30,000 per year.

Millennials who are able to relocate to these oases of opportunity get to enjoy their many advantages: better schools, more generous social services, more rungs on the career ladder to grab on to. Millennials who can’t afford to relocate to a big expensive city are … stuck. In 2016, the Census Bureau reported that young people were less likely to have lived at a different address a year earlier than at any time since 1963.

And so the real reason millennials can’t seem to achieve the adulthood our parents envisioned for us is that we’re trying to succeed within a system that no longer makes any sense. Homeownership and migration have been pitched to us as gateways to prosperity because, back when the boomers grew up, they were. But now, the rules have changed and we’re left playing a game that is impossible to win.

We start earning less money, later. We have more debt and higher rent.

Which means we aren’t able to save.

Which means we can’t buy a house or prepare for retirement.

Which means that unless something changes…

All of us are headed for a very dark place.

LOL Everything Matters

The most striking thing about the problems of millennials is how intertwined and self-reinforcing and everywhere they are.

Over the eight months I spent reporting this story, I spent a few evenings at a youth homeless shelter and met unpaid interns and gig-economy bike messengers saving for their first month of rent. During the days I interviewed people like Josh, a 33-year-old affordable housing developer who mentioned that his mother struggles to make ends meet as a contractor in a profession that used to be reliable government work. Every Thanksgiving, she reminds him that her retirement plan is a “401(j)”—J for Josh.

Fixing what has been done to us is going to take more than tinkering. Even if economic growth picks up and unemployment continues to fall, we’re still on a track toward ever more insecurity for young people. The “Leave It To Beaver” workforce, in which everyone has the same job from graduation until gold watch, is not coming back. Any attempt to recreate the economic conditions the boomers had is just sending lifeboats to a whirlpool.

But still, there is already a foot-long list of overdue federal policy changes that would at least begin to fortify our future and reknit the safety net. Even amid the awfulness of our political moment, we can start to build a platform to rally around. Raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation. Roll back anti-union laws to give workers more leverage against companies that treat them as if they’re disposable. Tilt the tax code away from the wealthy. Right now, rich people can write off mortgage interest on their second home and expenses related to being a landlord or (I'm not kidding) owning a racehorse. The rest of us can’t even deduct student loans or the cost of getting an occupational license.

Some of the trendiest Big Policy Fixes these days are efforts to rebuild government services from the ground up. The ur-example is the Universal Basic Income, a no-questions-asked monthly cash payment to every single American. The idea is to establish a level of basic subsistence below which no one in a civilized country should be allowed to fall. The venture capital firm Y Combinator is planning a pilot program that would give $1,000 each month to 1,000 low- and middle-income participants. And while, yes, it’s inspiring that a pro-poor policy idea has won the support of D.C. wonks and Ayn Rand tech bros alike, it’s worth noting that existing programs like food stamps, TANF, public housing and government-subsidized day care are not inherently ineffective. They have been intentionally made so. It would be nice if the people excited by the shiny new programs would expend a little effort defending and expanding the ones we already have.

But they’re right about one thing: We’re going to need government structures that respond to the way we work now. “Portable benefits,” an idea that’s been bouncing around for years, attempts to break down the zero-sum distinction between full-time employees who get government-backed worker protections and independent contractors who get nothing. The way to solve this, when you think about it, is ridiculously simple: Attach benefits to work instead of jobs. The existing proposals vary, but the good ones are based on the same principle: For every hour you work, your boss chips in to a fund that pays out when you get sick, pregnant, old or fired. The fund follows you from job to job, and companies have to contribute to it whether you work there a day, a month or a year.

Small-scale versions of this idea have been offsetting the inherent insecurity of the gig economy since long before we called it that. Some construction workers have an “hour bank” that fills up when they’re working and provides benefits even when they’re between jobs. Hollywood actors and technical staff have health and pension plans that follow them from movie to movie. In both cases, the benefits are negotiated by unions, but they don’t have to be. Since 1962, California has offered “elective coverage” insurance that allows independent contractors to file for payouts if their kids get sick or if they get injured on the job. “The offloading of risks onto workers and families was not a natural occurrence,” says Hacker, the Yale political scientist. “It was a deliberate effort. And we can roll it back the same way.”

Another no-brainer experiment is to expand jobs programs. As decent opportunities have dwindled and wage inequality has soared, the government’s message to the poorest citizens has remained exactly the same: You’re not trying hard enough. But at the same time, the government has not actually attempted to give people jobs on a large scale since the 1970s.

Because most of us grew up in a world without them, jobs programs can sound overly ambitious or suspiciously Leninist. In fact, they’re neither. In 2010, as part of the stimulus, Mississippi launched a program that simply reimbursed employers for the wages they paid to eligible new hires—100 percent at first, then tapering down to 25 percent. The initiative primarily reached low-income mothers and the long-term unemployed. Nearly half of the recipients were under 30.

The results were impressive. For the average participant, the subsidized wages lasted only 13 weeks. Yet the year after the program ended, long-term unemployed workers were still earning nearly nine times more than they had the previous year. Either they kept the jobs they got through the subsidies or the experience helped them find something new. Plus, the program was a bargain. Subsidizing more than 3,000 jobs cost $22 million, which existing businesses doled out to workers who weren’t required to get special training. It wasn’t an isolated success, either. A Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality review of 15 jobs programs from the past four decades concluded that they were “a proven, promising, and underutilized tool for lifting up disadvantaged workers.” The review found that subsidizing employment raised wages and reduced long-term unemployment. Children of the participants even did better at school.

But before I get carried away listing urgent and obvious solutions for the plight of millennials, let’s pause for a bit of reality: Who are we kidding? Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are not interested in our innovative proposals to lift up the systemically disadvantaged. Their entire political agenda, from the Scrooge McDuck tax reform bill to the ongoing assassination attempt on Obamacare, is explicitly designed to turbocharge the forces that are causing this misery. Federally speaking, things are only going to get worse.

Which is why, for now, we need to take the fight to where we can win it.

Over the last decade, states and cities have made remarkable progress adapting to the new economy. Minimum-wage hikes have been passed by voters in nine states, even dark red rectangles like Nebraska and South Dakota. Following a long campaign by the Working Families Party and other activist organizations, eight states and the District of Columbia have instituted guaranteed sick leave. Bills to combat exploitative scheduling practices have been introduced in more than a dozen state legislatures. San Francisco now gives retail and fast-food workers the right to learn their schedules two weeks in advance and get compensated for sudden shift changes. Local initiatives are popular, effective and our best hope of preventing the country’s slide into “Mad Max”-style individualism.

The court system, the only branch of our government currently functioning, offers other encouraging avenues. Class-action lawsuits and state and federal investigations have resulted in a wave of judgments against companies that “misclassify” their workers as contractors. FedEx, which requires some of its drivers to buy their own trucks and then work as independent contractors, recently reached a $227 million settlement with more than 12,000 plaintiffs in 19 states. In 2014, a startup called Hello Alfred—Uber for chores, basically—announced that it would rely exclusively on direct hires instead of “1099s.” Part of the reason, its CEO told Fast Company, was that the legal and financial risk of relying on contractors had gotten too high. A tsunami of similar lawsuits over working conditions and wage theft would be enough to force the same calculation onto every CEO in America.

And then there’s housing, where the potential—and necessity—of local action is obvious. This doesn’t just mean showing up to city council hearings to drown out the NIMBYs (though let’s definitely do that). It also means ensuring that the entire system for approving new construction doesn’t prioritize homeowners at the expense of everyone else. Right now, permitting processes examine, in excruciating detail, how one new building will affect rents, noise, traffic, parking, shadows and squirrel populations. But they never investigate the consequences of not building anything—rising prices, displaced renters, low-wage workers commuting hours from outside the sprawl.

Some cities are finally acknowledging this reality. Portland and Denver have sped up approvals and streamlined permitting. In 2016, Seattle’s mayor announced that the city would cut ties with its mostly old, mostly white, very NIMBY district councils and establish a “community involvement commission.” The name is terrible, obviously, but the mandate is groundbreaking: Include renters, the poor, ethnic minorities—and everyone else unable to attend a consultation at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday—in construction decisions. For decades, politicians have been terrified of making the slightest twitch that might upset homeowners. But with renters now outnumbering owners in nine of America’s 11 largest cities, we have the potential to be a powerful political constituency.

The same logic could be applied to our entire generation. In 2018, there will be more millennials than boomers in the voting-age population. The problem, as you’ve already heard a million times, is that we don’t vote enough. Only 49 percent of Americans ages 18 to 35 turned out to vote in the last presidential election, compared to about 70 percent of boomers and Greatests. (It’s lower in midterm elections and positively dire in primaries.)

But like everything about millennials, once you dig into the numbers you find a more complicated story. Youth turnout is low, sure, but not universally. In 2012, it ranged from 68 percent in Mississippi (!) to 24 percent in West Virginia. And across the country, younger Americans who are registered to vote show up at the polls nearly as often as older Americans.

The fact is, it’s simply harder for us to vote. Consider that nearly half of millennials are minorities and that voter suppression efforts are laser-focused on blacks and Latinos. Or that the states with the simplest registration procedures have youth turnout rates significantly higher than the national average. (In Oregon it’s automatic, in Idaho you can do it the same day you vote and in North Dakota you don’t have to register at all.) Adopting voting rights as a cause—forcing politicians to listen to us like they do to the boomers—is the only way we’re ever going to get a shot at creating our own New Deal.

Or, as Shaun Scott, the author of Millennials and the Moments That Made Us, told me, “We can either do politics or we can have politics done to us.”

And that’s exactly it. The boomer-benefiting system we’ve inherited was not inevitable and it is not irreversible. There is still a choice here. For the generations ahead of us, it is whether to pass down some of the opportunities they enjoyed in their youth or to continue hoarding them. Since 1989, the median wealth of families headed by someone over 62 has increased 40 percent. The median wealth of families headed by someone under 40 has decreased by 28 percent. Boomers, it's up to you: Do you want your children to have decent jobs and places to live and a non-Dickensian old age? Or do you want lower taxes and more parking?

Then there’s our responsibility. We’re used to feeling helpless because for most of our lives we’ve been subject to huge forces beyond our control. But pretty soon, we’ll actually be in charge. And the question, as we age into power, is whether our children will one day write the same article about us. We can let our economic infrastructure keep disintegrating and wait to see if the rising seas get us before our social contract dies. Or we can build an equitable future that reflects our values and our demographics and all the chances we wish we'd had. Maybe that sounds naïve, and maybe it is. But I think we're entitled to it.