Opinion|The Wilbur Ross Debacle
The Wilbur Ross Debacle
Lies, corruption, white nationalism and disdain for workers: Meet the commerce secretary.
By David Leonhardt
Opinion Columnist
Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, in his Washington office last October.CreditCreditMary Calvert/Reuters
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First, Roger Stone — the longtime adviser to President Trump — was indicted this morning on seven counts, including witness tampering and obstruction. Legal analysts and journalists are still sorting through the charges. But as Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare notes, Stone appears to have been a conduit between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. If so, he may also have been at the center of the relationship between the campaign and Russia. Stay tuned.
Let Them Eat Loans
At this point, Wilbur Ross almost seems to be campaigning for the title of Worst Trump Cabinet member.
Ross, the commerce secretary, made news yesterday by suggesting that federal workers working without pay don't have it so bad: They should just take out a loan, he suggested, and all will be fine.
[Listen to "The Argument" podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]
It was quite a sentiment, coming from a multimillionaire whose boss and friend — President Trump — is the reason that the workers aren't being paid. But it really shouldn't have been too surprising. Consider a few highlights of the Ross era at the Commerce Department:
After Trump picked him for the job, Ross "promised to divest from almost all his holdings upon entering government," Dan Alexander wrote in Forbes. But Ross evidently did not keep his promise. Instead, according to Alexander, he held onto his stakes "in companies co-owned by the Chinese government, a shipping firm tied to Vladimir Putin's inner circle" and other similarly "radioactive" companies. When government ethics officials later asked Ross about his holdings, he appeared to lie about them.
In 2017, shortly after a New York Times reporter submitted questions to Ross about a Russian-tied shipping firm, Ross shorted the stock — that is, he made a financial bet that the stock would lose value. That certainly appears to be a no-no. He was potentially profiting from information that was not available to the public, namely that the company was about to be the subject of a negative story in the press.
In 2017, Ross met with the chief executives of Chevron, even though his wife owned a substantial investment in the company. The meeting, according to Forbes, put Ross "at risk of violating a criminal conflict-of-interest law." Ross also met with the C.E.O. of Boeing, another company in which his wife owns a stake.
Last week, a federal judge ruled that Ross broke the law by misleading the public about his department's attempt to add a question about people's citizenship status to the 2020 census. Ross claimed data from the question would help the government protect African-American voting rights. In fact, it was intended to scare Latinos from answering the census, leading to an undercount that would ultimately damage immigrant-heavy communities both economically and politically.
As commerce secretary, Ross has managed to combine corruption, lies, white nationalism and disdain for working people. I'll let my colleague Gail Collins decide who is Trump's Worst Cabinet Member; she invented the competition, after all. But I hereby deem Ross to be the Trumpiest member of Trump's team.
Related: Ross's "extraordinarily shady financial history doesn't get the attention it deserves," Michelle Goldberg writes in her latest column.
Media diversity
"At some level, the modern newsroom gets the value of knowledge and experience when reporting on different American communities," David A. French writes in National Review, in a piece about the Covington Catholic controversy. News organizations, French continues, "diligently seek to hire reporters from historically marginalized communities. They do not, however, apply the same diligence to hiring people who come from the intellectual and religious communities on the other side of the great American divide. This creates yawning gaps of ignorance."
Impeachment, continued.
In Slate, the political scientist Yascha Mounk joins the impeachment debate and makes a case against impeaching Trump. The process could make the president more popular at a time when he is becoming more vulnerable, Mounk argues; a successful impeachment would enrage the Trump's base and energize them for future elections. "By solving one awful problem in the short run, it may create an even worse one in the long run," Mounk writes.
I'm sympathetic to much of Mounk's argument. He lays out several downsides of impeachment, and I agree it would be a mistake to begin proceedings now, as I wrote on Wednesday. I also agree with this: "There is every reason for Democrats to start holding hearings into Trump's misconduct. There is every reason for them to demand his tax returns and ask him to testify in front of Congress."
But I worry that giving up on the possibility of removing Trump from office is akin to overlooking the damage he could do before Jan. 20, 2021. Sometimes, a short-run problem is so awful that it matters more than the long-run risks.
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David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt • Facebook