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THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump's Big Lie Is Now Clear To All, And It May Not Matter

His false promises to the working class are being exposed. But the paradox of a new expose book is that it may actually strengthen his alliance with traditional Republicans.

Trump arriving at the White House on Jan. 7
Trump arriving at the White House on Jan. 7
E.J. Dionne Jr.

WASHINGTON — The most astonishing aspect of the response to Michael Wolff's book is that anyone is surprised. President Trump's unfitness for office was obvious long before he was elected. Once he moved into the White House, the destructive chaos of his administration was there for all to see. Future historians will scratch their heads to figure out why it took this particular book to break the dam of denial.

None of this takes anything away from Wolff's achievement in Fire and Fury. On the contrary, he deserves our thanks for creating Trump's "emperor has no clothes' moment, even if this point should have been reached before, say, Nov. 8, 2016. Trump's tweets on Saturday pronouncing himself "a very stable genius' only underscored the damage Wolff has done and Trump's dumbfounding insecurity.

But Wolff alone cannot bring this presidency crashing down, given how many Republicans still seem determined to protect Trump. Even as the news was dominated by Wolff's revelations, Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Lindsey O. Graham made a criminal referral to the Justice Department on Friday — and not against anyone who might have colluded with Russia. Instead, they urged investigation of Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored an explosive dossier including information that Trump may have been compromised by Moscow.

His flimflam has not deceived voters as to where his heart and his bank account lie.

Fortunately, this will not derail special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's probe, but the episode was one of many signs that Republican leaders in Congress are sticking with Trump in the face of the damage the president's increasingly obvious and glaring shortcomings are doing to our country. Over the weekend, Republican leaders trooped up to Camp David to meet with Trump and pledge their allegiance to a common agenda.

To chart a path forward from here, it's important to see why Trump has maintained enough support, or at least acquiescence, to keep himself in office.

The first key is his phony populism, with an emphasis on both words.

Trump will continue to try to rally what base he has left with tweets about kneeling NFL players, immigrants, law and order and "political correctness." He will keep attacking Hillary Clinton, the surest sign of his weakness, since his own record has done little to draw Americans his way. He needs targets to make his enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend approach work.

But it's not working as well as it used to. Trump's policies have shown that his true commitments are to himself and to other very wealthy people and corporate interests. The broad unpopularity of his tax cut is a sign that his flimflam has not deceived voters as to where his heart and his bank account lie.

His other policies, reflected in his slew of executive actions, have weakened federal protections for the environment, for workplace safety and worker pay, for civil rights and for small investors.

Last week alone, in the midst of the swirl around Wolff's book, the administration moved to open nearly all of our offshore waters to drilling even as the Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended an Obama-era rule requiring communities to address residential segregation. And the Justice Department, undercutting conservative states'-rights rhetoric, renewed enforcement of federal marijuana laws despite state legalization statutes.

What might be called the Wolff Effect will thus be paradoxical.

In response to what is little more than a traditional right-wing agenda, there has been a marked erosion of loyalty to Trump among voters who thought they were casting ballots for a populist and are getting ideological and plutocratic policies instead. A Pew Research Center survey last month found Trump losing ground particularly among whites without college degrees and white evangelical Christians, groups whose devotion Trump counts on.

On the other hand, the more Trump proves his populism to be phony and behaves like a traditional Republican, the more the congressional GOP will want to prop him up. Trump's break with Stephen K. Bannon, the nemesis of the Capitol Hill crowd, will bring the president and the elected conservative establishment closer, and Bannon's statement on Sunday attempting to soften his comments to Wolff without retracting them is unlikely to change this.

What might be called the Wolff Effect will thus be paradoxical. It could strengthen the bonds between Republican politicians and Trump at the very moment when everyone else is coming to terms with how dangerous it is to have a president who is so uninformed and unstable. In the meantime, more traditional journalists will carry on their painstaking work, piling up evidence that Trump did all he could to block a legal accounting for the methods that helped get him to the White House in the first place.

We should have gotten here sooner. But far better late than never.

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Green

The Unsustainable Future Of Fish Farming — On Vivid Display In Turkish Waters

Currently, 60% of Turkey's fish currently comes from cultivation, also known as fish farming, compared to just 10% two decades ago. The short-sightedness of this shift risks eliminating fishing output from both the farms and the open seas along Turkey's 5,200 miles of coastline.

Photograph of two fishermen throwing a net into the Tigris river in Turkey.

Traditional fishermen on the Tigris river, Turkey.

Dûrzan Cîrano/Wikimeidia
İrfan Donat

ISTANBUL — Turkey's annual fish production includes 515,000 tons from cultivation and 335,000 tons came from fishing in open waters. In other words, 60% of Turkey's fish currently comes from cultivation, also known as fish farming.

It's a radical shift from just 20 years ago when some 600,000 tons, or 90% of the total output, came from fishing. Now, researchers are warning the current system dominated by fish farming is ultimately unsustainable in the country with 8,333 kilometers (5,177 miles) long.

Professor Mustafa Sarı from the Maritime Studies Faculty of Bandırma 17 Eylül University believes urgent action is needed: “Why were we getting 600,000 tons of fish from the seas in the 2000’s and only 300,000 now? Where did the other 300,000 tons of fish go?”

Professor Sarı is challenging the argument from certain sectors of the industry that cultivation is the more sustainable approach. “Now we are feeding the fish that we cultivate at the farms with the fish that we catch from nature," he explained. "The fish types that we cultivate at the farms are sea bass, sea bram, trout and salmon, which are fed with artificial feed produced at fish-feed factories. All of these fish-feeds must have a significant amount of fish flour and fish oil in them.”

That fish flour and fish oil inevitably must come from the sea. "We have to get them from natural sources. We need to catch 5.7 kilogram of fish from the seas in order to cultivate a sea bream of 1 kg," Sarı said. "Therefore, we are feeding the fish to the fish. We cannot cultivate fish at the farms if the fish in nature becomes extinct. The natural fish need to be protected. The consequences would be severe if the current policy is continued.”

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