Hope came to the embattled Syrian region of eastern Ghouta today, as a 46-truck convoy carrying food and humanitarian supplies entered the rebel enclave for the first time in weeks.

But before the United Nations convoy could enter, Syrian officials ordered the removal of 70 percent of the medical supplies, Reuters reported: trauma kits and surgical and other medical gear that might help the 400,000 besieged residents cope with two weeks of unrelenting bombing by Syrian regime forces and Russia planes.

And inside eastern Ghouta – a suburb of Damascus where a weeklong cease-fire demanded by the UN Security Council appears to be nonexistent – the air strikes and artillery bombardment continued, even during the aid delivery, which prevented some trucks from being unloaded. With more than 50 people reported killed Monday alone, the death toll for the past 15 days soared past 700. State TV reported that a ground offensive launched by regime forces has recaptured 40 percent of the enclave in recent days, in an apparent bid to slice in half the last rebel stronghold near the capital.

President Bashar al-Assad, in remarks broadcast on state television Sunday, said the fight against Islamists in eastern Ghouta won’t stop, and that the “majority” of its residents “want to escape the embrace of terrorism.” Reports of dire humanitarian need, he added, were “ridiculous lies.”

But despite an agonizing scale of deprivation, residents say they do not see the logic of leaving, and would rather risk further regime attack than exit into an unknown and possibly vengeful future in regime hands. It is a choice that tells much about the state of Syria’s brutal war after seven years, and the violent reputation of a regime accused repeatedly of war crimes and known for retribution.

If raw fear of ongoing violence is one factor preventing civilians from approaching the designated exit corridor, an even greater hurdle is a lack of trust.

“The only corridor out of Ghouta is the corridor of death,” says Amer Zeidan, a bearded volunteer Syrian aid worker who each day delivers food and water to basement shelters.

“Even if the regime was being genuine, we cannot trust it,” Mr. Zeidan told the Monitor in a series of voice messages. “You can’t trust the murderer who has been killing men and women, the children and elderly, on a daily basis. In the same moment that they say there is an open humanitarian corridor, war planes are dropping bombs.”

Eastern Ghouta has been controlled by anti-regime rebels since 2012, besieged by government forces since 2013, and was the scene that year of a high-profile chemical weapons attack with sarin and chlorine that killed hundreds and nearly prompted then-President Obama to launch military strikes against the regime.

Syrian Red Crescent/AP

Civilians desperate for food and medicine gather near a convoy of vehicles of the Syrian Red Crescent in Douma, eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, Monday, March. 5, 2018. Shelling continued during the day, and some trucks reportedly left the enclave without unloading.

The convoy Monday delivered 5,500 food parcels for 27,500 people and was “a positive first step,” Robert Mardini, the International Committee of the Red Cross regional director, said in a statement. “But one convoy, however big, will never be enough given the dire conditions and shortages people are facing.”

“We delivered as much as we could amidst shelling,” tweeted Sajjad Malik, the UNHCR country representative for Syria, amid reports that, long after dark, the convoy was ordered back before it could offload all its aid.

Also Monday, two airstrikes brought down the building where Nemaat Mohsen, a former Damascus University student, had been sheltering in the basement. Afterwards she said it was a “complete catastrophe,” and her family members incurred “minor injuries,” before her phone again lost its signal. Last week she told the Monitor that civilian areas were being targeted “so heavily that it made the front lines look safe.”

And the state Syrian Arab News Agency said Monday that 15 civilians had been wounded by mortar fire from eastern Ghouta. It said the shelling struck the Tishreen Hospital and the Police Hospital in the Damascus countryside.

For Zeidan, nearly unfathomable examples of the residents’ extreme suffering are updated constantly. He speaks of a mother beseeching doctors and nurses not to prolong the life of her critically wounded child, telling them to “leave my son to die in peace, I don’t want him to be tortured more than this,” because she knew they lacked the means to save him.

He tells of two pregnant women sheltering in the basement of his building, both of whom suffered miscarriages amid the stress and confinement. Food is so scarce that 10 people are allotted less than one pound of rice total per day, says Zeidan. Many must go without food for 36 hours at a time.

And yet, few if any from eastern Ghouta have risked leaving.

“The cease-fire was not implemented. On the contrary, there is an escalation,” says Zeidan. “Imagine the Russians, whose warplanes have killed children for the last three years, are the guarantors for families to leave eastern Ghouta. How can this work out?”

Residents of eastern Ghouta are sheltering in schools, mosques, basements, and makeshift underground shelters that have sometimes collapsed over them during the shelling. Some have dug individual-sized, grave-like trenches to sit out the worst  bombardments.

Loophole in UN cease-fire

Panos Moumtzis, the UN regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis, called for warring factions to respect the UN cease-fire.

“Instead of a much-needed reprieve, we continue to see more fighting, more death, and more disturbing reports of hunger and hospitals being bombed,” Mr. Moumtzis said in a statement Sunday. “This collective punishment of civilians is simply unacceptable.”

However the cease-fire resolution, which was passed unanimously by the UN Security Council Feb. 24 and calls for a 30-day cessation of hostilities to ensure a “durable humanitarian pause” across the country, explicitly does not apply to attacks on Al Qaeda and other jihadists.

The White House laid the blame for the eastern Ghouta onslaught on Syria and its main military backer, Russia. In its strongest statement to date about eastern Ghouta, it accused them of ignoring the UN and Russia’s own self-declared truce “to kill innocent civilians under the false auspices of counterterrorism operations.”

Ghouta was one of four de-escalation zones created in May 2017 in a deal brokered by Russia, Turkey, and Iran to reduce hostilities. But Damascus and Moscow maintain that the deal excludes extremist factions present in eastern Ghouta.

The dominant rebel factions in eastern Ghouta, Jeish al-Islam and Failak al-Rahman, are Islamist in outlook and stand accused of human rights violations, but have also taken part in past peace talks. A jihadist alliance led by Al Qaeda’s former affiliate in Syria also has a presence there, but in smaller numbers, and other groups are said to have offered to flush them out during negotiations.

None of that makes any difference to the civilians of eastern Ghouta, who have been subject to regime leaflet drops aimed at pressuring them to leave the enclave.

One leaflet outlined plans for a “safe exit,” with a basic diagram showing two areas for safe assembly, one in the neighborhood of Arbeen and the other in the town of Douma. Northeast of Douma lies the Al-Wafideen crossing point, historically the gateway of limited goods into the besieged area in exchange for hefty kickbacks, and now designated as a humanitarian corridor.

'Surrender document' not trusted

Another leaflet provides step-by-step advice on how to approach the crossing, telling residents they should carry an identity document and come forward slowly, raising the leaflet with one hand while keeping the second hand visible on their head or holding a child, all the while following the directions of security forces stationed at the crossing.

“We guarantee your return home after terrorism is exterminated,” the text reads.

That promise rings hollow for Douma residents like Samira, who see the flyers as yet another weapon in the vast arsenal that has been deployed against the opposition stronghold.

“The regime is using these flyers as part of its psychological war against us,” says Samira, a mother who says she has spent much of the offensive above ground, partly so she can rush with her heavily pregnant daughter to hospital for delivery, when that time comes, and partly to minimize breathing problems in cramped spaces.

“The regime claims that this surrender document is the only thing that can take the besieged person out of the hell of the siege and into the paradise of the regime,” says Samira, contacted by phone. “But until now, we haven’t seen or heard of anyone getting out this way.”

Another aid worker, Wajih Mohammed, says the street leading to the humanitarian corridor comes under constant shelling and sniper fire. He echoes the fear of a replay of Aleppo, where evacuations were marred by deadly violence as pro-regime forces seized control of opposition-held areas in December 2016.

That campaign claimed hundreds of lives, and residents of eastern Ghouta fear a similar fate as pro-regime forces gain ground and hundreds are forced to move deeper into rebel-held territory.

“A truce could happen if it was truly guaranteed by the international community – France, Britain, the United States,” says Mr. Mohammed. “Not this truce where the guarantor’s warplanes bomb civilians.”

Dangerous walk to uncertainty

Sami al-Shami, a media activist, notes that the corridor is far from civilian areas anyway and would require a long walk exposed to shelling and bombs.

Reaching the corridor “is a huge security risk,” he told The Monitor over social media. “People are scared that what happened in eastern Aleppo will happen to them, that they will be targeted along the way.”

Samira says she hopes a real cease-fire can be put in place and the siege lifted until a comprehensive political solution is found. But residents mock the logic of leaving under heavy bombardment, only to return to the fold of a government that attacked them for years.

“People are scared the regime will treat them as terrorists, arrest them, and take revenge on them,” she says.

“The entry of regime forces without a political solution is considered certain death by residents of Ghouta, particularly the young men,” says Samira. “People want the war to end and for the government of Bashar al-Assad to end with it.”

When Clete Samson was a government prosecutor at the Department of Homeland Security’s special immigration court, he says that respecting the constitutional rights of immigrants accused of breaking US laws was part of the job.

“It’s a myth that noncitizens don’t have constitutional rights because they are non citizens,” says Mr. Samson, who for eight years prosecuted cases for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “I hear it a lot now in all these immigration debates, that these individuals don’t even have due-process rights.”

A lot of his job entailed fending off constitutional habeas corpus challenges from immigrants detained by ICE, says Samson, who now runs a national immigration practice at Kutak Rock’s Omaha, Neb., office. But their right to have the opportunity to contest the government, he and other legal experts note, remains one of democracy’s most fundamental values: No government can deprive a person of liberty without a giving valid reason ruled by law.

And beyond such rights granted to individuals by the United States Constitution, this value in many ways also governs the restrictions that Congress placed upon the actions of executive agencies in the 1940s. In general, that legislation barred federal agencies from creating or changing administrative procedures in an “arbitrary or capricious” way. One senator at the time called the law "a bill of rights for the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose affairs are controlled or regulated" by federal government agencies.

But amid the nation’s stormy debates over immigration the past year, a number of federal courts have been taking a closer look at the rights that immigrants hold as their lives become enmeshed in the decisions of federal agencies – especially the due-process rights of those being detained by ICE and the future status of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients.

Six months ago, President Trump said he would wind down the DACA program by Monday, giving Congress time to come up with a legislative solution. But federal courts have put a halt to the president’s decision to wind down the program, ruling in part that his action most likely violated the administrative procedures requirements. 

‘As ancient and important a right as any …’

Last week a divided Supreme Court grappled with the due-process rights of detained immigrants, and whether it was proper for a federal court to order ICE to provide bail hearings every six months. The conservative majority concluded that the federal law did not require such bail hearings, and that the court exceeded its authority by adding this requirement.

But the majority in the 5-to-3 decision sent the case back to the lower court to determine whether the indefinite detention of certain immigrants, who were not granted regular bail hearings, would violate the Constitution.

In a dissent he read from the bench, Justice Stephen Breyer objected to what he saw as a narrow, technical ruling of the majority and argued that constitutional due-process protections should have been presumed: “The Constitution does not authorize arbitrary detention,” he said. “And the reason that is so is simple: Freedom from arbitrary detention is as ancient and important a right as any found within the Constitution’s boundaries.”

Immigration a gray area

Still, the president and agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security have a lot of discretion in how they choose to administer their legal authority over immigration.

“Immigration is a weird space in that the government is given a little more latitude to exercise [the process] how it wants to,” says Sarah Pierce, an immigration policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. “It’s considered kind of a foreign policy right on the part of the federal government.”

That means “there’s confusion in the legal field as well” about the rights of DACA recipients and  noncitizen detainees, she adds. “It’s a legal gray area.”

In fact, Samson served in a special immigration court run by the Department of Homeland Security – an executive agency rather than the separate and co-equal federal judiciary. Congress gave the executive branch the authority to set up immigration courts as part of its responsibilities to protect the nation’s borders.

Despite the injunctions that two federal courts placed on the president’s decision to wind down DACA by Monday, “both courts have flat out said that there’s no dispute that the Department of Homeland Security has the authority to end this DACA program,” says Mr. Samson. “But they just didn’t pass the ‘arbitrary and capricious’ test, in the courts’ view.”

The Trump administration sought to appeal those injunctions directly to the Supreme Court, but last week the high court declined to bypass the appeals court, the usual next stage of judicial review.

​Protections for all people​

The federal court rulings agreed that there is no “right” to DACA and the government need not accept new applicants. Existing DACA holders may continue to re-apply for two-year extensions, the courts said.

But despite the gray areas – all the details of immigration laws and the discretion federal agencies have to enforce them – the values of due process and fairness remain firmly established for immigrants and noncitizens, experts say.

“The Constitution for the most part uses the language ‘people,’ so when you’re talking about 5th Amendment rights, 14th Amendment equal protection rights, or in all the Bill of Rights, everywhere you see ‘people,’ the Supreme Court has established that ‘people’ does mean people. It does not attach to and is not limited by citizenship status, but rather by presence here in the United States,” says Elissa Steglich, professor at the University of Texas, Austin, Law School and head of its immigration clinic.

Beyond the Constitution, these rights are “also important guideposts for how our institutions work,” Professor Steglich says, “and making sure every court, every immigration court, views every immigrant before it equally, and provides the same level of diligent review and consideration regardless of race, or language they speak, or where they hail from in the world.”

​Role for Congress

Questions still exist about how much leeway the Supreme Court may allow Mr. Trump, or any president, to make discretionary decisions about immigration policy, including those affecting the rights granted to immigrant detainees now being held indefinitely.

But the fate of the DACA recipients and their future status, most all experts agree, should come from Congress rather than presidential discretion – which the Trump administration argues was already abused in former President Barack Obama’s creation of the program.

“At the end the end of the day, DACA has to go through Congress, one way or the other,” says Patricia Gannon, partner in the immigration practice group at Greenspoon Marder in New York. “Kill the dream or don’t kill the dream, but do your job.”

Staff writer Henry Gass contributed to this article from San Antonio.

The voters of Italy have not so much spoken as snarled and shouted.

While Sunday’s election handed no party a clear mandate to govern, it drove home a message with sobering implications for the rest of Europe and beyond: the issue of immigrants and refugees, weaponized politically by populist firebrands promising to seal off borders and “reclaim” their countries’ true identity, has become a dominant force in Western politics.

A five-month political stalemate in Germany – finally resolved only as the Italians were voting – has provided further evidence. So has campaigning in Hungary, which goes to the polls next month. The two earliest and loudest wake-up calls – Britain’s 2016 referendum vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s election victory in America – were not outliers.

This marks a dramatic turnaround from a decade ago, when the political and economic winds were blowing toward greater international coordination and integration. It poses a serious challenge to political leaders who still believe in a more open, interconnected, and collegial world order. They’ve been thrown squarely on the defensive. So, too, have key institutions built since World War ll to promote and protect multinational cooperation: bodies like the European Union, the World Trade Organization, or the United Nations. With a new tide of nationalism taking hold, it could become ever harder to make the case for a shared interest in areas such as international trade, or the protection and resettlement of vulnerable refugees.

The immediate explanation for the altered climate, at least in Europe, is clear. Especially since a major surge in 2015, unprecedented numbers of refugees have been arriving, some 1.3 million in that year alone. Most have fled bloodshed and chaos in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but also, in the case of Italy, have traveled from Africa, through Libya and across the Mediterranean, often at the risk of their lives. More than 620,000 have reached Italy in the past several years.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded by welcoming even greater numbers, and proposing an arrangement for EU countries to share the burden, she won plaudits internationally for statesmanship. When Germans voted in September of last year, however, they punished her party and rewarded the fiercely anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party. That ushered in months of coalition talks before she finally managed to form a new government.

Immigration, or globalization?

Yet the surge of refugees was a catalyst, not the root cause, of the surge of populist parties once relegated to the fringes. The shift toward economic globalization and the quickening pace of technological innovation mattered most. Many of Europe’s old industrial and manufacturing businesses were reshaped or replaced in the process. Many of those who had worked in them found themselves faced with the challenge of retraining, competing for any other work they could find, or relying on government support.

In some cases, immigration did have an effect. In Britain, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of workers from new EU member states in Eastern Europe helped sway the Brexit vote. But in Britain, elsewhere in Europe, and now in Italy, the main reason for the advance of populist, anti-immigrant parties has been a more general anger in economically deprived areas – a feeling of having been cut loose by an increasingly borderless, technologically driven world economy. That feeling deepened after the economic crash of 2007-2008, and immigration and asylum gave populist politicians a powerful issue on which to focus the anger of those who felt left behind.

Though Italy’s election results  produced no definitive sign of who will form the next government, there was a clear loser: the center-left Democratic Party of former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. On his watch, the economy did begin to recover from the crash of 2008. But slowly. Living standards are only now returning to where they were at the dawn of the century. More than one-third of young Italians are unemployed.

The two main winners were the Five Star Movement, founded by a former comedian and led by a 31-year-old newcomer more in the mold of Bernie Sanders than Donald Trump; and The League: neo-Fascist, angrily anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim. Both share a kick-out-the-old-guard populism, and a message aimed at the economically dispossessed. Five Star leaders, too, have said Italy must hold firm against welcoming more refugees.

Europe’s more centrist, internationally minded politicians realize they have to find a way to reconnect with voters flocking to the anti-immigration, nationalist banner. In Germany, Merkel has been sounding sterner on immigration. In France, while President Emmanuel Macron takes a liberal line on a range of issues, he has adopted a tougher position on refugees and asylum-seekers.

But their longer-term challenge lies in broadening the debate and conveying a message that seems highly unlikely to find an audience in the current climate. The message: that even without the pressures of immigrants or refugees, the forward march of technological invention and innovation – is irreversible. The intricate international supply chain characterizing many businesses in Western countries could, in theory, be unwound. But even that would risk huge dislocations which, as President Trump found after last week’s announcement he intends to impose new steel and aluminum tariffs, would impact not just rivals but partners and allies.

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

Janice Jackson, CEO for Chicago Public Schools, announced on Feb. 12 that the city will postpone the closure of several high schools in an impoverished neighborhood in response to a contentious community response. The schools will close over the next few years, instead of in the fall, and be replaced by a new $85 million school.

Thirty years ago, Chicago’s schools were called the worst in the nation by the US education secretary. The country’s third-largest school district still makes headlines for its challenges, but is starting to be recognized for its achievements, too.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is celebrating a more than 20 percentage point increase in high school graduation rates between 2011 and 2017. In the younger grades, the learning happening in CPS between the 3rd and 8th grades is faster than in 96 percent of all US school districts, according to research from last fall that is included a January report by the Joyce Foundation. 

Despite heightened scrutiny after a scandal involving graduation numbers in Washington, D.C., education researchers both inside and outside Chicago say improvement in CPS is legitimate, and point to the impressive statistics across grade levels as proof. 

“If we see this kind of sustained improvement in a big, low-income district… It suggests there is something real happening,” says Sean Reardon, a professor who studies poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University in California. “It means that there are some lessons we should learn from Chicago.” 

It is difficult to say what exactly is driving this progress, adds Professor Reardon, who contributed to the recent Joyce Foundation study and is the author of the research on elementary and middle school gains. However, some observers note that an emphasis on high-quality principals has a lot to do with Chicago’s success. 

“Principals are an essential part of school improvement,” says Elaine Allensworth, Lewis-Sebring Director of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and a contributor to the Joyce Foundation report. “Schools generally don’t improve without strong leadership or a big structural change or change in student body.”

In Chicago's case, while the demographics of the student body have remained relatively consistent, the focus on principals has sharpened. CPS has worked to strengthen the “principal pipeline” through professional development, such as the Chicago Principal Fellowship, a partnership with Northwestern University, and a new Master Principal Program announced by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on February 1. The new $600,000 initiative will foster mentorships between new and experienced principals. 

The value of such programs appears evident in the low principal turnover in CPS: In 2017, 84 percent of CPS principals remained in their roles, above the national rate, as of 2013, of 77 percent.

Simultaneously, the district’s overall four-year high school graduation rate increased from 54 to 75 percent between 2011 and 2017, with a 20 percentage point improvement among both black and Hispanic students. The average four-year graduation rate in the US is 83 percent. The CPS rates follow a graduation tracking system adopted in 2015, after the district was accused of inflating graduation rates using a limited definition of “drop-out.” CPS defended it as an unintentional statistical error. 

An October report from the UChicago Consortium found that the number of CPS students graduating with at least a 3.0 GPA increased 16 percent between 2006 and 2015. 

On February 22, CPS became the first school district (of any size) to be named the College Board Advanced Placement (AP) District of the Year more than once, having previously won the award in 2011. The award celebrates the district’s expanded access to AP tests, which often signal college readiness, and improving test scores among every demographic. 

Between 2011 and 2017, the number of Chicago high school students taking at least one AP exam increased by almost 44 percent, and the number of students earning at least a “3” (a “qualified” score on the exam’s 1 to 5 scale) increased almost 100 percent.

The district’s newly appointed CEO, Janice Jackson, is a former CPS principal herself. Dr. Jackson believes that principals drive student achievement, so she has long focused on building up district-level leaders – a focus that contributed to her being named an “Education Week 2018 Leader to Learn From” on February 21.

“Great schools have strong principals,” says Jackson, “and Chicago has emerged as a national leader in urban education because of our focus on placing a high-quality principal in every school across the city.”

SOURCE:

Graduation Rates, 2015 Method, Chicago Public Schools; College Enrollment, UCHICAGO Consortium, Research Report, Oct. 2017; *Percentages may not add up due to rounding.

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Karen Norris/Staff

Jackson’s appointment to CEO in January follows a tumultuous few years for the district’s highest office. Current high-schoolers, for example, have had seven different CPS CEOs during their education.

To some observers, the fact that CPS has improved during a time with high turnover a the top is testament to the strength of its principals.

“[I]f you build a strong base at the school level, with really high-level principals, you can weather the storms you see at the high-end level of the district,” says Raymond Hart, director of research for the Council of the Great City Schools, who has done independent assessments of Chicago’s progress.

But problems still persist in the district, between budget shortfalls, rampant school closures, and wide achievement gaps between black and white students. Dr. Allensworth says that budget shortages in the last two years may cause some “backsliding” in future reports that address similar data. At the end of the 2016 fiscal year, CPS faced a deficit of $500 million in its operations budget – a culmination of years of budget gaps, temporarily filled in by short-term credit and cash reserves.

“There is always more work to be done but that doesn't mean you should be dubious of the results we are seeing,” says Mr. Hart. “There are real improvements in CPS.”

Correction: This story and its summary have been updated to reflect the graduation rate changes in percentage points. 

Linda Feldmann

The Monitor's Washington bureau chief, Linda Feldmann, in full Mardi Gras regalia, poses backstage at the Gridiron show with former AP correspondent and fellow Gridiron member David Espo.

It always made sense that, sooner or later, President Trump would attend one of the big annual Washington press dinners.

True, we media denizens are part of the “swamp” Mr. Trump loves to hate, but we also give him oxygen. Tweets only go so far in the vast enterprise that is presidential communications. And of course he’d be the center of attention – with legions of reporters hanging on his every word and facial expression – as he and the Washington political scene were being roasted.

Last year, the president pointedly skipped both the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the smaller, off-camera Gridiron Dinner, the annual gala and satirical show put on by Washington’s oldest journalistic club. So when the president agreed to attend last Saturday’s Gridiron and deliver remarks, a frisson of nervous anticipation shot through the group.

Would he really show up? Would he go off script? Would he walk out? Even Trump allies were asking themselves the same questions.

“I have no idea what’s going to happen,” an administration official told me before the event.

Full disclosure: I am a member of the club, and performed in the show. So I knew what was in store for the president, along with the first lady, Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, and the other top officials who accepted the invitation to attend.

The motto of the club is “singe, but never burn” – but the line between singeing and burning is highly subjective. I wondered, for example, how Trump would react to lines like this: “Don’t even think/ of making mirth/ About his girth/ or net worth!”

Try to imagine a Washington lawyer – a Gridiron “ringer” who can actually sing – dressed up as Groucho Marx, singing that line to the tune of “These are the Laws of My Administration” from the movie “Duck Soup.”

That’s how the Gridiron show works: Club members, all current or former reporters, take well-known tunes from stage and screen, and adapt the lyrics to fit the politics of the day. Elaborate costumes and visual jokes round out the show. Picture a pair of reporters in Twitteresque bluebird garb crossing the stage during scene changes with signs that read, for example: “SAD!”

Democrats also came in for serious satire. Hillary Clinton was lampooned to the tune of “You’re So Vain.” (“You walked into my West Wing/ My White House, or so I thought/ Your tie strategically dropped below your belt/ Your hair it was apricot/ I still wake up most nights screaming/ With my PJs in a knot.”) Former Vice President Joe Biden, Oprah Winfrey, and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu were all parodied for their possible presidential aspirations.

Yours truly was decked out in full Mardi Gras regalia to introduce the song ribbing Mr. Landrieu. He was the evening’s Democratic speaker, and he found some common ground with the president – sort of: “We’re both a little overweight and balding – I just have had an easier time admitting it.”

Ouch.

Maybe, on that particular joke, it helped that Trump himself had recently shared a bit about his bald spot. And maybe it helped set the tone that the skits mocking Democrats went first, before those mocking Republicans, and that the dinner’s GOP speaker was Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Trump favorite.

But by all accounts, including Trump’s own tweet, he enjoyed the show. As a showman himself, Trump surely appreciated the spectacle – and our sterling performances. Guests who watched from the ballroom report that he swayed to the music, smiled, and even laughed.

At last, Trump himself took the microphone. It was a Gridiron speech for the ages – by turns funny, bizarre, and biting – designed to show that he can, in fact, make fun of himself, even as he spared no one in his midst, including his wife and son-in-law.

“My staff was concerned that I couldn’t do self-deprecating humor,” Trump said. “And I told them not to worry, nobody does self-deprecating humor better than I do.”

Of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who stepped aside from his department’s Russian investigation, he said this: “I offered him a ride over, and he recused himself.”

Of Mr. Kushner, his son-in-law and a senior aide, he said this: “You know, we were late tonight because Jared could not get through security,” a reference to Kushner’s recent loss of top-level security clearance.

Of his wife, Melania, who sat nearby, he raised eyebrows with this: “Now the question everyone keeps asking is: Who is going to be the next to leave? [Senior adviser] Steve Miller or Melania?”

Trump then appeared to go off-script as he turned to his wife and said, “That is terrible, honey, but you love me, right?... I won’t tell you what she said.... She said, ‘Behave.’... Is that terrible?”

It was a “meta” moment that left club members standing at the back of the ballroom slack-jawed and wondering exactly what he was trying to tell us. For the record, there were no jokes in the show about Trump’s alleged affair in 2006 with a porn star, which he denies.

Trump’s remarks lasted 35 minutes – well beyond the 10 or 15 minutes presidents usually take at Gridiron. At one point, a heckler yelled at him to stop. For Trump, that was probably a plus.

“The Gridiron Dinner last night was great fun,” the president tweeted the next day.

Inevitably, this year’s gala extended the long-running debate about whether it’s appropriate for White House reporters and the people they cover to socialize for an evening, be it at Gridiron or the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s a worthy question, and with a president who has referred to the news media as “the enemy of the people,” it has taken on added weight.

But here’s this participant’s take: Regardless of how the president feels about the media, he and the scribes charged with reporting on him are in the same soup for the next three – or seven – years. One can argue they might as well get to know one another a bit as people, if only to promote mutual understanding.

Americans who disapprove of Trump’s performance in office and who are appalled that such fraternizing “normalizes” his presidency might consider this: News reporters are trained to maintain a certain emotional detachment from the people they cover. And better understanding of those people makes for fuller, more nuanced coverage – and a more informed citizenry.

Now, on to the correspondents’ dinner on April 28. The early line is that Trump might attend that one, too.

AP Photo

German Chancellor and chairwomen of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Angela Merkel, prepares to leave after making a statement at the party headquarters in Berlin, Germany, March 5.

Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter raised under a communist regime, is set to serve a fourth term as leader of Europe’s largest economy – a feat that reveals a remarkable set of qualities in leadership. On March 4, Germany’s main opposition party, the Social Democrats, voted in favor of another coalition in parliament with Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats and its sister party in Bavaria. 

The difficult task of negotiating a shared left-right government took six months of patient work and careful listening by Merkel. In the push and pull of electoral politics, the parties had to compromise on issues such as tax cuts, child care, immigration restrictions, and Germany’s role in the European Union. 

This renewal of stability in Berlin is a blessing for the Continent. Merkel has shepherded Europe through a decade of upheaval, from a currency crisis to Russian aggression to a refugee crush and, soon, Britain’s exit from the EU.

Still, German society, like other Western democracies, is increasingly split along partisan lines. The rise of extremist parties, such as the far-right Alternative for Germany, reflects an unsettling trend. This is why it is important to understand the virtues that Merkel brings to her style of management.

She may be dubbed “the world’s most powerful woman” but, to her, power does not lie in a grand ideology or the force of a dominant personality. She looks relaxed for a reason. As she did in 2005 when she became Germany’s youngest and first female chancellor, she asked voters in last year’s election to choose her for her temperament. Even her blandness – Germans call her “Mutti” or “Mother” – is a powerful draw. It stands out against the bravado of other politicians. 

Her Christian faith, as she puts it, is her “inner compass.” To her, the most important quality in life is humility. According to biographers, she learned how to treat people with respect and equality by growing up in a neighborhood with a high number of people with disabilities. One of her favorite phrases in dealing with a crisis is “step by step.” She often governs by remaining silent in a negotiation and then reframing a conflict of views by identifying the “wiggle room” within each person’s thinking.

In short, she draws people together by gentleness, or what might be called sweet and tender reason. “Fear is not a good adviser in politics,” she says.  

She is not without political ambition or playing hardball with political opponents. She was swift to order a closing of Germany’s nuclear power plants. She was forceful in imposing austerity on a bankrupt Greece. When up against the rough personal tactics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, she once said, “He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy.”

Yet she knows when to compromise and to delay in order to stay within the mainstream of public opinion. “I am regarded as a permanent delayer sometimes, but I think it is essential and extremely important to take people along and really listen to them in political talks,” she says. Germans have even a coined a new word, merkeln, or how a person lingers over a decision until it is ripe for action.

From China to Venezuela to Russia, more rulers are staying in power by force of intimidation and arms. Merkel’s reelection as chancellor was achieved by the attractiveness of her patience and openness. Those traits have also helped her in forging a new cross-party coalition. She cultivates in others the qualities that she expresses. 

Germany remains a powerful exporter of goods to the world. Merkel’s examples of leadership, such as gentleness, are another type of “good.” They are not for sale. But they are available for leaders to emulate.