The Gerald R. Ford, powered by two nuclear reactors, was designed to require seven hundred fewer sailors than the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers that will be replaced in the decades ahead. Among its increased efficiencies, the Ford uses two aircraft elevators instead of three to lift planes to the flight deck and return them to the interior hangars. The elevators are powered by electricity instead of steam, allowing them to move three times faster than on the older Nimitz-class carriers. Redesign of the superstructure and the flight decks allows the Ford to launch 270 flights a day, far more than its predecessors.
But the ship was also a financial disaster. The George W. Bush administration got Congress to order the keel laid before the ship was fully designed. Costs ballooned to $13 billion, roughly the cost of three of the Nimitz class of carriers. The Ford price tag alone equaled a quarter of the increase in military spending Trump wants. Construction began in late 2009. The ship was launched in November 2013, but not commissioned by the Navy until almost three months after Trump’s visit. It is not expected to be operational until 2020.
Ray Mabus, the Obama administration’s Navy secretary, called the Gerald R. Ford “a poster child for how you don’t build a ship.” Mabus said, “They were designing the Ford while they were building it—not a good way to—to build a ship. This is just a dumb way to build—to build any type of ship, but particularly something as big and as complicated as a carrier.” Senator John McCain, a Navy fighter pilot denigrated by candidate Trump because he was captured when his plane was shot down over Vietnam, has also criticized the Ford costs and design during construction as an unnecessary fiasco.
But even with design before construction, the cost of ships as well as jet fighters has risen because of modern electronics, much more powerful engines, and advanced weaponry. These complex systems require highly trained personnel, who can command higher pay if they leave the military for civilian jobs. But even with increased skill requirements for sailors and others, the economics of war are shifting. What was for centuries a labor-intensive enterprise that relied on soldiers, who are relatively cheap meat machines, modern warfare is capital-intensive, requiring god-awful expensive ships and planes that use digital-era weaponry, nuclear power, and other sophisticated equipment and systems.
Two months later, in an interview with Time magazine, Trump broke the most significant news from his March 2 visit to the Ford. Keep in mind that Trump says that he does not use a computer, does not trust them, and has important messages hand-delivered—as he did when he fired James Comey, his bodyguard Keith Schiller delivering the note to FBI headquarters five blocks from the White House. Trump does not embrace new technology but tends to look backward.
What Trump told Time shows that he did not understand what he was told.
“You know the catapult is quite important,” Trump said, bringing up the future of aircraft carriers and the systems used to fling military planes into the sky from short floating runways.
“So, I said ‘what is this?’ ” Trump recounted to Time.
“ ‘Sir, this is our digital catapult system,’ ” he quoted a sailor as responding. “He said, ‘well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology].’
“I said ‘you don’t use steam anymore for catapult?’
“ ‘No sir.’
“I said, ‘Ah, how is it working?’
“ ‘Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.’
“It sounded bad to me,” Trump said. “Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said, ‘and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers.’ I said ‘what system are you going to be—’
“ ‘Sir, we’re staying with digital.’
“I said, ‘no you’re not. You [sic] going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.’ ”
First off, the system is not digital, but electromechanical. It uses the same concept as the roller coasters that for nearly a century clicked and clanked as cars full of thrill seekers were pulled to the top of the first rise. Modern roller coasters use series of magnets that, when turned on in rapid sequence, accelerate the cars much faster.
Second, it’s unlikely that any Navy officer or enlisted personnel described the system the way Trump did. Rather, lacking knowledge of the principles of science and engineering, Trump converted what was said into something that made sense to him, including the word digital, which to Trump is a red flag for technology to be avoided at all costs. His remarks show that he did not listen, he just reacted, a trait described by many of his former top employees, casino regulators, and others who have dealt with him since he was a young man.
Third, while the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, was born in trouble, delaying the formal acceptance of the ship by three years, it was reworked and refined until the technical problems were resolved. That’s how progress works, by tinkering with new systems until the practical problems are overcome.
Fourth, the electromagnetic system enables launching much heavier planes and getting them into the air much faster. Not having to maintain high-pressure steam lines saves taxpayers several billion dollars in personnel costs over the life of each vessel.
In issuing his demand to return to steam, which will not happen because the ship is already built, Trump again demonstrated his backward-looking perspective on the world and his rejection of ideas, science, and technologies that move our species forward. Just as he promotes coal and rejects electricity made from wind, solar, and other renewable sources, Trump’s vision is not about the future but about a mythical past, at best a romantic nostalgia.
Trump’s limited capacity to understand complex issues prompted some of his advisers to find unusual ways to arouse his interest in policies they wanted, Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Robert Costa learned. Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, three-star general H. R. McMaster, and other military leaders found it difficult to persuade Trump to renege on his campaign promises and his 2013 “Let’s get out!” of Afghanistan tweet. Then McMaster and others told Trump that sending Americans into combat could revive an era when Afghanistan had been amenable to Western culture. What persuaded Trump to flip-flop, ordering more soldiers into combat seven months into his term? McMaster showed Trump a 1972 black-and-white photo of Afghan women in Kabul. They wore miniskirts.
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In the Time interview, Trump also demonstrated, yet again, his ignorance of economics. Trump said that when Shinzo Abe arrived in Washington soon after the inauguration, the first thing the Japanese prime minister said was “Thank you, thank you.”
“I said, ‘For what?’ ” Trump said, again quoting himself.
“F-35,” Abe supposedly replied. “You saved us one hundred million dollars” on the cost of the planes Japan was buying.
The lower cost means that the prime manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, collects less money from Japan. That’s good for Japanese taxpayers, not so much for Lockheed Martin, its subcontractors, or the American economy. And it’s certainly not “putting America first.”
Blithely unaware of how his own words undercut his America First promises, Trump continued boasting. “I saved Japan a hundred million bucks!” he proclaimed, conflating issues and reiterating his claim that as president-elect his negotiating skill had lowered the cost of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive airplane weapons system ever.
“Took me probably an hour if I added up all the time. But I will be saving, when we put that out over two, the two thousand five hundred planes, billions of dollars. Nobody ever wrote a story about that,” Trump said.
In fact, many news reports had examined the issues. “I was able to get $600 million approximately off those planes,” Trump said on January 30, in remark
s uncritically quoted in many news reports. Trump said that as president-elect he resolved long-stalled price negotiations to get costs down.
The claim was pure Trumpian fantasy.
Lockheed Martin would indeed get less money for the next batch of F-35s it delivered to the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on February 3 that Trump’s negotiating would save taxpayers $455 million or about $5 million per plane, significantly less than Trump’s claim of about $6.7 million per plane.
But the cost reduction was not news. The price per plane had been falling for years. “The price tag of the F-35A, the version flown by the U.S. Air Force and most allies, has fallen with each order. For example, F-35As in the seventh order cost 5 percent less than those in the sixth order, and so on,” the Jordanian-owned news service Defence Monitor Worldwide reported right after Trump’s January claims.
Lockheed had resisted cutting the price of Lot 10 by as much as the Pentagon wanted. Negotiations dragged on for fourteen months. Then, six days before the November election, the Pentagon invoked a take-it-or-leave-it clause in the F-35 contract mandating a lower price. Trade publications that track Pentagon contracting noted that Christopher Bogdan, the lieutenant general in charge of the F-35 program, had told reporters months earlier that he expected the cost per plane for Lot 10 to be 6 percent to 7 percent lower than Lot 9. Trump’s initial claim about the Lot 10 aircraft worked out to 6.5 percent less per plane, meaning Trump contributed nothing to the lower price, he just claimed credit for what others had already done.
Lockheed, which counts on the federal government for about 71 percent of its revenue—and a third of that government money is for the F-35. That explains why Lockheed trod cautiously in a public statement responding to what Trump said. Even though it had informed shareholders in writing that Trump had nothing to do with the lowered price for Lot 10 planes, it took care to avoid disputing Trump. The weapons company said tepidly that it appreciated Trump recognizing “the positive progress we’ve made on the F-35 program.”
To sell the public on a $54 billion boost in military spending, Trump proposed to cut spending elsewhere. His 2018 budget year plan includes cuts of more than a third in spending on diplomacy and aid to poor countries. And he wants to address the future of warfare in a most unusual way. The focus of global conflict is shifting from traditional battlefields to cyberspace, where theft by hacking and inflicting damage by planting computer viruses abound. Russia is a leader in both, including the help it gave Trump in the 2016 elections. But Trump’s idea is to partner with the Russians.
Soon after Trump’s unintentionally revealing comments to Time, he left on his first foreign trip, flying to Saudi Arabia where, as we have seen, what he did not know created new problems.
PART VI
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EDUCATION
Promises and Performances
On the campaign trail Donald Trump repeatedly argued that he was the one true champion of African Americans, especially when he talked about education. He described African Americans as homogeneous—uniformly impoverished, poorly educated, living in communities of dilapidated housing, overrun by drugs and violent crime—ignoring the many black entrepreneurs, industrialists, physicians, scholars, and scientists. Again and again he would say to African Americans, as well as to Latinos, that the Democrats were their real enemy.
“What the hell do you have to lose?” by voting for him, Trump would ask. Trump declared that he would do more for black Americans than anyone ever had. He said that Hillary Clinton had done more harm to them than any other living politician, a bizarre claim he failed to support with any facts.
Only about 4 percent of African American voters said they planned to cast their ballots for Trump, although about 8 percent actually did. This broad rejection was not surprising given Trump’s long and documented history of discriminating against blacks in renting apartments and in employment at his casinos. At campaign rallies, he repeatedly singled out African Americans, ordering police to eject people of color or urging the crowd to rough them up.
Just days before the election, Trump held a public rally in Kinston, North Carolina, where two thirds of the populace are African American. His audience was nearly all white. One black man who had arrived early to get a good spot stood near the podium. Trump assumed he was a protester. “Were you paid $1,500 to be a thug?” Trump shouted, ordering security to remove him. As it turned out, the man, C. J. Cary, is a former Marine who had come to show his support for Trump. He stood up front because he hoped to hand Trump a note suggesting he would get more votes if he showed more respect to four groups of people: blacks, women, the disabled, and college students.
In posturing as the true champion of African Americans, the Republican standard-bearer earlier that day in Charlotte, had compared himself to Abraham Lincoln. Trump evidently thought his audience was ignorant of the Civil War president’s political affiliation, saying twice that “a lot of people don’t know” Lincoln was a Republican, a point he continued making after the election.
The well-known fact that Trump offered about Lincoln as if it were a revelation came during a scripted address in a private meeting. “I’m asking today for the honor of your vote and the privilege to represent,” he said.
In an uncharacteristically subdued voice Trump then proposed his “New Deal for Black America.”
Anyone watching the official video reasonably would have thought his audience consisted of black North Carolinians. After being introduced by a black pastor, Leon Threatt of Christian Faith Assembly in Charlotte, Trump said he wanted to make an important announcement to “a small group of very, very powerful people in the African American community.”
The video camera operator did not show the audience, unlike news cameras that typically pull back to show the audience at Trump rallies and other events. Had the camera panned the room, it would have shown that the seven hundred guests were not “very, very powerful people in the African American community.” Trump’s invited audience was nearly all white.
Trump said he had a three-prong plan to expand the African American middle class through education, jobs, and investment. It was typical Trump, slogans and claims without substantive policy proposals. Trump did make one clear and specific pledge. It concerned the future of America’s 107 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). “My plan will also ensure funding for historic black colleges and universities,” he promised.
In February, the White House invited leaders of the HBCUs to two days of meetings. Among those present was Betsy DeVos, the billionaire from western Michigan whom Trump had named education secretary even though she had no experience as a teacher, education professor, or administrator.
The sessions were billed as listening sessions so Trump and his appointees could hear the concerns of HBCU presidents. The meetings did not proceed as promised. “There was very little listening to HBCU presidents,” Walter M. Kimbrough, president of Dillard University in New Orleans, said afterward. “We were only given about two minutes each, and that was cut to one minute,” he said. Few of the college presidents got to speak at all.
Had Kimbrough gotten a chance to be heard, he would have said that a half century ago “a philosophy emerged suggesting education was no longer a public good, but a private one. Since then we’ve seen federal and state divestment in education, making the idea of education as the path to the American dream more of a hallucination for the poor and disenfranchised. There is no doubt who is left to hallucinate. In the past decade, the wealth gap between whites and blacks has gone from seven- to thirteen-fold. The median net worth of a single-parent white family is twice that of the two-parent black family. Black students graduate with 31 percent more college debt than their white peers.” To shrink the wealth gap, Kimbrough wanted to say, Trump should expand Pell Grants to poor students. Pell Grants support 70 percent of students at historically black colleges, compared to a bit more than a third of American college students
overall. And Pell Grants needed to be increased, many education leaders had argued elsewhere, because in 2017 their value measured as a share of typical public college tuition was at its lowest level in four decades.
Kimbrough also wanted to propose a simple reform that would end a structural bias against poor students. He wanted Pell Grants made available to part-time students because poor students generally must work while attending college, making it difficult to do the study required with a full course load.
The next day a score of other black college presidents were abruptly ushered into the Oval Office by Omarosa Manigault. She was the repeat guest on Trump’s television shows who late in the campaign said that every Trump critic would be forced to “bow down” to the new American president. The college presidents and Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund, which has raised $3.6 billion to educate more than 400,000 African American young people since World War II, assembled around Trump’s desk.
With White House cameras rolling, Trump skillfully created the impression that he was very familiar with these educators, grabbing one and pulling him forward. To the casual viewer, Trump seemed to heartily embrace the idea of investing more federal tax dollars in improving young African American minds. Trump promised to “do more” for students at these colleges than any previous president. “We will make HBCUs a priority in the White House, an absolute priority,” said Trump, looking into the camera. He pledged to “bring education and opportunity to all of our people.”
With a flourish and awkward attempts to inject some laughter into the televised ceremony, Trump read from a statement announcing that he was signing an executive order establishing the President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Its twenty-five members would advise him “on all matters pertaining to strengthening the educational capacity of HBCUs” so that they would “remain fiscally secure institutions.” This board was nothing new. It had existed for more than a third of a century. Its genesis was an order issued by President Jimmy Carter to strengthen the HBCUs and address historic discrimination in education funding. President Reagan created the board and every president who followed renewed it. Its annual budget was minuscule at less than $100,000. Any hope that this White House event showed that Trump would follow through on his campaign promises and expand federal financial support for HBCUs evaporated a few weeks later when the so-called skinny budget came out.
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