RUTHFULLY YOURS

From Wisconsin to Warsaw, voters around the world have been expressing their deep dissatisfaction with political elites. Yet establishment politicians have preferred to rely on a politically convenient narrative to explain away the populist explosion: Russian interference.

Russian meddling is a real and serious problem. Much more could be done to address it, from naming and punishing those responsible to improving trans-Atlantic efforts to combat it. But the obsession over Russia, sparked by Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, distracts attention from the real causes of populist anger.

Take Italy. Two euroskeptic movements, 5 Star and Northern League, made a strong showing in the general election earlier this month. The result proved vexing to some. “Italy joins long list of elections influenced by Russia,” tweeted Samantha Power, President Obama’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “Sputnik will do what Sputnik does.”

What nonsense. There are plenty of plausible explanations for the result that don’t lead back to Vladimir Putin. Italy’s youth unemployment rate, the third highest in the European Union, stands at 31.5%. The last time Italy’s economic growth topped 2% was 2006. It has struggled to reach 1% since 2010. More than 150,000 African and Middle Eastern refugees landed on Italy’s shores in 2015 alone. Transparency International last year ranked Italy 54th in corruption perceptions. Namibia ranks higher.

Those factors alone ought to be enough to explain Italy’s populist turn, though populism is hardly a new phenomenon in postwar Italy. And Italy isn’t alone. Russian bots supposedly were behind the Brexit campaign, America’s #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag and the Catalan independence movement. That’s not to mention the credit Russia is given for all the racial tension in the U.S. and the political clashes that follow school shootings like the one last month in Parkland, Fla.

Russian interference, apparently, can do almost anything. It seems income stagnation, unbridled immigration, economic inequality, automation and the opioid crisis don’t influence voters as much as a few poorly produced memes. CONTINUE AT SITE

The shock of losing the Presidency to Donald Trump has to be mind-blowing, but Hillary Clinton keeps offering evidence for why she may have been the only Democrat in 2016 who could have managed the feat.

Mrs. Clinton provided the latest demonstration on a visit to India in which she was asked to explain her loss. She blamed the “backwards” parts of America where “you didn’t like black people getting rights; you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs; you don’t want to, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are.”

This a reprise of her famous “deplorables” crack from the campaign trail, but she didn’t stop there. She also complained about “married white women” who supported Mr. Trump because they were too weak to stand up to “a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”

Mrs. Clinton was supposed to be the first female President who rose as the feminist champion for the aspirations of all American women. Yet it turns out she really believes that any woman who voted against her must have been a mental or emotional prisoner of some man, trapped in a kind of political purdah.

Democrats may think Mr. Trump is unfit to be President, but maybe they should take responsibility for nominating a candidate who had such contempt for so many Americans.

President Trump’s decision to replace Rex Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State looks like a trade up for the Administration and perhaps for U.S. foreign policy. Mr. Tillerson deserved better than the shabby way he was fired, but Mr. Pompeo shares more of the President’s views and is likely to carry more clout with Mr. Trump and foreign leaders.

Mr. Trump was initially attracted to the former Exxon CEO’s status and business success, and boosters like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hoped he’d mesh with a businessman president. But foreign policy isn’t made in flow charts, and Mr. Tillerson squandered political capital by trying to reorganize the State Department.

The most successful recent Secretaries— Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker —used the department’s assets to serve their agendas. They put allies in key jobs to manage the biggest issues, while letting the career staff run lesser portfolios. But more than a year into the Trump era, most senior State posts remain vacant, as do key ambassadorships to the likes of South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Mr. Tillerson relied on too many diplomats who served the bureaucracy’s agenda.

Mr. Tillerson’s larger problem was that he disagreed with his boss on key issues. From the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate pact to the Saudi Arabia-Qatar dispute, Mr. Tillerson took positions publicly at odds with the White House. This offended Mr. Trump’s easily offended ego, and the President struck back with tweets that undercut Mr. Tillerson at key moments. As if to prove the point, on Tuesday the White House fired another senior State official for contradicting the White House line on Mr. Tillerson’s ouster.

“A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and Harvard University, Mr. Pompeo holds more hard-line views than his predecessor on two key foreign policy issues: Iran and North Korea.”

WASHINGTON— Donald Trump’s plan to nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo to succeed Rex Tillerson as secretary of state positions a crucial Trump ally as the administration’s top diplomat, one who the president said is more in line with his foreign-policy vision.

Mr. Pompeo is among the few outsiders to have developed a seemingly close relationship with the president. The two meet each morning for the daily intelligence brief, conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency director. During the meetings, Mr. Pompeo explained the nuances of major international issues to Mr. Trump, officials close to him said. He also would, at times, bring in CIA staffers to explain a particular issue or how they obtained a key piece of intelligence.

As CIA director, Mr. Pompeo demanded the Counterintelligence Mission Center report to him, which some Trump administration critics said hampered the agency from aggressively pursuing charges of collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. He also pushed for more agents to go to the front lines of major conflict zones.

Notably, he delicately walked a line between a president who frequently criticized the intelligence community and the agents under his command angered by Mr. Trump’s remarks.

In a textbook example of denial and projection, Trump foes in and out of government wove a sinister yarn meant to take him down.

Barack Obama keeps a close watch on his emotions. “I loved Spock,” he wrote in February 2015 in a presidential statement eulogizing Leonard Nimoy. Growing up in Hawaii, the young man who would later be called “No-Drama Obama” felt a special affinity for the Vulcan first officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise. “Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy,” the eulogy continued. “Leonard was Spock. Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed.”

It is the rare occasion when Obama lets his Spock mask slip. But November 2, 2016, was just such a moment. Six days before the presidential election, when addressing the Congressional Black Caucus, he stressed that the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, threatened hard-won achievements of blacks: tolerance, justice, good schools, ending mass incarceration — even democracy itself. “There is one candidate who will advance those things,” he said, his voice swelling with emotion. “And there’s another candidate whose defining principle, the central theme of his candidacy, is opposition to all that we’ve done.”

The open display of emotion was new, but the theme of safeguarding his legacy was not. Two months earlier, on July 5, in Charlotte, N.C., Obama delivered his first stump speech for Hillary Clinton. He described his presidency as a leg in a relay race. Hillary Clinton had tried hard to pass affordable health care during Bill Clinton’s administration, but she failed — and the relay baton fell to the ground. When Obama entered the White House, he picked it up. Now, his leg of the race was coming to an end. “I’m ready to pass the baton,” he said. “And I know that Hillary Clinton is going to take it.”

But he was less certain than he was letting on. Hillary Clinton was up in the polls, to be sure, but she was vulnerable. Three weeks earlier, on June 15, a cyberattacker fashioning himself as Guccifer 2.0 had published a cache of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). They proved, as supporters of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders had long alleged, that the DNC had conspired with the Clinton campaign to undermine their candidate. Sanders was still withholding his endorsement of Clinton for president, even though her nomination as the Democratic candidate was now a foregone conclusion. At the very moment when Clinton had expected the Democratic party to unite behind her, its deepest chasm seemed to be growing wider. In contrast to Clinton, Obama held some sway over the Sanders insurgents. He came to Charlotte to urge them to support Clinton against their shared enemy, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump.

Anti-Semitism, racism, deception, and dirty tricks: For progressives, the ends justify the means.

‘White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew, and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through.”

So spoke recently our Nietzschean Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

There is almost nothing new in his latest hate-filled accusations. Farrakhan in the past has praised Hitler and derided Judaism as a gutter religion. Yet I say “almost nothing new” because the 84-year-old Farrakhan is now empowered by a new generation of leftist, minority, and feminist activists such as Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour, who coordinate marches with Farrakhan or ardently praise him.

Not long ago, Representative Danny Davis (D., Ill.) spoke up in behalf of Farrakhan, calling him “an outstanding human being.” Davis went on to use an unfortunate choice of words: “The world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question.”

“The Jewish question”?

The “Jewish question,” of course, refers to a 19th-century pan-European debate over whether Jews would ever assimilate into European countries. The debate quickly descended into abject anti-Semitism. And by the 20th century, in the German Third Reich, the phrase “Die Judenfrage” was to become the signature Nazi euphemism for the Final Solution. Davis is either ignorant or shameless or both.

Even weirder was a recent revelation that in 2005, at a Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) event, a smiling Barack Obama, then a newly elected senator, had posed in the basement of the U.S. Capitol for a photo alongside a smiling Farrakhan.