26 July 23
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The Cold War ended. The United States declared victory. Then things took a turn.
Bush was less eager. His predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had blown a huge hole in the budget by cutting taxes and increasing defense spending; then he had somewhat rashly decided to go along with Gorbachev’s project to rearrange the world system. Bush’s national-security team, which included the realist defense intellectual Brent Scowcroft, had taken a pause to review the nation’s Soviet policy. The big debate within the U.S. government was whether Gorbachev was in earnest; once it was concluded that he was, the debate was about whether he’d survive.
On the summit’s first day, Gorbachev lamented the sad state of his economy and praised Bush’s restraint and thoughtfulness with regard to the revolutionary events in the Eastern Bloc—he did not, as Bush himself put it, jump “up and down on the Berlin Wall.” Bush responded by praising Gorbachev’s boldness and stressing that he had economic problems of his own. Then Gorbachev unveiled what he considered a great surprise. It was a heartfelt statement about his hope for new relations between the two superpowers. “I want to say to you and the United States that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war,” Gorbachev said. “The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.”
As the historian Vladislav Zubok explains in his recent book “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” (Yale), “This was a fundamental statement, a foundation for all future negotiations.” But, as two members of Gorbachev’s team who were present for the conversations noted, Bush did not react. Perhaps it was because he was recovering from seasickness. Perhaps it was because he was not one for grand statements and elevated rhetoric. Or perhaps it was because to him, as a practical matter, the declaration of peace and partnership was meaningless. As he put it, a couple of months later, to the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed and they didn’t.” Gorbachev thought he was discussing the creation of a new world, in which the Soviet Union and the United States worked together, two old foes reconciled. Bush thought he was merely negotiating the terms for the Soviets’ surrender.
The most pressing practical question after the Berlin Wall came down was what would happen to the two Germanys. It was not just the Wall that had been keeping them apart. In 1989, even after four years of Gorbachev’s perestroika, there were still nearly four hundred thousand Soviet troops in the German Democratic Republic. On the other side of the East-West border were several hundred thousand nato troops, and most of the alliance’s ground-based nuclear forces. The legal footing for these troop deployments was the postwar settlement at Potsdam. The Cold War, at least in Europe, was a frozen conflict between the winners of the Second World War. Germany, four and a half decades later, remained the loser.
West German politicians dreamed of reunification; the hard-line Communist leaders of East Germany were less enthusiastic. East Germans, pouring through the dismantled Wall to bask in the glow of Western consumer goods, were voting with their feet. What would Gorbachev do? Throughout the months that followed, he held a series of meetings with foreign leaders. His advisers urged him to extract as many concessions as possible. They wanted security guarantees: the non-extension of nato, or at least the removal of nuclear forces from German territory. One bit of leverage was that nato’s nuclear presence was deeply unpopular among the West German public, and Gorbachev’s hardest-line adviser on Germany urged him, more than a little hypocritically, to demand a German popular vote on nukes.
In February, 1990, two months after the summit with Bush on the Maxim Gorky, Gorbachev hosted James Baker, the U.S. Secretary of State, in Moscow. This was one of Gorbachev’s last opportunities to get something from the West before Germany reunified. But, as Mary Elise Sarotte relates in “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate” (Yale), her recent book on the complex history of nato expansion, he was not up to the task. Baker posed to Gorbachev a hypothetical question. “Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of nato, independent and with no U.S. forces,” Baker asked, “or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to nato, with assurances that nato’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?” This last part would launch decades of debate. Did it constitute a promise—later, obviously, broken? Or was it just idle talk? In the event, Gorbachev answered lamely that of course nato could not expand. Baker’s offer, if that’s what it was, would not be repeated. In fact, as soon as people in the White House got wind of the conversation, they had a fit. Two weeks later, at Camp David, Bush told Kohl what he thought of Soviet demands around German reunification. “The Soviets are not in a position to dictate Germany’s relationship with nato,” he said. “To hell with that.”
The U.S. pressed its advantage; Gorbachev, overwhelmed by mounting problems at home, settled for a substantial financial inducement from Kohl and some vague security assurances. Soon, the Soviet Union was no more, and the overriding priority for U.S. policymakers became nuclear deproliferation. Ukraine, newly independent, had suddenly become the world’s No. 3 nuclear power, and Western countries set about persuading it to give up its arsenal. Meanwhile, events in the former Eastern Bloc were moving rapidly.
In 1990, Franjo Tudjman was elected President of Croatia and began pushing for independence from Yugoslavia; the long and violent dissolution of that country was under way. Then, in February of 1991, the leaders of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, as it was then, met in Visegrád, a pretty castle town just north of Budapest, and promised one another to coördinate their pursuit of economic and military ties with European institutions. These countries became known as the Visegrád Group, and they exerted pressure on successive U.S. Administrations to let them join nato. They were worried about the events in Yugoslavia, but even more worried about Russia. If the Russians broke bad, they argued, they would need nato’s protection; if the Russians stayed put, the alliance could mellow out and just enjoy its annual meetings. Either way, there would be no harm done.
The counter-argument, from some in both the Bush and the Clinton Administrations, was that the priority was the emergence of a peaceable and democratic Russia. Admitting the former Warsaw Pact countries into the alliance might strengthen the hand of the hard-liners inside Russia, and become, in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
After the Soviet collapse, Western advisers, investment bankers, democracy promoters, and just plain con men flooded the region. The advice on offer was, in retrospect, contradictory. On the one hand, Western officials urged the former Communist states to build democracy; on the other, they made many kinds of aid contingent on the implementation of free-market reforms, known at the time as “shock therapy.” But the reason the reforms had to be administered brutally and all at once—why they had to be a shock—was that they were by their nature unpopular. They involved putting people out of work, devaluing their savings, and selling key industries to foreigners. The political systems that emerged in Eastern Europe bore the scars of this initial contradiction.
In almost every former Communist state, the story of reform played out in the same way: collapse, shock therapy, the emergence of criminal entrepreneurs, violence, widespread social disruption, and then, sometimes, a kind of rebuilding. Many of the countries are now doing comparatively well. Poland has a per-capita G.D.P. approaching Portugal’s; the Czech Republic exports its Škoda sedans all over the world; tiny Estonia is a world leader in e-governance. But the gains were distributed unequally, and serious political damage was done.
In no country did the reforms play out more dramatically, and more consequentially, than in Russia. Boris Yeltsin’s first post-Soviet Cabinet was led by a young radical economist named Yegor Gaidar. In a matter of months, he transformed the enormous Russian economy, liberalizing prices, ending tariffs on foreign goods, and launching a voucher program aimed at distributing the ownership of state enterprises among the citizenry. The result was the pauperization of much of the population and the privatization of the country’s industrial base by a small group of well-connected men, soon to be known as the oligarchs. When the parliament, still called the Supreme Soviet and structured according to the old Soviet constitution, tried to put a brake on the reforms, Yeltsin ordered it disbanded. When it refused to go, Yeltsin ordered that it be shelled. Many of the features that we associate with Putinism—immense inequality, a lack of legal protections for ordinary citizens, and super-Presidential powers—were put in place in the early nineteen-nineties, in the era of “reform.”
When it came to those reforms, did we give the Russians bad advice, or was it good advice that they implemented badly? And, if it was bad advice, did we dole it out maliciously, to destroy their country, or because we didn’t know what we were doing? Many Russians still believe that Western advice was calculated to harm them, but history points at least partly in the other direction: hollowing out the government, privatizing public services, and letting the free market run rampant were policies that we also implemented in our own country. The German historian Philipp Ther argues that the post-Soviet reform process would have looked very different if it had taken place even a decade earlier, before the so-called Washington Consensus about the benevolent power of markets had congealed in the minds of the world’s leading economists. One could add that it would also have been different two decades later, after the 2008 financial crisis had caused people to question again the idea that capitalism could be trusted to run itself.
Back during the last months of Gorbachev’s tenure, there was briefly talk of another Marshall Plan for the defeated superpower. A joint Soviet-American group led by the economist Grigory Yavlinsky and the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison proposed something they called a Grand Bargain, which would involve a huge amount of aid to the U.S.S.R., contingent on various reforms and nonproliferation efforts. In “Collapse,” Zubok describes a National Security Council meeting in June, 1991, at which the Grand Bargain was discussed. Nicholas Brady, then the Secretary of the Treasury, spoke out forcefully against extensive aid to the Soviet Union. He was candid about America’s priorities, saying, “What is involved is changing Soviet society so that it can’t afford a defense system. If the Soviets go to a market system, then they can’t afford a large defense establishment. A real reform program would turn them into a third-rate power, which is what we want.”
But, if our advice and actions did damage to Russia, they also did damage to us. In a forthcoming book, “How the West Lost the Peace” (Polity), translated by Jessica Spengler, Ther writes on the concept of “co-transformation.” Change and reform moved in both directions. Borders softened. We sent Russia Snickers bars and personal computers; they sent us hockey players and Tetris. But there were less positive outcomes, too. It was one thing to impose “structural adjustment” on the states of the former Eastern Bloc, quite another when their desperate unemployed showed up at our borders. Ther uses the example of Poland—a large country that underwent a jarring and painful reform period yet emerged successfully, at least from an economic perspective, on the other side. But in the process many people were put out of work; rural and formerly industrialized sections of the country did not keep up with the big cities. This generated a political reaction that was eventually expressed in support for the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice Party, which in 2020 all but banned abortions in Poland. At the same time, a great many Poles emigrated to the West, including to the United Kingdom, where their presence engendered a xenophobic reaction that was one of the proximate causes, in 2016, of Brexit.
The reforms did not merely cause financial pain. They led to a loss in social status, to a loss of hope. These experiences were not well captured by economic statistics. The worst years for Russians were the ones between 1988 and 1998; after that, the ruble was devalued, exports began to rise, oil prices went up, and, despite enormous theft at the top, the dividends trickled down to the rest of society. But the aftereffects of that decade of pain were considerable. Life expectancy had dropped by five years; there was severe social dislocation. At the end of it, many people were prepared to support, and some people even to love, a colorless but energetic former K.G.B. agent named Vladimir Putin.
There have always been two views of Putin: in one, he is a pragmatic statesman, doing what he can for Russia under difficult circumstances; in the other, he is an ideologue, bent on restoring something like the Soviet empire to its 1945 borders. Would a different Russian leader have behaved differently, under the circumstances? It’s an unanswerable question, though one worth asking.
Philip Short’s “Putin” (Holt), published last summer, is one place to start. It is the most comprehensive English-language biography to date of the Russian leader. It is also, in its attempt to understand the perspective of its subject, the most sympathetic. Short dismisses for lack of evidence many of the conspiracy theories that have attached to Putin over the years: he depicts him as a fairly impressive but also typical product of a patriotic working-class Soviet family of the nineteen-fifties. Young Putin was an indifferent student and an enthusiastic street brawler rescued from a wayward life by a passion for judo and, eventually, a fascination with the secret services; he was recruited by the K.G.B. in his last year of college after attempting to join while still a teen-ager. Short does not exaggerate Putin’s standing within the K.G.B. He was a middling officer with a short fuse and was dispatched in 1985 to East Germany, by spy standards a backwater. But from there he got a clear view of how it looked when Soviet power collapsed, and he did not like what he saw.
Putin returned to Leningrad in 1990. As Russia, under the rule of the Mongol khans, missed the European Renaissance, so, too, had Putin missed the romantic period of perestroika. By the time he came back, all was in ruins. Short is almost certain that Putin was assigned by the K.G.B. to infiltrate the “democratic” movement; if that’s true, he did so with great success, becoming in a few years the deputy mayor to Anatoly Sobchak, one of the heroes of the perestroika era. Short depicts St. Petersburg Putin as a serious, hardworking official, and only moderately corrupt. He sees Putin’s well-documented ties to criminal organizations in the city as the cost of doing business. And he notes that, although most foreign diplomats who interacted with Putin during this time (among other things, he was in charge of foreign economic ties at the Mayor’s office) got a sense of his competence and sobriety, they did notice that he had a weak spot: when it came to the relinquished empire—which meant, for St. Petersburg, complicated travel and trade arrangements with nearby Estonia—Putin would lose his temper and start speechifying. He considered it “ridiculous,” the German consul recalled, that Estonia had established an independent state.
His rise to the Presidency was in many ways accidental—in four years he went from unemployed former official (after Sobchak lost his reëlection campaign, in 1996) to the country’s highest office—but it was not without its logic. Putin found himself in the right place at the right time over and over, and he impressed the right people with his diligence and his loyalty. If some of his supporters, such as the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whom Putin hounded into exile and eventually into an early grave, were disappointed by their man, others got exactly what they wanted, and much more.
For many Russians, Boris Yeltsin’s abdication in favor of a former K.G.B. lieutenant colonel represented the end of their experiment in democracy and tentative rapprochement with the West. For others, it had ended sooner, in the shelling of the Supreme Soviet and among the mountains of Chechnya. Yet others believed that, even a decade into the Putin regime, democracy could still be revived. Two things can be true simultaneously: one, that Putin was well within the mainstream of Russian politics—that any Russian leader would have been faced with his country’s unenviable geopolitical position between a dynamic Europe and a rising China and recognized that state capacity did have to be rebuilt after the collapse of the previous decade and a half. But, also, two, that Putin was always quick to solve problems through the deployment of violence, and that as time went on he became bolder and more aggressive, and took steps that others in his circle would likely have shied away from.
Short argues convincingly that Putin came into the office ready to work with the West. He had a tense first meeting with Bill Clinton (“We’re going to miss ol’ Boris,” Clinton remarked to Strobe Talbott, his Deputy Secretary of State), but then a much warmer summit with George W. Bush in which Bush claimed to look into Putin’s eyes and see his soul. A few months later, Putin was the first world leader to call Bush in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. He actively supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and didn’t complain too much, at first, about nato expansion: most of the Visegrád states had joined in 1999, under Clinton, and the Baltic states were up next. But from the high-water mark of 2001 the relationship with Putin continuously declined. The Russian leader did not enjoy the Bush Administration’s “Freedom Agenda,” whether it took the form of the full-scale invasion of Iraq or the much milder cheerleading for the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine. (In this case, the U.S. did, symbolically, jump up and down on the Berlin Wall.) Putin was deeply disappointed by Western criticisms of his continuing war against Chechen separatism. To Putin, it looked like the same war on terror that the West was waging, “gloves off”; to the West, it looked like human-rights violations and war crimes. Having supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Putin was furious when the U.S. and the U.K. refused to extradite Chechen leaders.
Is there a counter-history in which Putin’s Russia and the U.S. merrily prosecuted the war on terror together—threw bags over people’s heads, knocked down doors in the middle of the night, and zapped people from the skies, together? Certainly there would have been plenty of room for C.I.A. black sites in Russia. It’s not exactly a cheering prospect, and in any case there was no room for an equal partner in George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s global crusade. By 2004, Putin was darkly accusing the West of collaborating with Chechen terrorists. He started talking more and more about the threat posed by nato expansion. In 2007, during a speech at the Munich Security Conference, he all but declared his secession from the West.
Putin was lucky. Oil prices rose and Russia grew richer. Moscow, in its restaurants and cafés, increasingly came to resemble a European capital. But looks were deceiving. In fact, Russia was rearming, and growing ever more resentful, and plotting vengeance: it was sliding into the abyss.
Still, even now, as the full-scale war in Ukraine continues into its second year, one can point to moments when things might have turned out differently. The years when the longtime Putin associate Dmitry Medvedev served as President showed a less combative Russia to the world. Despite continuing many of Putin’s policies—among other things, it was Medvedev who prosecuted the war with Georgia in August of 2008—Medvedev created a more liberal atmosphere in public life; with prodding from the Obama Administration, coöperation on the U.S. war in Afghanistan started again. Another Russia was possible, maybe, and Putin, as Prime Minister, seemed content to remain in the background. But he was never far away. There is some evidence that his decision to return to the Presidency was spurred less by anything Medvedev did on the domestic front than by his behavior during the early stages of the Libyan civil war, in 2011. The U.S. co-sponsored a U.N. resolution to help protect rebel forces from Muammar Qaddafi’s Army; ordinarily, this was the sort of thing Russia vetoed. But Medvedev ordered his foreign ministry to abstain. When Putin disagreed publicly, Medvedev reprimanded him. According to Short, this was “political suicide.” In the wake of the nato-led intervention, Qaddafi—who had previously acceded to America’s security requests and had provided assistance for its global war on terror—was captured and then murdered by rebel forces, who filmed the killing and posted the video online. Putin supposedly watched it multiple times. In any case, a few months after nato bombed Tripoli, he announced that he would be returning to the Presidency.
Five years ago, the longtime American diplomat and Russia expert William Hill published a book about the decline of the U.S.-Russia relationship in the post-Cold War period: he called it “No Place for Russia.” There was no place for Russia in the E.U., because it was too big; there was no place for Russia in nato, because nato was an anti-Russian alliance. Meanwhile, the organizations in which Russia had an equal voice—most notably, the U.N. and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe—were increasingly sidelined. The stronger and more active nato became, the weaker Russia was. There was no getting around this.
American power during this period was so great, and Russian power so diminished, that to the Russians everything the U.S. did seemed like a provocation. Some of our actions were evidently selfish and malevolent; others were well-meaning but ineffectual. And sometimes American policymakers were simply faced with impossible choices. These tended to arise on the periphery of Russian’s old empire, in the countries that formed the new fault line between Russia and the West: what the political scientists Timothy Colton and Samuel Charap have called the “in-betweens”—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and, especially, Ukraine.
In the winter of 2004-05, Putin watched helplessly as thousands of protesters in Kyiv demanded and won a new vote after large-scale fraud had seemed to give Viktor Yanukovych the Presidential victory in Ukraine. Yanukovych managed to mount a successful Presidential bid in the next election cycle, but in 2014 vast protests over his refusal to sign an association agreement with the E.U. once again chased him from power. That same week, Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms appeared in Crimea. The invasion of Ukraine had begun.
By the logic of co-transformation, we urged brutal free-market policies on Eastern Europe, and then imposed them on ourselves. Having participated in the creation of the Russian monster, we are now forced to become monsters to battle it, to manufacture and sell more weapons, to cheer the death of Russian soldiers, to spend more and more on defense, both here and in Europe, and to create the atmosphere and conditions of a second Cold War, because we failed to figure out how to secure the peace after the last one.
The development of Russia in the post-Cold War period was not the result of a Western plot or Western actions. Russian officials chose, within a narrow range of options, how to behave, and they could have chosen differently. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, was no more inevitable or foreordained than the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003. Still, it’s worth asking what other course we might have followed.
Sarotte, in her book on nato, argues that a slower pace of expansion might have caused less damage to Russian internal politics; in time, with less pressure from an expanding West, Russia might have come around. Ther suggests that, in place of Western triumphalism and complacency, a more serious reckoning with the revolutionary ideals of 1989—a striving for democracy and freedom of the sort that was utopian even by Western standards—could have led to a different result. In Zubok’s book on the demise of the Soviet Union, the top American officials—Scowcroft, Baker, and Bush—are depicted as thoughtful and sympathetic but also, in the end, keeping their cards, and their cash, too close to their vests. Everyone in the former Soviet bloc looked to America for guidance and inspiration. Never had the prestige of the United States been higher in that part of the world. We had an astonishing amount of moral capital. What did we do with it?
Ultimately, the West chose the West. We extended our writ where we could, and dug in where we had to. This meant, among other things, keeping the structures we already had in place and expanding them, as opposed to inventing new ones. Back in 1990, three months after the “not one inch” meeting, Gorbachev had waxed lyrical to Baker about a new pan-European security arrangement. The American Secretary of State’s response was polite, but firm: “It is an excellent dream, but only a dream.”
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Two and a half years have passed since the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Yet investigators are still piecing together the breadth of Donald Trump's attempt to derail the transfer of power. (photo: Julio Cortez/AP)
How Trump’s disparate and increasingly desperate campaign to undermine the 2020 election led to his next expected criminal charges.
Two and a half years have passed since the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Yet investigators are still piecing together the breadth of Trump’s attempt to derail the transfer of power. It wasn’t a singular plan but in fact was many disparate schemes, led by distinct groups of advisers who embraced increasingly fringe strategies and were not always working in harmony.
Each arm of the effort was held together by one core lie with Trump at the center: that the election was stolen. And each tentacle has faced withering scrutiny from Smith’s investigators, who may ask a federal grand jury any day now to approve criminal charges tied to Trump’s election subversion, mere weeks after Smith charged Trump in a separate case for hoarding classified documents.
But if and when Smith brings charges related to Trump’s wide-ranging bid to cling to power, it will fall to the courts and a jury to determine whether Trump’s conduct — no matter the broad powers and immunities of the presidency — crossed the line into criminality.
The exact charges that Smith will seek are unclear, but here’s a look at the extraordinary range of conduct that will figure into them.
The disinformation campaign
Key figures: Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell
Even before votes were cast, Trump began conditioning his supporters to distrust the outcome of the 2020 election, insisting that mail-in voting — which states embraced to contend with Covid-era dangers — would be exploited by Democrats, foreign adversaries and bad actors to steal the election.
Trump rejected advice from his own allies, like campaign manager Bill Stepien and House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, to embrace mail-in voting as a way to drive turnout among his supporters. Instead, he set up mail ballots to be a scapegoat for his possible defeat.
In tandem with this effort was Trump’s plan, which he telegraphed to advisers, that he would declare victory on election night — when interim results were likely to be tilted in his favor due to delays in counting mail-in ballots — even though large shifts toward Joe Biden were anticipated as all votes were tallied in the days following the election.
Trump did just that. In the wee hours of the morning on Nov. 4, 2020, at the urging of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and against the advice of virtually everyone else in his inner circle, Trump declared victory and warned his supporters that Democrats would try to steal the election.
Trump followed his early claim of victory with a weekslong campaign alleging — without evidence — widespread fraud in a handful of states Biden won: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. He and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits aimed at overturning the results or throwing out millions of votes in areas that favored Biden. Most were summarily dismissed for lacking substance or being filed in untimely ways.
A last-ditch bid to challenge the results, filed by Texas but supported by Trump in a separate legal brief, was turned aside by the Supreme Court.
Despite being rebuffed in the courts, wild conspiracies proliferated in pro-Trump circles. Figures like Sidney Powell, an attorney who represented Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn in criminal matters, promoted the false notion that election machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been manipulated by foreign governments to tip the election toward Biden.
In the meantime, Trump barraged the airwaves and his supporters’ inboxes with fundraising appeals and ads accusing Democrats of cheating, stuffing his campaign’s coffers even as many of his own advisers privately indicated that he had, in fact, lost the race.
Smith may be eyeing Trump’s fundraising and messaging tactics for potential crimes related to defrauding donors or the public at large.
The Electoral College, Part I: The states
Key figures: Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Brad Raffensperger, John Eastman
As Trump’s efforts flailed in the courts, his allies began eyeing a second target: state legislatures. Although by late November election officials and governors had certified Biden’s victory, Giuliani began promoting the notion that state legislatures could simply override those decisions by citing fraud or “irregularities” that justified a different outcome.
To support this notion, Giuliani and Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis traveled to the states Trump was contesting and convened public hearings with sympathetic GOP legislators to highlight allegations of fraud. They pushed GOP-controlled legislatures to attempt to designate pro-Trump slates of presidential electors to replace or compete with Democratic electors that had been certified by election officials and governors.
Most notably, Trump leaned on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to simply “find” the votes that would put Trump ahead of Biden in the state. A recorded Jan. 2, 2021, phone call captured the lengthy exchange and has become fodder for Smith as well as investigators in Georgia.
Raffensperger balked. So did other state leaders, refusing to appoint their own slates of electors despite Trump’s increasing pressure.
This stage of Trump’s strategy is where John Eastman — a conservative attorney with fringe theories about the Electoral College — began gaining prominence in Trump’s orbit. He participated in Trump’s efforts to lean on state legislatures to act, appearing at public hearings convened by Republican legislators. Ultimately, Eastman would become the driving force behind Trump’s final, desperate bid to stay in power, a plan focused squarely on Jan. 6.
The Electoral College, Part II: The fake electors
Key figures: John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani
When the Electoral College met on Dec. 14, 2020, in 50 state capitals and Washington, D.C., no contested states had designated pro-Trump electors to compete with Biden’s electors. Nevertheless, in seven of those states, dozens of pro-Trump activists convened in state capitals, at the same time as Democratic electors, and cast ballots that they claimed made them legitimate presidential electors.
These “alternative” or “contingent” electors signed certificates claiming to be the states’ duly qualified electors and delivered them to the National Archives and Congress, following a process set out in federal law for actual presidential electors.
Enter Eastman. Emails released by the House select committee on Jan. 6 show that after the Electoral College ballots had been cast, he shifted his focus to legitimizing the uncertified electors.
The conservative attorney, who advised Republican legislators during the contested Bush v. Gore election of 2000, had been advising Trump and his allies since before the 2020 election, joining a working group assembled by attorney Cleta Mitchell to develop a post-election litigation strategy.
Within days of the Nov. 3 election, Mitchell asked Eastman to draw up a plan for state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors to supplant those certified by governors. Eastman obliged, and his plan, by late November, had made its way to the Oval Office.
Eastman, who would also author Trump’s Supreme Court brief in the Texas case, spent much of December leaning on state legislators to declare their elections invalid, citing fraud and irregularities, and use that as a pretense to appoint alternate electors. Eastman told allies at the time that without the imprimatur of a state legislature, these “contingent” electors wouldn’t have any legal force.
Mulling the seizure of voting machines
Key figures: Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn
After the Supreme Court refused to consider the Texas election challenge Dec. 11, 2020, Trump saw his options dwindle to an increasingly desperate few.
He had begun mobilizing members of Congress to formally challenge the election results Jan. 6, when the House and Senate were required to meet and count electoral votes. And he still hoped state legislatures would swoop in and send their own electors to Washington. But he also began eyeing a more extreme option.
Powell, Flynn and their allies had been in Trump’s ear about the prospect of invoking presidential authority to seize voting machines in the states he was contesting, using a combination of national security directives to justify the move. Various drafts of an executive order supporting such a move circulated in the White House (some of which were turned over to the Jan. 6 select committee).
The conversation culminated in a Dec. 18 Oval Office meeting with Trump, Flynn, Powell, Giuliani and others. At the meeting, Trump flirted with naming Powell a roving “special counsel” to pursue election-related matters, and Flynn advocated for taking the machines. But White House aides and Giuliani pushed back, and Trump ultimately opted against the move.
Hours later, in the middle of the night, Trump issued his first call to supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. “Be there,” he tweeted. “Will be wild.”
Deploying the Justice Department
Key figures: Jeff Rosen, Rich Donoghue, Jeff Clark, Pat Cipollone, Scott Perry
Trump was publicly frustrated that his own Justice Department had openly rejected his claims of widespread election fraud, and when Attorney General Bill Barr resigned in December 2020 — amid open conflict with the president — Trump eyed another mechanism to bolster his bid to remain in power.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA.), who espoused some fringe theories about election fraud, had begun connecting Trump with Jeff Clark, a Justice Department official who was sympathetic to his efforts. Several documented meetings or calls with Trump in late December 2020 and early January 2021 showed Clark had Trump’s ear during this crucial period.
Internally, Clark had been pressing Justice Department leaders to issue a letter to the states Trump was challenging, describing “irregularities” and recommending that their legislatures reconvene to consider whether Trump, rather than Biden, should be declared the winner.
Clark faced sharp pushback from Barr’s successor, acting attorney general Jeff Rosen, and his deputy, Rich Donoghue. But Trump briefly considered outflanking them by naming Clark acting attorney general and giving him the perch to implement the effort. But Trump backed down after a mass resignation threat by Trump Justice Department officials and top White House lawyers, including White House counsel Pat Cipollone.
Records revealed by the Jan. 6 select committee indicate that Trump may have briefly effectuated Clark’s appointment as acting attorney general before rescinding it.
The Electoral College, Part III: Pressuring Pence
Key figures: Mike Pence, John Eastman, Greg Jacob, Ken Chesebro
When all else failed, Trump turned firmly to Jan. 6, 2021, seen by his increasingly fringe group of allies as the ultimate deadline to stop the transfer of power to Biden. Though no states had endorsed alternative slates of electors, Congress was still in receipt of the unofficial slates sent in by pro-Trump activists.
The Jan. 6 session, required by the Constitution as well as an 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act, has long been a formality, a ceremonial gathering to affirm the certified results of the states. Only a handful of times in American history have challenges been brought — and no challenge to a state’s electoral votes had ever been sustained.
But in Trump’s view, the Jan. 6 session was a last stand of sorts. And he had one final cudgel to attempt to stave off a Biden presidency: his vice president, Mike Pence.
The Constitution requires that the vice president — who doubles as the president of the Senate — preside over the counting of Electoral College ballots. So Trump spent the final weeks of his presidency pressing Pence to assert the power to simply refuse to count Biden’s electoral votes. Pence, Trump argued, could cite the competing slates of electors and declare the results to be in doubt, postponing the count and sending the matter back to the states for consideration.
His contention was backed by a coterie of fringe attorneys who had spent a frantic few weeks fleshing out what they dubbed “The president of the Senate strategy.” Emails obtained by the Jan. 6 select committee show Eastman communicating with lawyers like Giuliani and Ken Chesebro, who attempted to muscle through what they acknowledged was a constitutionally dubious plan.
But Pence resisted. He recognized that taking such steps would require violating provisions of the Electoral Count Act and would be an unprecedented assertion of single-handed authority to determine the outcome of the election.
Trump publicly and privately browbeat Pence to change course, but Pence repeatedly refused. On the morning of Jan. 6, Trump called Pence for one final, angry phone call in which he derided Pence for refusing to bend to his will. It was the last time they would speak that day.
As violence unfolded at the Capitol that afternoon, Eastman and Giuliani continued to press Trump’s allies to stop the election process. Giuliani called Republican members of Congress and asked them to mount continued challenges to the results that might buy more time, and Eastman corresponded with a Pence aide, counsel Greg Jacob, in a final effort to get Pence to delay the electoral vote count.
Jacob pushed back on Eastman, even as he fled from the first wave of rioters. He has since become a key witness in California bar discipline authorities’ bid to strip Eastman of his law license over his Jan. 6-related actions.
The rally
Key figures: Ali Alexander, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon
After Trump told his supporters to “be there” for a “wild” protest in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, a large pro-Trump faction responded. The tweet invigorated groups like Ali Alexander’s “Stop the Steal” organization, which made plans for a rally on Capitol grounds Jan. 6. Women for America First organized a rally near the White House that became Trump’s primary event that day.
The rally was the primary reason tens of thousands of Trump supporters descended on Washington. And Trump’s tweet imploring them to “be there” has figured into dozens of prosecutions stemming from the riot that followed the rally. It was the moment, prosecutors have argued, that extremists like Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes began mobilizing large contingents to descend on Washington. Both have since been convicted of seditious conspiracy.
The far-right conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones, who attended the rally, helped lead hundreds of people from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Nearby, at the Willard Hotel, a pro-Trump “war room” was working to manage the ongoing efforts to overturn the election, featuring participation from Steve Bannon, Giuliani and other Trump allies.
Trump used the rally crowd as a means to pressure Congress, telling them that if they didn’t “fight” to stop Biden’s victory they wouldn’t “have a country anymore.” He then pointed them to the Capitol, where he urged them to march “peacefully and patriotically” to reject the election results.
But Trump’s rhetoric was overwhelmingly packed with apocalyptic imagery, which has led at least one federal judge to say he might plausibly be accused of inciting the violence that followed.
The riot
Key figures: Mark Meadows, Mike Pence, Pat Cipollone
After Trump’s rally speech, he retreated to the White House — furious that his Secret Service detail had resisted his desire to go to the Capitol, where violence had begun to break out.
Instead, he withdrew to the Oval Office dining room, where he watched the chaos at the Capitol unfold on TV. While watching, he resisted desperate pleas from allies like McCarthy and other Republicans in Congress, aides, advisers and family members to explicitly tell his supporters to go home. For hours, Trump ignored those appeals while outnumbered police officers were battered and members of Congress — and Pence — evacuated to safety.
While Pence fled, Trump tweeted an attack on his vice president, saying he lacked the courage to stop Biden’s election. That tweet appeared to inflame the crowd; the Jan. 6 committee has shown how the mob intensified in the ensuing moments and many on hand at the Capitol shared it with those around them.
Throughout the day, Trump held court with a long list of advisers, like chief of staff Mark Meadows and Cipollone. Both have become key witnesses in Smith’s probe. Pence has also testified to the special counsel.
When Trump finally did tell supporters to go home, 187 minutes after the first police line was breached, many in the crowd seemed to respond. Videos from the riot show supporters sharing the tweet with one another and heeding his call.
The damage, however, was done. Five people died during or shortly after the attack; hundreds more were injured. In the 30 months since, more than 1,000 rioters have been criminally charged for what they did Jan. 6. Now, Smith’s next moves — and the secret vote of a grand jury that has undoubtedly heard all of the evidence above — will determine whether Trump, and members of his inner circle, will stand trial, too.
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Church personnel inspect damage in the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa on Sunday. (photo: Jae C. Hong/AP)
Khlapova was raised in Ukraine and had always dreamed of living in the seaside city. But not as the war refugee that she has become.
In only a week, Russia has fired dozens of missiles and drones at the Odesa region. None struck quite as deeply as the one that destroyed the cathedral, which stands at the heart of the city’s romantic, notorious past and its deep roots in both Ukrainian and Russian culture.
“I am a refugee from Kharkiv. I endured that hell and came to sunny Odesa, the pearl, the heart of our Ukraine,” said Khlapova, who has lived in the country for 40 of her 50 years.
Her neck still has a shrapnel scar from the third day of the war, when her apartment was hit. On Day 4, she fled to Odesa.
Now, she’s making a quick trip back to her place in Kharkiv to grab winter clothes so she can wait out the war in Ireland, “because here we are not protected for a single second, in any city.”
“At any moment, you can just be hit and your whole body will be torn apart,” she said. “After the war ends — and I believe that Ukraine will defeat this filth, these vampires — I will come back home. I will return, no matter what.”
Ever since Ukraine gained independence from Moscow in 1991, Odesa viewed itself differently than the country’s other major cities because of its long, conflicted history and an outlook that stretched far beyond its borders.
Odesa’s past is intertwined with some of Russia’s most revered figures, including Catherine the Great, author Leo Tolstoy and poet Anna Akhmatova.
Its ports were key to last year’s international agreement that let Ukraine and Russia ship their grain to the rest of the world. Its Orthodox cathedral belongs to Moscow’s patriarchate. Its residents largely speak Russian. And -– at least until the Kremlin illegally annexed the nearby Crimean Peninsula in 2014 -– its beaches were beloved by Russian tourists.
In the war’s early weeks, rumors seeded by Kremlin propaganda flew around the city: Moscow would never hit the historic center, the mayor had loaded a boat filled with roses to greet Russian soldiers, a silent majority of residents were waiting for a Russian “liberation.”
They were false.
“To this day, if you read and monitor Russian channels, all of them are absolutely convinced that we are waiting for them here,” said Hanna Shelest, a political and security researcher raised in Odesa whose father is a harbormaster.
Odesa’s regional infrastructure was hit repeatedly by Russia over the winter, unlike its port, which was key to the Black Sea Grain Initiative that allowed agricultural products to be shipped safely from both countries to feed people around the world.
The region’s silos were full when Russia pulled out of the agreement in mid-July. Missiles and drones struck the next day, taking aim at storage sites, transportation infrastructure and random buildings. Ukraine’s air defenses deflected most of the hits, but every day a handful made it through.
Last week’s attacks marked the first time Odesa’s historic city center was hit since the war started.
Mayor Hennadii Trukhanov was unequivocal in a furious video message directed to Russians after Sunday’s strike on the cathedral, showing rescue workers carefully removing a damaged icon from the ruins.
“If you only knew how much Odesa hates you. Not only hates you. Despises you. You’re fighting small children, the Orthodox church. Your rockets even fall on cemeteries,” he said. “You must hardly know us Odessans. You will not break us, just make us angrier.”
Another missile crashed into the House of Scientists, a mansion that once belonged to the Tolstoy family and was transformed into an institution to unite scholars and researchers. A third hit administrative and apartment buildings.
The targets were within 200 meters (yards) of the port. Shelest believes the cathedral was hit by accident, but that’s little consolation amid the destruction.
Since Catherine the Great transformed Odesa into an international seaport in 1794, the city’s identity has as its foundations the sea, cosmopolitan tolerance and an innate sense of humor. It had one of Europe’s largest concentrations of Jews, who before a series of pogroms made up about a quarter of the population, and large communities of Greek and Italian sailors whose descendants remain to this day.
A week of attacks shook those foundations for Iryna Grets, who counts at least three generations of family in the city.
“Every morning, I go to the sea, to witness the sunrise. But today, I didn’t have the strength to go to the sea because we didn’t sleep all night. You see, we haven’t been sleeping all week,” said Grets, who decided instead to visit each site bombarded on Sunday.
She started at the cathedral, at the center of life in Odesa. The original structure was destroyed under Josef Stalin in 1936 as part of his campaign against religion. When Ukraine gained independence, residents took up a fund to restore it to its original condition. In 2010, the new building was consecrated by Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Kirill, whose church has aligned itself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has since repeatedly justified the war in Ukraine.
“Each rocket that today arrives on the territory of Ukraine is perceived by its inhabitants as your ‘blessing’ on their children,” Archbishop Viktor Bykov, the vicar of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s Odesa Diocese, wrote in an open letter to Kirill.
The bitter pilgrimage by Grets had less to do with religion than with mourning, and many others made the same trip on Sunday. Some attended a service outside the damaged cathedral. Even more came to clear debris, instead of enjoying the famed beaches despite the beckoning summer sun.
“This is my city, it’s a part of me, it’s my soul, it’s my heart,” Grets said.
Then, fury overcoming her, she abruptly switched to Ukrainian: “Odesa will never be part of Russia.”
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A group of men from El Salvador were detained in May by Border Patrol agents in Sunland Park, N.M. (photo: Todd Heisler/NYT)
Immigrant advocacy groups had challenged the administration’s decision to sharply limit who is allowed to apply for asylum in the United States.
The ruling was a blow to the White House, which has seen unlawful entries plunge since the new policy was put in place in May. But the policy has been far from the only factor in the dramatic decline in crossings, and how the ruling on Tuesday will affect migration, if it stands, is uncertain.
The judge, Jon S. Tigar of the U.S. District Court in Northern California, immediately stayed his decision for 14 days, leaving the asylum policy in place while the federal government appealed the decision. The appellate court could extend the stay while it considers the challenge.
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People walk through the gate on Harvard Yard at the Harvard University campus on June 29, 2023 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (photo: Scott Eisen/NPR)
Affirmative action for minority kids may now be dead. But a blockbuster new study, released today, finds that, effectively, affirmative action for rich kids is alive and well. They may or may not always do it on purpose, but a group of the most prestigious private colleges in America are handing a massive admissions advantage to rich kids over less affluent kids — even when they have the same SAT scores and academic qualifications.
The study is by Raj Chetty and David J. Deming, of Harvard University, and John N. Friedman, of Brown University. We at Planet Money have already dubbed Raj Chetty the Beyoncé of Economics because of his long list of popular hits in empirical economics. And, let me tell you, this is another ***Flawless classic in his catalog. I mean, not only is the study eye-opening, but Chetty is also kind of sticking his neck out here, by shining a spotlight on the admission practices of his employer, Harvard. But they can't fire Beyoncé! (He has tenure).
Among a number of other discoveries, the economists find that kids from the richest 1% of American families are more than twice as likely to attend the nation's most elite private colleges as kids from middle-class families with similar SAT scores. The silver spoon these wealthy kids are born with can, apparently, be used to catapult them past other equally bright, but less privileged kids into some of America's best colleges.
Chetty and his colleagues provide compelling evidence that fancy schools are promoting a kind of neo-aristocracy, with admission programs that help to perpetuate a family's class privilege from one generation to the next. The advantages they grant to rich kids are about more than just legacy admissions, a practice in which elite colleges give preferential treatment to kids of alumni and donors. The economists find that other types of evaluation and recruitment play important roles in giving rich kids a leg up, as well.
Going further, the economists find evidence suggesting that reforms to the admissions policies at these prestigious schools could really make a big difference in the life trajectories of less affluent kids, and make America's elite less of an exclusive club for people born into privilege.
Silver spoon-fed schools
Chetty, Deming, and Friedman focus their study on what they call the "Ivy-Plus colleges": the eight Ivy League schools — Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and UPenn — as well as Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago.
Less than half of 1% of Americans go to these prestigious private colleges. "Yet these twelve colleges account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century," the economists write. These schools, in other words, appear to be an important gateway to the American elite, which makes their admission policies relevant for all of us.
Rich kids obviously have a bunch of advantages that help them bolster their academic credentials — like great private schools, SAT tutors and so on. Indeed, Chetty and his colleagues have already amassed a ton of evidence that the environment — even the zip code — in which kids grow up has a huge impact on their chances of climbing the economic ladder.
But these childhood advantages are not what this study is about. In this study, the economists compare rich kids and their less affluent peers who have achieved roughly equal academic credentials (measured by SAT scores and GPAs). Yet, even then, the rich kids are still way more likely to get into elite colleges. It's pretty shocking when you consider how much harder it is for a less well-off kid to measure up academically to a rich kid, who, from a young age, has benefited from tremendous resources aimed at bolstering their academic credentials.
The economists pull together a range of large data sources that enables them to thoroughly analyze the admission decisions of America's most elite colleges. They got internal admissions data from a bunch of schools, allowing them to see which kids applied and which ones got in. They have SAT and ACT test scores. And, equipped with IRS data, the economists are able to see how rich these kids' families were when they applied to college, and how much money the kids earned after they graduated. They focus primarily on students admitted between 2010 and 2015, which gives them enough of a postgraduate track record for the researchers to see how they've done in their careers.
With this treasure trove of data, the economists then embark on a rigorous analysis. First, they establish the overwhelming reason why rich kids are disproportionately attending these schools: admissions. Yes, they find, their less affluent peers are a bit less likely to apply and enroll, but the main reason for the disparity is colleges are systematically admitting more rich kids than less well-off ones.
As previously mentioned, the economists find that wealthy children, even when they have comparable SAT and ACT scores to less affluent kids, are much more likely to get into these elite schools. A student from the richest 1% of American families (from families earning over $611,000 per year) is twice as likely to attend an elite private college as a middle-class student (from a family earning between $83,000-$116,000 per year) with the same academic credentials. The economists find this disparity can only be found at elite private colleges: they find no such advantage for rich kids at America's flagship public universities, like UC Berkeley or the University of Michigan.
"I think implicitly what we're finding in the data is that — whether intentionally or not — we currently have a system that appears to have affirmative action for kids from the richest families, the top 1% in particular, which gives them a substantial leg up in admissions relative to other kids," Chetty says.
Why rich kids are getting admitted more
The economists find three factors that give rich kids this huge admissions boost. The first is legacy admission programs. They calculate that 46% of their admissions advantage comes from programs that give them preferential admission due to their parents being alumni.
One defense for these legacy kids might be that they're smart, hard-working, and ambitious, so they'd be able to get into another Ivy-Plus college if they wanted to. But the economists find these same legacy kids see no advantage when they apply to schools their parents did not go to. "So, in other words, that legacy impact is totally non-transferrable across colleges, which strongly suggests that it's not that these kids are just kind of stronger applicants in general," Chetty says. "It's actually about literally being a legacy at this college."
The second reason that rich kids get an admissions advantage is athletic recruitment. The economists calculate that 24% of the admission boost for students from the richest 1% of families comes from the fact that they excel at some sort of sport. That may be somewhat surprising, because if you watch pro sports, the stars usually don't come from privileged backgrounds. The economists are unable to do a sport-by-sport analysis, but, Chetty says, it's likely that kids are finding a recruitment advantage in expensive, elite sports, such as fencing, tennis, rowing or lacrosse. Elite private colleges, after all, are generally not known for their stellar football or basketball teams.
The last reason rich kids are more likely to be admitted is because they tend to have higher non-academic ratings that make their applications pop. Think extracurricular activities, compelling letters of recommendation, and guidance counselors who help them engineer perfect resumes and personal statements. This explains about 30% of their advantage.
Chetty says the rich-kid advantage in non-academic ratings is almost entirely driven by the fact that they are much more likely to attend elite private high schools. "If you're coming from an elite private school, you tend to have much higher non-academic ratings," Chetty says. "Now, of course, kids from high-income families are much more likely to attend these schools."
Why the particular college you go to might matter, after all
So, yeah, rich kids are much more likely to get into fancy colleges than less affluent kids. But does that necessarily mean that it really matters for future outcomes? It's possible that going to one of these elite schools doesn't have a large effect on a person's later career. Indeed, there have been some influential economic studies that suggest that the choice of college by similarly qualified students doesn't have much of an effect on how much they end up making, on average.
The reason for this, economists have long figured, is that elite colleges are highly selective. The kids they admit are smart, hard-working, highly ambitious — and apparently much more likely to come from rich families — which means they have a solid shot at success, whether they go to a particular school or not. Economists call this "selection bias." The idea is, basically, schools are just selecting winners — not necessarily making winners. Which is why the causal effect of a particular school on a kid's outcomes might not actually matter very much.
But that's not what this new study finds. They find that going to these Ivy-Plus colleges makes kids a lot more likely to become tremendously rich and successful. This is especially the case for less affluent kids. "Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases low-income students' chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm," the economists write.
So why are these economists finding that the particular school that kids attend matters a great deal, while previous studies have suggested that it doesn't? Chetty and his colleagues do a bunch of statistical work backing up and double-checking this finding. For example, they use one technique in which wait-listed kids serve as a kind of quasi-experiment. In some cases these kids are admitted from the waitlist for a somewhat random reason, and other times they are not let in. This enables the researchers to compare outcomes of statistically similar students, some of whom went to Ivy-Plus colleges, some of whom went to flagship public colleges. The economists are now able to see what happened to those students over time.
Chetty says that, consistent with previous findings, the data shows that the particular school these students attend doesn't matter much when it comes to their average earnings. If a bright kid goes to UC Berkeley instead of Harvard, they'll still make good money working in tech or law, or whatever. Compared to similar kids who did go to Harvard, their earnings, on average, usually won't look much different.
However, Chetty says, their data is much richer than previous studies, which relied on small surveys instead of the massive administrative datasets that Chetty, Deming and Friedman use in this study. As a result, the economists are able to zero in and see "upper-tail" outcomes like the likelihood of these kids reaching the top 1% of income earners. Previous studies couldn't see outcomes in the same detail. And that's where Chetty and his colleagues are finding significant advantages when kids go to these elite private schools.
"These colleges have a huge causal effect on getting you access to the upper tail — to positions of influence, to becoming a leader," Chetty says. We're talking about elite positions like corporate executives, U.S. Senators, top professors, Supreme Court justices. "I think what these colleges do is really open doors for some folks to get to a set of positions that they really would not have had much access to had they not gone."
As a result, Chetty says, reforming admission practices at these schools could have a meaningful impact on what America's elite looks like. One potential reform they highlight: just use the same admissions criteria as America's flagship public universities, where it's more about raw academic credentials, and wealthy children don't have the same overt admissions advantage.
Admissions in a world after race-based affirmative action
Mind you, Chetty and his colleagues studied admissions data before the recent Supreme Court decision, when most of these schools had some sort of race-conscious affirmative action program. Even in this world, as Chetty and his colleagues found in a previous study, kids from the richest 1% of American families were 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those from families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution.
Now, with race-based affirmative action dead, it's plausible that the underrepresentation of lower and middle-class families at these schools could look even worse in coming years, because race is strongly correlated with income and wealth.
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, we've begun to see a national debate about admissions policies at America's elite schools. Just days after the ruling, a group of advocacy organizations filed a complaint against Harvard for their legacy admissions policy, arguing that it primarily benefits the kids of wealthy, white families. President Biden criticized legacy admissions and other similar policies that "expand privilege instead of opportunity." And a wave of universities, including Wesleyan and Carnegie Mellon, have begun ending their legacy admission programs.
But many schools, including the majority of the Ivy-Plus colleges, are still clinging to their legacy admission programs. If their goal is to have their students go on and make a significant impact on society, Chetty and his colleagues find, that doesn't make a lot of sense. They find that rich kids who are admitted because of their legacy status or their athletic background or their non-academic ratings are actually a bit less likely to see outsized success after graduating, compared to middle- or lower-class kids who don't have those credentials. The economists find that raw SAT and ACT scores — and, more generally, academic ratings like GPA — are much more predictive of future success than anything else.
Of course, these colleges may still be reluctant to end their programs that give a leg up to the richest kids in America. The colleges assert that legacy programs help build community and school loyalty. Probably more relevant is the importance of legacies to these fancy private colleges' business models: rich kids are more likely to pay tuition — and their parents are more likely to give donations and pad their endowments.
As for concerns that diversity at these schools is about to plummet because of the end of race-conscious affirmative action, Chetty has some ideas to promote both racial and socioeconomic diversity that may survive judicial scrutiny.
It would be an admission process that would take into account "kids who come from neighborhoods that have particularly low levels of upward mobility and use that as a measure of adversity," Chetty says. This would not be explicitly focused on race itself, but it would pick up "the adversity in childhood environments that is correlated with race."
Call it zip code-based affirmative action. After all, if you grow up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood and manage to score a 1500 on the SATs, you've jumped over a much higher hurdle than your silver-spoon-fed competition.
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Indigenous Mayan authorities hold up batons in Guatemala City as they protest ahead of Guatemala's independence day, on September 12, 2022. (photo: Moises Castillo/AP)
Indigenous asylum seekers from Latin America often face language barriers and discrimination on their journey to the US.
While narrowing asylum pathways has thrown life into flux for many of those seeking refuge in the US, Indigenous people say that the obstacles they face – from language barriers to discrimination and violence – have gone largely unrecognised in conversations about immigration.
“We don’t migrate for a good life. We’re forced to leave. Parents send their children on this journey to save their lives,” said Geronimo Ramirez, a Maya-Ixil community organiser who lives in the US and works with the International Mayan League, a Maya-led human rights organisation.
“But we have been invisible. In immigration statistics, we’re characterised as Latino or Hispanic. Our identity has been assassinated.”
Indigenous advocacy organisations say the demand for asylum will only become more urgent, as their communities face displacement from climate change and violence from groups who target opposition to industrial projects on ancestral land.
Rolling back asylum
Earlier this year, the administration of US President Joe Biden announced a series of policies designed to discourage migrants and asylum seekers from crossing the country’s southern border irregularly.
One would render most of those arriving at the border ineligible for asylum, by requiring that they first apply for protection in the countries they passed through before reaching the US.
Immigration rights groups have slammed the policy as a “transit ban” and compared it to a similar “safe third country” rule implemented under former President Donald Trump.
Many also point out that migrants and asylum seekers travelling through Central American countries are often subject to violence and exploitation, with abusive authorities and criminal groups targeting them for extortion and other crimes.
In June, 143 immigration and human rights groups issued a letter to the Biden administration, urging more flexibility when processing Indigenous asylum claims.
“Indigenous Peoples should not be subject to the Asylum Ban for failure to seek asylum in a transit country, given the mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples by the governments of many transit countries,” the letter read.
Indigenous identity a target
For people of Indigenous backgrounds, discrimination can make the dangers more acute.
“People can spot if you’re Indigenous from the food you eat, the language you’re speaking,” said Julisa Garcia, an Indigenous Kaqchikel organiser with Promotores de la Liberacion Migrante, an immigrant and Indigenous rights group in Guatemala.
She has noticed that some Indigenous people abandon traditional clothing patterns when making the journey north in order to avoid drawing attention to their identity. Otherwise, she said, “you’re stigmatised as a delinquent”.
Language barriers can also leave Indigenous migrants more vulnerable to abuse.
In one high-profile instance, a Mayan Chuj woman from Guatemala named Juana Alonzo Santizo was kidnapped on her way to the US border and forced to work for her captors in Mexico.
When police broke up the kidnapping ring, they accused Santizo herself of human trafficking. But unable to speak Spanish, she could not deny the allegations. She has since alleged that police beat her and threatened her with a gun, forcing her to sign a confession she did not understand. There was no translator present to help her, she said.
Only in May 2022 was she released, after seven years without a trial. A Mexican court ultimately found no consistent evidence against her.
Language a barrier in proceedings
Language barriers can also carry over into the immigration process, with Indigenous people struggling to communicate with officials or find legal representation.
“Most immigration law offices will have fluent Spanish speakers on staff, but it’s more difficult to find translators for Indigenous languages,” said Victoria Neilson, a lawyer at the National Immigration Project, one of the signatories to the June letter to the Biden administration.
Neilson also pointed to problems with the increasing use of the CBP One, a mobile application launched in 2020 and expanded under President Biden as the main portal for scheduling appointments with border authorities.
The app, which has been criticised as defective and difficult to use, does not include Indigenous languages.
Neilson explained that applicants can ask for exemptions from the app based on language, but they nevertheless have to prove they were unable to complete the process with the help of a third party.
The Biden administration itself has acknowledged that language barriers may hinder Indigenous peoples as they navigate the US immigration system.
In a June memo from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), officials wrote that immigration judges “should be cognizant that some noncitizens have limited proficiency in the dominant language spoken in their country of origin” and “are fluent only in an Indigenous language”.
However, Neilson notes that the memo does not apply to the Department of Homeland Security or pertain to the CBP One app.
Legacies of violence
Organisations such as the International Mayan League are quick to underscore the connection they see between today’s migration crisis and the colonial forces that have displaced Indigenous people for centuries.
Increasingly, Indigenous groups in Latin America are forced to compete with business interests – legal or otherwise – for control of their ancestral lands. Those conflicts can lead to outright violence, as opponents try to silence or expel Indigenous activists.
A report from the environmental nonprofit Global Witness found that Indigenous people comprised 40 percent of the fatal attacks recorded against land and environmental defenders in 2021.
Another analysis, from the Irish-based nonprofit Front Line Defenders, found that 22 percent of all human rights defenders killed in 2022 were Indigenous, making them one of the most at-risk groups relative to their population size.
In 2019, for instance, four community leaders working with the Indigenous-led political organisation CODECA were killed in a single month in Guatemala, a state where a previous US-backed government carried out a genocide against the Maya population that killed 200,000 people.
And last December, an Indigenous community leader in neighbouring Honduras also survived an apparent assassination attempt after organising efforts to stop displacement by local landowners.
“We see a clear connection between the imposition of transnational extraction and the lack of respect for Indigenous sovereignty, land rights and, in turn, forced displacement,” said Lorena Brady, policy and programme manager at the International Mayan League.
Climate change fuelling displacement
Brady also pointed out the disproportionate effects of climate change on Indigenous communities, some of whom are reliant on their immediate environment for basic needs.
“Indigenous people have done the least to contribute to climate change, but they’re going to suffer some of the worst effects. We would like to see the US create a classification for people seeking refuge due to climate displacement,” she said.
With Indigenous economies left fragile by the ravages of climate change, some residents face barriers to employment even outside of their communities.
“There’s this term going around calling Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador ‘the dry corridor’. It’s becoming desert-like,” said Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana, an assistant professor at Baruch College in New York who has studied migration across the US-Mexico border.
“What happens when that land is no longer fertile? What happens when this land can no longer serve as a source of income, and beyond that, as a source of food?”
A 2022 study published in the Journal of Migration Health pointed to economic poverty and “exclusionary state policies” as primary motivations for Indigenous people leaving Guatemala for the US. Some communities, the study pointed out, lacked “paved roads and basic social services”.
“The ones who are at fault are the governments who don’t guarantee the rights of its people,” said Ana Gomez, founder of Promotores de la Liberacion Migrante.
“When there is a flood or some kind of displacement, people have no choice but to migrate. The situation is not going to change because there is no plan to improve people’s lives.”
Gomez warns that, as climate change worsens, the processes displacing Indigenous people may speed up, funneling more people into an immigration system with little understanding of their unique vulnerabilities.
“We are always processed as Central Americans, not Indigenous,” she said. “There needs to be more awareness about the rights of Indigenous people.”
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Fish swim around a coral reef in Key West, Florida, where shallow waters topped 100F for several hours on Tuesday. (photo: Joseph Prezioso/AFP)
The 90-100F readings add to previous warnings over warming water putting marine life and ecosystems in peril
A water temperature buoy located in the waters of Manatee Bay at the Everglades national park recorded the high temperature late on Monday afternoon, US government data showed. Other nearby buoys topped 100F (38C) and the upper 90s (32C).
Normal water temperatures for the area this time of year should be between 73F and 88F (23C and 31C), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). The level of heat recorded this week is about the same as a hot tub.
Records for ocean surface temperature are not kept, but a 2020 study suggested that the highest temperature observed was 99.7F (37.61C) in the Persian Gulf.
The extreme readings add to previous warnings over Florida’s warming waters in the south-eastern United States as prolonged heat continued to bake other parts of the country. The south Florida coast has been grappling with an extreme heatwave that threatens marine life and ocean ecosystems.
“We didn’t expect this heating to happen so early in the year and to be so extreme,” Derek Manzello, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, told CNN last week. “This appears to be unprecedented in our records.”
Heatwaves are increasingly affecting the world’s oceans, destroying kelp, seagrass and corals and killing swathes of sea-life like “wildfires that take out huge areas of forest”. Research in 2019 found that the number of ocean heatwave days had tripled in recent years.
A 2021 heatdome likely killed more than 1 billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific, experts have said.
The growing frequency and intensity of severe weather – both on land and in oceans – is a symptom of the global, human-driven climate crisis that is fueling extremes, experts warn, with current heatwaves expected to persist through August.
The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported earlier this month that global sea temperatures have reached monthly record highs since May, also driven in part by an El Nino event. Sea surface temperatures worldwide have broken monthly records for heat in April, May and June, according to Noaa.
The temperatures in Florida also pose a threat to human food supplies and livelihoods for those whose work is tied to the water.
As he worked his knife to filet fish hauled into Key Largo on Tuesday, fishing boat captain Dustin Hansel said the catch has been getting “slower and slower” for the past five summers. He’s also been seeing more dead fish in waters around Key Largo.
“As far as all of our bay waters, any near-shore waters, everything is super, super hot,” Hansel said.
Noaa warned earlier this month that the warmer water around Florida could supercharge tropical storms and hurricanes, which build more energy over warmer waters. Rising temperatures are also severely stressing coral reefs, the agency said.
The high temperatures around the Florida Keys are putting coral reefs at risk – scientists have observed bleaching and even death in some of the Keys’ most resilient corals, said Ian Enochs, lead of the coral program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.
“This is more, earlier than we have ever seen,” Enochs said. “I’m nervous by how early this is occurring.”
It’s not yet clear whether the temperatures recorded in Florida will count as a world record because the area is shallow, has sea grasses in it and may be influenced by warm land in the nearby Everglades national park, University of Miami tropical meteorologist Brian McNoldy said.
Still, McNoldy said, “it’s amazing”, and the fact that two 100F measurements were taken in consecutive days gives credence to the readings.
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