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THE UNTHINKABLE is starting to look like the inevitable: Absent an extraordinary effort from people who understand the menace he represents, Donald Trump is likely to be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. At this stage, even an extraordinary effort might fall short. But history will not look kindly on GOP leaders who fail to do everything in their power to prevent a bullying demagogue from becoming their standard-bearer.
A few days ago we criticized Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus for his assertion that a Trump victory in November would silence the doubters. “Winning is the antidote to a lot of things,” Mr. Priebus had said. We argued that winning would not erase the bigotry and ugliness of Mr. Trump’s campaign, nor remove the dangers of a Trump presidency. On Wednesday, the GOP chairman, perhaps wanting to show that he can match Mr. Trump in eloquence, responded: “That is the stupidest editorial that I have ever seen.”
So it falls to other leaders to decide if their party will stand for anything other than winning. A political party, after all, isn’t meant to be merely a collection of consultants, lobbyists and functionaries angling for jobs. It is supposed to have principles: in the Republican case, at least as we have always understood it, to include a commitment to efficient government, free markets and open debate.
Now it is faced with a front-runner who, in the interval between the two Priebus comments cited above, said of a protester, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” This is a front-runner with no credible agenda and no suitable experience. He wants the United States to commit war crimes, including torture and the murder of innocent relatives of suspected terrorists. He admires Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and sees no difference between Mr. Putin’s victims and people killed in the defense of the United States. He would round up and deport 11 million people, a forced movement on a scale not attempted since Stalin or perhaps Pol Pot. He has, during the course of his campaign, denigrated women, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, people with disabilities and many more. He routinely trades in wild falsehoods and doubles down when his lies are exposed.
Certainly there are Republican leaders who understand all this: people such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.); former president George W. Bush and former presidential nominees Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney; and governors, senators and community leaders across the country. Some have spoken up over the course of Mr. Trump’s campaign, and then stepped back; others have been silent. The silence may reflect an absence of courage and also an element of calculation: There was an assumption that Mr. Trump would fade, and that confronting him would only make him stronger.
The calculations have proved wrong. If Mr. Trump is to be stopped, now is the time for leaders of conscience to say they will not and cannot support him and to do what they can to stop him. We understand that Mr. Trump would seek to use this to his benefit, and that he might succeed. But what is the choice? Is the Republican Party truly not going to resist its own debasement?
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Bolivian President Evo Morales shows a photograph of graffiti that reads “No more Indians” during a news conference Feb. 24, 2016, at Quemado Palace in La Paz. (Aizar Raldes/AFP/Getty Images)
Voters in Bolivia have narrowly rejected a constitutional change that would have allowed leftist Evo Morales, South America’s longest-sitting president, to run for a fourth term and potentially extend his rule to 2025.
The final tally was close, with the “no” vote winning 51 percent to 49 percent for “yes,” with 99.8 percent of votes counted as of Wednesday afternoon.
Morales acknowledged the defeat in a televised appearance Wednesday morning, assuring supporters that the “fight against capitalism and neoliberalism” would soldier on.
“We’ve lost a battle but not the war,” he said. “This isn’t the end of Evo.”
Morales, 56, has spent a decade in power, and the loss was the first electoral setback for the popular former coca grower, who is the first Bolivian president elected from the country’s long-downtrodden indigenous majority.
But even Morales was not immune to the anti-incumbent climate sweeping South America, where leftist leaders have dominated elections for more than a decade by promising to redistribute wealth and boost social spending, buoyed by strong global demand for the region’s commodity exports.
Now the party is ending, as Chinese demand for raw materials goes slack and government revenue from commodity exports is shriveling. Even the most successful South American leaders are paying a price.
Unlike Argentina and Venezuela, where entrenched leftist parties were thrown out amid deep financial troubles, Bolivia has a strong economy, projected to grow 4.5 percent this year. But after a recent spate of scandals, many Bolivians have grown weary of Morales, who took office in 2006. Voters in the region are also increasingly skeptical of attempts to remove democratic checks on power, said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank specializing in Latin American affairs.
“Even Evo’s supporters, who credit him for the country’s progress in recent years, wanted to send a message that three terms in power is more than enough and it’s healthy for someone else to take charge,” Shifter said. “Bolivia under Evo may have shown some authoritarian tendencies, but it has a democratic system, and it’s natural and normal for people to want change and a fresh political environment after such a long stretch of one man in office.”
“Evo should now begin to groom a successor, but he seems to be resisting that,” Shifter added.
Morales was reelected to a third term in 2014 with 60 percent of the vote. Mixing fiery socialist speeches and denunciations of American “imperialism” with far more quiet pro-business prudence, he built roads and gas pipelines while also accumulating one of the world’s biggest cash reserves. This pleased everyone from rural Bolivian quinoa farmers to Wall Street bond traders.
But a wave of scandals appeared to hurt his proposed constitutional change to lift term limits. In recent months, Morales acknowledged that he had fathered a child in 2007 with a girlfriend nearly half his age.
The ex-girlfriend later got an executive job working for a Chinese company with almost $500 million in government contracts, and Morales claimed he no longer had a relationship with the woman despite appearing with her in a recent photo.
Powerful indigenous groups in the country have broken with him, too, accusing Morales of ignoring their plight, and the president was also hurt by a video last year that showed him ordering an aide to bend down and tie his shoelaces.
Morales on Wednesday accused opponents of dirty tricks, racism and a negative media campaign. He said that “the time had come” for tighter regulations on the Bolivian press.
Sunday’s ballot measure lost by just 115,000 ballots out of 5.2 million cast, and it’s possible Morales could float a similar referendum in the future, before his term expires in 2020. The region’s negative economic outlook does not bode well, but Shifter said Morales should not be underestimated.
“Hugo Chávez, too, suffered a setback in 2007 when he lost a vote to abolish term limits — only to come back later to get it passed,” Shifter said. “Evo is resourceful. He did not lose reelection — he just lost a referendum that would have allowed him to run again in 2019.”
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Nick Miroff is a Latin America correspondent for The Post, roaming from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to South America’s southern cone. He has been a staff writer since 2006.
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High-ranking members of the elite hunting society, St. Hubertus, were staying at Cibolo Creek Ranch at the same time as Justice Scalia in the days leading up to his death. Here's what you need to know about the group. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 11 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-ranking members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.
After Scalia’s death Feb. 13, the names of the 35 other guests at the remote resort, along with details about Scalia’s connection to the hunters, have remained largely unknown. A review of public records shows that some of the men who were with Scalia at the ranch are connected through the International Order of St. Hubertus, whose members gathered at least once before at the same ranch for a celebratory weekend.
Members of the worldwide, male-only society wear dark-green robes emblazoned with a large cross and the motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures,” according to the group’s website. Some hold titles, such as Grand Master, Prior and Knight Grand Officer. The Order’s name is in honor of Hubert, the patron saint of hunters and fishermen.
Cibolo Creek Ranch owner John Poindexter and C. Allen Foster, a prominent Washington lawyer who traveled to the ranch with Scalia by private plane, hold leadership positions within the Order. It is unclear what, if any, official association Scalia had with the group.
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The Texas resort ranch spanned 30,000 acres.
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Feb. 14, 2016 One of the ponds outside the suite where Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at Cibolo Creek Ranch, the West Texas resort that stretches over 30,000 acres. Matthew Busch/Getty Images
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“There is nothing I can add to your observation that among my many guests at Cibolo Creek Ranch over the years some members of the International Order of St. Hubertus have been numbered,” Poindexter said in an email. “I am aware of no connection between that organization and Justice Scalia.”
An attorney for the Scalia family did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Two other private planes that landed at the ranch for the weekend are linked to two men who have held leadership positions with the Texas chapter of the Order, according to a review of state business filings and flight records from the airport.
After Scalia’s death, Poindexter told reporters that he met Scalia at a “sports group” gathering in Washington. The U.S. chapter of the International Order of St. Hubertus lists a suite on M Street NW in the District as its headquarters, although the address is only a mailbox in a United Parcel Service store.
The International Order of St. Hubertus, according to its website, is a “true knightly order in the historical tradition.” In 1695, Count Franz Anton von Sporck founded the society in Bohemia, which is in modern-day Czech Republic.
The group’s Grand Master is “His Imperial Highness Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke of Austria,” according to the Order’s website. The next gathering for “Ordensbrothers” and guests is an “investiture” March 10 in Charleston, S.C.
The society’s U.S. chapter launched in 1966 at the famous Bohemian Club in San Francisco, which is associated with the all-male Bohemian Grove — one of the most well-known secret societies in the country.
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Antonin Scalia, the influential and most provocative member of the Supreme Court, has died. He was 79.
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Oct. 8, 2010 Justice Antonin Scalia at the Supreme Court. Larry Downing/Reuters
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In 2010, Poindexter hosted a group of 53 members of the Houston chapter of the International Order of St. Hubertus at the Cibolo Creek Ranch, according to a Houston society publication. A number of members from Mexico were also part of the ranch festivities that included “three days of organized shoots and ‘gala’ lunches and dinners.”
Poindexter told CultureMap Houston that some of the guests dressed in “traditional European shooting attire for the boxed bird shoot competition” and for the shooting of pheasants and chukar, a type of partridge.
For the hunting weekend earlier this month, Poindexter told The Washington Post that Scalia traveled to Houston with his friend and U.S. marshals, who provide security for Supreme Court justices. The Post obtained a Presidio County Sheriff’s Office report that named Foster as Scalia’s close friend on the trip.
Sheriff Danny Dominguez confirmed that a photograph of Washington lawyer C. Allen Foster is the same man he interviewed at the ranch the day of Scalia’s death.
From Houston, Scalia and Foster chartered a plane without the marshals to the Cibolo Creek Ranch airstrip. In a statement after Scalia died, the U.S. Marshals Service said that Scalia had declined a security detail while at the ranch.
The friend, Louisiana-born Foster, is a lawyer with the Washington firm Whiteford, Taylor & Preston. He is also known for his passion for hunting and is a former spokesman for the hunting group Safari Club.
In 2006, Foster was featured in The Post when he celebrated his 65th birthday with a six-day celebration in the Czech Republic. He flew his family and 40 Washington friends there to stay in Moravia’s Zidlochovice, a baroque castle and hunting park. The birthday bash included “tours of the Czech countryside, wine tasting, wild boar and mouflon (wild sheep) hunts, classic dance instruction and a masked costume ball.”
A secretary at Foster’s law firm said he is traveling in Argentina. The firm’s director of marketing, Mindee L. Mosher, said Foster was traveling and she would try to contact him. A woman answering a phone associated with Foster hung up when asked for comment.
Planes owned by Wallace “Happy” Rogers III and the company of A.J. Lewis III left from San Antonio and arrived at the ranch just after noon Feb. 12. The planes departed the ranch about 30 minutes apart Feb. 14, according to flight records provided to The Post by FlightAware.
Rogers owns the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum in San Antonio. He has donated $65,000 to Republican candidates since 2008. Lewis is the owner of a restaurant supplier company, also based in San Antonio. He has given $3,500 to GOP candidates since 2007.
Rogers and Lewis have both served as prior officers in the Texas chapter of the International Order of St. Hubertus, according to Texas business records. Rogers spoke to a Post reporter briefly on the phone and confirmed that he was at the ranch the weekend of Scalia’s death. He declined to comment further.
Lewis did not respond to several attempts for comment.
The Presidio County Sheriff’s Office released an incident report to The Post on Tuesday that revealed Foster’s name as Scalia’s traveling companion and provided details about the discovery of his body.
Poindexter and Foster told the sheriff that Scalia had traveled to Texas the day before to go hunting. Poindexter told the sheriff that they “had supper and talked for a while” that evening.
Scalia “said that he was tired and was going to his room for the night,” the sheriff wrote in his report.
When Scalia didn’t show up for breakfast that morning, Poindexter knocked on his door and eventually went in and found the Justice dead in his bed, Poindexter said.
Law enforcement officials told The Post that they had no knowledge of the International Order of St. Hubertus or its connection to Poindexter and ranch guests. The officials said the FBI had declined to investigate Scalia’s death when they were told by the marshals that he died from natural causes.
Alice Crites in Washington and Eva Ruth Moravec in San Antonio contributed to this report.
Amy Brittain is a reporter for The Post's investigative team.
Sari Horwitz covers the Justice Department and criminal justice issues nationwide for The Washington Post, where she has been a reporter for 30 years.
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After sailing to victory in Nevada and South Carolina and leaving the political establishment gobsmacked, Donald Trump has predicted that he will not only nab the GOP presidential nomination, but deliver the largest voter turnout in history. Typical trumpery perhaps, but the blustery billionaire is now closer to the White House than many people would have imagined. With breathtaking speed, he has rewritten the rules of campaigning while holding up a middle finger to Fox News, Republican elders and even the pope. He says things nobody else dares say — from expressing support for fans who roughed up a Black Lives Matter protester to maligning Senator John McCain’s military record.
His reality is becoming America’s. Do we have the Kardashians, in part, to thank?
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West arrive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala 2015 in Manhattan, New York, May 4, 2015. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
With their cartoonish appearances — Trump with his buoyant hair and Kim Kardashian with her outlandish curves — both seem characters from a storybook. They are the king and queen of an American Dreamland, all the more important now that the American Dream has become fantasy for so many people. In an era of growing inequality and foreclosed futures, people can’t get what they need, much less what they want.
In a better system, those who take advantage of a rigged set-up wouldn’t be seen as heroes. But when there seems no hope of transformation, watching celebrities who float free from any kind of social responsibility becomes hypnotically compelling. Not only can you be famous doing nothing of value for society, you can even be president! How awesome is that?
Trump and Kardashian have both acted as barometers for how far a person can go and how low a culture can sink. Trump was famous, of course, long before the Kardashians. He was the poster boy for 1980s excess, just as Kardashian became the emblem of same in the naughts. He started grabbing media attention during his ill-fated ownership of a football team, which he ran into the ground while seducing the press with his outlandish claims and boisterous personality. Trump learned then to present himself as the biggest and the best at everything — bankruptcies and business blunders be damned. He may have ridden to success on a train of tax breaks and government largesse, but he became adept at styling himself as the emblem of the free market.
Kim Kardashian arrives at the Clive Davis and Recording Academy Pre-Grammy Gala in Beverly Hills, California February 11, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Redmond
The temporal bridge between Trump and Kardashian is the 1990s — the decade in which reality television exploded, making people with no special talents wildly famous. The shows were loudly denounced as signals of American cultural enfeeblement, but the more the critics sniffed, the more the ratings soared.
Trump and the Kardashians perfected the genre. The Apprentice, hosted by Trump from its inception in January 2004 until 2015, presented the mogul interviewing, and gleefully dismissing, job candidates and went on to become one of the most-watched programs on NBC. In 2007, Keeping Up with the Kardashians flooded American living rooms with what looked like fly-on-the-wall glimpses of the lives of the Kardashian-Jenner family, mainly the antics of daughters Khloe, Kourtney and Kim. That program became one of the longest-running reality shows in TV history, with the 11th season airing last fall.
Reality stars aren’t supposed to elevate us or educate us. They are there to entertain us. So Candidate Trump need not concern himself with the minute details of foreign policy or healthcare. He only has to say, “It’s going to be very big. It’s going to be very special,” to have the crowd cheer. Kim Kardashian never went to college, but she can make the news instantly whether she demonstratinghow to achieve maximum cleavage or tweeting semi-literate statements about the 1915 Armenian genocide.
Trump and Kardashian share the values of opportunism, image-obsession and materialism, but where they really rise above the celebrity pack is their knack for making oodles of money simply telling the world how awesome they are. And being rich. In 2015, Kardashian ranked 33rd on Forbes’ roster of the world’s highest paid celebrities. With $52.5 million in earnings, she beat out both Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence and former Beatle Paul McCartney. Trump placed 121st on theForbes 400 list of the wealthiest people on Earth the same year, with a pile estimated at $4.5 billion.
Donald Trump speaks at his South Carolina primary night victory rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina, February 20, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Surely something magical happens in the rarefied air at that stratospheric level of wealth and fame. Inanity can magically transform into insight; solipsism into social concern; ridicule into reverence. The only skills required to keep the American public’s attention are self-promotion and conspicuous consumption. Peers of this realm get a certain immunity from criticism and a pass on gaffes. Exaggeration becomes truth, or, as Trump himself artfully puts it, “truthful hyperbole.”
Garish taste and questionable credentials become emblems of connection to ordinary people. Despite a dwelling that looks like the fevered dream of a French monarch, Trump has been called the “people’s billionaire” and is considered by many a populist. Celebrity watchers love to remind usthat Kardashian is just a “regular girl.” She has a daughter! She hangs with her family! Her lack of talent — unless you consider taking photos of your rear end for Instagram a talent — dissolves in the public fascination for such mundane activities as taking endless selfies (we all take selfies!), even when she is shelling out $827,000 on gold-plated toilets.
Kim Kardashian poses for a selfie with presenters Ant and Dec at the BRIT music awards at the O2 Arena in Greenwich, London, February 25, 2015. REUTERS/Toby Melville
Reality stars are special kinds of celebrities. Not only do they distract viewers from what’s missing in their lives as we follow their every move, their association with a genre that ostensibly documents unscripted situations lures viewers into imagining that they are more “real” than other celebrities. They suspend viewers’ disbelief more than professional actors, so when they fabricate reality out of whole cloth, the public might just buy it. They seem extra-intimate because they come to viewers apparently unfiltered.
Reality TV thrives on high drama, outsized personalities and loud-mouthed conflicts, so when we see a person linked to the form, we expect and accept these things as par for the course. That’s why Trump can get away with denigrating Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on the air during a debate. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush could not. The rules are different.
Kardashian and Trump appear to represent a kind of capitalist abundance and freedom. What they really signify, however, is the imprisonment of the self and a future of further restricted possibilities.
When our connections to each other fall away and our self-absorption intensifies, Americans’ chances to act collectively to redefine the terms of our lives diminishes. Trump’s loud talk of building walls and roughing up those who get in the way is really the whisper of an authoritarian future where the freedom and abundance are reserved for elites who will protect their privileges at any cost.
The real wall will be around us — to keep us in our place. And we will have helped build our new reality.
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America is deeply divided over cultural issues such as abortion, LGBT rights and religious freedom.
SEVNICA, Slovenia (AP) -- Melania Trump has seen more of the world than most people - a journey propelled by her own big dreams concocted as a young girl growing up under Communism....
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A Kurdish Convergence in Syriaby By MICHAEL CRUICKSHANK and GISSUR SIMONARSON
Turkish opposition must not wreck a rare coalition of forces that has both Russian and American backing.
Ilya Yashin was in the middle of a press conference presenting a special report on the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, when a police officer tried to force everyone to leave the building.
After months of cautious silence, Egypt acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that terrorists had downed the Russian jet that broke up over its Sinai Peninsula in October.
Visitors at the museum of Uralvagonzavod, the largest battle tank producer in the world. While workers who produce train cars at the factory have been put on two-thirds pay, the tank assembly lines are still rolling full speed and workers are being paid in full.
Every day, hundreds of money-exchange offices in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Jordan funnel millions of dollars in and out of militant-held territory, despite financial sanctions intended to isolate the terror group.
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