Trump pays tribute to ‘brave men and women’ of civil rights movement

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JACKSON, Miss. — President Trump spent about 30 minutes inside Mississippi’s glimmering civil rights museum Saturday, strolling through exhibits honoring jailed and assassinated leaders before delivering a brief speech at a private ceremony.

The president’s visit to commemorate the opening — the capstone of Mississippi’s bicentennial celebration — brought protests and boycotts and evoked raw emotions in the center of the Deep South, the core of the generations-long civil rights movement. Trump delivered his speech to a largely white audience, and his motorcade left before the main opening ceremony — for which hordes of people had gathered in freezing temperatures and a rare snowfall. Tickets had been sold out for months. 

Trump largely stuck to prepared remarks, with an occasional impromptu comment. 

“Those are very big phrases, very big words,” he said, after reading his speech on Jim Crow laws, segregation, emancipation and achieving the “sacred birthright of equality.”

Trump praised several civil rights leaders by name, including Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in his Jackson driveway in 1963.

“Here, we memorialize the brave men and women who struggled to sacrifice, and sacrifice so much, so that others might live in freedom,” Trump said. 

In contrast with his 76-minute rally in Pensacola, Fla., on Friday night, the president finished speaking within 10 minutes — and was gone five minutes after. The often voluble Trump was largely silent as he walked past a Confederate flag insignia, a replica of a Mississippi county jail where protesters were held and beaten, a plaque honoring hundreds of Freedom Riders, an elaborate light sculpture and portraits of slaves in the 1800s. He looked mostly ahead, occasionally stopping briefly to look at a picture or sign, as he was guided by the governor and locals. 

“I didn’t have the courage to do what they did,” Reuben Anderson — the first black Supreme Court justice in the state and chairman of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum Foundation — who was the president’s tour guide, said to Trump regarding the Tougaloo Nine, who integrated the library in Jackson in 1961. “They took their lives in their hands.”

The museum includes the Freedom Wall, a timeline of slavery from 1619 to the end of the Civil War in 1865, as well as mementos of the civil rights era — including a blood-soaked chessboard from a jailhouse, shards of glass from a bombed church, the rifle used to kill Evers, textbooks from segregated schools — and portraits and names of thousands involved in the struggle. Trump saw two exhibits, blocked from the lobby by a curtain, and was soon whisked away. 

The visit was carefully calibrated — with organizers creating an earlier ceremony for Trump to keynote, and protesters never coming within shouting distance of the president. Organizers and Trump’s aides alikefeared widespread protests, but the president wanted to attend after he was invited by Republican Gov. Phil Bryant. 

In some ways, the day was a dichotomy of scenes. Trump was greeted by an adoring crowd largely made up of white Mississippians at Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport; others gathered along the snowy roadways, waving American flags and snapping pictures of his motorcade. 

Trump is popular in the state, having won in 2016 with 58 percentage points compared with Hillary Clinton’s 40 percentage points, and was hailed by Bryant, who greeted him at the airport and rode with him in the presidential limousine. 

Bryant told the crowd that, with his busy schedule, it was nearly impossible for Trump to come from Washington for the museum event. (Trump was actually in Florida for the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate.)

He received loud applause during his brief remarks at the private ceremony.

“We’ve been through a whole lot. We’ve seen a whole lot. But we’re a forgiving and loving state,” Anderson said.

On High Street, a few blocks from the new museum, about 100 demonstrators protested the president’s presence, saying that they were disgusted with Trump’s rhetoric on race — including statements that black voters are impoverished with no jobs, his years of questioning President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, his attacks on black athletes and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), and his moves as president. Some put Confederate flag stickers over their mouths as a form of silent protest. Others chanted, “No hate in our state.” Many carried handmade signs. One read, “There’s nothing civil or right about Donald Trump.”

Lewis, the famed civil rights leader, boycotted. The NAACP had a separate ceremony earlier in the day.

“The martyrs of Mississippi who have died for our civil rights, for our progress, will not allow me to stand with Donald Trump,” Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba (D) said, explaining his absence.

Amos C. Brown, a veteran civil rights activist who, at 14, founded the NAACP’s first youth council, also boycotted the museum opening. “It was a mockery for him to be present,” Brown said of Trump. “He has not been involved at all in the struggle.”

At the formal opening, speakers talked more about the unusually frigid weather than the president.

Paula Barksdale, a Jackson native, flew from her home in Texas to attend the ceremony. Barksdale grew up next door to Evers. From her childhood, she remembers being awakened by the sound of the gunshots that killed him.

She described the museum’s opening as “just awesome,” but she had mixed feelings on the president’s attendance. 

“I think it’s kind of good that he came,” Barksdale said. “But actually, no, I don’t think that. Nobody saw him. He wasn’t going to affect my decision to come either way.”

Al White of Duck Hill, Miss., waited outside the museum with his 12-year-old daughter for their turn to enter. White, who drove an hour and a half to attend the ceremony, said he thinks the museum is especially important for the youths of Mississippi. “I think this is a good first step,” he said. “A chance to move in a different direction.”

The Mississippi Bicentennial Choir sang gospel hymns as the crowd moved toward a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the entrance. Around 1 p.m., long lines formed as the museum finally opened its doors. By that time, Trump was headed to his estate, where he planned to watch the Army-Navy college football game. He said he was pulling for both teams.

DeNeen L. Brown in Washington contributed to this report.

Sexual harassment becomes a political issue with pitfalls for both parties in 2018

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Sen. Al Franken says he will resign. He joins a long list of other high profile people accused of sexual harassment and assault in recent months. Some question why the process to remove politicians takes longer than those in other industries.
USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – A Capitol Hill firestorm over sexual harassment that felled three U.S. lawmakers in one week allows Democrats to draw a loud contrast with Republicans on a cultural flash point rocking the nation – even if it’s hard to measure how much the party will ultimately gain politically.

The downfall of Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who resigned after a series of accusations from women who said he groped or harassed them, is part of a broader Democratic effort to purge the accused harassers from the party. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the longest-serving current member of Congress, also resigned this week after support among his party collapsed amid several harassment allegations.

Following Franken’s Thursday resignation announcement on the Senate floor, Democrats drew an immediate distinction with Republicans and President Trump, who was accused by several women during the 2016 campaign of having groped or forced himself on them.

“This will place the parties at a very stark contrast going into 2018. The Democrats have now become the party of real family values and the Republicans look incredibly hypocritical,” said Maria Cardona, a longtime party strategist. “They have an accused sexual assaulter in the White House and they will never be able to claim to be the party of family values until they come to a reckoning with that fact,” said Cardona. 

“The Republicans have accepted it, just as they accepted President Trump, who admitted to outrageous things, violating women,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., did push one of his own, Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona, to resign Thursday amid reports he discussed with female staffers the possibility they could be surrogates for his and his wife’s baby. Yet in the same week, Trump officially endorsed Roy Moore, the GOP Senate candidate in Alabama who has been accused of courting and improperly touching teenagers when he was in his 30s. The Republican National Committee also gave Moore a cash infusion. “Go get ‘em Roy!” Trump told Moore.

Even some Republicans are sending up flares. 

“It’s a huge problem with women and particularly college-educated white women if Republicans come to be perceived as the party that accepts and defends men credibly accused of assault and being sexual predators,” said GOP pollster Whit Ayres.

The challenge for Democrats in trying to seize this moment of national reckoning is balancing their race to cleanse the party with the danger of over-compensating. As more lawmakers are accused, Democrats must grapple what specific behavior merits resignation, how many accusers are needed to justify action and what to do when some members could very well be falsely accused.

For instance, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called for freshman Rep. Ruben Kihuen, D-Nev., to resign after a report that he made sexual advances toward a campaign worker, but he has not stepped down. Kihuen denies any misbehavior.

Republicans say Moore is an isolated case and that many lawmakers, including Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has promised an ethics investigation of Moore if he is elected, have condemned him. They also point to Pelosi’s early hesitation to condemn Conyers as evidence that both parties are vulnerable on this subject.

Polls show combating sexual harassment is a rare issue that is bipartisan. About three-quarters of the public says it is “very important” for the country to address, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Democrats are protecting their brand as champions of women’s equality, said Michael Golden, author of “Unlock Congress,” a book about legislative dysfunction, and a senior fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy. “The parties are choosing to handle these cases in dramatically different ways, and their strategies just might determine who holds the majority after November 6th, 2018,” he said.  

“It keeps Trump’s problems in the public eye because the president himself is much more important than any single person in a midterm (election),” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan newsletter at the University of Virginia. Analysts point to recent special elections this year in which Democrats have dramatically outperformed historical margins with the help of educated women voters swinging to their column, including a Georgia House race and the Virginia statehouse elections.

Sensing an opening, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says it will challenge vulnerable Republicans to “unequivocally disavow” Moore and refuse funding from the RNC. Further, Democratic parties in at least nine states are seizing on the issue in Senate races, according to a USA TODAY review of official statements. That includes Arizona and Nevada, the two most competitive Senate seats next November, a leading indicator of how the campaigns hope to gain an advantage with suburban women voters.

Yet there are rumors swirling that dozens more lawmakers could become ensnared in the debate. That raises serious questions for Democrats about how far they are willing to go in order to maintain the moral high ground, said Kondik.

“Any time a credible allegation comes out, are Democrats going to feel like they have to throw that person overboard?” said Kondik. And then there’s former President Bill Clinton, who was impeached for lying about his sexual dalliance with a female intern. “Is he going to be banned from the party? Is he going to speak at the 2020 convention?” said Kondik. As more names come out, “it could really be anyone who gets caught up in this,” he said.

What’s more, the more members who are forced out, the greater the likelihood that some false accusations are leveled. “Can a party just make this determination that every single allegation is correct? If the Democrats do that it just seems like you could be inviting scurrilous accusations at some point,” said Kondik.

Cardona, the Democratic strategist, agreed there is potential danger ahead. “There are a lot of open questions moving forward” and “I do think this could become an over-correction,” she said. “The big question is can there be gradations of this kind of behavior?” 

At the same time, said Cardona, “I do believe that the Democratic Party is taking care of this in the right way for the moment in time that we’re in,” she said.

More: Congress reels as two lawmakers resign Thursday over sexual misconduct

More: A list: Members of Congress facing sexual misconduct allegations

Why the overwhelming majority of North Korean defectors are women

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The US-led UN command released dramatic video showing a North Korean soldier dash across border into South Korea as North Korean troops fire at him. The defector was wounded. The UN says North Korea violated the Korean War armistice by firing. (Nov. 22)
AP

SEOUL — The North Korean soldier shown on video dashing across the Demilitarized Zone and being shot five times — and surviving — was not that isolated country’s typical defector. The overwhelming majority are women.

About 70% of the more than 31,000 defectors who have made it to South Korea since the end of the Korean War are women, according to the government’s Ministry of Unification. That figure has climbed in recent years, reaching about 80% from 2014-2016, and 85% this year.

The path to freedom for North Koreans usually begins by escaping across the long border with China, with the help of brokers who may lead them across Vietnam, Laos and Thailand before they finally make their way to South Korea.

More: ‘We would never think of eating for pleasure,’ North Korea defector admits

More: Hundreds of North Korean defectors live in this London suburb

More: Is Kim Jong Un crazy? The North Korea leader is just a cold calculator, experts say

Accurate information from North Korea is difficult to obtain to understand why women defect in higher numbers, but experts point to several factors.

One key reason is a strong demand for North Korean women in neighboring China for both the sex industry and as arranged brides in a country where men outnumber women by more than 33 million. 

“Historically, the largest influence in female migration from North Korea to China has been sex trafficking and marriages,” said Sokeel Park, the Seoul-based director of research and strategy for Liberty in North Korea, an organization that helps rescue North Korean refugees hiding in China. 

Park said North Korean women may have a better chance of staying under the radar and working informally in China in restaurants and factories. Many women working abroad send money back to their families in North Korea.

Women also have a significantly lower social status than men in North Korea, which allows them to remain further out of sight from authorities, said Heather Barr, a senior researcher in the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch. North Korean women hold few positions in government or state-run businesses, and instead are the key movers of an informal market that sprang up after the near collapse of North Korea’s economy in the 1990s.

“This market economy has primarily been driven by married women who have had the space in their lives to engage in that type of work, because they’re not required to show up at a government job like men,” she said.

Barr said this gives women greater access to the networks of brokers who can arrange passage to China, while it also leaves them at the mercy of a world that operates on bribes and corruption.

“It creates lots of vulnerabilities for women, including sexual harassment, coercion and assault,” she said, noting that reports of rape and domestic violence are common among defectors. In November, a United Nations human rights panel found that women are deprived of education and work opportunities, and often face sexual assault in the workplace.

Also motivating some women to escape has been access to information about the world outside North Korea. A black market of South Korean television shows and videos are smuggled in on DVDs and USB drives, and North Koreans living near China can sometimes pick up TV signals. 

Many popular South Korean programs that make their way into North Korea are known as K-dramas — glamorous soap operas targeted to female audiences.

Park, with Liberty in North Korea, said some North Korean defectors explained they were motivated by the freedom of expression and fashion they saw on those shows, along with the higher status and respect enjoyed by the female characters.

“Their lifestyle was very carefree, freewheeling,” said one female North Korean defector in Seoul who spoke with USA TODAY in September. “If they want to do something, they can do something. if they want to travel somewhere, they travel. I could see that life is much freer than in North Korea,” said Yoon Ok, whose full name was withheld for her safety.

Trump unleashes fresh attacks, saying ‘CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake’

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President Trump, armed with fresh ammunition against the mainstream media, fired off “fake news” attacks on Twitter after CNN incorrectly reported that his campaign received access to hacked emails well before the group WikiLeaks made the files public.

Trump called the mistake “vicious and purposeful” and said CNN’s slogan should be “THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!” in a series of tweets Saturday morning.

“Watch to see if @CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?” Trump said.

In an exclusive report Friday, CNN senior congressional correspondent Manu Raju and politics reporter Jeremy Herb reported that the Trump campaign, including Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, and top aides, received an email on Sept. 4, 2016, that gave them early access to documents hacked from the Democratic National Committee. The implication was clear: The Trump campaign knew about the hacked emails more than a week before WikiLeaks made them public.

The report, which relied on multiple sources who described the emails to the reporters, was the lead story on CNN’s homepage Friday morning and was discussed on air. CBS later published a similar story.

[Email pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents that were already public]

But by Friday afternoon, The Washington Post had obtained a copy of the email, which was actually sent to the Trump campaign on Sept. 14, 2016 — after WikiLeaks had already made the documents public. The email said that “WikiLeaks has uploaded another (huge 678 mb) archive files from the DNC” and included a link and a “decryption key,” The Post’s Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger reported. The message also noted that information from former secretary of state Collin Powell’s inbox was available “on DCLeaks.com.”

The later date suggests that the campaign may have simply been alerted of information that was already public. As CNN acknowledged in its correction, it “indicates that the communication is less significant” than the network initially reported. CBS also corrected its story.

Trump attacked CNN Friday night, when he was holding a rally on behalf of embattled Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in Pensacola, Fla.

“CNN apologized just a little while ago. They apologized. Oh, thank you, CNN. Thank you so much. You should’ve been apologizing for the last two years,” Trump told supporters.

The controversial error was not CNN’s first. Three journalists resigned last summer after the network retracted a story connecting Anthony Scaramucci with investigations into the Russian Direct Investment Fund.

The mistake also comes just a week after ABC News committed an arguably bigger blunder. Investigative journalist Brian Ross erroneously reported that former national security adviser Michael Flynn was prepared to testify that Trump, as a candidate, “directed him to make contact with the Russians.” The explosive report, which relied on one anonymous source, was followed by a dramatic plunge in the stock market.

CNN’s recent error prompted fresh attacks not only from the president, but also from Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“So who’s going to be fired?” Assange tweeted Friday.

In his tweets Saturday, Trump said CNN was “caught red handed, just like lonely Brian Ross at ABC News (who should be immediately fired for his ‘mistake’).”

Ross was suspended for four weeks without pay. CNN’s Raju and Herb will not face disciplinary action because they followed CNN’s editorial standards process, and the network does not believe the reporters’ sources intended to deceive them, CNN’s Oliver Darcy wrote in a separate article explaining the mistake.

[CNN armed Trump with new ammunition. Sure enough, he launched another ‘fake news’ attack]

While some of the president’s attacks were over legitimately inaccurate reporting, which mainstream outlets do correct, Trump regularly vents at the media’s coverage of him and his administration and labels news organizations as “fake news” — while often singling out Fox News as the single most trustworthy cable news channel.

Two weeks ago, he tweeted that there should be a contest as to which network, except Fox, “is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me.)”

“They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!” Trump said.

Trump also has singled out CNN, tweeting in late November that CNN International “is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly.”

CNN’s public relations department, as well as several reporters and analysts, fired back. Many reminded their social media followers that the network’s foreign correspondents risk their lives every day to deliver the news.

Read more:

ABC News apologizes for ‘serious error’ in Trump report and suspends Brian Ross for four weeks

One problem with CNN’s defense against Trump’s latest attack

Three CNN employees resign over retracted story on Russia ties

Bitter Senate race tests Alabama’s image in the country — and at home

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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — For many Alabama voters, unaccustomed to a competitive election and the national attention that has come with it, the bitter showdown between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones has become something more personal than a race to fill an open Senate seat. It is now a referendum on the state’s identity.

Supporters of Jones say with concern that a win Tuesday by the firebrand Moore would derail the state’s efforts to escape its painful history and rebrand itself as a forward-thinking place welcoming to Fortune 500 companies and a highly educated workforce. And they express a nagging feeling that a Moore victory would be a deflating sign that Alabama remains beholden to its past.

“You travel across the country and you say ‘Alabama,’ and something goes right across people’s eyes every time,” said retired actor Jonathan Fuller, a 61-year-old Democrat, as he shopped at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket in the suburbs south of Birmingham. “I don’t want to apologize anymore for where I’m from because there is this pocket of stubbornness in my state.”

Supporters of Moore, meanwhile, see his candidacy as a conduit for their rejection of the national media and political elites who they believe unfairly caricature their home state as a cultural backwater. They shrug off the notion that sexual misconduct allegations against Moore — allegations that some see as a fabrication by outsiders — should make a difference.

People wait for the arrival of Doug Jones, Roy Moore’s Democratic rival, at an event Thursday in Cullman, Ala. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

“I don’t believe a word they say about him,” J.W. Poore, a 77-year-old retired home builder and Republican, said outside a Lowe’s Home Improvement store in the Birmingham area. “The Democrats have been against us all the way. They don’t accept the president, they don’t accept nobody.” He said people outside of Alabama “have no right to judge us.”

The vivid contrast between the two candidates — Moore, 70, with his apocalyptic warnings about Muslims and gay rights, against Jones, a low-key 63-year-old lawyer best known as for prosecuting Ku Klux Klan members who planned the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham — has put in sharp relief the idea that the results could speak volumes about Alabama to the rest of the country — and to itself.

One key group on Tuesday will be voters who feel caught between these two visions and must pick a side, especially Republican-leaning voters who feel pulled between their traditional values and a desire to turn the page on the uglier parts of Alabama’s past.

In the last several decades, Alabama has successfully begun to transform from a largely agricultural economy based around poultry and timber to a manufacturing and technology hub anchored in a growing federal contracting community. Much of the aerospace industry is based around Huntsville. Mercedes-Benz and a core supplier of the company recently relocated to rural Bibb County, and GE Aviation recently announced a $200 million investment to build a new ceramic matrix composites factory. The local universities have invested heavily in recent years in science and engineering programs, nurturing a booming biotechnology industry.

From the shadow of the University of Alabama’s football stadium to Moore’s hilly hometown of Gadsden, voters — black and white, Democrat and Republican — said they are deliberating in their communities and sometimes with themselves on the campaign and what it means for their state.

“We’ve got a lot of good here, a lot of people who died for equal rights. And we’ve got a lot of people who are stuck in 1930, and that’s not going to change,” Phillip Hutchins, a 67-year-old Democrat and retired aircraft worker, said last week outside a grocery store in Titusville, a heavily black neighborhood in Birmingham.

Business-minded white Republicans — a bloc that sees itself as modern and puts an emphasis on education, commerce and tradition — have been uneasy about Moore. They have recoiled, too, at the cascade of controversies that have gripped the state this year, making the current race a culmination of various discomforts rather than a sudden drama.

Business leaders said the state’s image had already taken a hit with the resignation of then-governor Robert Bentley (R) in April, after pleading guilty to two campaign finance misdemeanors in connection with a scandal involving secret recordings of inappropriate sexual conversations by Bentley with a woman who is not his wife.

The competition with other states for corporate investment is fierce, and state business executives have watched closely what happened in North Carolina after its ban on gender-neutral bathrooms.

“The margin of error is extremely thin,” said George Clark, president of Manufacture Alabama, an industry advocacy group. “Everybody is trying to improve their workforce. Any negative you have — it’s like recruitment in football — it will be used against you.”

Jones has courted the business establishment, many of them Republicans, on both moral and economic grounds, urging them to abandon their partisan instincts to protect the state’s economy and reputation.

But Jones, who supports abortion rights and whose campaign headquarters has a Planned Parenthood poster on its wall, has struggled to win over Republicans such as JoAnn Turner, a 71-year-old nurse who lives in Vestavia Hills, a mostly white Birmingham suburb.

“I’ve been in Alabama for 42 years, and I’m so tired of the publicity being so bad. It’s not who we are, and it’s embarrassing,” Turner said, referencing the allegations against Moore and the racial tensions associated with the state. “The people of today, the generation of today, has put what has happened behind us. You look at this neighborhood, it’s kind, good Christian people.”

“All that said,” Turner added, “I can’t vote for Roy Moore, and I can’t vote for Doug Jones. I have spent my life helping to deliver babies. I’ll have to do a write-in, because at the end of the day, this is about my conscience.”

Turner plans to write in Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.), who was appointed to the seat earlier in the year following Jeff Sessions’s confirmation as attorney general. Moore beat Strange, an ally of President Trump with a moderate temperament, in a September primary runoff.

Billie Hopper, a soft-spoken 73-year-old Republican from Fultondale, said she stands by Moore and will support him because she does not trust the reporting about his alleged sexual advances toward teenage girls when he was in his 30s. She called him crucial to the causes of putting another conservative justice on the Supreme Court and assisting Trump with his legislative agenda.

“He has stood up for things that I believe in, Christian values,” Hopper said, adding that she is dismayed by coverage of Alabama and television ads that she says portrays the state as “backwoodsy . . . white supremacists, haters, things like that. I don’t hate anyone. I love them all.”

While Trump has endorsed Moore, as has former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, Strange and veteran Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) have remained wary of the former judge who was twice removed from the state Supreme Court — and have called the allegations against him credible and disturbing.

Shelby has opted to cast a write-in vote, telling The Washington Post that he is anxious about how a Moore victory would affect the corporate world’s impressions of Alabama. “Image, reputation. Is this a good place to live, or is it so controversial that we wouldn’t go there?” Shelby said. “You know, these companies are looking to invest. They are looking for a good place to live, a good place to do business, a good education system, opportunities, transportation. And we have come a long way; we’ve got to keep going. . . . We can’t live in the past.”

Other Alabama Republicans do not share the senators’ apprehension about Moore. Gov. Kay Ivey (R), who is running in a crowded race for governor next year, has said she would vote for him.

Black Democrats, on whom the Jones campaign is counting to turn out Tuesday in strong numbers, said they believe Jones has a shot at winning but do not expect his victory, should he win, to change the state’s culture entirely.

“Right, wrong or indifferent, that’s who we are,” Ron Pace, an Army veteran and Democrat, said over breakfast at Fife’s Restaurant in downtown Birmingham, when asked about Moore. “Five more years from now, there’s going to be another Roy Moore, and they’ll vote in the interests of that Christian coalition.”

A Washington Post-Schar School poll released Dec. 2 showed Jones and Moore in a dead heat among likely voters, while a RealClearPolitics polling average shows Moore slightly ahead. The Post-Schar School survey illustrated the ways the race is dividing the state, with Moore supported by more than 6 in 10 whites — including a clear majority of white women.

Dana Billingsley, a Republican real estate broker sitting with friends at a Starbucks on a weekday in suburban Vestavia Hills, is more open to voting for Jones and said she has taken to Facebook to vent about “Roy Moore being on Jimmy Kimmel” and Sessions being parodied on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

“I like Donald Trump since he loves real estate and isn’t afraid of getting a divorce,” Billingsley said with a laugh. “But I actually haven’t liked Roy Moore since before the allegations. I mean, this is 2017. Come on. The world has changed.” She said she hasn’t followed Jones but knows enough: “What he did on the 16th Street bombing was right.”

Outside of Birmingham and in rural towns to the east — home to massive evangelical churches and family-owned barbecue restaurants that puff black smoke out of chimneys — Moore’s support is heartier, particularly in his home town of Gadsden on the Coosa River.

“I know Roy Moore personally. He’s an easygoing guy, and I don’t believe he did what he’s accused of,” said Michael Newsome, a burly 22-year-old Gadsden-area welder. “I’ve done work at his house, and we all know him as a gentle guy who’s religious. Honestly, in good faith, I truly believe him.”

Ava Lyles, a 71-year-old grandmother who leans Republican, echoed him as she picked up Christmas gifts at the Gadsden Mall — the same mall Moore frequented when he was a young district attorney and where several of his accusers say he engaged them.

“I’m for Moore,” Lyles said. “Whatever happened in the past is now in the past, and God forgives us all.” She dismissed the suggestion that the race has stirred debates about the state’s character.

“Oh, please. Haven’t we always been bad, like cousins marrying cousins? That’s not true, but people say what they want to say. Always have judged us,” Lyles said.

Otis Dupree, a 53-year-old retired chicken-plant worker who works part time at the Burger King in Gadsden, said he is “disgusted” with the city’s embrace of Moore.

“The way I see it is white folks stick with him; that’s pretty much what’s going on,” Dupree said. “People in Alabama are going along with it — and it’s messed up.”

More than 100 miles southwest on the state’s flagship campus — the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa — hundreds of students in athletic clothing and T-shirts stream out of dorm buildings and sorority mansions across the street from the school’s beloved Bryant-Denny Stadium.

As with the men and women in Vestavia Hills, many of them are financially stable and white — and Republican in a cultural sense as much as ideologically. They see themselves as Alabama’s future and are eager to define it.

Roy Moore isn’t part of that plan, according to Ella Jernigan, a 19-year-old Republican student who’s studying marketing.

“My family had been friends with Luther Strange for years,” Jernigan said on her way to a meeting. “I thought that was where we were as a state. I can’t stand us getting pinned now as rednecks or uneducated.”

She added, “Every time you think we’re going forward, something like Roy Moore sets us back.”

Tim Booth, a 52-year-old construction worker on campus, however, had no such angst over Moore. Chewing tobacco and wearing a camouflage hunting cap, Booth said Tuesday’s vote was more of a rebuff to the state’s critics than a reckoning for its residents.

“People can see us the way they want to,” Booth said. “It’s like the way we look at California: They should be their own little country.”

The Jerusalem Issue, Explained

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Maybe more important, Israel’s position on Jerusalem isn’t just that its capital should be somewhere in the city. A 1980 law declared Jerusalem to be Israel’s “undivided” capital, which was widely understood as a de facto annexation of the city’s eastern half.

Mr. Trump, in endorsing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, did not explicitly endorse this idea. But he didn’t reject it, either. Nor did he say that Jerusalem should also become the Palestinian capital.

This implies that the United States is increasingly supportive of Israel’s position — full annexation — though this would almost certainly kill any viable peace deal.

Why Does It Matter if the U.S. Takes Sides?

The United States has, for decades, positioned itself as the primary mediator between Israelis and Palestinians. Neutrality ostensibly allows the United States to remain a credible arbiter and keeps both sides at the negotiating table.

American diplomats tend to consider neutrality a bedrock principle and essential for peace, and see Mr. Trump’s announcement as an alarming break.

But the policy of neutrality has grown contentious in American politics since the 1980s and the rise of the evangelical Christian right as a political force.

The movement’s pro-Israel positions — strongly in favor of Israeli control of Jerusalem — have roots in millenarian theology as well as more straightforward identity politics. (Still, a number of Palestinians are themselves Christian, and Jerusalem’s Christian leaders objected to Mr. Trump’s move.)

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Evangelical Christians have been joined by a subset of American Jews and others on the political right in arguing that the United States should overtly back Israel in the conflict. This position hardened during the second intifada, a period of vicious Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the early 2000s.

This debate has often played out over Jerusalem. Presidential candidates will promise to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby recognizing the city as Israel’s capital. But once in office, the new president will forestall the move, explaining that peace should be given a chance.

Mr. Trump actually went ahead (though only partly, because he will not move the embassy right away), implicitly endorsing an American shift from neutral arbiter to overtly siding with Israel.

Has the U.S. Really Been Neutral?

That is not really the perception outside of the United States, particularly in Europe and the rest of the Middle East.

Much of the world already considered the United States a biased and unhelpful actor, promoting Israeli interests in a way that perpetuated the conflict.

Partly this is because of the power imbalance between Israelis and Palestinians. Because the far stronger Israelis are the occupiers, and the United States is seen as a steward, the Americans are sometimes blamed, rightly or wrongly, for that imbalance.

Partly it is because of domestic politics that led American leaders to pronounce themselves as pro-Israel while pursuing policies intended as neutral.

But it is also because of a decades-old American negotiating tactic. The last three administrations — led by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — all believed that they needed to grant Israel concessions to make Israeli leaders feel secure and comfortable enough to make their own concessions for peace.

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So Mr. Trump’s move, though he does not describe it this way, is arguably in line with past American strategy. And it is seen abroad as confirming long-held doubts about American leadership, rather than as drastically new.

What Happens Now?

Protests, which sometimes grow violent, have been a common Palestinian answer to perceived provocations, particularly on issues related to Jerusalem. The Palestinian view is that Israel’s occupation should be made costly and uncomfortable if it is to ever end.

As for the wider Arab response, the United States is just not very popular or trusted in the region. That tends to happen when you invade an Arab-majority country, Iraq, on what most Arabs consider false pretenses, starting a war that kills hundreds of thousands. This move is going to be unpopular, but it’s sort of a drop in the bucket.

Still, it could complicate regional politics. Marc Lynch, a political scientist at George Washington University, wrote in The Washington Post, “The visible pursuit of peace, if not its achievement, has long been the mechanism by which the United States reconciles its alliances with Israel and with ostensibly anti-Israel Arab states.”

This could make it harder for Arab governments to justify their cooperation with what is perceived to be an American-Israeli plot against Palestinians. Even if Arab governments do not themselves care much about Palestinians, they worry about domestic unrest.

That doesn’t mean Arab states will break with Washington, but they might need to be a little quieter and more careful about cooperating.

What Does This Change Long Term?

Warnings of a long-term shift tend to hinge on the idea that losing American neutrality means losing American leverage over Israelis and Palestinians to achieve peace.

But the simple fact of American power makes the country an important broker, neutral or not. American leverage with Israel also comes from implicitly guaranteeing Israel’s security and providing it with lots of military hardware. Still, because Israel got something for nothing from Mr. Trump’s announcement, it has little reason to make difficult concessions.

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American leverage over Palestinian leaders is also significant, since those leaders rely on American support to keep their administration funded and stable. But those leaders are deeply unpopular with their own people. A real risk here is that they one day grow so unpopular that their administration collapses. This would risk chaos and violence in the short term and, long term, a likely takeover by the militant Palestinian group Hamas.

All of that points toward a future in which peace is less likely, a Palestinian state is less likely and Israel is one day forced to choose between the two core components of its national identity: Jewish and democratic. Either it asserts permanent control over Palestinians without granting them full rights — a sort of state that critics sometimes compare to apartheid South Africa — or it grants Palestinians full rights, establishing a pluralistic democracy that is no longer officially Jewish.

Mr. Trump’s move likely edges Israelis and Palestinians closer to that future. But things were probably moving in that direction already.


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Firefighters begin to turn the tide on Southern California wildfires

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Firefighters hoped to make more progress Saturday against the wildfires burning from Ojai to Oceanside that have destroyed more than 1,000 structures and forced some 90,000 people to flee from their homes.

As Santa Ana winds finally died down Friday, crews were able to begin containment of some of the biggest fires. But red flag fire warnings remain in effect, and forecasters say the Santa Anas will return to Southern California Saturday evening.

On Saturday, Gov. Jerry Brown plans to survey the devastation Saturday in Ventura, the hardest hit by this week’s firestorms. Brown’s visit comes four days after he declared a state of emergency.

In all, there are six wildfires burning in Southern California, according to Cal Fire officials. About 8,500 firefighters are battling the fires, which have collectively burned 175,000 acres.