Frank Bruni

By the reasoning of Rep. Jim Jordan, I did absolutely nothing wrong.

You’re alive! Not a drop of blood on you! An unconsummated crime is no crime at all, or so Jordan, one of the Republican Party’s more rococo philosophers, argued Wednesday in defense of President Donald Trump. Ukraine got its military aid; Trump did not get his investigation of the Bidens. To Jordan, that’s proof of innocence.

To a normal person, that’s proof of incompetence, which doesn’t exonerate the president but should definitely reassure us. Trump’s an autocrat all right, but the silver lining is that he’s an inept one. All strongmen should be this weak.

And all of us should have the mental limberness and ethical elasticity that Jordan and his troupe possess. They’re the Cirque du Soleil of c’est la vie. I’ve never seen anything like the Republican effort to defend Trump, which charts the frontiers of creativity, explores the outer limits of audacity, mutates like the monsters in the “Alien” movies and restores my faith in American ingenuity.

My faith in Washington, too. I long feared that politics had stopped attracting the country’s top talent, but some of our finest storytellers are working in the United States Capitol. John Grisham has nothing on Jordan. Danielle Steel can’t hold a candle to Devin Nunes.

Nunes was among the first Republicans to pipe up on Day 1 of the impeachment inquiry’s public hearings, held by the House Intelligence Committee, and it wasn’t just his narrative ambition that mesmerized me. It was his bold descent into his thesaurus, a sort of semantic spelunking.

The hearings, he said, marked the “pitiful finale” and “spectacular implosion” of the “Russia hoax.” They amounted to a “scorched-earth war against President Trump” that was “horrifically one-sided” and “preposterous.” This “low-rent Ukrainian sequel” had already involved a “closed-door audition process in a cultlike atmosphere in the basement of the Capitol.” Cultlike, no less! That’s a more fitting description of Republicans’ obeisance to the president and laundering of his wrongdoing, but then one hallmark of Trump and his sycophants is the projection of their own flaws onto their adversaries.

Nunes’ best bit Wednesday and then again Friday was his portrayal of Trump’s Democratic detractors as amateur pornographers intent on finding nude pictures of the president. I’m fairly confident that no one is intent on finding nude photographs of the president.

But at this point it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump himself tweeted one out. Would that be any crazier than what he did Friday, as Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, testified?

There she was, a pained, stoic State Department amalgam of Erin Brockovich and Norma Rae, and Trump used his Twitter account to call her an international wrecking ball, single-handedly responsible for the mess that is Mogadishu. (One of her posts before Ukraine was Somalia.)

This accomplished nothing in the way of silencing her but raised the prospect of witness intimidation being added to any articles of impeachment. Clearly, the Republican response to this impeachment inquiry isn’t some elegant strategy. It’s an epic snit.

Its leitmotif is hypocrisy. Nunes opened Friday’s hearing by lamenting all the important government business that was on hold because Democrats preferred to torture Trump. I somehow missed his pleas that lawmakers keep their eyes on the ball and devote themselves to practical problem-solving when the president stirred up one culture war after another just to change the topic of a given news cycle or hear a rally audience’s roar. But along comes the impeachment inquiry, and suddenly House Republicans are stymied stewards of levelheaded government.

They’re dismissing Wednesday’s and Friday’s hearings, held in public, as pure theater. But they <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/us/politics/republicans-storm-trump-impeachment-hearing.html" id="b9ef6657-eb3a-3f36-aa1c-0dcdc5346f9c">complained about the closed-door testimony</a> beforehand. They’re shrugging off the accounts of William Taylor, George Kent and others as hearsay. But the White House has decreed that such firsthand witnesses as Mick Mulvaney not cooperate.

One moment, Mulvaney publicly acknowledges the shakedown of Ukraine’s president, insists that it’s how foreign policy is done and tells the media to “get over it.” The next, he tells the media that they’re reprehensible fabulists for reporting exactly what he said. One moment, Republicans completely ignore Trump’s infamous July 25 phone call and claim that there’s no direct evidence of his bullying and — yes, Nancy Pelosi is right — his bribery. The next, they acknowledge the call, sigh over Trump’s behavior but say that it’s hardly impeachable.

In fairness, that’s only slightly more confusing to me than the Democrats’ perspective on the call, a definitive piece of evidence that they may be inadvertently downgrading. Usually, a process like the one that they’ve been engaged in over the last seven weeks is about finding a smoking gun. This process began with the smoking gun, and the farther the Democrats travel from it — eight witnesses this coming week? — the more they risk implying that it wasn’t enough.

But for curious behavior, Republicans have them easily beat, and their conduct during the impeachment inquiry is the culmination and apotheosis of their conduct since Trump wrapped up the Republican presidential nomination: an utter sellout of principle and a pure embrace of fiction to pacify an emotional infant and keep him from spitting up on them.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Republicans again suggested — while maintaining straight faces — that Trump’s foremost concern was corruption in Ukraine. Steve Castor, the Republicans’ chief counsel, also gave one of the president’s most convenient (and thus favorite) conspiracy theories a fresh whirl, positing that perhaps American intelligence officials had it all wrong and Ukraine, not Russia, hacked Democratic emails in 2016 and otherwise interfered in the election.

How would this make Trump’s demand that Ukrainians smear Joe Biden in return for millions of dollars of already-authorized aid OK? It wouldn’t — but what a juicy distraction! And what a perfect gateway for Castor’s attempt to get Taylor to testify that Trump legitimately believed that Ukrainians were, in Castor’s words, “out to get him.”

Try to follow along. Not only does incompetence equal innocence, but also paranoia is exculpatory. Same goes for the relative dastardliness of a deed, which becomes innocuous if it’s not maximally obnoxious. That’s my takeaway from when Castor, referring to Rudy Giuliani’s shenanigans, asked Taylor: “This irregular channel of diplomacy, it’s not as outlandish as it could be — is that correct?” Clarence Darrow, move over. Another genius of jurisprudence demands space in the history books.

All that Wednesday’s hearing lacked was Lindsey Graham. Yes, I know, he serves in the Senate, and the hearing took place in the House. But he’s the standard-bearer for Trump-coddling contortionism, the reigning king of the kinds of contradictions that were on display.

Presaging Jordan’s approach at the hearing, Graham a week and a half ago shrugged off the impeachment inquiry by calling Trump’s policy toward Ukraine so “incoherent” that the president and his minions “seem to be incapable of forming a quid pro quo.”

He said at one point that he’d be open to any evidence that backed up such a quid pro quo, but then, more recently, he announced that he wouldn’t and couldn’t be bothered to follow the testimony, because he’d already made up his mind. As Billy Binion of Reason magazine noted, “Graham has bemoaned the Democrats’ lack of transparency, only to shield his eyes once the curtain was lifted.”

Maybe Graham will storm the hearing room yet, an effigy of Hunter Biden in tow. That would match the dignity of what we’ve seen from Republicans so far.

This article originally appeared in

I came to your house with a gun. At least imagine I did. I tied you to a chair, took a step back and repeatedly fired. But my arm twitched; every bullet missed. Meanwhile, you slipped your knots and fled.

Devin Nunes Is Danielle Steel

I’m pinning them now on a shrub.

It’s called mastic, it grows in particular abundance on the Greek island of Chios and its resin — the goo exuded when its bark is gashed — has been reputed for millenniums to have powerful curative properties.

Ancient Greeks chewed it for oral hygiene. Some biblical scholars think the phrase “balm of Gilead” refers to it. It has been used in creams to reduce inflammation and heal wounds, as a powder to treat irritable bowels and ulcers, as a smoke to manage asthma. I’m now part of a clinical trial in the United States to determine if a clear liquid extracted from mastic resin can, through regular injections, repair ravaged nerves.

That would have profound implications for millions of Alzheimer’s patients, stroke survivors — and me. The vision in my right eye was ruined by a condition that devastated the optic nerve behind it, and I’m at risk of the same happening on the left side, in which case I wouldn’t be able to see a paragraph like this one.

Will a gnarly evergreen related to the pistachio tree save me? That’s unclear. But in the meantime, I thought I should hop on a plane and meet my medicine.

Chios has just 50,000 or so year-round residents. It lies much closer to Turkey than to the Greek mainland. And there’s no separating its history from that of mastic.

In the 1300s and 1400s, when Chios was governed by the Republic of Genoa, the punishment for stealing up to 10 pounds of mastic resin was the loss of an ear; for more than 200 pounds, you were hanged. The stone villages in the southern part of the island, near the mastic groves, were built in the manner of fortresses — with high exterior walls, only a few entrances and labyrinthine layouts — to foil any attempts by invaders to steal the resin stored there.

Today there’s fresh interest in mastic — which is a tree or a shrub, depending on the individual plant’s size — as pharmaceutical companies and supplement manufacturers scour the natural world for overlooked or underutilized wonders: sprouting, blooming or oozing remedies developed in the largest laboratory of all. Might something more than superstition explain the spell cast by mastic over time?

“This tree has been selected by humans for 3,000 years,” Leandros Skaltsounis, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Athens, told me when I visited Chios in early July. “We’ve always known that mastic is good for health. Now we’re learning the reasons. It has huge potential.”

I ran into Skaltsounis beside the dusty construction site for a new building to accommodate technicians and equipment dedicated to studying (and, ideally, validating) mastic’s various applications. He had come to Chios for the project’s official blessing, and stood among more than a dozen business executives and scientists who listened as a bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priest sang hymns and prayed that the work done here would end suffering far and wide.

It’s a lot to ask of a plant. But then it’s hardly an unprecedented request. Many indispensable medicines can be traced back to the earth’s forests and fields: another reason to protect and nurture them a whole lot better than we do. Although we now use a synthetic version of aspirin, it was originally made from a compound found in the bark of the willow tree and its kin. Hippocrates reputedly prescribed chewing such bark or drinking tea brewed with it for pain.

The cancer drug taxol, the malaria drug artemisinin, the opiate morphine and much more are the bequests of bark, leaves, flowers, berries, herbs or roots, some of which captured the attention of modern scientists because ancient folk healers venerated them.

There’s a formal name for the quest to find more drugs like these — bioprospecting — and scientists involved in it frequently pore through old tomes for clues to where in nature they should look. They know that we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s out there.

They know, too, that what we’ve already discovered — mastic resin, for example — may be able to do more than we’ve asked of it. That’s why scores of Americans with my vision impairment, known as Naion, are injecting a translucent amalgam of selected compounds in the resin — or a placebo of cottonseed oil — into our thighs or bellies twice weekly for six months. I have no idea which group I fall into or whether my stint as a human pincushion is helping me. Three months in, I haven’t experienced any improvement.

The drug is the raison d’être of an Israeli biotech startup, Regenera Pharma, built on an Iraqi émigré’s research. In animal tests and two small-scale human studies, Regenera established that it was safe and showed enough promise in restoring neural function that the Food and Drug Administration blessed the larger trial that I’m in, which will involve nearly 250 people with Naion at a dozen sites in the United States.

We’re perfect test subjects, because we have just one, discrete neural function to monitor — vision. Either we correctly read more letters on an eye chart or we don’t. But Naion is rare, affecting only about 1 in 10,000 Americans, so we’re only a small fraction of the market that Regenera is after. If the drug, RPh201, works, it or its derivatives could be useful for an array of neurological or neurodegenerative disorders. But that’s a big if.

Though mastic grows throughout the Mediterranean, Jordan Rubinson, chief executive of Regenera, told me that the company gets all its resin from Chios. Only here has it been cultivated with such an eye toward consistency for so long. Only here do mastic trees and shrubs produce so much resin, the result of many centuries of horticultural eugenics. Only here is a visitor constantly encountering, in everything from coffee to soap, the subtle, evanescent taste or perfume of the resin, which is like a suggestion of pine, a hint of vanilla and a rumor of seawater but a confirmation of none of the above.

And only here is mastic not just a facet of the flora but an indispensable engine of the economy and, really, a pillar of identity. Chios is mastic, and islanders are embracing that with a whole new exuberance and marketing savvy. Near the crest of a mountain in the south, a stunning structure of glass and stone houses the Chios Mastic Museum, which opened three years ago. Local tour organizers have christened the medieval stone settlements that I mentioned earlier “mastic villages,” a few of which, like Mesta and Olympi, are surprisingly well preserved. Guides take visitors through those mazes and then beyond them, to touch the fabled trees.

Fabled but frumpy, if I’m honest. Although they cover much of the southern slopes, they’re overshadowed by the silver-leaved olive trees that rise taller and more flamboyant around them, and I would have looked right past them but for their dandruff. That’s how I came to think of the odd layer of white powder — calcium carbonate — on the soil around their forked trunks.

The mastic farmers spread the powder there in early July, a few weeks before they begin the process of cutting diagonal grooves in the mastic’s bark. The resin then rises to fill these wounds — it’s how some plants protect themselves from insects and pathogens, a sort of botanical self-care — and forms what look like giant teardrops. As they harden, they tumble to the calcium-carbonate landing pads, which keep them from sticking to the ground. They’re collected in September and October.

Some 4,500 people on Chios are involved in the mastic industry, which doubled its production over the last 15 years, according to Ilias Smyrnioudis, the head of research and development for the island’s mastic growers association. He gave me a tour of the hangar-like building where an array of food products with mastic resin are produced. The resin has long been a culinary darling in Greece, especially as a chewing gum, a liqueur or a flavoring in sweets. Lately the enterprising islanders have assigned it a much broader gastronomic portfolio.

“Cereal, pasta, tomato sauce, eggplant sauce, olive oil, salt, jams,” Mairi Giannakaki, a senior official with a Chios food company, ticked off as we slalomed around conveyor belts bearing the various items. “We put mastic in everything.”

But the more important production plant, a few miles away, is the one where the resin bound for therapeutic use is cleaned meticulously by dozens of women in sterile garb who buff and sort small, ivory-colored pebbles of it as delicately as if they were cutting diamonds. Some pebbles are shipped that way, to be processed further by the companies receiving them. Some are pulverized first.

Smyrnioudis took me to a room where sealed white and blue boxes — the colors of the Greek flag — were stacked high and far.

“This one is going to Libya,” he said, inspecting the label on one box before moving on to another. “This one says Japan. It’s powder, maybe for toothpaste.” He told me that the resin is exported to more than 45 countries.

“Its gastrointestinal, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic, antimicrobial and anticancer activity, as well as its beneficial effects in oral hygiene and in skin care, are firmly documented,” reads a glossy booklet by Smyrnioudis, who has a doctorate in virus epidemiology and molecular biology. “Firmly” is in the eye of the beholder: While the booklet cites scores of papers and studies, they’re not from particularly prominent medical journals, and in America at least, the resin isn’t the FDA-approved treatment of choice for the ailments it purportedly relieves.

There are clinical trials in Greece to evaluate the resin’s effectiveness in treating inflammatory bowel disease and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Smyrnioudis said that he has seen evidence that it can reduce blood pressure; Skaltsounis, the pharmacology professor, spoke of its potential in lowering cholesterol.

To hear them tell it, there’s virtually nothing mastic can’t do.

In the Chios beach town of Komi, I met Irene Argyraki and her dog, Bella, a stray who came her way several years ago after being hit by a car. Fur and skin had been shorn from one of Bella’s legs, and a veterinarian told Argyraki that Bella “would always be limping, with a very obvious scar.” Bella was neither limping nor scarred when I saw her, a fate that Argyraki credited to daily applications of an ointment with mastic-resin powder that she instructed a local pharmacist to make.

In the central square of the medieval village of Mesta, just a few long strides past the Mastic Memories memorabilia shop, I had coffee with Roula Boura. She and her husband run a group that promotes island tourism, and she, too, is a mastic evangelist.

“When I was pregnant,” she told me, “I needed to digest my food better, so I drank water with mastic powder in it.” Problem solved. “But still I couldn’t sleep,” she added. “I had a very big belly. I was carrying twins.”

I told her that I was injecting mastic for my bum eye, and she lit up, because she said she knew of something else excellent for vision problems: organic olive oil with fennel. I should start consuming it regularly.

Maybe hyperbole, along with mastic, thrives in this sunny climate. Some islanders have claimed that Christopher Columbus was born here, angering Italians no end. Some speak of Chios as the birthplace of Homer, although many scholars believe that Homer wasn’t even a single person but a troupe of poets.

And some questions aren’t easily answered, even after millenniums of asking. I couldn’t be sure — as I walked among the mastic and then headed home to pump yet more of it inside me — whether this was a story of human ingenuity or human gullibility, of shrewd enterprise or blunt opportunism. Regardless, it’s a story of hope, which comes from many sources, some of them gnarly and evergreen.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/opinion/mastic-greek-medicine-chios.html" id="a9a676b5-476d-37ff-a093-cecdd6adce80">The New York Times</a>.

Can This Ancient Greek Medicine Cure Humanity?

CHIOS, Greece — Over my 54 years, I’ve pinned my hopes on my parents, my teachers, my romantic partners, God.

It’s a lot to ask of a plant. But then it’s hardly an unprecedented request. Many indispensable medicines can be traced back to the earth’s forests and fields: another reason to protect and nurture them a whole lot better than we do. Although we now use a synthetic version of aspirin, it was originally made from a compound found in the bark of the willow tree and its kin. Hippocrates reputedly prescribed chewing such bark or drinking tea steeped in it for pain.

“This is one is going to Libya,” he said, inspecting the label on one box before moving on to another. “This one says Japan. It’s powder, maybe for toothpaste.” He told me that the resin is exported to more than 45 countries.

So, yes, his appearance on Capitol Hill on Wednesday — hours of remarks from a man who has barely spoken in public since the start of his investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia — is a big moment. But that’s not the same as a game-changing one. And anyone rightly aghast at this presidency and righteously desperate to move past it needs to recognize that Mueller’s testimony probably isn’t even the beginning of the end.

It should be. That’s obvious from his report, unexamined by most voters. It makes clear that while officials with the Trump campaign didn’t huddle with Vladimir Putin over vodka and blinis to scrawl a to-do list — Column A for the Kremlin, Column B for Javanka — their attitude about help from Moscow was: Here’s the Trump Tower address! Use the far-right elevator in the lobby. Wait, wait, you have emails? Out with them, fast! It’s not digital theft. Merely glasnost for the age of Assange.

And while Trump may not have dispatched goons to kneecap Mueller, he made plenty of other attempts to interfere, impede and intimidate. A vivid, colorful recitation of those efforts would be damning.

But Mueller is neither vivid nor colorful. He takes pride in that, and he twists his fingers into pretzels lest he put them on the scale. He’s so emphatically apolitical and nonpartisan that he became inadvertently political and partisan. His report’s arid language, gummy syntax and thick riddles dulled its findings of awful conduct. He gave Bill Barr room to spin and Trump the opening to claim exoneration, which he has been doing for four months now.

That’s another drag on Mueller’s testimony: the passage of time. He began his work two years and two months ago. He concluded it last March, when Barr scurried to issue his blithe four-page summary of Mueller’s report. A redacted version of the report was released in April. That drawn-out process means that many Americans have grown numb to it, dismissed it as the latest front in a ceaseless war between Republicans and Democrats, or both.

There was also a gap of nearly a month between Barr’s summary and journalists’ ability to call out its staggering inaccuracy and bias. That gap allowed his fiction to jell. There’s no impression as strong as the first one. He knew and exploited that, potentially diminishing the effect of what Mueller now has to say.

In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released about two weeks ago, only 21% of respondents believed there was enough evidence to begin impeachment hearings against the president. That’s the climate in which Mueller is testifying. While I’d bet that the percentage rises after Americans hear and see him — which is more immediate, accessible and credible than listening to others’ analyses of his work — it’s unlikely to go up to 50% or more. House Democrats will still be looking at a situation in which impeachment is, politically, an enormous roll of the dice.

The climate is also one in which seemingly nothing moves public opinion about Trump all that much. It’s extraordinary, and it reflects both the era’s profound political tribalism and the fact that he has been omnipresent for so long that almost all voters have made up their minds: love him, hate him, endure him, check out property in Canada.

For all of his presidency — through that humiliating news conference with Putin in Helsinki, through Michael Cohen’s damning account of his years in Trump’s employ, through a long and fruitless government shutdown — his approval rating has remained between the mid-30s and mid-40s, according to the Marist Poll. That’s an exceptionally narrow band. Not even his racist attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color changed that. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released on Monday put his approval rating at 44%: the highest in that survey since his inauguration. So can Mueller really do to Trump what Trump can’t manage to do to himself?

There’s yet one more reason for Trump’s opponents to be guarded in their expectations of what Mueller’s testimony will achieve. Mueller is answering questions from Republicans on the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees as well as Democrats. This was overlooked in much of the advance media coverage, which focused on precisely what Democrats should ask and exactly how they should word it. But lawmakers who support Trump have the same opportunity to inject their views and massage Mueller’s findings as lawmakers who oppose Trump do. They too are plotting carefully.

Make no mistake: It matters that Mueller have this say and this day. But for November 2020? Maybe not so much.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/opinion/mueller-testify.html" id="ec962c97-046d-3b06-a093-2217decca5e2">The New York Times</a>.

Without courting attention or even familiarizing Americans with the sound of his voice, Robert Mueller became a celebrity, portrayed by Robert De Niro on “Saturday Night Live,” and a potent political symbol: of the stubborn hope for truth and justice if you believed in his cause; of the indefatigable persecution of Donald Trump if you bought the president’s deceits and delusions.

Robert Mueller Testifies! Don't Get Too Excited

Bernie Sanders is trundling toward the primaries as expected — with intense devotion from many of the progressives who rallied around him in 2016 and with concerns about his appeal to minorities, whom he’s courting more aggressively than ever before.

But what to make of Kamala Harris?

As she announced her candidacy in late January, on the observance of Martin Luther King’s birthday, she was on fire. She drew a huge crowd for her first big campaign event, in Oakland, and an enormous television audience for a CNN town hall that showed her to be both fierce and funny.

But a second CNN town hall two and a half weeks ago was an altogether different affair: She came across as timidly noncommittal, feeding a growing chorus of complaint from party strategists and political commentators that her footing was unsure and her momentum was gone. More important, she struggled then — and struggles still — with a question of transcendent importance in a field of contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination as bloated as this one: Why her and not one of her many rivals? What’s distinctive about her message and credentials?

Here’s one answer: She can lay claim to blazing trails in a way that many of them can’t. Her ancestry is Jamaican on her father’s side, Indian on her mother’s, and she was the first black woman and the first Asian-American woman to be the district attorney of San Francisco and then the attorney general of California. She’s only the second black woman elected to the Senate.

That, coupled with the intelligence and poise on display whenever she grills one of the witnesses before the Senate Judiciary Committee, has created more excitement and interest than many of the other Democratic candidates can muster.

And yet she has not yet received the sort of gushing star treatment from the media that Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, two handsome and clean-cut Ivy League grads, have: a discrepancy that, I think, says as much about us as it does about her.

O’Rourke, not Harris, got the cover of Vanity Fair. Buttigieg, not Harris, got the covers of New York magazine and Time.

To judge by that, you’d never know that she out-raised Buttigieg by $5 million in the first quarter of the year or that her second CNN town hall had the most viewership among a sequence of five consecutive CNN town halls — the other four showcased Buttigieg, Warren, Sanders and Amy Klobuchar — on the same night.

You wouldn’t know that in a Morning Consult poll published on Monday, her support from 7 percent of Democratic voters nationwide put her 1 percentage point above Buttigieg and 2 above O’Rourke. (She trailed the third-place finisher, Warren, by 1 point; Joe Biden had the lead with 40 and Sanders was second with 19.) In a Harvard-Harris poll published Friday, Harris took third place, trailing only Biden and Sanders.

Her campaign, then, is a test not only of her mettle but of our biases and receptiveness. In terms of the latter, much of the “electability” chatter of the last few weeks pivots explicitly or implicitly on the assumption that she and Warren would be at a disadvantage in the Rust Belt because white male voters would be less open to them than to Biden or Sanders. She addressed that head-onin a series of appearances in the Midwest over recent days, noting that there are plenty of minority voters in Midwestern cities.

One of her supporters, Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative, reminded Politico: “The only Democratic candidate to win the presidency in the last two decades was a black guy.” Sellers also said that “we’ve allowed ‘working class’ to enter our lexicon and only mean white working class — and totally disregard a whole other swath of voters.” In the 2016 election, he added, “What we saw in Milwaukee, in Detroit and Philadelphia — we lost the presidency where we probably could have focused on those working-class voters of color just a little bit more.”

Be that as it may, Harris has important adjustments to make. She should take firmer positions, even at the risk of angering some voters. It signals character and strength, and sometimes the best way to win is to be willing to lose.

She also needs to find better ways to draw on her life story and let voters in. One of the keys to Buttigieg’s surprising emergence as a top-tier candidate is how lavishly he doles out so much of himself: his military service, his marriage to another man, his linguistic dexterity, his Christianity, his Midwestern roots and more. It allows voters many different points of connection and establishes him as more multi-dimensionally human than politicians usually seem to be.

But there’s little to no sign that Buttigieg has made a meaningful connection with black voters, who play a profoundly important part in the Democratic Party and whose turnout in a general election could be the difference between an end to Donald Trump’s presidency or four more years. That’s Buttigieg’s great challenge, one complicated by complaints that he was insufficiently sensitive to people of color as mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

Other top-tier candidates have other problems. Biden’s is his tendency toward ill-advised tangents, captured by a strange riffduring his remarks at a campaign stop in Iowa last week. He dismissed China as a serious economic rival of the United States. “China is going to eat our lunch?” he said. “Come on, man.” Referring to rampant corruption there, he concluded: “They’re not competition for us.”

He’s right that China wrestles with mighty internal tensions and growing pains that could severely diminish its velocity at any point. There’s room and cause for intelligent, nuanced observations about those and about the infinite reasons that the Chinese way — with its unbearable caps on individual liberty — isn’t to be envied by Americans. But he was flippant and misleading. China is competing with us, and it’s competing well, and if his strategy for the industrial Midwest is to tell displaced and anxious factory workers that their fears are hallucinatory, I doubt he’ll have the enormous traction in the region that his backers and many pundits project.

Sanders has to show voters something more and more varied than he did in 2016, lest his bid seem a tired, one-note rerun, and it’s unclear that he has that in him. He also lacks the warmth that commentators are so quick to insist on from female candidates, who are given demerits for the same perceived personality characteristics that are cast as quirks in Sanders.

It’s hard to figure out where O’Rourke stands right now: Ever since that Vanity Fair coronation, he has steered as clear of national media as Buttigieg has hurtled toward it, but he has been spending oodles of time and energy on the ground in early primary states, and that retail campaigning could pay off, especially given his undeniable skills on the stump.

As for Warren, my gut is that her worst patch — the DNA test— is behind her and that she’s on an upward swing. She has been very smart about tailoring her message and movements around who she is: a proud wonk. In that manner she is achieving the authenticity that so many voters crave.

But it’s my sense that Trump would have a harder time campaigning against Harris in a general election — that he would be more flummoxed by her — than against many of the other Democratic aspirants.

Certainly I agree with the opening language in a lengthy profile of Harris in The Atlantic this month: “No other matchup would be as riveting — or as revealing — as Harris versus Trump.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/opinion/kamala-harris-2020.html" id="f2f206eb-dcb6-378d-ab9a-1758806cc1de">The New York Times</a>.

There’s nothing terribly surprising about how Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is playing out. She’s scoring big points for her seriousness, reflected in a raft of detailed policy proposals. But many Democratic leaders and voters experience her as too strident, and she scares big donors, especially those in the financial industries.

The Mysteries of Kamala Harris

That’s emerging as a central challenge of the Democratic presidential primary. And it’s worrying me.

I’m worried because there was an actual mini-debate on the left recently over whether Pete Buttigieg is gay enough. Do his whiteness, upper-middle-class background and Harvard and Oxford degrees nullify his experience as a minority and undercut his status as a trailblazer? This question is out there, in both senses of that phrase.

I’m worried because it in some ways echoes an earlier question about whether Kamala Harris — whose father came from Jamaica, whose mother came from India and whose husband is white — is black enough.

And I’m worried because of what Joe Biden is going through — because of the intensity of the censure that he faced after Nevada politician Lucy Flores’ allegation and because of the fixation on precisely what kind of apology he must issue.

Flores of course accused him of coming up behind her, touching her shoulders and kissing the back of her head: a gesture that’s inappropriate and demeaning. Biden says that he doesn’t recall the incident, from 2014. The media has given this breathless coverage.

I’ve written that I don’t think Biden, 76, should run, for many reasons, including that someone in politics as long as he has been carries too much baggage; that Democratic voters have generally preferred candidates significantly younger than he is; and that he mismanaged and failed miserably in his two prior presidential campaigns.

But I feel just as strongly that Democrats need to show some proportion, realism and reason as they assess and react to candidates (or, in Biden’s case, probable candidates). With Biden especially but with others as well, too many Democrats aren’t doing that.

It’s nonnegotiable that Democrats hold their presidential aspirants to high standards on issues of racial justice, gender equality and more. It’s crucial that the party nominate someone who can credibly represent its proudly diverse ranks. But it’s also important that the party not demand a degree of purity that nobody attains.

I’m not recommending the Republicans’ course in accepting and protecting Donald Trump, which was to bury principles so deep that they may never be exhumed. I’m saying that to turn the Democratic primary into a nonstop apology tour when the nominee will be going up against a president never expected to apologize for anything is a risky strategy. It obsesses over the flaws in candidates who have many strengths, defining them in terms of what they seek forgiveness for. It blurs the line between job interview and inquisition. Taken too far, it rips contenders to shreds before Trump even takes out his scissors.

As for the mini-debate about Buttigieg’s gayness, it arose principally from a column in Slate, which included the following paragraph:

“A marginalized sexual orientation can remain unspoken and unnoticed for as long as a queer person desires. A gay man who conforms to a critical mass of gendered expectations can move through life without his sexuality attending every interaction, even after he comes out. Buttigieg, for instance, would register on only the most finely tuned gaydar. Most people who are aware of his candidacy probably know he’s gay, but his every appearance doesn’t activate the ‘Hey, that’s that homosexual gentleman’ response in the average brain. That doesn’t mean he’s not gay enough — there’s really no such measure. It just means that he might not be up against quite the same hurdles that a gay candidate without such sturdy ties to straight culture would be.”

The author is asserting that Buttigieg, 37, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, doesn’t come across as particularly gay, meaning ... what? That he lacks stereotypical mannerisms? That his voice isn’t high-pitched? I’m kind of floored, because I and other gay people around my age (54) or older spent most of our lives educating people about the bigotry and inaccuracy of those very stereotypes and trumpeting the message — the truth! — that gay people can be every bit as buttoned-down and strait-laced as, well, Pete Buttigieg! Now his divergence from those stereotypes is deemed remarkable and in need of dissection? Strange days indeed.

Also, I guarantee you that Buttigieg’s adherence to “a critical mass of gendered expectations” and failure to “activate” the homosexual-alert siren don’t mean that being gay has been incidental to his life and is incidental to his perspective. That he didn’t come out until he was 33 is all the proof you need that he wrestled privately with his sexual orientation and with fears about how the world would respond to it and to him.

And when I first met and interviewed him nearly three years ago, this is how he argued that Democrats should reclaim the word “freedom” from Republicans, who have tried to reserve it for their brand:

“You’re not free if you have crushing medical debt. You’re not free if you’re being treated differently because of who you are. What has really affected my personal freedom more: the fact that I don’t have the freedom to pollute a certain river, or the fact that for part of my adult life, I didn’t have the freedom to marry somebody I was in love with? We’re talking about deep, personal freedom.”

He sounds sufficiently gay to me. His powers of empathy seem plenty informed by his sexual orientation. And we need to stop making assumptions about how well someone can understand and address what minorities go through based on his or her looks or vocal inflections or anything of the sort. That’s the quintessence of prejudice. And it’s the antithesis of enlightenment.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/opinion/pete-buttigieg-joe-biden.html" id="92cd8899-4957-3f75-a2cc-a14988b5102d">The New York Times</a>.

How do Democrats properly vet their candidates for president without cannibalizing them? How do they rightly insist on sensitive and inclusive leaders while making allowances for past mistakes, present quirks, human messiness and the differences in the conversation and the culture now versus 10 or 20 or 40 years ago?

Mayor Pete Is Plenty Gay

He recounted the involvement of one father and mother in their son’s personal (hah!) essay, which they didn’t trust him to ace himself. They drafted it, focusing of course on the hardship that he had overcome. But when they showed it to him, he spotted a minor problem. What they’d described — his mom’s difficult pregnancy, a sequence of visits to medical specialists, so much fear, so much suspense — predated his arrival in this world. Poignant as it was, he could take zero credit for it.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the indictments of dozens of wealthy parents, including Emmy-winning actress Felicity Huffman, for employing various forms of bribery and fraud to get their kids into highly selective schools. Some allegedly paid college coaches, including at Yale and Stanford, to lie and say their children were special recruits for sports the kids didn’t even play. Others allegedly paid exam administrators to let someone smarter take tests for their children. Millions of dollars changed hands.

It’s a galling exposé of widespread cheating by families who are already well-to-do and well-connected, but it’s not really a surprising one. Anyone who knows anything about the cutthroat competition for precious spots at top-tier schools realizes how ugly and unfair it can be: how many corners are cut, how many schemes are hatched, how big a role money plays, how many advantages privilege can buy.

The wrinkle here is that the schemes were actually criminal and will apparently be prosecuted, and for once the colleges’ administrators were in the dark about them. But they’re versions of routine favor trading and favoritism that have long corrupted the admissions process, leeching merit from the equation.

It may be legal to pledge $2.5 million to Harvard just as your son is applying — which is what Jared Kushner’s father did for him — and illegal to bribe a coach to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but how much of a difference is there, really? Both elevate money over accomplishment. Both are ways of cutting the line.

It may be legal to give $50,000 to a private consultant who massages your child’s transcript and perfumes your child’s essays, and illegal to pay someone for a patently fictive test score, but aren’t both exercises in deception reserved for those who can afford them?

And while ghostwriting, whether by consultants or parents, may not be detectable or at least provable, it happens all the time and contributes to applications as bogus as the ones that came to federal prosecutors’ attention.

What a message it sends to the children: You’re not good enough to do this on your own. You needn’t be. Your parents and your counselors know the rules, and when and how to break them. Just sit back and let entitlement run its course.

The Jared Kushner story was uncovered more than a decade ago by Daniel Golden, who showcased it in his 2006 book, “The Price of Admission,” a definitive account of the strings pulled by rich families like Kushner’s. Jared indeed got into Harvard, despite grades and test scores that were, according to Golden’s reporting, well below what Harvard typically wants.

I spoke with Golden just after the Justice Department detailed the bribery and fraud scam, which he characterized as “an extreme outgrowth of what I wrote about.”

“I had a chapter about how the wealthy benefit from athletic preference because there are so many white patrician sports that most kids never get a chance to play,” he said. Indeed, inner-city schools aren’t sending as many rowers or water polo players to the Ivy League as the storied boarding schools of New England.

Golden added that the affluent kids in the just-revealed scam seized an edge beyond that. “They didn’t even bother to get on the team,” he said.

They got away with it, the Justice Department charges, because coaches went along with it, accepting bribes. The people indicted by federal prosecutors or implicated in what happened worked at Wake Forest, the University of Southern California, Georgetown, UCLA and other prestigious schools. According to court documents, the former head coach of the women’s soccer team at Yale pleaded guilty almost a year ago and became a cooperating witness who helped federal prosecutors gather evidence against others.

There are many takeaways from this appalling story. One is how crassly hypocritical parents can be. I bet that more than a few of those charged are proud liberals who talked about the importance of equal opportunity and an even playing field, then went out and did whatever it took to push their kids into the winner’s circle. In this case, they doomed them, imparting garbage values and mortifying them in the process.

While colleges pledge fairer admissions processes and more diverse student bodies, they don’t patrol what’s going on with nearly enough earnestness and energy to honor that promise. They’re ripe to be gamed because the college admissions process is a game.

The spell that some of these colleges cast over applicants and their families — and the magic attributed to them — are absurd. But they are indeed part of an infrastructure of perks and packaging that isn’t uniformly accessible.

When struggling Americans seethe at “the elite,” they mean parents who exploit their station to try to guarantee it for their kids. They mean the self-regarding colleges that allowed that to happen.

When they say the system is rigged, they have this kind of wrongdoing — and the widely accepted and entirely legal shenanigans that are none too far from it — in mind. Our country’s best schools are supposed to be engines of social mobility and the gateways to dreams. Sometimes they’re just another sour deal.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/opinion/college-bribery-admissions.html" id="8bdebe56-8b15-344d-a0b4-e18a98b49a38">The New York Times</a>.

One of the funniest stories I ever heard about the college admissions madness came from an independent consultant who was paid handsomely to guide families through it and increase the odds that Harvard or Yale said yes.

Bribes to Get Into Yale and Stanford? What Else Is New?

That’s a trick question, of course. There’s no magic number. There’s no number, period. And that’s because the anti-vaccine crowd (or anti-vaxxers) aren’t trafficking in anything as concrete, mundane and quaint as facts. They’re not really engaged in a debate about medicine. They’re immersed in a world of conspiracies, in the dark shadows where no data can be trusted, nothing is what it seems and those who buy the party line are pitiable sheep.

And, boy, are they living at the right time, when so much information and misinformation swirl by so quickly that it’s easy to confuse the two and even easier to grab hold and convince yourself of whatever it is you prefer to believe. With Google searches, you find the ostensible proof you seek. On social media, you bask in all the affirmation you could possibly want.

The parents who are worried or sure about grave risks from vaccines reflect a broader horror that has flickered or flared in everything from the birther movement to “Pizzagate,” that nonsense about children as Democratic sex slaves in the imagined basement of a Washington pizza joint. Their recklessness and the attendant re-emergence of measles aren’t just a public health crisis. They’re a public sanity one, emblematic of too many people’s willful disregard of evidence, proud suspicion of expertise and estrangement from reason.

Again and again, until blue in the face, medical authorities have debunked the renegade assertion that there’s a link between the MMR vaccine, so named because it inoculates against measles, mumps and rubella, and autism. On Tuesday, a group of Danish researchers who looked at more than 650,000 children over 10 years announced that they had found no such association.

Again and again, until out of breath, those same medical authorities have also explained why making sure that all or nearly all children are vaccinated is so crucial: It creates a critical mass of resistance, known as herd immunity, that doesn’t give a disease the chance to spread.

Nonetheless, enough parents plug their ears that the World Health Organization lists “vaccine hesitancy” — a euphemism if ever I heard one — among 10 global health threats in 2019.

They choose their own alternative facts. Take Darla Shine, wife of Bill Shine, who just announced his resignation as White House communications director. Last month, amid alarms about new cases of measles, she took to Twitter with the cockamamie claim that not being vaccinated and coming down with measles or mumps was a big-picture plus, a hardiness builder that could help a person fight cancer down the line.

“I had the #Measles #Mumps #Chickenpox as a child and so did every kid I knew,” she tweeted, adding that her own kids were, regrettably, vaccinated. “They will never have the lifelong natural immunity I have. Come breathe on me!”

Thanks but no thanks. I suspect my breath is better spent elsewhere.

A week and a half ago, a Republican state representative in Arizona said on her Facebook page that pressure on parents to vaccinate children “is not based on American values but, rather, Communist.” Bet you didn’t know that the original symbol of the Russian Revolution wasn’t a hammer and sickle. It was a syringe.

I shouldn’t joke, and I should add that anti-vaxxers run the political gamut. They’re on the left, their professed concern for social welfare proved hollow by the risk that their unvaccinated children pose to newborns and others who haven’t yet been — or can’t be — vaccinated. They’re on the right, among people who see the government and its edicts as oppressive forces. Paranoia has no partisan affiliation.

I should also add that alternative facts had currency long before Kellyanne Conway christened them such and that junk science, nutty hypotheses and showy apostasies have been around forever. Humans aren’t rationalists. We’re romantics, and the world is wondrous when you believe that you belong to some brave and special tribe and have experienced enlightenment — about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, about the existence of extraterrestrials, about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, about vaccines — that all the less perceptive, more gullible conformists out there simply can’t comprehend.

But there are differences now that make the cranks that much more baffling, numerous and pernicious. For starters, they fly ever more stubbornly in the face of sophisticated research and hard-earned knowledge. Beneficiaries of wisdom that prior generations lacked, they toss it away, wasting and mocking progress itself.

At the same time, in many educational circles, there’s as much talk of students’ individual truths as of the truth. Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, said that social science and history courses increasingly emphasize that truth is situational and that “very few things are always true all the time.” That healthy skepticism can turn unhealthy when it leads to the rejection of incontestable realities. There’s “a crisis of authority, a crisis of expertise,” Donovan told me.

There’s also a man in the White House, at the Resolute Desk, who makes grand pronouncements based on random conversations; implores Americans to distrust traditional institutions and conventional sources of information; and promotes conspiracy theories (millions of illegal votes, a celebration among Muslims in Jersey City on 9/11, and on and on). He has specifically echoed and validated the apprehensions of anti-vaxxers. Whether he’s symptom or cause doesn’t matter. He’s dangerous either way.

Then there’s the internet, which turbocharges everything. “I don’t want to say it’s the only force, because there was Holocaust denialism before the internet — there was even AIDS denialism before the internet — but it’s an enormous, enormous force: the most effective echo chamber in the history of mankind,” said Michael Specter, a staff writer for The New Yorker who is the author of the 2009 book “Denialism,” about irrational thinking. He added, “It’s very difficult for people, no matter how well educated they are, to parse what’s the wheat and what’s the chaff on the internet.”

For example, anti-vaccine propaganda — some of which was spread by Russian trolls and bots as part of their sowing of discord before the 2016 election — can look as official and trustworthy as legitimate information. “And as websites get better and Twitter becomes something that people not only look at but rely on, it’s very difficult to get away from falsehoods and conspiracies,” Specter told me. “We’re living in a world where facts are just another element of your decision-making process.”

One of the best explanations of that came in a 2016 essay in The Times Magazine by Jonathan Mahler, who noted “a radical new relationship between citizen and truth.” He wrote that millions of people “are abandoning traditional sources of information, from the government to the institutional media, in favor of a DIY approach to fact-finding.”

They turn to the internet, which is both a hall of mirrors and an overstuffed bazaar. It lets them customize their input and thus tailor their reality, which is reinforced by the like-minded company they keep online. They become surer that climate change is a hoax, that the deep state plots against the bold warriors who threaten it, that a fake Melania Trump is sometimes used as a substitute for the actual one. And they open the floodgates to so much fiction that fact is swept away.

Where’s the vaccine against that?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/the-real-horror-of-the-anti-vaxxers.html" id="5673592c-c215-3e4c-ab47-7b0901b7f90e">The New York Times</a>.

How many studies do you have to throw at the vaccine hysterics before they quit? How much of a scientific consensus, how many unimpeachable experts and how exquisitely rational an argument must you present?

The Real Horror of the Anti-Vaxxers

In November 2016 we did. As anyone paying close attention then knew and anyone who finally woke up over these last few ugly days must now admit, we gave the supreme prize and ultimate compliment — leadership of the most powerful nation on earth — to a man who wouldn’t know the truth if it raced toward with him sirens blaring, ran over him, then backed up and did it again; whose loyalties stand as firm as a strand of overcooked linguine; whose vanity makes Narcissus look like a mere pretender; and who will sacrifice whatever and whomever he must on the altar of his own spurious magnificence. What he lacks in moral fiber he makes up for in gilt. It sufficed to bring him his treasure and, for 72 years and counting, spare him his reckoning.

There are several kinds of success stories. We emphasize the ones starring brilliant inventors and earnest toilers. We celebrate sweat and stamina. We downplay the schemers, the short cuts and the subterfuge. But for every ambitious person who has the goods and is prepared to pay his or her dues, there’s another who doesn’t and is content to play the con. In the Trump era and the Trump orbit, these ambassadors of a darker side of the American dream have come to the fore.

What a con Holmes played with Theranos. For those unfamiliar with the tale, which the journalist John Carreyrou told brilliantly in “Bad Blood,” she dropped out of Stanford at 19 to pursue her Silicon Valley dream, intent on becoming a billionaire and on claiming the same perch in our culture and popular imagination that Steve Jobs did. She modeled her work habits and management style after his. She dressed as he did, in black turtlenecks. She honed a phony voice, deeper than her real one.

And for a good long while it worked, which was more than could be said of the product that Theranos peddled, a magical black box that was supposed to be able, with just a few drops of blood from the prick of a finger, to screen for scores of ailments and diseases. She spoke, with immaculate assurance, of a day when it might be on everyone’s bathroom counter: a time saver, a money saver and quite possibly a lifesaver. She sent early, imperfect versions of it to Walgreens pharmacies, which used it and thus doled out erroneous diagnoses to patients. She blocked peer reviews of it and buried evidence of its failures.

This went on not for months but for years, as Holmes attracted more than $900 million of investment money and lured a breathtakingly distinguished board of directors including two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger; a former secretary of defense, William Perry; and a future secretary of defense, James Mattis. What they had before them wasn’t proof or even the sturdy promise of revolutionary technology. It was a self-appointed wunderkind who struck a persuasive pose and talked an amazing game.

She was eventually found out, and faces criminal charges that could put her in prison. But there’s no guarantee of that. Meantime she lives in luxury. God bless America.

Theranos was perhaps an outlier in the scope of its deceptions, but not in the deceptions themselves. In an article titled “The Ugly Unethical Underside of Silicon Valley” in Fortune magazine in December 2016, Erin Griffith tallied a list of aborted ventures with more shimmer and swagger than substance, asserting, “As the list of startup scandals grows, it’s time to ask whether entrepreneurs are taking ‘fake it till you make it’ too far.”

Interesting word there: fake. A president who’s a textbook study in the psychological phenomenon of projection — by which you attribute to others the flaws that you possess — uses it all the time. What did he call Cohen’s interchanges with House lawmakers on Wednesday? “A fake hearing,” of course.

Dangle the prospects of celebrity and riches, and plenty of charlatans rush forward. So it stands to reason that a country of supersize celebrity and riches would have a surfeit of charlatans, including some who see even the White House as fair game. Cohen’s testimony confirmed yet again how much pure bluster fueled Trump’s quest, and how heavily Trump’s entire career leaned on shady arithmetic, personal myth making and intimidation: all arrows abundant in the quivers of Holmes and her Silicon Valley kin.

But that testimony was also a reminder of how gullible their audiences are, how readily we all believe when we perceive some benefit in the transaction. This isn’t just the land of the fraud but the home of the knave, and Cohen implored Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters nationwide to learn from his own credulity. It takes two to bamboozle: the illusionist and the enraptured.

I sometimes think that when Trump came down that escalator at Trump Tower, he didn’t just begin a presidential campaign. He pinched the edge of a scab on our body politic and began to tug, revealing all the racism, resentments and partisan fury beneath it. He gave us a fresh, jolting glimpse of just how much depravity and even criminality exist among the powerful (and the power-mad). Look at his own collaborators: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, David Pecker and lesser reprobates who either still serve in his administration (Alex Acosta, Jared Kushner) or did until they went too far (Tom Price, Scott Pruitt).

They’re favor traders, corner cutters, rule breakers, perk hoarders. They’re notorious examples of types that many of us see all the time. How many people owe their success to exaggerating their talents, grabbing credit when it doesn’t belong to them and projecting a potency that’s really smoke and mirrors? How many depend on the continued support of people who bought the performance in the beginning and don’t want to admit that they were duped? Trump and Holmes are such achievers in extremis.

They also have a competitive advantage: They’re without shame. There’s a whole lot you can do once you’ve slipped that tether. To the unscrupulous go the spoils.

Trump’s amorality play contradicts our paeans to the Puritan work ethic. It’s not the script that we teach our children. But with Trump in the White House, validated by tens of millions of votes, it may well be what some of them are learning.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/opinion/trump-cohen-theranos-fraud.html" id="804673fc-f0ef-34c7-aa52-dd465dd61731">The New York Times</a>.

Maybe the best book I read last year was “Bad Blood,” about the epic sham of the biotech startup Theranos and its delusional creator, Elizabeth Holmes. I had trouble shaking it, and it roared back into my mind on Wednesday, when Michael Cohen testified publicly before the House Oversight Committee and retraced the mountain of lies buttressing Donald Trump’s business empire and the clouds of fiction preventing any clear view of it. This country of ours doesn’t lack for frauds, I thought. We we...

Donald Trump's Phony America

He’s talking about the Vatican. And he’s delivering a bombshell.

Although the book’s publishers have kept it under tight wraps, I obtained a copy in advance of its release next Thursday. It will come out in eight languages and 20 countries, under the title “Sodoma,” as in Sodom, in Western Europe and “In the Closet of the Vatican” in the United States, Britain and Canada.

It includes the claim that about 80 percent of the male Roman Catholic clergy members who work at the Vatican, around the pope, are gay. It contends that the more showily homophobic a Vatican official is, the more likely he belongs to that crowd, and that the higher up the chain of command you go, the more gays you find. And not all of them are celibate. Not by a long shot.

I’m supposed to cheer, right? I’m an openly gay man. I’m a sometime church critic. Hooray for the exposure of hypocrisy in high places and the affirmation that some of our tormentors have tortured motives. Thank heaven for the challenge to their moral authority. Let the sun in. Let the truth out.

But I’m bothered and even a little scared. Whatever Martel’s intent, “In the Closet of the Vatican” may be less a constructive reckoning than a stockpile of ammunition for militant right-wing Catholics who already itch to conduct a witch hunt for gay priests, many of whom are exemplary — and chaste — servants of the church. Those same Catholics oppose sensible and necessary reforms, and will point to the book’s revelations as proof that the church is already too permissive and has lost its dignity and its way.

Although Martel himself is openly gay, he sensationalizes gayness by devoting his inquiry to Catholic officials who have had sex with men, not ones who have had sex with women. The promise of celibacy that priests make forbids all sexual partners, and what violates Catholic teaching isn’t just gay sex but sex outside marriage. In that context, Martel’s focus on homosexuality buys into the notion that it’s especially troubling and titillating.

His tone doesn’t help. “The world I am discovering, with its 50 shades of gay, is beyond comprehension,” he writes. It will seem to some readers “a fairy tale.” He challenges the conventional wisdom that Pope Francis, who has detractors all around him, is “among the wolves,” clarifying, “It’s not quite true: he’s among the queens.” Maybe it’s better in the original French, but this language is at once profoundly silly and deeply offensive.

The sourcing of much of “In the Closet of the Vatican” is vague, and other Vatican experts told me that the 80 percent figure is neither knowable nor credible.

“It’s not a scientifically based accusation — it’s an ideologically based one,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a columnist for The National Catholic Reporter who visits the Vatican frequently and has written several highly regarded books about the Roman Catholic hierarchy. “One of the problems is that Catholic bishops have never allowed any kind of research in this area. They don’t want to know how many gay priests there are.” Independent studies put the percentage of gay men among Catholic priests in the United States at 15 to 60 percent.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Martel stressed that the 80 percent isn’t his estimate but that of a former priest at the Vatican whom he quotes by name in the book. But he presents that quotation without sufficient skepticism and, in his own words, writes, “It’s a big majority.”

He says that “In the Closet of the Vatican” is informed by about 1,500 interviews over four years and the contributions of scores of researchers and other assistants. I covered the Vatican for The Times for nearly two years, and the book has a richness of detail that’s persuasive. It’s going to be widely discussed and hotly debated.

It depicts different sexual subcultures, including clandestine meetings between Vatican officials and young heterosexual Muslim men in Rome who work as prostitutes. It names names, and while many belong to Vatican officials and other priests who are dead or whose sexual identities have come under public scrutiny before, Martel also lavishes considerable energy on the suggestion that Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, and other towering figures in the church are gay.

Perhaps the most vivid of the double lives under Martel’s gaze is that of Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo of Colombia, who died a little over a decade ago. According to the book, he prowled the ranks of seminarians and young priests for men to seduce and routinely hired male prostitutes, sometimes beating them up after sex. All the while he promoted the church’s teaching that all gay men are “objectively disordered” and embraced its ban on priests who are believed to have “deep-seated homosexual tendencies,” whether they act on them or not.

Part of my concern about the book is the timing of its release, which coincides precisely with an unprecedented meeting at the Vatican about sexual abuse in the church. For the first time, the pope has summoned the presidents of every Catholic bishops conference around the world to discuss this topic alone. But the book “is also bound to shift attention away from child abuse and onto gay priests in general, once again falsely conflating in people’s minds homosexuality and pedophilia,” the Rev. James Martin, a best-selling Jesuit author, said in a recent tweet. He’s right.

The book doesn’t equate them, and in fact makes the different, important point that the church’s culture of secrecy — a culture created in part by gay priests’ need to conceal who they are — works against the exposure of molesters who are guilty of crimes.

As David Clohessy, a longtime advocate for survivors of sexual abuse by priests, said to me on the phone a few days ago: “Many priests have a huge disincentive to report sexual misdeeds by colleagues. They know they’re vulnerable to being blackballed. It’s celibacy and the secretive, rigid, ancient all-male hierarchy that contributes to the cover-up and, therefore, more abuse.” Abuse has no sexual orientation, a fact made clear by many cases of priests having sex with girls and adult women, including nuns, whose victimization by priests was publicly acknowledged by Pope Francis for the first time early this month.

Marveling at the mysterious sanctum that his new book explores, French journalist Frédéric Martel writes that “even in San Francisco’s Castro” there aren’t “quite as many gays.”

Frank Bruni

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