Mark Danner: Welcome tonight to the School of Journalism. We have a rare opportunity to hear about national security and foreign policymaking in the Trump administration, which is very much a dark hole to most mortals and to most people in the Trump administration as well. Following the news cycle nowadays is like having your head in a bass drum, boom, boom, boom, Trump everyday without stop. It is easy to forget if you’re following the doings and the excitements and the insults and the turns of phrase and everything else that Trump is orchestrating that very large things are going on at the horizon of American power. Arguably a system set up after the second world war based on alliances in Europe and Asia is transforming itself, arguably coming to an end or at least transforming itself into something else.
If we look at the border of those areas of power, in Ukraine a hot war is going on between the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels. If we look at the border of Asia, we have a nuclear power in North Korea and an aggressive China in the South China Sea that’s casting considerable doubt on American defense guarantees in Northeast Asia. And of course the Middle East and in “expansive Iran,” as the Trump administration would call it, and certainly hot Wars in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.
So, fires are burning everywhere and they rarely reach the front page. We are, it seems to me, extremely privileged tonight and lucky to have a reporter who is up to her neck in the foreign policymaking of the Trump administration and can describe it to us in its dailiness and its, to use her word, weirdness.
I’m very honored to introduce Nahal Toosi. She was born in Iran, came to the United States at 6 as a refugee, was raised in Texas, was valedictorian of her high school class, went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she worked for the student newspaper as editor and writer. She then served on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel where she covered higher education and also, very interested from then until now, in refugee issues. She managed to report also from Iraq, South Korea, Germany and Thailand. She then joined the AP where she was based in Kabul, Islamabad, New York and London. And finally, now she is national security and foreign affairs reporter for Politico .
She has covered the Rohingya genocide. She was in Abbottabad the day after Osama bin Laden was killed. She has written about, among other things, the Trump administration’s so-called new human rights policy. Her work, if you Google it, repays close attention, as I have just paid it these past couple of days. She has just come from speaking to my class very eloquently, and I am delighted to introduce her to you.
Nahal Toosi: Thank you so much. Thank you very much. And I just want to be very clear that despite what Google says, I am not 105 years old. But that is what it says. If you Google my name, it’s fabulous.
Mark Danner: You look very good.
Nahal Toosi: I’m owed a lot of birthday presents. I tweeted about that. And by the way, you have an amazing memory, because you just said all that. I can’t remember anything unless I write it down. I’m just going to talk for a little bit and then open it up to any and all questions. I prefer the Q&A sections on these things, so please feel free to ask me anything, including stuff that I didn’t mention in these notes.
But I want to take you guys back to the first week of the Trump administration. It’s a Thursday, he’d been inaugurated Jan. 20. So, it’s Jan. 26. Then I get a call from a source of mine at the State Department. And he’s like, “I need to give you something. Can you please meet me at this coffee shop?” And I’m like, “Okay, fine.” I was all busy, but all right. So, I get there and he gives me a draft of the travel ban. What some people know as the Muslim ban. And I look at it and he’s like, “Look, somebody from the White House gave this to me. I thought you should look at this. I thought you should do something with it.” And I’m looking at it and I’m like, “Okay, sure.” And it’s not, it’s not quite hitting me. And I knew there were reports that they were talking about some sort of a ban and it was, but I was like, “Okay, okay.”
And I look at it and the guy he’s like, “Look, it’s effing crazy.” He’s like, “This is nuts.” I was like, “Okay.” So, then I go back to the office and I coordinate with a colleague who actually herself had managed to obtain a draft coincidentally, and I’m reading this draft at the van and I’m not a lawyer, but it was clearly just problematic on multiple levels. I mean, I was just like, “Ooh, I don’t think that’s going to work.” So, of course we put together the story because we have the story and we have the draft and it got pretty prominent placement. But the whole time in my head, I’m thinking, “This is never going to become a reality. The lawyers are going to stop this.” I was like, “This just can’t become a reality, the lawyers will never allow this.”
The next day Trump signs it. And I’m starting to get increasingly like, “Wait, what’s really happening?” Of course we alerted. They took forever between him signing it to actually send out the text. So, we’re waiting and then it comes and it’s almost identical to the draft that we had the previous day. And I’m starting to think, “Oh, this is even bigger than I thought, but still, how is this real? I mean, I know he signed it, but is it really going to take effect?” I talked to a colleague of mine who specializes in legal coverage and he points out stuff that I didn’t even think about. Like, does this affect dual nationals? Does it affect legal, permanent residents? And I was like, “I don’t even know.”
So, then I go to the editors and I’m like, “Look guys, I think this is a big deal. I think this is a bigger deal than we realize.” And they’re like, “Are you sure?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And I was like, “I’ll try to write a follow-up story tomorrow about it.” And they’re just like, “Okay.” And I was like, “Look, I think it’s a big deal. Because like, for instance, that high-level Politico executive we have in Brussels, well, she’s Iranian-French. And this means she can no longer enter America.”
That’s where I explained it to them. And they were like, “Oh, okay.” But again, it’s still not really fully hitting us. It’s still not there. Saturday morning, I start writing what I think is like a big analysis piece about the potential implications of this, including the possibility to other countries will act reciprocally as they usually are supposed to do and ban Americans, this could really screw up a lot of different things. And in the meantime, two of my colleagues who also sort of covered these issues started pinging me, “Hey, hey there’s these people, these Iraqi refugees who are not being allowed to come in, they’ve just reached the airport. There’s a lawsuit being filed.”
It starts this snowball. And all this stuff starts happening. And as I call sources and people and legal experts, it’s very clear that people inside the government and outside it, they themselves did not fully understand what was happening. They were like, “We’re still trying to figure this out.” But at the same time, as we all know, they were already enforcing it. By that night. I mean, my two poor colleagues ended up spending the whole day writing their own legal aspects of the story with the court cases.
I’m writing this big analysis that night, the protest breakout across airports. And so, I’m writing a big story about that by the next day, basically half of Politico staff is somehow working on this story. We had reporters heading the Dallas airport. I mean, it was wild. Everybody’s like, “What is going on?” And I’m sure you guys kind of remember that. But the thing that really just gets me about that, when I look back, is that we were all thinking inside the box. We were thinking, “This can’t happen because there’s safeguards against this. There’s supposed to be a process. There are supposed to be people… there are supposed to be lawyers who vet these things who say, “No, no, no, you can’t do this.” And yet, the Trump administration came in and they took the box and they set it on fire.
There was no more box. So, I guess the one thing, and I wish, I honestly wish I could say that I learned my lesson that day. And from then on, I knew to always be on the lookout for the wacky and the insane and the things that are just not normal. But I gotta tell you, even to this day now more than three years later, they do things and my immediate instinct is, “Well, they can’t do that.”
And then, I have to train myself like, “Wait, wait, come on. You’ve reported on this. You know that they’re going to do this.” So, the key lesson for me was don’t assume that anything in Washington, DC is permanent — not a norm, not a rule, not a law and definitely not an institution. You take all this and you have to remember that when you look at everything that has happened, everything from the story that I would have, I’m not saying I would have murdered someone to get to this story, but I would have considered it, which is Trump wanting to buy Greenland. Come on, I was so upset that I didn’t get that story. To taking children away from their parents at the border and locking them up by the thousands. So we are going through this… This talk is titled myths of national security reporting.
But the myth really, I think, is that anything is permanent, that anything is not doable. Today, we have reports of Ken Cuccinelli basically refusing to leave the Department of Homeland Security, even though a court has ruled that he was not legally appointed to this position. The courts, everything, these institutions are not, they’re not holding. And whether it’s through people, leaving people being fired, or frankly, people just mean too scared to fight back anymore. Things are very much degrading. And I feel like I can say that as an objective journalist, we can have a discussion about objectivity, but I try to be fair. I try to be fair-minded looking at all of it. But I think the analysis is very obvious and these things are collapsing. And I don’t know how long they can go before it totally, totally falls apart.
So, jumping to a couple of other things. I asked some other reporters about some myths of national security reporting and some of my friends at other papers and elsewhere. They mentioned a few, but I think it’s partly because they have their own egos. And one of the things they said was that the people readily talk to us, most don’t most rat us out. So even now, even under the Trump administration, where there have been way more leaks than normal, there have been way more contacts with the press among people within the government institutions. Most people still, they don’t want to talk to a reporter. We’re not like sitting there like easily getting anyone to talk to us.
For every 10 people who I reach out to, nine ignore me, or immediately tell the PR person in their agency. So, it’s hard. Usually, there’s not really these magical leaks. Usually, it’s the painstaking process of talking to people, digging, persuading people to talk to you and just noticing things that are different or unusual or odd, like things that people don’t even realize that they’re giving away when you’re talking to them. If there is a leak — and there’s a difference between a scoop and a leak. A lot of what we’re getting are our scoops. But sometimes this administration, like any other, does have its own way of leaking a story. They do talk to certain media outlets more than others. And my experience is that they often leak to the reporter who’s least likely to question the information that they’re giving them.
I’ll give you an example recently. The Trump administration announced the members of what it’s calling the International Religious Freedom Alliance. This administration has made religious freedom a major human rights priority. Arguably, really its only human rights priority. I mean, that’s the one issue that they’re big on. And it happens to be very convenient for them politically because Christian evangelicals have a lot of concern about persecution of Christians overseas, which unfortunately, there’s a lot of and so, it works for their base. And it’s an issue that they can use. So I said, “Look I cover religious freedom more than like, pretty much, really any other major reporter. And I want the exclusive on who’s going to be on the Alliance.” I can be really pushy.
I just said, “I want this, I think you should give this to me.” And they actually were like, “Yeah. maybe. We’ll think about it, whatever.” And they didn’t give it to me. And I was like, “What?” And then finally, when they announced, it barely got any coverage really, but I got the list eventually and Hungary was on the list. Poland was on the list. These are countries that have had some recent, serious religious freedom crises. Hungary’s government goes around pursuing conspiracy theories about George Soros.
So, I actually did a big Twitter thread. I used their state departments’ own human rights reports and religious freedom reports to point out the issues with all of these countries in this list.
And I realize, of course they weren’t going to give me this leak because I would call out the strangeness of this. So, another myth is, as Trump often claims, that reporters make up anonymous sources. We don’t really need to, there are a lot of people who do want to talk to us. I know that sounds a little bit odd in terms of what I said earlier, but it is a combination. There’s more people who want to talk, but most who still don’t. We don’t really need to. But we totally understand the reason to give these people anonymity because their jobs are at stake. But yet it can be held against us. So, these are just anonymous leaks.
And my favorite thing, though, is this administration, they complain about the anonymity, but then they hold background briefings all the time with unnamed, senior administration officials and that’s the only way you’re allowed to participate is if you agree to that ground rule.
One myth I think that increasingly people are realizing, and I think Trump has accelerated this, is that national security is really about military and crime. It’s really about those like physical security issues. And I think what we’re learning increasingly is that it’s about the economy. It’s about cyber issues. It’s about climate. It’s about migration. It’s about the coronavirus. You have all these different areas of coverage and the past journalists that they’re increasingly blending. And Trump, because of his background as a businessman who has all these interests and financial interests, all these things that are just never really have come to the fore before for a president. He is leading to some very unusual byline combinations of various news organizations.
I mean, you’re seeing the business reporter of who’s never before worked with David Sanger of the New York Times and suddenly their byline. I remember I really got shocked. And I use the New York Times as an example because everyone reads it. But once there was a quintuple byline on a New York Times story. And I have never seen that before in my life. Because, and this is a paper that used to only allow no more than two bylines because it didn’t credit everybody that worked for it, but that worked on a piece. But this just shows you the kind of synergy, I guess you could say, that’s been forced by this administration. I mean, I’m having to work with our health reporters because we’re realizing these things are all coming together. So, it’s not just about war and it’s not just about the FBI or whatever. It’s all these other things that have to work together.
And strangely enough, though, it’s coming at a time during an administration that doesn’t really respect process, the way that usually past administrations have, because the process of making a national security decision is basically just totally, totally broken.
And I think another myth is that the big news organizations get all the best stories, the Times , the Post , CNN. No doubt these guys get a lot of great stories. And I’m not just saying this because I work for Politico . But there’s a lot of fabulous reporting that goes on at trade publications. Smaller outlets that often frankly the bigger outlets don’t credit, even though they’re basically ripping them off. So, if you really want to like understand and learn and figure out and be ahead when it comes to national security issues, you need to have a much wider group of news organizations that you look at.
And one way, luckily, that we’ve been able to kind of help people with that is newsletters that aggregate some of these things and point to different news organizations that break certain things that often don’t get the kind of treatment that the big papers give them. I’m very paper-minded, because that’s kinda my background. I don’t have a broadcast or radio background. But I do think it’s worth noting. And again, let’s not forget that it was Knight Ridder that did the real work in the Iraq run-up and they were the ones who were sounding the alarm like, “This isn’t necessarily accurate, this weapons of mass destruction thing.” But not enough people were paying attention because they were caught in the headlights, caught in the glare.
Mark Danner: McClatchy.
Nahal Toosi: It was Knight Ridder at the time.
Mark Danner: Yeah, and then it became McClatchy.
Nahal Toosi: Yes. And now it’s gone bankrupt.
Mark Danner: Now it’s gone.
Nahal Toosi: A couple of things. So a lot of people say, “Oh, open records FOIA. FOIA the information.” The FOIA system is broken, especially on national security, especially at the State Department. I mean it takes years and years and years to get any response from the State Department on a FOIA request. It’s just not really, it’s deeply frustrating. And I recently went to the investigative reporters and editors conference and I asked for advice from a big investigative reporter. I was like, “So, I cover state and I don’t know how to deal with the FOIA thing.” And he was like, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” It’s an impossible zone. And so, one of the things they told us was, “Well, ask for the FOIA log.” That’s the list of things people have previously FOIAd. So that you could just say, “Hey, I want that thing you already produced.” It could save them time. So, I went to the State Department and I said, “Hey, can I have your FOIA log?” And they were like, “Oh yeah, you have to FOIA that.”
The good news under Trump is that there are a lot more people willing to talk. Within weeks, I mean, people were losing their minds. I wrote this great…. well look, it’s was great. I wrote this story called “Inside The Chaotic Early Days of Trump’s Foreign Policy.” And it basically charted what was happening at the National Security Council the first few months. And I mean, read this story because it will shock you. But again, like my initial example showed where this guy from the State Department is like, “Please, you have to take this.” He did that because there were people in the White House who could not, they were in a much more sensitive position and could not talk directly to the media. So, what they were doing was they were pushing out the information. They weren’t saying, “Hey, go leak this to your reporter friend.” They were like, “Hey, I think you should know about this because it might be coming down the pike.”
And so, people in the agencies were like, “Oh, man.” So the hope was, “We have to get this out to the public somehow.” They copied agencies in part because they knew agencies and material was FOIA-able. The White House information is not. So, there were these maneuvers, these tricks they were trying to do within just weeks to try to get the information out there. And so, it’s been kind of amazing. I mean, people who in the past, when I was covering foreign policy under Obama, would never talk to me. I mean, would not even consider talking to me, would reach out to me out of nowhere. Like, “Hey, so you want to get coffee? Hey, we should really get to know each other.”
And I’d be like, “Sure.” Director of… I’m making this one up, but Director of Lebanon or whatever. I will definitely have coffee with you.” It’s been a glorious time in a lot of ways. And my favorite, and I mean, sometimes I don’t know how people find my number. I actually don’t post my number. I’m kind of careful because I’m a female and you can get a lot of abuse and stuff. But my impression is it’s kind of the book, He’s Just Not That Into You, the whole idea that if he really wants to, he will track you down. Unlike if it’s a good story, the sources will find me and it usually works. Doesn’t work for me in my dating life. But in terms of journalism, people can find me and they can reach me through LinkedIn or whatever.
But sometimes you can’t always get them to talk. I wrote this story about how this ambassador, this was an anecdote within this story, this political appointee ambassador to Spain wanted to somehow ship his polo ponies to Spain. I mean, he was talking about how hard this was because of all the EU regulations and the career ambassadors were like, “Oh my God, this is insane.” And then, I got this text later because his people would not tell me if the ponies were ever shipped. And then, we got this tip later that the ponies were shipped and I reached out to the tipster just to try to figure out who they were everything, but he never got back to me. So, if he sees this, I still want to talk about that.
Another favorite one was I was covering Tillerson pretty intensely. And I had all these plans, like I was going to do more intel coverage and all that stuff. And then, the State Department went into meltdown under Tillerson. And so, I was covering him pretty intensely. And somebody sent in a tip about just trying to describe this bizarre, something about contracts and the redesign of the State Department. It was just this completely bizarre thing. And at the end of it, it just said, “Nahal will understand. Tell Nahal.” So I reached out to the guy — he has me meet him at the FDR Memorial in the dark, in the freezing weather. He comes, his head is wrapped in a scarf. And I’m like, with this thick stack of documents, and he goes through it. He won’t even tell me who he is.
He goes through the documents with me. And he told me to bring those little like sticky things, the kind that mark. And I was like, “Okay, I’m freezing.” And he’s explaining all this stuff, but none of it makes any sense to me because it’s all complicated contract… I mean, it was bizarre, but I took the material, pretended I knew what I was doing. And then, I went and took it to experts and had them vetted. And so, I got this great story about how Rex Tillerson had spent $12 million on private contractors to help him redesign the State Department in a project that never ended up leading to anything, all while demanding budget cuts for the department itself and putting a hiring freeze. And so, but these things, I mean it was amazing.
And it’s a situation now where you can turn your critics into your sources. A lot of folks who feel like I’m too hard on the administration, they attack me and then I reach out to them and I’m like, “Hey, let’s go have coffee. Let’s talk about this.” Because I do want to be a fair journalist. And so, one thing I find is a lot of people, they don’t necessarily expect you to put some false equivalence in the story, but they want their side to be heard. And oftentimes, it’s the Trump administration people, they’re like, “Look, this program we’re doing was totally mischaracterized. Can you please… Here’s the way we’re thinking.” And when you talk to them, it is often rational and it makes sense. And when you realize, and I think that that’s really, really important because I do think there is this kind of very much an anti-Trump sentiment in a lot of places, especially on social media.
And so, sometimes people blow the small thing out of proportion and it’s not entirely fair. And so, I do try very hard to be fair, but I’m also never going to be one of those people who says, “Oh yeah. The earth is flat.” I mean, I’m just not. At the end of the day, you have to call BS where it is. One thing that I’ve found really fascinating under the Trump administration is they’re trying to weaponize “off the record.” So, basically what they’ll do is they will go off the record. They’ll try to go off the record to say, “No comment.”
That is not a thing. And this is a hill I’m willing to die on. I have gotten into yelling matches with people from the National Security Council who try to go off the record to say, “No comment.” I was like, “No, I’m not going to. No, that’s not a thing.” And they’re like, “You can just write that we didn’t get back to you.” But that’s a lie. I wouldn’t write that. Screaming matches in the newsroom, after which the newsroom gave me a standing ovation, or they try to go off the record to refer you to another agency. And I’m like, “No.” And this happened recently — the White House referred me to the state. The State Department tried to go off the record to refer me to The White House.
It was this circular thing. Happens a lot. And I was just like, “I don’t accept off the record referrals.” I just don’t. So, I will say, I do worry about kind of what comes next. If Trump is reelected, but why? I mean, people don’t take that out of context. What I worry about in terms of journalism, because I do think more and more people are going to be fearful about speaking out. A lot of the people who, I think, are willing to talk now are leaving. Or they will leave if Trump is reelected. I think the people who are left either will completely be fine with the agenda, but also I just think they will be scared and they will be worried about their families, their paychecks, that sort of thing.
But I also do hope that these muscles that we’ve developed as journalists over the past three years, that they will help us be strong in our coverage. And we continue to try to hold this administration accountable whenever possible. And if it’s a new administration, hold them accountable. I tell a lot of my sources, a lot of them happened to be like Obama folks. And I make it very clear to them, “Hey, this relationship is going to continue even if a Democrat wins office, right? And if you think for a second that we’re going to take it easy on you, you’re out of your mind. Because the last three years have been an education for us journalists. And we are definitely going to hold your feet to the fire.” So I shall end on that.
Mark Danner: Good, good, very good end point. Let me take the privilege before I throw this out to the audience for questions to ask you about the decision-making process in the NSC. I mean, it’s one of the things that really strikes me about this administration to kind of radicalism of method. That you had this decision-making process that really dates from 1947 from the National Security Act, in which all the bureaucracies have a seat at the table.
Nahal Toosi: The interagency process.
Mark Danner: Exactly. And all the information is supposed to go together to make for a good decision. And then, it’s supposed to be imposed outward. And am I right in assuming what you’re really telling us is that what we see is true, which is that that process is being completely circumvented, that they’re not using it?
Nahal Toosi: Right. So early on, basically there was no process. I mean, there were virtually, what were known as principles committee meetings and deputies committee meetings and PCCs — Policy Coordinating Committee meetings. They kind of weren’t really happening or when they were, they just didn’t matter. For instance, the decision to authorize our military to be able to carry out more operations in Yemen was made by President Trump basically over dinner with… I think it was the Japanese prime minister at that time. I can’t remember… he just was like, “Oh yeah, this is fine.” He did it over dinner with a couple of generals and everything. And then the next day, senior people at the NSC hear about this and they’re like, “What are you talking about? We haven’t even put that through the system yet.”
And then, they decided to hold a deputies committee meeting and people are like, “Why are we even doing this if the president’s already made the decision?” So, this was happening, there weren’t meetings. And then McMaster came in, he put the process in place. And so, there were these meetings, but it didn’t matter because Jared Kushner had his own process he was running. Steven Miller had his own process he was running. The president was talking to outside advisers and he had his own views on what he wanted to do about everything. So, even if the McMaster went to him with a recommendation that came through this process, it didn’t really didn’t really matter. John Bolton took over from McMaster and the process basically fell apart again, he hardly held any principal’s committee meetings.
I’ll tell you guys a funny story later, but I mean, he didn’t really hold those, there weren’t deputy committee meetings. But it just didn’t matter because, effectively, it was Bolton doing whatever he wanted with the president and all these other processes simultaneously happening. What I’m told now is that, yes, there will continue to be these processes, but again, you have these side things happening. Jared is doing his own thing. Rudy Giuliani is doing his own thing. And I think part of it was simply, frankly, when President Trump took over, I don’t think he really understood or knew how the NSC worked. I don’t think his people knew that and I’m not judging them. I mean, a lot of people, I think they, these guys had no experience. So, I mean, you wouldn’t expect them to necessarily know, but it’s also just not really his style. He kind of goes on gut. But that also means that there’s the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. The State Department has no clue that this is happening, the DOD, they don’t know what to do, so they refer you to each other.
Mark Danner: So, when they take a decision like killing Soleimani, for example, which could have all sorts of consequences and a lot of different realms, the various bureaucracies simply are not involved in that decision.
Nahal Toosi: Right. I mean they basically, I don’t know specifically about the Soleimani case. So, I want to be careful on that. But I mean, just generally speaking, they’re just not in the loop. And part of the reason you want to have these meetings is because they end up resulting in documents that are action memos that they send out to the various agencies so that people know what is going to happen and what the talking points even are. And oftentimes, things happen and it’s only a small cadre of people who really know what happened. Maybe Pompeo, maybe a couple of others, but partly because of leaks.
Mark Danner: So, it means there’s no real record also.
Nahal Toosi: Yeah. And one of the questions I’m going to have, and I don’t know how we’ll ever know this except in the decades from now, is how much paper record there really is of any of this. And you’ve got to remember, this is all stuff that we are able to know. There’s a lot of stuff happening that’s classified that nobody’s reporting. So, we just don’t. We can’t get access to it.
Mark Danner: You did remark earlier that so many guardrails have been passed and institutional degradation and so on, things could collapse, but I wonder what would that look like as distinct from what’s happening? I mean, I’m always fascinated. I remember being in Haiti once talking to a diplomat and riots were going on in the streets and people were being burned and people were starving and there was no gas. And the diplomat said, “If this gets any worse, things could collapse here.” And I remember hearing this voice say, “What would that look like?” It was me. So, what would constitute a collapse?
Nahal Toosi: I mean a poor decision on a nuclear strike. I mean…
Mark Danner: Well I asked, didn’t I?
Nahal Toosi: I mean, you want to be really careful and that’s not, that is something in theory that the president has a lot of authority to just kind of do on his own. But the question of whether the intelligence is getting to him in time. I mean, that’s a possibility. I say that with very, very careful thinking.
Mark Danner: Well, on that happy note, I think I’ll throw this open to questions from the floor. Questions?
Nahal Toosi: I answered all your questions? Wow.
Mark Danner: Incredible. Yes, ma’am.
Audience 1: On the event that hopefully Trump doesn’t get reelected or maybe he kicks it over at Kentucky Fried Chicken or something one day, how easy is it going to be for Bernie or Biden and whoever is next to put all this right again? Or, is it going to be chaos from now on? I mean, how do we get these institutions back?
Nahal Toosi: If you look at one parallel, it was under George W. Bush the second half of his the second term, there was a lot of unhappiness with his government. His approval rating was terrible. But then, what you saw was that Obama came in and there were a lot of people who Obama kind of inspired to join government, to join the foreign service. There is that possibility — that people will feel like, “Now is my time to join or stay.” That’s the other thing, is whether people want to stay.
I think it’s easier than some people might think, but harder than some people might know. You can reinstitute a series of meetings. If you plan in advance far enough, you can have a slate of nominees the first day you’re you take office. You can already, I mean, for everything. I can tell you that, I wrote a story about this, Democrats are already really worried about how this transition is going to go, if there is a transition. They’re already making plans for how they will deal with the possibility of Trump administration, people not being helpful to them, not giving them records, possibly destroying records. I mean, they’re thinking very like expansively. They’re making lists of career government officials deep into the bureaucracy who they can turn to because they feel like they are more reliable sources than political appointees who they worry will not tell them everything that’s going on.
I know that there’s a lot of planning happening by outside groups in the event that the Democrats do win. There is this effort to fix these institutions and I’m sure they’re going to put out a call for service. Like, people come join us, come help us. There are plenty of people who are qualified, who they can bring back. And so, I think it’s I think it is possible to make this more what it was. I think some Democrats say they want to build back better. I don’t really know what that means.
But there is a lot of thought going into this, but there’s also this question of, say Bernie wins. He has a very radically different actually surprisingly in some ways, not that radically different, but still different than Trump. Biden would have a very radically different view than Trump on everything from trade deals to whatever. And so, the question also, and I have to write a story about this at some point, is just like, how much do you want to swing back? Because do you really want to set up a system where every time there’s a new administration that there’s this back and forth.
One example, and I know some Democrats, even some very progressive, thoughtful, very leftist, anti-Trump Democrats. They are aware of this. And one example is the decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in Israel. Already a lot of these, the Dems say, “We’re not reversing that. We’re just going to leave it there. What’s done is done.” And because they feel like if they do, if they move it back, then the next Republican administration will, they just don’t want to. They want to have some stability on the foreign policy front. So, they’re going to be looking for places where I think they can stay stable because you don’t want to have a system where like the international community is like, “Oh, my God. We’re going to have radical changes every time there’s a new administration.”
Mark Danner: After George W. Bush left people expected, Obama might prosecute people who had been involved in torture, for example. And none of that was done. I mean, he didn’t do a lot of things that people expected. And it occurs to me that when it comes to things that increase the president’s power, very rarely does the next administration step back with that. In fact, they use it. And I wonder if that will be the consequence, even if there is a democratic transition.
Nahal Toosi: I think a lot of that is going to come down to who’s in Congress and how Congress asserts itself. I mean, a lot of people like to blame the president, whoever’s the president. “Oh, you’re amassing all this power.” Well, it’s partly because Congress…
Mark Danner: Lets him.
Nahal Toosi: Lets him. A classic example is Obama and Syria. So, Obama doesn’t want to strike Syria after chemical attacks blamed on the Assad regime or he says it’s his red line. People think he’s going to do it. And then, he’s like “I’m going to put this to Congress.” And guess what, Congress, wasn’t willing to take a vote on it. People forget that part, right?
Mark Danner: Right.
Nahal Toosi: And it’s like, “Guys, don’t you want to?” I mean, Congress does the authorization for use of military force. And there are some Congress folks who are like, “Let’s renew it or get rid of the old one.” And they just can’t because they don’t want to take these votes.
Mark Danner: No. So, I mean look, Congress, they have only really themselves to blame to some extent on some of this and I think it’ll be really interesting if there’s a Democratic president but a Republican controlled Senate or both Houses and how they will suddenly start to really care about executive power again, the way they did under Obama.
Nahal Toosi: Yeah. The authorization of the use of military force that, how I mentioned dates from September 2001, and all of these wars are being fought under that authority. It’s a completely untenable situation and yet it is. There it is. Questions?
Audience 2: I’m curious about the big picture. We’re so taken with Trump’s temperament, the way he governs by caprice. He governs by peak. He gets angry. He does things that don’t seem to have any particular rhyme or reason apart from the fact that somebody goaded him on from Fox News. But if you pull the camera back and ask, “Well, what is the coherence? What is American foreign policy under Trump? What is security policy under Trump and what is the case you could make that it constitutes a coherent reimagining of America and the world.” And if so, if you were to make that case, weeding out all of these weirdnesses about Trump’s personality and the way he governs and the way he’s basically abandoned fairly well-established and thoughtful procedures that were in place. But what is America and the world under Trump? How does it differ from what it was in the world under Obama and how is it likely to be changed back?
Nahal Toosi: I think a lot of things still remain the same, despite the president’s rhetoric and some of the administration’s rhetoric. We haven’t left NATO. We haven’t quit the UN. You could even argue that Trump has actually strengthened NATO because he’s forced the other countries to do more than they probably would have done despite whatever Obama got them to agree to. I mean, you could argue that he’s been a force for strengthening that alliance in that sense. Now, so I do think that sometimes the rhetoric is just much more harsh than the reality, even his cozying up to Putin, for instance, we still have a ton of sanctions on Putin. We’ve actually imposed more under Trump. That was thanks to Congress, in part. Our policies are not always that different.
I would say, though, that the real difference is America, in a way. In a way, it’s more honest about what it cares about and what it doesn’t under Trump. I mean, in the past there was more lip service to issues like human rights in places like Saudi Arabia. And they at least tried to maintain the facade, but we cared about those issues and et cetera. This administration is much more honest. They’re just like, “Yeah, we sell them a lot of weapons, so sorry to the human rights people.” But it’s really the same policy that like any previous administration would have done. I feel the honesty is there. I feel it’s a more transactional America. I think people from other countries are like, “Okay, well, the only way we can get them to do what we want is if we give them something that they want.” They have kind of a Hobbesian view of the world, this administration does. There’s no such thing as the greater good. It’s every country for themselves.
And so, that’s a frustration, I think, for a lot of our allies, in particular. They’re just like, “No, working together makes us stronger.” And Trump doesn’t believe that. He thinks our allies are treating us worse than our adversaries. But at the same time, you could argue that maybe we do need to push them a little more to carry a little more of the burden in a lot of places in the world than just relying on the Americans to come and rescue them every time. I don’t know. So, I mean, I do think the one thing is they do feel America is simply not going to be there for them the way that it once was. And I think that and I know that they feel this way, even if Bernie becomes president, even if Warren becomes president, a lot of the Dems are not that different from Trump when it comes to this idea of, “You guys need to step up a bit.” Biden I think would be kind of a throwback. But even then, I just think they feel America is just more out for its own self-interest in a more honest way. And I think they kind of are counting on that to continue.
Mark Danner: Just to pick up that point. These assertions of principle. Obviously, they always were a little bit hollow and they were always carefully tempered in practice by self-interest, but that doesn’t mean they were trivial. I mean, they were assertions of principle and they were rallying points and they were, you could get traction policy traction by invoking them. And instead there’s something so cynical about their just flagrant abandonment, that “We’re not even going to make believe that we care about the Saudis murdering a journalist. We’re not even gonna pretend we care.” And that’s surely something that is lost under that regime. It’s something that a real value is lost and people… The discourse about diplomacy and the purposes of the diplomacy is altered in a very fundamental way under that would seem to me.
Nahal Toosi: I mean, you could argue one thing that’s lost is America being a role model. I mean, how can the U.S. argue about how another country treats migrants when we’ve basically ended the practice of asylum in this country. How can we lecture the Chinese on what they’re doing to Uyghur Muslims when… I think the case of China is a really interesting example because they can just keep pointing to these hypocrisies and saying, “You don’t get to tell us anything.” And I mean, we lose that kind of moral force, in a sense. And so, we’re kind of becoming the world that they think we are: every man for himself. And it didn’t not necessarily have to be that way.
China’s an interesting example because the Trump administration makes a really big deal, Pompeo in particular, President Trump himself doesn’t, but Pompeo, in particular, makes a big deal about the Uyghur Muslims situation in China and the human rights concerns there. And it’s really striking because one thing I noticed is that he often doesn’t mention they’re Muslims. He just says, they’re Uyghur. I found that interesting and when he bashes them on it, and then when you ask the administration, “Why do you care about human rights?” And they’re like, “Look, we care about Muslims here. Look at the Uyghurs.” “Yeah, but you didn’t do anything about the Rohingya in Myanmar. You’re not saying anything about what India is doing to the Muslims.” So, why are they going after this Muslim issue in China? Well, because they’re trying to go after China.
To them, it’s like, “This is an adversary. And so, therefore, we will use every stick available to beat them with even if it risks us being called hypocritical on every other front.” But they just assume people won’t notice. I notice, but they just assume people won’t notice and it gives them a certain level of cover. And in China, also I should add, one reason they’re making a big deal of religious freedom in China is because they care about Christians in China and how they are being oppressed, as well. So that helps them politically.
Mark Danner: I just want to add that I think the dean has a real point that there are policy consequences for this and you’ve just made that point obviously, but Khashoggi, I mean it’s crazy to pretend if that had happened under another administration, that that administration would have broken relations with the Saudis. They wouldn’t have, but they would have withdrawn the ambassador. There would have been a period, a winter period of relations between the countries. There would have been arms deals that would have been put on hold. Possibly the Crown Prince would have lost his job. There would have been consequences and the consequences mean that it wouldn’t happen again and that other people wouldn’t do it. There’s a way of enforcing of norms that has gone away completely.
So, these things aren’t just for show at all. I think they have real consequences. And the other issue, of course, with the alliances is… it seems to me there are two things that matter with the alliances beyond simple supplying troops. If you put troops in Germany, one is the reliability that the United States would protect what are now far flung areas of NATO that are not protectable, which were dumb decisions. And the other was a kind of moral agreement on what we’re doing as nations and the moral agreement part, it’s kind of over, I think, and the reliability. I’m not so sure.
Nahal Toosi: It’s really interesting because so often Trump administration policies clash with each other. So, he’s trashing our allies. But if you really want to take on China, it would be great to have Europe in your corner. But now you can’t even get the Europeans to get rid of Huawei. They undermine themselves over and over. I wrote a whole story about how their immigration policy just often just completely clashes with other policies.
Mark Danner: Gee, they should have a National Security Council that would coordinate these things.
Nahal Toosi: Oversee, then we have to do a whole lecture about Stephen Miller, how he circumvented that process.
Mark Danner: Question.
Audience 3: Well, that’s a good segue to my question. I wanted to ask about immigration because you started out talking about being feeling so incredulous about the Muslim ban. Like, this can’t be, and yet day after day, what we see is undermining the rule of law with regard to immigration. I mean, Trump has broken every law that I can think of sending people back to Guatemala. The Muslim ban, religious discrimination and so forth. And I was wondering how do you see the future of immigration policy after this is over or even in the next four years? I mean, like you sort of offhandedly said he’s banning asylum. And this really worries me. And not only because I’m worried about refugees daily, but because the rule of law is undermined every single time. How will this affect other policies where they are breaking the law willy nilly?
Mark Danner: Great, great question.
Nahal Toosi: Well, I would actually, so look, obviously there are some cases where the courts have stepped in and said, “No, you can’t do this.” But they’re actually scoring a lot of wins, too, on that front. So, I don’t know if they’re necessarily technically breaking a lot of law. I know it sounds kind of weird, but partly probably I think it’s because you’re assuming that they’re going to agree or to follow international law or respect international law, but the reality is we don’t.
Audience 3: Or they can say the Muslim ban is a security issue.
Nahal Toosi: Right. I mean. That’s how they framed it originally.
Mark Danner: Well, as you say, they’ve kind of, in effect, ended asylum, which Congress, so far as I know, didn’t didn’t end, but…
Nahal Toosi: But it’s all about regulation versus law. And so, the genius of Stephen Miller is that he knows immigration regulations, everything. I mean it’s astonishing. So they have used everything they possibly can to make it harder to get immigration here, basically through changes in regulations or how they define or interpret a particular law. So some of it may be illegal, but as we found with the travel ban, it started out clearly, deeply problematic. By the time it got to the Supreme Court, it was the third iteration of it. And they had made it fit within the law. I mean, there’s no doubt that the executive has a ton of control over immigration policy. Nobody denies that. And again, Congress just doesn’t step up, right?
Mark Danner: Right.
Nahal Toosi: So, I mean, one of the public charge changes this basically is making it a lot harder for people to become citizens, legal immigrants, to become citizens. If people in the immigration system decide that in the future, they could become a public drain on public resources. But the way that they are defining it is if you’ve ever used food stamps or if you’ve ever… So one of the things that counts against you is if you apply for citizenship, but they can do that. I mean, they’re, they have a lot of leeway in this particular administration. The real wall that they’re building is through these regulations. It’s not the wall on the border. It’s making it harder for people to come here, either, even for visit, to immigrate here from Nigeria. I mean, I think one of the great obvious hypocrisy of this administration was when they recently expanded the travel ban. Adding a bunch of countries like Nigeria, et cetera.
And I broke the story on, I found out which countries they were going to add or planning on adding. And what was astonishing about it was they added these countries and they said, this was for national security reasons, people from these countries. But in several of the cases, they did not ban tourists. They did not ban the people who were coming here on non-immigrant visas from these countries like Nigeria. They just banned their ability to become immigrants to this country and ended up being citizens here. So, it was like, “Well, if you have a national security reasons, don’t you want to leave out the guys who come on a tourist visa?” They didn’t even pretend. I mean, it was just so… that’s kind of what we’ve gotten.
I don’t know if I answered your question except, but I will say this, look, a lot of the stuff is reversible and fairly quickly. I mean, I know that Democrats are already planning like a slew. There are people who are keeping track of this, they are like, “These are the 20 executive orders you need to sign on your first day to reverse a lot of this stuff.” Some of the stuff they might want to keep, I mean, frankly the birth tourism thing, I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that on both sides — the idea that people come here just to have their babies and get that privilege of citizenship. I know it’s not normal, but I cannot stress enough how much it is Stephen Miller driving these policies it is. I’ve never seen one single person get this amount of control over an issue. It is something people will study.
Mark Danner: I think we have time for one more question. One more concisely stated highly necessary brilliantly shaped question.
Audience 4: That’s a lot of pressure. And I also just wanted to stop talking about Stephen Miller. So I wonder if you could, just two questions. I’ll make it one. Can you just talk about what it’s like to be a woman covering politics in 2020?
Nahal Toosi: Oh, I think it’s awesome. I mean, I’ve always, it’s been very rare in my career that I have found that being a woman is a disadvantage. I’ve usually found that to be an advantage. It gives me access to people that a lot of the guys don’t get access to. And people who underestimate you, they pretty quickly learn their lesson. The next time they don’t underestimate you.
The greatest things that happened to me was I broke the story early on about the career government official who was basically being kicked out of position because of conservative media attacks on her. And they had targeted her basically because she was of Iranian descent, even though she was born in America and they accused her of being a mole in the Iranian regime, it was a totally wild and insane. And because of that story, it led to a bunch of stuff, including a whistleblower thing, and then an IG report and all this stuff. And along the way, there were these emails that were uncovered and in it there were all these discussions about my questions about this. And the State Department official was like, “She isn’t one to back down.” And I was like, “Yeah.” And I put that in my Twitter bio.
But I have found that it’s pretty cool. I haven’t found it to be an issue. I think where I’m just one of those people who honestly feels like if you make it an issue, it will become an issue. But if you just pretend it’s not even an issue, people will be like, “Oh, cool. Yeah, we’ll talk to you.” But most importantly is simply proving yourself. So like, “Fine, you don’t want to talk to me this time. Here’s the story I wrote. Next time, you’re going to talk to me. Aren’t you?” “Yeah, okay.” I know maybe other people have had different issues. I don’t know, I’ve been very fortunate. I don’t get sexually harassed, not in this country, overseas for some reason. But I’ve just kind of avoided some of those things. And I’m told, “Well, it’s because they know you won’t put up with it.” So, I don’t know, but I’ve been lucky. You had said you had one more question or?
Audience 4: Well, if I we have time, could you talk a little bit about your coverage of the Rohingya and also just how that is such a major human rights and humanitarian crisis. And now, maybe we’re not even talking about it anymore, but what’s going to happen?
Nahal Toosi: Yeah. I mean, it was the hardest story I’ve ever written. It required me to travel to Myanmar and Bangladesh, but a lot of the reporting was actually done in Washington. I didn’t want to repeat the other stories that people had already written about just simply at being a humanitarian disaster. I think that was abundantly clear. Although man, when you’re there it is just it’s something else. I focused a lot of it on the policy decisions made under Obama and whether the U.S. kind of missed this and whether it could’ve have done more to stop it. I didn’t personally draw any final conclusions because I felt like that’s up to the reader. And I also realized it was actually a very complicated thing. I kind of went in thinking, “Oh, they should have… and by the end of it I’m like, “I really don’t know.” Because foreign policy is often about making decisions between something terrible and something even worse.
Emotionally it was very, very trying. It was very hard. The writing was something, I’m not a magazine writer. And so this was very much a new experience for me to do this type of report and magazine story. It was very informative and really I’m glad, but I also learned that I don’t want to be a magazine writer. I learned that I really just love being in the daily conversation. I love writing regularly. I love seeing my byline and I don’t mind doing a magazine piece now in them, but I cannot psychologically, I cannot go from one big project to another big project. I will get ulcers. I will just lose my hair. I don’t know how you do it. Although my editor was like, “Well, the thing about most magazine writers is they’re incapable of writing a story in a single day.”
Mark Danner: It’s true.
Nahal Toosi: So it was, it was really good. And I will say this will no doubt be the peak of my career, but I was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for the story and in the reporting category. And when I got that news, I burst into tears and I cried all day. But I mean, partly it was because I felt like I had not really helped anyone. I mean, this was the thing I was I couldn’t. I would get every single bit of this if I just helped one Rohingya kid. But it was what I do hope is that maybe future policymakers will read that piece and like take away something from it that will affect them and how they make policy in the future on these issues. And I do know there’s one Arab ambassador who basically forces everybody he meets to read the story because he’s like, “See, this is what it’s like to deal with the US.” So it was interesting. I hope you guys all get a chance to look at it and read it and read the inside the chaotic early days of Trump’s foreign policy piece to that one. I think you’ll enjoy and be terrified by it so.
Mark Danner: I definitely would second that, that people should read the Rohingya piece because it’s a kind of model of a piece about a horrible thing that happened that you want to blame on someone and the deeper you get into the issues involved. And the more honest you are and how you talk to people and what their issues were at the time, the more complicated it becomes, and you finish the piece with nobody really to blame except the killers themselves. And it’s very frustrating in that way. It’s very alarming in that way. But it’s also a model of a great piece of journalism and the kind of stuff that we’d like our graduates obviously to be able to accomplish. So I’m extremely grateful…
Nahal Toosi: Can I just say, though, if so a few months after, I mean more than a year or so after I wrote that piece I read Mark Danner’s piece on “The Truth of Elmos Otay” and it was because I was going to be dealing with Elliot Abrams more and I was like, “I should find out what happened.” And then, I read this piece and I’m like, “Oh, my God, this is incredible.” I was just in complete awe of your work. And I mean, one of the things that you wrote in that piece that really stuck with me was you talked about this woman who was a witness to what happened. And she had a young child, and you mentioned that as she was waiting, her breasts filled with milk. And that was, I just was like, “That is incredible.” I was like, “Who is this man? I must get to one day reach out to him if I ever have the bravery.” And then luckily this happened and I was like, “Yay.”
Mark Danner: Well, I’m very glad it did. I’m very glad you came here and thank you for those comments. And I’m bound to thank the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Goldman School of Public Policy, the Institute of Governmental Affairs. And I hope all of you would just join me in thanking Nahal Toosi for coming to talk to us tonight.
Nahal Toosi: Thank you. It was a pleasure, thank you.
Mark Danner: Thank you.
Nahal Toosi: Great. Thank you so much.