Syndicated columns

When I first learned to dive, every coral reef or kelp forest looked like something out of a science fiction story. Over the years, I’ve spent more than 3,000 hours underwater, even co-designing a submersible and piloting it to remote, otherworldly destinations. What I’ve witnessed and learned has helped shape me, as an explorer and a resident of our planet, as well as a filmmaker. When I traveled 12,000 feet underwater to the Titanic, it profoundly reinforced my reverence for the ocean and the importance of bringing powerful stories back to the surface. The ocean has been a source of inspiration for millennia. Our ancestors looked to the watery horizon, expanding the boundaries of what we know about ourselves and the globe. Where their knowledge ended, they filled the gaps with dragons and other myths. But instead of turning away in fear, they sailed beyond the edges of our maps, returning with stories that inspired generations of future explorers.

Shortly after Donald Trump won the South Carolina primary in February 2016, I warned in an article co-written with economist Benn Steil that “a Trump presidency threatens the post-World War II liberal international order that American presidents of both parties have so laboriously built up – an order based on free trade and alliances with other democracies. His policies would not make America ‘great.’ Just the opposite. A Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great power.” Such warnings might have sounded hyperbolic at the time. Who, after all, knew whether Trump would make good on his threats? Even in year one of the Trump era, it would have been possible to dismiss our dire prediction. Trump did not, after all, pull U.S. troops out of allied countries, exit NATO or lift sanctions on Russia. He still hasn’t done any of those things, but, hey, he’s only been in office a little more than 500 days. Give him time. In just the past few weeks, he has taken a giant step toward destroying the global system that the United States created after 1945.

I have been uncharacteristically silent these past 10 months. I had thought that silence would soon be coming to an end, but I’m afraid I must tell you now that fate has decided on a different course for me. In August of last year, I underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in my abdomen. That operation was thought to have been a success, but it caused a cascade of secondary complications – which I have been fighting in hospital ever since. It was a long and hard fight with many setbacks, but I was steadily, if slowly, overcoming each obstacle along the way and gradually making my way back to health.

Charles Krauthammer, a man who has beaten unbelievable odds and overcome obstacles that would defeat most mortals, has finally encountered one foe over which he says he can’t claim victory. In a note to readers Friday, he announced that he has only a few weeks to live following a battle with cancer.

Friday has always been Charles’ day. Since long ago, before digital news, when space meant just a strip across the top of a printed page, we knew to save space on Friday’s page for Charles Krauthammer. Charles always filled the space, with just the right number of words, and the most acute words, too. Our copy editors knew to check any change with Charles, because he cared about every word. There was never much to change. Now Charles has told us, along with all of you, his readers, to expect no more copy. After a final, months-long, unimaginably courageous battle, the columnist has been informed by his doctors that he won’t live much longer. A physician by training, Charles tells all of us, in a statement we publish today, that he accepts their verdict and will depart sadly but without regrets. He also asks us, and his friends at Fox News, not to embarrass him with flowery tributes. With difficulty, we will respect his request.

In its latest effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act – and in the process, raise premiums for many Americans – the Trump administration is urging a federal judge in Texas to throw out the law’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions. In other words, the administration wants insurers to be able to deny coverage to the people most in need of it, or to charge them considerably higher premiums than they’re allowed to charge today.

Call me naive – I’ve been called worse – but it never occurred to me that Roseanne Barr’s firing would be viewed by some as a political statement. Alas, it seems I’m a mere babe in the thicket.

You cannot understand President Trump’s so-called “trade war” without acknowledging that it’s mostly about politics and not about economics. Trump has embarked on a giant marketing campaign to convince us that foreigners – their exports – are to blame for our economic problems. It’s a seductive appeal to nationalism whose main defect is that it’s mostly untrue. To be fair, Trump’s message has been consistent since the early days of 2016. He said he would slap our trading partners with high tariffs, and so he has. The campaign continues. Here’s a recent tweet: “The U.S. has been ripped off by other countries for years on Trade, time to get smart!” The standard anti-trade narrative is that U.S. officials have botched trade negotiations, giving too much to foreigners and getting too little for U.S. exporters. Massive trade deficits result and destroy American jobs. The employment loss is aggravated by U.S. multinationals relocating factories to developing countries with their dirt-cheap wages. Low-cost products are then exported back to the United States. Now, all these statements contain some truth. After World War II, the United States was generous in granting trade concessions to Europe and Japan to help revive their economies. Similarly, many U.S. multinationals do locate factories abroad. These statements are not blatantly false, but their effects are hugely exaggerated. Take the connection between trade deficits and job loss. Obviously, this occurs for individual factories. But it doesn’t exist for the entire economy. Consider: From 2009 to 2017, the annual U.S. trade deficit for goods and services rose from $384 billion to $568 billion. Over the same years, the number of private U.S. payroll jobs increased by 15.5 million, and the unemployment rate fell from 9.3 percent to 4.4 percent. If trade deficits created huge job losses, this would be impossible. The main explanation for the apparent paradox is, as I’ve argued for years, that the dollar is the main international currency. Foreigners and investors want dollars to conduct global trade and investment. This keeps the dollar’s exchange rate high, making U.S. exports costlier and imports cheaper. The resulting trade deficit is structural; but Americans’ spending for domestic products is still the main determinant of U.S. employment. Or take the notion that U.S. multinationals move factories abroad to exploit cheap labor – say, car plants in Mexico. This clearly happens and is routinely reported by the media. But it is not the main reason that U.S. multinationals invest abroad: 71 percent of their foreign investments occur in developed countries “where consumer tastes are similar to those in the United States,” reports James Jackson of the Congressional Research Service. Europe alone accounted for 59 percent of these investments. Presumably, it’s less expensive to service these foreign markets from local factories, warehouses and offices than to export from the United States. According to Jackson’s report, about 60 percent of the sales of foreign affiliates of U.S. multinationals go to local markets – say, France. (The other 40 percent go to exports to other foreign countries or to the United States.) None of this means that we don’t have serious trade problems with some of our partners, most obviously China. But the idea that trade issues lie at the core of our economic shortcomings is somewhere between wild exaggeration and sheer fiction. Trump’s policies and rhetoric are meant to turn foreign countries – via their exports and trade practices – into a hateful scapegoat. It’s their fault. The cost of this misguided exercise in misinformation is, as headlines remind us, steep. It has alienated our closest historical allies (including Canada, Mexico, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and Germany) and created enough uncertainty about trade policy to jeopardize worldwide economic growth. At its best, the imposition of these politically motivated tariffs would raise domestic prices and trigger widespread retaliation against U.S. exports. At its worst, it might result in the collapse of the post-World War II trading system and usher in an era of reconstruction that would be dominated by China as the world’s biggest trading nation. Robert J. Samuelson is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.

Patriotism, Samuel Johnson told us long ago, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. President Trump just made it the last refuge of the jilted. Here, on the South Lawn of the White House on Tuesday afternoon, there was to have been a celebration honoring the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles, but it turned out very few Eagles actually wanted to be celebrated by Trump. So Trump, to spare himself the snub, disinvited the team because, he said, they disagree with him about standing for the national anthem – even though all members of the Eagles stood for the anthem all season long.

Sixty percent of Americans say they expect the next generation will be “worse off” than their own. That profound sense of pessimism was perhaps the most startling finding of a recent national survey on views about early childhood development.

On the evidence of Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s CNN interview over the weekend, the likely next speaker of the House is a mindless sycophant and a threat to the constitutional order. Confronted with a simple ethical question – would he condemn demonstrable White House lies in covering up Donald Trump’s role in drafting his son’s account of the infamous Trump Tower Russia meeting – McCarthy was initially dumbstruck, then shifted into a prerecorded attack on special counsel Robert Mueller. It would have been easy enough to say: “The president and his team are hurting themselves with unnecessary falsehoods. Their overall case, however, is strong.” But such is the atmosphere of intimidation in the Republican Party that affirming the Ninth Commandment is seen as an act of disloyalty. When the king is a liar, truth becomes treason.

It made my mother scream. That’s what I remember. I had been lying dozy in bed, but at the sound of her, I scrambled into the living room. She was standing before the television watching an image of chaos in a hotel ballroom.

Of course, I’m jealous of Ivanka Trump – because any criticism of another woman has to be jealousy, according to the letters I shall receive. In the following order, I want her wardrobe, hair, makeup, private transportation and height (5’11”) – and all of her trademarks in China. Confession accomplished, let’s move on to emoluments, as in the constitutional clause forbidding gifts, titles or what-have-you from foreign nations to officeholders or appointees within the executive and legislative branches of government.

How evil is MS-13? Last year, two gang members in Texas reportedly murdered a teenage girl as an offering to Satan. According to prosecutors, the gang leader (known as “Diabolico”) told the young girl that “the Beast” wanted “a soul” before having his partner shoot her in the head and dump her body on a street corner. As charges were read against the two, the Houston Chronicle reported, they “laughed, smiled and waved for the media cameras.” MS-13 gang members, police have said, also stabbed a Maryland man more than 100 times before decapitating him and cutting out his heart ... lured a 34-year-old man to his already dug grave ... and stoned an 18-year-old boy to death and dumped his body under a bridge. MS-13 is a demonic death cult. And President Trump has Nancy Pelosi defending its members’ humanity.

The first time I was called a monkey was in high school. I was groggily emerging from a nap in the auditorium during a debate tournament at Bronx Science, when a teammate sitting in front of me told his partner that black people were more likely to get AIDS because we stayed in Africa longer, hence continuing to have sex with monkeys. The logic was so shocking that I didn’t fully believe what I overheard until my classmate looked at me and said “ooh-ooh-ahh-ahh,” mimicking the sound of a monkey. I chose to ignore it. At the time, I thought that’s what it meant to turn the other cheek. I was young.

Members of Congress were in their districts this Memorial Day, giving speeches about how much they appreciate the sacrifices of service members. But their constituents should take their fine words with more than a grain of salt. Just five days before the holiday, the U.S. Senate passed a measure that will set Veterans Affairs on the road toward privatization and severely undermine veterans’ health care. Congress sent the VA MISSION Act to the president on May 23. The act funnels dollars to the private, for-profit sector. It will promote outsourcing of care now received at the VA, and it will allow a private, corporate-style commission to decide which VA facilities to close.

Last month, I visited Russia to learn more about the Kremlin’s campaign to influence the U.S. election in 2016. But the more I learned about Kremlin techniques, magnified by social media, the more similar those techniques appeared to President Donald Trump’s modus operandi.

To peruse the coverage of the Democratic primaries of 2018, you’d think there was a battle royale within the Democratic Party: insurgent vs. establishment, Bernie vs. Hillary, progressive vs. moderate, grass roots vs. party bosses.

As the acclaimed poet Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them – the first time.”