Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.
Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he stated in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter's questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California's ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.
"It's taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life," said Mehlman, now an executive vice-president with the New York City-based private equity firm KKR. "Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I've told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they've been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that's made me a happier and better person. It's something I wish I had done years ago."
Privately, in off-the-record conversations with this reporter over the years, Mehlman voiced support for civil unions and told of how, in private discussions with senior Republican officials, he beat back efforts to attack same-sex marriage. He insisted, too, that President Bush "was no homophobe." Mehlman often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called "the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now."
"Anyone who watched me knew I was clearly uncomfortable with the topic."
Mehlman's leadership positions in the GOP came at a time when the party was stepping up its anti-gay activities -- such as the 2006 distribution in West Virginia of literature linking homosexuality to atheism, or the less-than-subtle, coded language in the party's platform ("Attempts to redefine marriage in a single state or city could have serious consequences throughout the country..."). Mehlman said at the time that he could not, as an individual Republican, go against the party consensus. He was aware that Karl Rove, President Bush's chief strategic adviser, had been working with Republicans to make sure that anti-gay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.
Mehlman acknowledges that if he had publicly declared his sexuality sooner, he might have played a role in keeping the party from pushing an anti-gay agenda.
"It's a legitimate question and one I understand," Mehlman said. "I can't change the fact that I wasn't in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that. It was very hard, personally." He asks of those who doubt his sincerity: "If they can't offer support, at least offer understanding."
"What I do regret, and think a lot about, is that one of the things I talked a lot about in politics was how I tried to expand the party into neighborhoods where the message wasn't always heard. I didn't do this in the gay community at all."
He said that he "really wished" he had come to terms with his sexual orientation earlier, "so I could have worked against [the Federal Marriage Amendment]" and "reached out to the gay community in the way I reached out to African Americans."
Mehlman understands that his attempts to justify his past silence will not be adequate for many people. He and his friends say that he is aware that he will no longer control the story about his identity -- which will simultaneously expose old wounds, invite Schadenfruede, and legitimize anger among gay rights activists in both parties who did not hide their sexual orientations.
Mehlman, who has never married, long found his sexuality subject to rumor and innuendo. He was the subject of an outing campaign by gay rights activist Mike Rogers, starting when Mehlman was Bush's campaign manager. Rogers's crusades against closeted gay Republicans split the organized gay lobby in Washington but were undoubtedly effective: he drove several elected officials, including Virginia Rep. Ed Shrock, from office, pushed out a would-be presidential campaign manager for George Allen well before Allen was set to run, slung rumors about Sen. Larry Craig's sexual orientation well before Craig's incident in a Minneapolis airport bathroom, and even managed to make homosexuality a wedge issue within the party's activist circles.
In 2006, Rogers caught up to Mehlman and asked him why he gave "so many confusing answers to social conservatives about your homosexuality," and followed up by asking whether Mehlman knew of a man who Rogers had claimed was Mehlman's secret partner. Mehlman denied to Rogers that he had given conflicting answers and said that the man in question was a law school classmate.
In several discussions I've had with Mehlman since he stepped down from the Republican National Committee in 2007, he never volunteered information about his sexual orientation, although charges that he helped preside over a resurgence in anti-gay sentiment were clearly an ongoing burden to him.
The disclosure at this stage of Mehlman's life strikes one close friend as being like a decision to jump off of a high diving board: Mehlman knows that there is plenty of water below, but it is still frightening to look down and make the leap. Mehlman likes order and certainty, and he knows that the reaction to his public confirmation cannot be predicted or contained.
Mehlman is the most powerful Republican in history to identify as gay.
Because his tenure as RNC chairman and his time at the center of the Bush political machine coincided with the Republican Party's attempts to exploit anti-gay prejudices and cement the allegiance of social conservatives, his declaration to the world is at once a personal act and an act of political speech.
"I wish I was where I am today 20 years ago. The process of not being able to say who I am in public life was very difficult. No one else knew this except me. My family didn't know. My friends didn't know. Anyone who watched me knew I was a guy who was clearly uncomfortable with the topic," he said.
During the Rogers crusades, many news organizations made attempts to confirm rumors and stories about Mehlman's sexuality. Republicans close to Mehlman either said they did not know, or that it did not matter, or that the question was offensive.
Mehlman once joked in public that although he was not gay, the rumors put a crimp on his social life. He admits to having misled several people who asked him about his sexuality directly.
He said that he plans to be an advocate for gay rights within the GOP, that he remains proud to be a Republican, and that his political identity is not defined by any one issue.
"What I will try to do is to persuade people, when I have conversations with them, that it is consistent with our party's philosophy, whether it's the principle of individual freedom, or limited government, or encouraging adults who love each other and who want to make a lifelong committment to each other to get married."
"I hope that we, as a party, would welcome gay and lesbian supporters. I also think there needs to be, in the gay community, robust and bipartisan support [for] marriage rights."
Ed Gillespie, a former RNC chairman and long-time friend of Mehlman, said that "it is significant that a former chairman of the Republiucan National Committe is openly gay and that he is supportive of gay marriage." Although Gillespie himself opposes gay marriage, he pointed to party stalwarts like former Vice President Dick Cheney and strategist Mary Matalin as open advocates for gay rights who had not been drummed out of the party. He acknowledged "big generational differences in perception when it comes to gay marriage and gay rights as an agenda, and I think that is true on the Republican side."
But, Gillespie said, he does not envision the party platform changing anytime soon.
"There are a lot of Republicans who are gay, there are a lot of Republicans who support government sanction of gay marriage, a lot of Republicans who support abortion on demand, a lot of Republicans who support cap-and-trade provisions. They're not single-issue voters." Gillespie acknowledged that the party had been inhospitable to gays in the past, and said that he hopes Mehlman's decision to come out leads the party to be "more respectful and civil in our discourse" when it comes to gays.
Mehlman said that his formal coming-out process began earlier this year. Over the past several weeks, he has notified former colleagues, including former President Bush. Once he realized that the news would probably leak, he assembled a team of former advisers to help him figure out the best way to harness the publicity generated by the disclosure for the cause of marriage rights. He is worried that some will see his decision to go public as opportunistic. Mehlman recently moved to Chelsea, a gay mecca in New York City. He refused to discuss his personal life with me, and he plans to give only a few print interviews on the subject.
Chad Griffin, the California-based political strategist who organized opposition to Proposition 8, said that Mehlman's quiet contributions to the American Foundation for Equal Rights are "tremendous," adding that "when we achieve equality, he will be one of the people to thank for it." Mehlman has become a de facto strategist for the group, and he has opened up his rolodex -- recruiting, as co-hosts for the AFER fundraiser: Paul Singer, a major Republican donor, hedge fund executive, and the president of the Manhattan Institute; Benjamin Ginsberg, one of the GOP's top lawyers; Michael Toner, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission; and two former GOP governors, William Weld of Massachusetts and Christie Todd Whitman of New Jersey.
Dustin Lance Black, the Academy Award-winning writer of "Milk," said, "Ken represents an incredible coup for the American Foundation for Equal Rights. We believe that our mission of equal rights under the law is one that should resonate with every American. As a victorious former presidential campaign manager and head of the Republican Party, Ken has the proven experience and expertise to help us communicate with people across each of the 50 states."
Photo: Jay L. Clendenin-Pool/Getty Images
He comes out of the closet and talks about gay marriage, Karl Rove, and more
Marc Ambinder is an Atlantic contributing editor. He is also a senior contributor at Defense One, a contributing editor at GQ, and a regular contributor at The Week.
A long, surprisingly standard speech ignored the tumultuous lived reality of American politics over the past year—and the likely reality in the year to come.
The strangest thing about watching President Donald Trump deliver a State of the Union address was how normal it seemed. Tuesday night, in his first State of the Union, the president offered a workmanlike speech that seemed worlds away from the tumultuous, gridlocked lived reality of American politics over the past year—and the likely reality in the year to come.
Looking back to his speech to a joint session of Congress last February, Trump recalled, “A new tide of optimism was already sweeping across our land. Each day since, we have gone forward with a clear vision and a righteous mission—to make America great again for all Americans.” He added, “Over the last year, we have made incredible progress and achieved extraordinary success.”
How Afghanistan’s neighbor cultivated American dependency while subverting American policy
Two months after the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Vice President–elect Joe Biden sat with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, in the Arg Palace, an 83-acre compound in Kabul that had become a gilded cage for the mercurial and isolated leader. The discussion was already tense as Karzai urged Washington to help root out Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, implying that more pressure needed to be exerted on Pakistani leaders. Biden’s answer stunned Karzai into silence. Biden let Karzai know how Barack Obama’s incoming administration saw its priorities. “Mr. President,” Biden said, “Pakistan is fifty times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.”
It was an undiplomatic moment for sure, but also a frank expression of the devastating paradox at the heart of the longest war in American history. In 16 years, the United States has spent billions of dollars fighting a war that has killed thousands of soldiers and an untold number of civilians in a country that Washington considers insignificant to its strategic interests in the region. Meanwhile, the country it has viewed as a linchpin, Pakistan—a nuclear-armed cauldron of volatile politics and long America’s closest military ally in South Asia—has pursued a covert campaign in Afghanistan designed to ensure that the money and the lives have been spent in vain. The stakes in Pakistan have been considered too high to break ties with Islamabad or take other steps that would risk destabilizing the country. The stakes in Afghanistan have been deemed low enough that careening from one failed strategy to another has been acceptable.
Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.
The clinic permitted Paul Manafort one 10-minute call each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Arizona, his voice often soaked in tears. “Apparently he sobs daily,” his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring of 2015, Manafort’s life had tipped into a deep trough. A few months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica, that suicide was a possibility. He would “be gone forever,” she texted Andrea.
His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship.
The program uses state-of-the-art AI techniques, but simple tests show that it's a long way from real understanding.
One Sunday, at one of our weekly salsa sessions, my friend Frank brought along a Danish guest. I knew Frank spoke Danish well, since his mother was Danish, and he, as a child, had lived in Denmark. As for his friend, her English was fluent, as is standard for Scandinavians. However, to my surprise, during the evening’s chitchat it emerged that the two friends habitually exchanged emails using Google Translate. Frank would write a message in English, then run it through Google Translate to produce a new text in Danish; conversely, she would write a message in Danish, then let Google Translate anglicize it. How odd! Why would two intelligent people, each of whom spoke the other’s language well, do this? My own experiences with machine-translation software had always led me to be highly skeptical about it. But my skepticism was clearly not shared by these two. Indeed, many thoughtful people are quite enamored of translation programs, finding little to criticize in them. This baffles me.
Those hoping the special counsel will prosecute the president are engaging in fantasy.
The latest revelations about President Trump have, once again, excited the interest of the public, leading to speculation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller may have amassed sufficient evidence to charge the president with obstruction of justice. Trump’s attempt to fire Mueller (which happened last June, but is only now being publicly reported) is, under this line of thinking, the final straw.
Color me deeply skeptical.
Mueller will not indict Trump for obstruction of justice or for any other crime. Period. Full stop. End of story. Speculations to the contrary are just fantasy.
He won’t do it for the good and sufficient reason that the Department of Justice has a long-standing legal opinion that sitting presidents may not be indicted. First issued in 1973 during the Nixon era, the policy was reaffirmed in 2000, during the Clinton era. These rules bind all Department of Justice employees, and Mueller, in the end, is a Department of Justice employee. More to the point, if we know anything about Mueller, we think we know that he follows the rules—all of them. Even the ones that restrict him in ways he would prefer they not. And if he were to choose not to follow the rules, that, in turn, would be a reasonable justification for firing him. So … the special counsel will not indict the president.
A British broadcaster doggedly tried to put words into the academic’s mouth.
My first introduction to Jordan B. Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist, came by way of an interview that began trending on social media last week. Peterson was pressed by the British journalist Cathy Newman to explain several of his controversial views. But what struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method his interviewer employed. It was the most prominent, striking example I’ve seen yet of an unfortunate trend in modern communication.
First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.
Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and various Fox News hosts all feature and reward this rhetorical technique. And the Peterson interview has so many moments of this kind that each successive example calls attention to itself until the attentive viewer can’t help but wonder what drives the interviewer to keep inflating the nature of Peterson’s claims, instead of addressing what he actually said.
Thousands of vulnerable migrants may soon be deported, which many Jews see as inconsistent with their faith.
TEL AVIV—Around 9:30 p.m. on a recent weekday night, four men sat waiting on the sidewalk outside Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority office. In a broken mix of Hebrew, English, and Arabic, they told me they were waiting for it to open so they could turn in their applications for refugee status—the next morning. According to local activists, the office only processes a handful of these forms each day, so asylum seekers arrive the night before to ensure their place in line.
These men are among the roughly 40,000 African migrants who have been stuck in limbo in Israel for years. Many crossed into Israel through the Sinai desert between 2006 and 2012, according to Israel’s African Refugee Development Center, fleeing the harsh political conditions in Eritrea or genocide and war in Sudan. The Israeli government has argued that these migrants are simply in Israel looking for work. Human-rights organizations, however, claim that most or all are here out of fear of persecution in their home countries. Of more than 13,000 people who had applied for asylum as of last summer, only 10 have been recognized as refugees, according to the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli human-rights organization.
A year after arriving in Washington promising to hand power back to the people, the president has instead given the city’s insiders precisely what they wanted.
On a drizzly January afternoon one year ago, a newly sworn in President Donald J. Trump stood on the steps of the United States Capitol, doing his best to terrify America’s ruling class.
“Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another,” Trump declared, peering out at a sea of supporters, “but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people.”
From Washington to Wall Street and beyond, a deep sense of unease permeated gatherings of high-status respectables at the dawn of the Trump presidency. The situation seemed dire: A madman had been swept into office in a wave of populist rage directed at them—and in that hallucinatory moment, it felt as if he was capable of anything. Would he tank their stock portfolios with a single tweet? Imprison their favorite New York Times columnists? Start a trade war with China, or a nuclear war with North Korea? And what to make of this mysterious movement he now marshaled?
A New York Times exposé of a “black market” for online fame diagnoses the symptom of social-media despair, but misses its cause.
In the summer of 2015, the game designer Bennett Foddy and I were sloshing down cocktails while waiting for prime dry-aged rib-eye steaks in Midtown Manhattan. We weren’t living large, exactly, but we did pause to assess our rising professional fortunes. Among them, both of us seemed to be blowing up on Twitter. “Where did all these followers come from?” I asked. We’d both added tens of thousands of apparent fans over the previous year or so.
Foddy, an unpresuming Australian with a doctorate in moral philosophy who now makes video games that purposely abuse their players, encouraged me not to get too chuffed about my entourage. We’d both been added to a list of accounts that are recommended to new Twitter users during the sign-up process, he explained. Many of our new followers were fake, created for the purposes of spam or resale. They had followed us automatically.
The omissions in the State of the Union, and the fate of Victor Cha, all point in the same direction.
The more closely you read Donald Trump’s comments about North Korea in his State of the Union address, the more plausible it becomes that he is preparing for war.
First, there’s the sheer emphasis he placed on the subject. In his speech, Trump devoted a mere sentence to Russia and China. He devoted 23 words to Israel, 34 to Afghanistan, and 48 to Iran. Even the war against ISIS, which Trump cites as the main foreign-policy achievement of his first year in office, garnered only 302 words. North Korea received 475.
Second, there are the things Trump didn’t say. The Olympics begin in South Korea in 10 days, and the South Korean government hopes participation by athletes from the North will ease hostility on the Peninsula. But Trump didn’t mention the games. In fact, he didn’t mention diplomacy at all.