US Politics

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley declined to specify that slavery was a cause of the civil war on Wednesday, wading into an area of history that continues to reverberate and in some ways define US politics nearly 160 years after it concluded.Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, where the first shots of the north-south conflict were fired by Confederate soldiers in April 1861, was asked by a New Hampshire voter about the reason for the war but didn’t mention slavery in her response.Instead, Haley talked about the role of government, replying that it involved “basically how the government was going to run” and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do”.The questioner said they were astonished she did not mention slavery.“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And we will always stand by the fact that I think the government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people,” said Hayley at a town hall event in Berlin, New Hampshire.“It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom.”The Republican presidential candidate, who served as US ambassador to the UN under the Trump administration, then turned the question back to the man who had asked it.The unnamed questioner replied that he was not the one running for president and wished instead to know her answer. Haley went into an expanded explanation about the role of government, individual freedom and capitalism.“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery’,” the questioner responded, prompting a retort from Haley.“What do you want me to say about slavery?” she asked.On Thursday, amid wide reporting of her response and in apparent damage limitation mode, Haley said in a radio interview: “Of course the civil war was about slavery.”According to the Washington Post, Haley told The Pulse of NH radio show: “I want to nip it in the bud. Yes, we know the Civil War was about slavery. But more than that, what’s the lesson in all this?“That freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people. That’s the blessing of America. That was a stain on America when we had slavery. But what we want is never relive it. Never let anyone take those freedoms away again.”Wednesday’s exchange comes less than a month before the New Hampshire primaries on 23 January. Recent polling has placed Haley in second place to Donald Trump among Republican voters in the state.The Biden campaign later posted a clip of the question on the X social media platform and text saying: “It was about slavery.”After Wednesday’s town hall meeting, Christale Spain – elected this year as the first Black woman to chair South Carolina’s Democratic party – said Haley’s response was “vile, but unsurprising”.“The same person who refused to take down the Confederate Flag until the tragedy in Charleston, and tried to justify a Confederate History Month,” Spain said in a post on X. “She’s just as MAGA as Trump,” Spain added, referring to Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJaime Harrison, current chair of the Democratic National Committee and South Carolina’s party chair during part of Haley’s tenure as governor, said her response was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor”.“Same person who said the confederate flag was about tradition & heritage and as a minority woman she was the right person to defend keeping it on state house grounds,” Harrison posted Wednesday night on X. “Some may have forgotten but I haven’t. Time to take off the rose colored Nikki Haley glasses folks.”A poll last week placed Haley within four points of the former president, though the poll was conducted across a small number of people and its results have not been replicated in other surveys that give Trump a commanding lead.Haley has frequently said during her campaign that she would compete in the first three states before returning “to the sweet state of South Carolina, and we’ll finish it”.Haley’s campaign did not immediately return a message seeking comment on her response. The campaign of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, another of Haley‘s GOP foes, recirculated video of the exchange on social media, adding the comment: “Yikes.”Issues surrounding the origins of the civil war and its heritage are still much of the fabric of Haley’s home state, and she has been pressed on the war’s origins before.As she ran for governor in 2010, Haley, in an interview with a now-defunct activist group then known as the Palmetto Patriots, described the war as between two disparate sides fighting for “tradition” and “change” and said the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist”.During that same campaign, she dismissed the need for the flag to come down from the statehouse grounds, portraying her Democratic rival’s push for its removal as a desperate political stunt.Five years later, Haley urged lawmakers to remove the flag from its perch near a Confederate soldier monument after a mass shooting in which a white gunman killed eight Black church members who were attending Bible study. At the time, Haley said the flag had been “hijacked” by the shooter from those who saw it as symbolizing “sacrifice and heritage.”.South Carolina’s ordinance of secession – the 1860 proclamation by the state government outlining its reasons for seceding from the Union – mentions slavery in its opening sentence and points to the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” as a reason for the state removing itself from the Union.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

Before House Republicans left for their holiday recess this month, they addressed one last matter of business. They did not take up an aid package for Ukraine or pass an appropriations bill to fully fund the government through the fiscal year.The House chose instead to vote along party lines to formally authorize an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, even though Republicans have failed to uncover any proof that the president financially benefited from his family’s business dealings.“Instead of doing anything to help make Americans’ lives better, they are focused on attacking me with lies,” Biden said of the vote. “The American people deserve better.”The vote was a fitting end to a year defined by new lows on Capitol Hill. From removing a House speaker to expelling an indicted member and issuing threats of violence, 2023 saw Congress explore new depths of dysfunction. And it all started with a days-long speakership race.The battle for the gavel (part one)After a disappointing performance in the 2022 midterms, Republicans took control of the House in January with a much narrower majority than they had anticipated. That created a math problem for Kevin McCarthy, a Republican of California and the conference’s presumed speaker nominee.Instead of the uneventful process seen in past speakership elections, McCarthy failed to win the gavel on the first ballot, as roughly 20 hard-right members of the Republican conference opposed his ascension. The gridlock forced the House to hold a second round of voting, marking the first time in a century that the chamber failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot.The standoff lasted for four long days and necessitated 15 ballots in total. Just after midnight on 7 January, McCarthy won the speakership with a wafer-thin majority, in a vote of 216 to 212. He would hold the job for just nine months.On the brink of economic collapseAs soon as Republicans (finally) elected a speaker, attention turned to the most pressing matter on Congress’s agenda for 2023: the debt ceiling.The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, warned that the debt ceiling, which represents the amount of money the US government is allowed to borrow to pay its bills, had to be raised or suspended by early June to avoid a federal default and prevent economic catastrophe.Despite those urgent warnings, hard-right members of the House Republican conference appeared prepared to let the US default on its debt in an attempt to force steep government spending cuts. With just days left before the expected default deadline, both the House and the Senate passed a bill to suspend the debt ceiling until January 2025.The bill passed the House with a vote of 314 to 117, as 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats supported the measure. But 71 House Republicans opposed the bill, accusing McCarthy of cutting a horrendous deal with Biden. One Freedom Caucus member, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, mocked the deal as “insanity”.In retrospect, the Freedom Caucus’s attacks on McCarthy marked the beginning of the end of his speakership.The indicted senator from New JerseyAs House Republicans clashed with each other, the Senate grappled with its response to a member accused of corruption so rampant that it bordered on comical. In late September, Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat of New Jersey, was charged in connection to what prosecutors described as a “years-long bribery scheme”.The indictment accused Menendez of exploiting his role as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee to promote the interests of the Egyptian government in exchange for kickbacks. A raid of Menendez’s home, conducted in 2022, revealed that those kickbacks allegedly included a Mercedes-Benz convertible, $500,000 in cash and 13 gold bars.Even as more of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate called on him to step down, Menendez insisted he would not resign, claiming he had been “falsely accused” because of his Latino heritage.Pete Aguilar, a Democrat of California and the highest-ranking Latino member of the House, said of those claims, “Latinos face barriers and discrimination across the board in so many categories, including in our justice system. This is not that.”The chair is declared vacantThe next near-disaster for Congress came in September, when the government appeared to be on the brink of a shutdown that would have forced hundreds of thousands of federal employees to go without a paycheck.But that fate was avoided because, with just hours left before the government’s funding was set to run out, McCarthy introduced a mostly clean bill to fund the government for 45 days. In the House, the bill won the support of 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans, but 90 Republicans opposed the legislation.Democrats and hard-right Republicans alike said McCarthy had “folded” in the funding negotiations, failing to secure the steep spending cuts demanded by hard-right Republicans. Outraged by the bill’s passage, Matt Gaetz, a Republican of Florida, introduced a motion to vacate the chair, forcing a chamber-wide vote on removing McCarthy as speaker.The motion passed, with eight Republicans joining House Democrats in voting for McCarthy’s ouster. Seated in the House chamber, McCarthy let out a bitter laugh as he became the first speaker in US history to ever be ejected from the job.The battle for the gavel (part two)McCarthy’s removal prompted another speakership election, and this one somehow proved even more chaotic than the days-long spectacle that unfolded in January.Republicans initially nominated the House majority leader, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for the speakership. But Scalise was forced to withdraw from the race days later because of entrenched opposition to his nomination among hard-right lawmakers. The caucus then nominated Jim Jordan of Ohio, who attempted to pressure his critics into electing him as speaker by holding multiple unsuccessful chamber-wide votes. Jordan dropped out of the race when it became clear that opposition to his speakership bid was only growing.The election reached its peak level of absurdity on 24 October, when Tom Emmer of Minnesota withdrew from the race just hours after becoming the conference’s third speaker nominee in as many weeks. By then, it appeared even Republicans had grown tired of their manufactured crisis. Republicans’ fourth and final speaker nominee, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, won the gavel in a party-line vote, bringing an end to weeks of turmoil that had become the subject of nationwide mockery.‘You are a United States senator!’The fourteenth of November was a special day on Capitol Hill because it offered an opportunity for members of both the House and the Senate to embarrass themselves.In the House, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, one of the eight Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy as speaker, accused McCarthy of elbowing him in the kidneys. Burchett then chased after McCarthy to confront him, but the former speaker denied the allegation.“If I’d kidney-punched him, he’d be on the ground,” McCarthy told reporters.Meanwhile, on the other side of the Capitol, Senator Markwayne Mullin, a Republican of Oklahoma, challenged one of the witnesses at a committee hearing to a fistfight. Mullin had previously clashed with the witness, the Teamsters union president, Sean O’Brien, over social media and suggested they settle their score with a physical fight.“You want to do it now?” Mullin asked.“I’d love to do it right now,” O’Brien replied.“Then stand your butt up then,” Mullin said.“You stand your butt up,” O’Brien shot back.The chair of the committee, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, then intervened to prevent any violence and offered this pointed reminder to Mullin: “You know, you’re a United States senator.”From Congress to CameoThe House kicked off the final month of the year with a vote to expel George Santos, a freshman Republican from New York who had been indicted on 23 federal counts related to fraud and campaign finance violations.Santos had been plagued by controversy since before taking office, as reporters discovered he had fabricated most of the life story he shared with voters. A congressional investigation uncovered that Santos had spent thousands of dollars from his campaign account on Botox treatments, luxury items at Hermès and payments to OnlyFans, an online platform known for its sexual content.Faced with that mountain of evidence, more than 100 House Republicans joined Democrats in voting to expel Santos. The 311-114 vote made Santos only the sixth member of the House ever to be expelled from Congress.Without his day job, Santos has turned his attention to Cameo, which allows D-list celebrities to make money by filming short personalized videos for fans. Reports indicate Santos is already raking in six figures on the platform.Goodbye, KevinSantos is not the only House members leaving Congress this year. McCarthy announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he would resign from the House at the end of December. McCarthy’s decision brought an end to a 17-year career in the House that encapsulated the Republican party’s shift away from small-government conservatism and toward Donald Trump’s “Make America great again” philosophy.Despite his humiliating fall from power, McCarthy expressed unbroken faith in Americans’ goodness and in “the enduring values of our great nation”.“I’m an optimist,” McCarthy declared.That makes one of us, Kevin. More

The 60th US presidential election, which will unfold in 2024, will be quite unlike any that has gone before as the US, and the rest of the world, braces for a contest amid fears of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism.It will be a fight marked by numerous unwanted firsts as the oldest president in the country’s history is likely to face the first former US president to stand trial on criminal charges. A once aspirational nation will continue its plunge into anxiety and divisions about crime, immigration, race, foreign wars and the cost of living.Democrat Joe Biden, 81, is preparing for the kind of gruelling campaign he was able to avoid during coronavirus lockdowns in 2020. Republican Donald Trump will spend some of his campaign in a courtroom and has vowed authoritarian-style retribution if he wins. For voters it is a time of stark choices, unique spectacles and simmering danger.“It feels to me as if America is sitting on a powder keg and the fuse has been lit,” said Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The protective shield that all democracies and social orders rely on – legitimacy of the governing body, some level of elite responsibility, the willingness of citizens to view their neighbors in a civic way – is in an advanced stage of decline or collapse.“It’s quite possible that the powder keg that America’s sitting on will explode over the course of 2024.”US politics entered a new, turbulent era with Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The businessman and reality TV star, tapping into populist rage against the establishment, was the first president with no prior political or military experience. His chaotic four-year presidency was scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic and ended with a bitter defeat by Biden in a 2020 election that was itself billed as an unprecedented stress test of democracy.Trump never accepted the result and his attempts to overturn it culminated in a deadly riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, and his second impeachment. He has spent three years plotting revenge and describes the 5 November election as “the final battle”. But he is running for president under the shadow of 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, knowing that regaining the White House might be his best hope of avoiding prison – a calculus that could make him and his supporters more desperate and volatile than ever.Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “This is the most astounding election I have ever seen.“We have never had an election where a likely major party nominee is indicted for major felony charges of the most serious nature; this is not shoplifting. He’s being charged with an attempt to destroy our democracy and subverting our national security. Both in terms of Trump’s personal morality and his incredibly serious crimes, we have never seen anything remotely like this.”First Trump must win the Republican primary against Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, putting the electoral and legal calendars on a collision course. On 16 January, a day after the Iowa caucuses kick off the Republican nomination process, Trump faces a defamation trial brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, who has already won a $5m judgment against him after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.On 4 March, Trump is due in court in Washington in a federal case accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election result. The following day is Super Tuesday, when more than 15 states are scheduled to hold Republican primaries, the biggest delegate haul of the campaign.On 25 March, Trump also faces state charges in New York over hush-money payments to an adult film star, although the judge has acknowledged he may postpone that because of the federal trial. On 5 August, prosecutors have asked to start an election fraud trial in Georgia, less than three weeks after Trump is likely to have been nominated by the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Trump is hard at work to flip his legal troubles to his political advantage, contending that he is a victim of a Democratic deep state conspiracy. He frequently tells his supporters: “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you – and I’m just standing in their way.” His Georgia mugshot has been slapped on T-shirts and other merchandise like a lucrative badge of honor.It seems to be working, at least according to a series of opinion polls that show Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical matchup. A survey in early December for the Wall Street Journal newspaper showed Trump ahead by four points, 47% to 43%. When five potential third-party and independent candidates were included, Trump’s lead over Biden expanded to six points, 37% to 31%.To Democrats, such figures are bewildering. Biden’s defenders point to his record, including the creation of 14m jobs, strong GDP growth and four major legislative victories on coronavirus relief, infrastructure, domestic production of computer chips and the biggest climate action in history. He has also led the western alliance against Russian aggression in Ukraine.Lichtman added: “He gets credit for nothing. It’s just amazing: I’ve never seen a president do so much and get so little mileage on it. He has more domestic accomplishments than any American president since the 1960s. He’s presided over an amazing economic recovery, a far better economy than was under Donald Trump even before the pandemic in terms of jobs, wages, GDP. Inflation has gone down by two-thirds.“It was Biden who single-handedly put together the coalition of the west that stopped [Vladimir] Putin from quickly overtaking Ukraine. He seems to get no credit for any of this whatsoever and that’s partly his own fault and the fault of the Democratic party. The Democratic party has been horrible for some time now – at least 15 years. Republicans are so much better at messaging.”The president’s approval rating has been stubbornly low since around the time of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. He is grappling with record numbers of migrants entering the country – an issue that increasingly aggravates states beyond the US-Mexico border. His refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is costing him some support among progressives and young people.The latest Democratic messaging salvo – “Bidenomics” – appears to have been a flop at a moment when many voters blame him for rising prices and a cost-of-living crisis. For all the barrage of positive economic data, Americans are lacking the feelgood factor.Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said: “People feel that Biden overpromised and underdelivered and ultimately what it came down to was he didn’t make me feel good while he did it and he didn’t make it look easy.”Biden still holds a potential ace in the hole. Democrats plan to make abortion central to the 2024 campaign, with opinion polls showing most Americans do not favor strict limits on reproductive rights. The party is hoping threats to those rights will encourage millions of women and independents to vote their way next year. It is also seeking to put measures enshrining access to abortion in state constitutions on as many ballots as possible.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe issue has flummoxed Republicans, with some concerned the party has gone too far with state-level restrictions since the supreme court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling last year, ending constitutional protection for abortion. Trump has taken notice and is conspicuously trying to be vague on the issue.The Wall Street Journal poll found Biden leading Trump on abortion and democracy by double digits. But it gave Trump a double-digit lead on the economy, inflation, crime, border security, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and physical and mental fitness for office. Biden still has time to reshape perceptions but even close allies concede that he is not an inspirational speechmaker like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. How can he turn it around?Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “My advice would be to be aggressive, go on offence and set the narrative. They must make the contrast between a Biden America and a Trump America and ask people which America do they want to live in.“A year out, most people are not paying attention so the polls are meaningless in that they are not predictive of what will happen in a year. Where they do have value is what the trend line shows, which is that the American people are not getting the messaging clearly enough now, so it’s time to get up off their asses and activate the campaign at level 10 right now.”Setmayer, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, added: “What Donald Trump is telegraphing, what he plans to do to this country, I don’t fully think most Americans understand.“Use the power of incumbency, of the bully pulpit, of their record. Biden is surrounded by people who are experienced campaign veterans and so is he. Use it.”Should Trump prevail, numerous critics have warned that his return would hollow out American democracy and presage a drift towards Hungarian-style authoritarianism. In a recent interview on Fox News, Trump was asked: “You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody?” He did not give an outright denial but replied airily: “Except for day one.”Should Biden serve a second term, he will be 86 when he leaves office. Dean Phillips, 54, a congressman from Minnesota, mounting a Democratic primary challenge, is calling for a new generation of leadership. Some Democrats privately wish that Biden had declared mission accomplished after the 2022 midterm elections and stepped down to make way for younger contenders such as Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. It now appears too late.Frank Luntz, a prominent consultant and pollster, said: “Democrats should be apoplectic. Donald Trump has been indicted in felony after felony. The economy is relatively OK and yet Biden is sinking every week and it’s because of something that no soundbite and no messaging can fix: his age. If I were a Democratic strategist, I would have been arrested in front of the White House for begging him to accept four years and move on. You can’t fix age.”Biden’s potential for gaffes was limited during the pandemic election; this time he will be expected to travel far and wide, his every misstep amplified by rightwing media. The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, is now owned by Elon Musk and populated by extremists such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. This has also been dubbed the first “AI election”, with deepfakes threatening to accelerate the spread of disinformation – a tempting target for foreign interference.It is unfolding in a febrile atmosphere of conspiracy theories, polarisation, gun violence and surging antisemitism and Islamophobia. Political opponents are increasingly framed as mortal enemies. Violence erupted on January 6 and again last year when a man broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer.Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “If you have something like the last couple of elections where it’s razor thin, and people who don’t understand the American electoral process see malfeasance and misfeasance where there is none, we have a very non-trivial chance of violence.“I wouldn’t even presume that we wouldn’t have an outbreak of sporadic violence before that. The fact is when people see each other as the enemy, and talk about each other as the enemy, people who are mentally unbalanced and have access to firearms will do mentally unbalanced things.”Luntz does not foresee violence.But nor is he optimistic about the future of a nation torn between hope and fear. “What I do expect is a fraying no longer at the edges but at the heart of American democracy,” he said. “I’m afraid that we are reaching the point of no return. In my conversations with senators and congressmen every day I’m on the Hill – it doesn’t matter which party – we all agree that it’s not coming, it’s here, and no one knows what to do about it.” More

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential nomination contender and biotech billionaire, has stopped spending on TV ads, it was reported on Wednesday.According to his campaign and analysis from an ad-tracking firm obtained by NBC News, the candidate spent just $6,000 on TV ads last week compared with $200,000 in the first week of December.Still, Ramaswamy’s campaign maintains it is still spending money on ads less than a month before the 15 January Iowa caucuses and the 23 January New Hampshire primary – just not on TV, which is the largest beneficiary of political advertising by medium with as much as $5.1bn estimated for the current US election cycle.In a post on X, Ramaswamy said “presidential TV ad spending is idiotic, low-ROI [return on investment] & a trick that political consultants use to bamboozle candidates who suffer from low IQ”.Tricia McLaughlin, the campaign’s press secretary, told the network that the campaign was “focused on bringing out the voters we’ve identified – best way to reach them is using addressable advertising, mail, text, live calls and doors to communicate with our voters on Vivek’s vision for America, making their plan to caucus and turning them out”.McLaughlin acknowledged that the strategy “isn’t what most campaigns look like” and it was “intentionally structured this way so that we have the ability to be nimble and hypertargeted in our ad spending”.Former president Donald Trump, who built his 2016 campaign using social media and text, reacted to his rival’s change of strategy on Truth Social, writing: “He will, I am sure, Endorse me. But Vivek is a good man, and is not done yet!”Trump has treated the young political neophyte as something of standard bearer, despite being a trailing rival, and has lauded him as winner of Republican TV debates.“Vivek WINS because he thinks I’m great,” Trump remarked after the most recent Republican nomination TV showdown in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, this month. The former president took a swipe at his closest polling rival, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the UN, saying: “Birdbrain looked different & lost, but I give her second place.”On X, Ramaswamy indicated that his campaign’s change in strategy was planned.“We’re doing it differently. Spending $$ in a way that follows data … apparently a crazy idea in US politics. Big surprise coming Jan 15,” he said. More

“Norman Mailer said every writer has one book that’s a gift from God.” So says Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, now author of a revelatory book on the civil war, Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta – And Then Got Written Out of History.“And agnostic as I am, I have to say this was such a gift, one way or another.”Raines tells the story of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, loyalists who served under Gen William Tecumseh Sherman in campaigns that did much to end the war that ended slavery, only to be scorned by their own state and by historians as the “Lost Cause” myth, of a noble but traduced south, took hold.For Raines, it is also a family story. As he wrote in the Washington Post, his name is a “version of the biblical middle name of James Hiel Abbott, who … help[ed] his son slip through rebel lines to enlist in the 1st Alabama … That son is buried in the national military cemetery at Chattanooga, Tennessee. Until a few years ago, I was among the thousands of southerners who never knew they had kin buried under Union army headstones.”The 1st Alabama was organised in 1862 and fought to the end of the war, its duties including forming Sherman’s escort on his famous March to the Sea, its battles including Resaca, Atlanta and Kennesaw Mountain.To the Guardian, Raines, 80, describes how the 1st Alabama and the “Free State of Winston”, the anti-secession county from which many recruits came, have featured through his life.“My paternal grandmother gave me my first hint, when I was about five or six, that our family didn’t support the Confederacy. It was a very oblique reference but it stuck in my mind. And then, in 1961, I ran across a reference … in a wonderful book called Stars Fell on Alabama [by Carl Carmer, 1934], and it confirmed … that there were Unionists in my mother’s ancestral county, Winston county, up in the Appalachian foothills.“So those were the seeds, and I just kept over the years saving string, to use a newspaper term. And I could never rid myself of curiosity about what the real story was. And then when I started reading enough Alabama history to see how these mountain unionists had been libeled in the Alabama history books, that, I suppose, fit my natural curiosity as a contrarian.“… For years, I thought I would write it as a novel. I had done one novel set in that same county [Whiskey Man, 1977]. And it took me a long time to realise that the true story was better than anything I could make up.”Raines has written history before: his first book, written in the 1970s when he was a reporter and editor in Georgia and Florida, was My Soul Is Rested, an oral history of the civil rights years. His new book is also inflected with autobiography and follows two memoirs, Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis (1993) and The One That Got Away (2006), the latter published not long after his departure from the Times, in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair affair.He had, he says, “a very unusual upbringing”, for Alabama in the 1940s and 50s.“In no house of my extended family was there a single picture of Robert E Lee or any of the Confederate heroes. It didn’t strike me until I was much older that I lived in a different southern world than most other white kids my age in Alabama. Our families not venerating these Confederate icons was the very subtle downstream effect of having had a significant number of unionists and indeed some collateral kin and direct kin who were part of the Union army.“It’s a curious thing about Alabama. After segregation became such an inflamed issue in the south with the 1954 school desegregation decision [Brown v Board of Education, by the US supreme court], families with unionist heritage quit telling those family stories on the front porch. The only way to find out about it was to dig them out. And it always struck me as the ultimate irony that many of the Klan members in north Alabama in the 1960s, and many of the supporters of George Wallace [the segregationist governor], were actually descendants of Union soldiers without knowing it.”Reading Stars Fell on Alabama “was a seminal moment. [Carmer’s] observation that Alabama could best be understood as if it was a separate nation within the continental United States: suddenly the quotidian realities that a child accepts as normal or even a young college student accepted as normal, I began to see as odd behavior.“For example, Alabamians were always complaining in the 1950s and 60s about being looked down upon. And suddenly … I said, ‘Well, there’s a reason for this. If you pick [the infamous Birmingham commissioner of public safety] Bull Connor and George Wallace to be your representatives before the nation on the premier legal and moral issue of the decade” – civil rights – “then they’re going to think you’re strange.”If Alabamians complained of being looked down upon, many Alabamians looked down on the unionists of Winston county – people too poor to own enslaved workers.“Even though the story of unionism was suppressed, it survived enough in the political bloodstream of the state that the legislature continued to punish them for 100 plus years after the war. So much so that my cousins in the country went to school in wooden schoolhouses while the schools in the rest of the state were modern, even in the rural counties. And up until I was 10 years old, we had to travel to my grandparents’ farm, only 50 miles from Birmingham, via dirt roads. So this was a matter of punishing through the state budget, this apostasy that sort of otherwise washed out of the civic memory.”As Raines writes in his introduction to Silent Cavalry, “History is not what happened. It is what gets written down in an imperfect, often underhanded process dominated by self-interested political, economic and cultural authorities.”He “had to really dig deeply into historiography to understand how this odd thing came to be: that the losers of the civil war got to write the dominant history … [and how] that revisionist view … became nationalised.” That’s what happened in the Lost Cause crusade of the 1870s to 1890s that in turn produced William Archibald Dunning” (1857-1922), a historian at Columbia University in New York who did much to embed the Lost Cause in American culture.”Raines discusses that process and its later manifestations, not least in relation to The Civil War, Ken Burns’ great 1990 documentary series now subject to revisionist thinking. Burns, his brother Ric and Geoffrey C Ward, a historian who co-wrote the script, are quoted on why the 1st Alabama is absent from their work. But Raines also discusses historians who have begun to tell the stories of the unionist south.“Histories of the Confederacy were written by Dunning-trained scholars who delivered a warped version of Confederate history: very, very racist [and] very classist, in terms of their contempt for southern poor whites. And those became the fundamental references which national historians … were writing off. A tainted version of southern history.“That obtained until the publication in 1992 of a book called Lincoln’s Loyalists. Richard Nelson Current went back and actually discovered that there were 100,000 citizens of the Confederate states who volunteered in the Union army – almost 5% that came from the south.“The reviews at the time hailed Current’s book as opening up an entire new field of scholarship. But in fact it was not until about 2000 that a new generation of PhD students, hungry for unexplored topics, began to really dig into this new area of study. And it’s a thriving field now, with a lot of really interesting books.Asked how his book has been received back home, Raines laughs.“I don’t know about Alabama. I’m having a signing party in Birmingham in January but that’ll be like-minded southern progressives, for the most part. The defensiveness I referred to … will cause many readers down there to say, ‘Oh, this is just another chance to make Alabama look bad.’“Alabamians take no responsibility for being on the wrong side of history since 1830, and they think anyone who points that out is is being unfair. So that won’t change.”
Silent Cavalry is published in the US by Crown More

In 2015, the man who coined Godwin’s law, a famous maxim about argument on the internet, wrote a column for the Washington Post. Its headline: “Sure, call Trump a Nazi. Just make sure you know what you’re talking about.”By the lawyer and author Mike Godwin’s own definition, his law reads thus: “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches one.” Since Republicans fell under Trump’s thrall, the law has often been invoked. Why? See our list of the 10 worst things Trump said in 2023:VerminIn November, in Claremont, New Hampshire, Trump continued his dominant primary campaign. His rant was familiar but it held something new:
We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.
Hillary Clinton, who Trump beat in 2016, had already likened him to Hitler. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian from New York University, told the Washington Post: “Calling people ‘vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanise people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”PoisonOf course, the signs were already there. In September, discussing immigration with the National Pulse, Trump said:
Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now … It’s poisoning the blood of our country.
He had already promised “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”. Plans to hold migrants in camps would be reported. But Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC summed up the “poisoning” comment as “a straight-up white supremacist/neo-Nazi talking point”. Trump went there again in December, too.DictatorTrump wasn’t done. In December, at an Iowa town hall, the Fox News host Sean Hannity asked if he would promise not to “abuse power as retribution against anybody”. Trump said: “Except for day one”, then explained:
I love this guy. He says, ‘You’re not gonna be a dictator, are you?’ I say, ‘No, no, no – other than day one.’ We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that I’m not a dictator, OK?
Noting Trump’s laughter and the crowd’s cheers, Philip Bump of the Washington Post wrote: “What fun! I guess we can put that to bed.”RetributionNo one could say such comments were surprising. In March, closing CPAC in Maryland, Trump told conservatives:
In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.
Jonathan Karl of ABC would report that the Trump strategist Steve Bannon said Trump was speaking in code, referring to a Confederate plot to take hostage – and eventually kill – President Abraham Lincoln.DeathIn September, the Atlantic profiled Mark Milley, then chair of the joint chiefs of staff. Milley’s work to contain Trump at the end of his presidency was already widely known but the profile set Trump off nonetheless. On Truth Social, referring to a call in which Milley assured Chinese officials he would guard against any attempted attack, Trump lamented …
… an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!
Milley was moved to take “appropriate measures to ensure my safety and the safety of my family”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCourtsThis has been the year of the Trump indictment. He faces four, spawning 91 criminal charges regarding election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments. On 4 August, lawyers for the federal special counsel Jack Smith notified a judge of a post in which Trump appeared to threaten them, writing:
If you go after me, I’m coming after you!
Trump claimed protected political speech but the exchange teed up one of many tussles over gag orders and the general impossibility of getting Trump to shut up.IndictA recurring question: if re-elected, will Trump seek to use the federal government against his enemies? The slightly garbled answer, as expressed to Univision in November, was of course … yes:
If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them, mostly they would be out of business. They’d be out. They’d be out of the election.
AnimalIn April, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, filed 34 charges over Trump’s 2016 payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star who claims an affair. Trump had already made arguably racist comments about Letitia James, the New York attorney general. Aiming at Bragg, Trump used Truth Social to say:
He is a Soros-backed animal who just doesn’t care about right or wrong.
Calling Bragg an animal played to racism about Black people. “Soros-backed”, commonly used by Republicans, refers to the progressive financier George Soros and is widely regarded as antisemitic.Whack jobIn May, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse of the writer E Jean Caroll. Ordered to pay about $5m, he was not about to be quiet. The next night, in New Hampshire, he ranted:
And I swear and I’ve never done that … I have no idea who the hell – she’s a whack job.
Carroll called the comments “just stupid … just disgusting, vile, foul”. Then she sued Trump again.All-out warTrump is 77. Questions about his mental fitness for power are not going away. Recently, he has appeared to think he beat Barack Obama in 2016 and become confused about which Iowa city he was in. On 2 December, however, another Iowa gaffe seemed to point to a worrying truth:
That’s why it was one of the great presidencies, they say. Even the opponents sometimes say he did very well … but we’ve been waging an all-out war on American democracy. More

Imagine a white, working-class American, most likely a man, from Louisiana or Alabama, perhaps, standing in a long line that represents his life’s journey. The man has been sold the American “bootstrap myth”, which states that his great country is a place where anyone can rise from the humblest of origins to become a billionaire or a president, and at the end of the line he expects to find a little part of that dividend for himself. But things aren’t panning out as he had hoped. For a start, the line stretches to the horizon, and even as he stands in it, he suffers: his pay packet is shrinking, the industry he works in is moving overseas, and the cost of everything from food to gas to healthcare is through the roof. Worse still, he can see people cutting into the line ahead, beneficiaries of “affirmative action” – black people, women, immigrants. He doesn’t think he’s racist or misogynist, but that’s what they call him when he objects. He is doubly shamed: privately, by his failure to live up to the myth; publicly, by liberal society.This is the so-called deep story of the American right. We don’t have to accept the man’s worldview, just believe that this might be how he perceives it.Now a new figure enters the scenario, an orange-haired tycoon: we’ll call him Donald. Donald seems instinctively to understand the man’s shame. In fact, he’s a shame expert. He has a long history of transgression, and people have been trying to shame him for much of his life. But Donald has found a way around it: he has become shame-less. He demonstrates his shamelessness almost daily by producing a stream of shameful remarks – about Mexicans, say, or Muslims, or the sitting president, who happens to be black. Although people shout “Shame!” at him, each condemnation inflates Donald a little more in the eyes of his tribe, including the man in the line, who holds him up as a sort of shame messiah. By refusing his own shame, Donald absolves them, too.This, more or less, is the analysis of Trumpism offered by David Keen in his fascinating, occasionally frustrating book. We are living through a sort of shame golden age, Keen observes, with the words “shame” and “shameless” in greater vogue than at any time since the mid-19th century. We have developed a “habit of instant condemnation”, which is “choking off curiosity and narrowing the space for understanding of others”. It is also having a terrible effect on our politics.It’s not hard to see where our shame culture originates. Every keyboard jockey now holds the power of a witch-finder general, while the phones in our pockets vibrate with the merry-go-round of digital finger-pointing, body-shaming and moral high-handedness that constitutes much of social media. Of course, shame isn’t always a negative thing – what would #MeToo or #BLM be without it? But too often the effect of shaming is to drive the shamed into an angrier, more shameless place. Oddly, despite the huge seam of public shaming that Twitter/X, Instagram and Facebook provide daily, Keen doesn’t spend any time on them. Instead, he draws on his expertise as professor of conflict studies at the London School of Economics to embark on a series of case studies, including the Holocaust, the civil war in Sierra Leone, the Brexit vote and Trump’s election.His analysis of the violence in Sierra Leone is compelling, his chapter on the Nazis less so, but it is Trumpism that lies at the heart of the book, and his arguments here are highly plausible. Might a shame analysis even explain the great paradox of modern politics, in which one individual can be mobbed for the slightest indiscretion, while another can brag, as Trump once did, that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote? Does the shame/shameless diptych explain not only Trump, but the whole crew of latter-day demagogues, from Johnson to Modi, Meloni to Bolsanaro, and now Javier Milei in Argentina?I think it could, but I’m not wholly convinced, absent a deeper dive into the driving mechanism of modern shame: technology.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion More

An appellate court on Tuesday reversed a 2022 federal conviction against former Nebraska congressman Jeff Fortenberry, ruling that the Republican should not have been tried in Los Angeles.Fortenberry was convicted in March 2022 on charges that he lied to federal authorities about an illegal $30,000 contribution to his campaign from a foreign billionaire at a 2016 Los Angeles fundraiser. He resigned his seat days later after pressure from congressional leaders and Nebraska’s Republican governor.In Tuesday’s ruling, the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit wrote that the trial venue of Los Angeles was improper because Fortenberry made the false statements during interviews with federal agents at his home in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in his lawyer’s office in Washington.“Fortenberry’s convictions are reversed so that he may be retried, if at all, in a proper venue,” the decision said.A federal jury in Los Angeles found the nine-term Republican guilty of concealing information and two counts of making false statements to authorities. He vowed to appeal from the courthouse steps.Fortenberry was charged after denying to the FBI that he was aware he had received illicit funds from Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian billionaire of Lebanese descent.At trial, prosecutors presented recorded phone conversations in which Fortenberry was repeatedly warned that the contributions came from Chagoury. The donations were funneled through three straw men at the 2016 fundraiser in Los Angeles.The case stemmed from an FBI investigation into $180,000 in illegal campaign contributions to four campaigns from Chagoury, who lived in Paris at the time. Chagoury admitted to the crime in 2019 and agreed to pay a $1.8m fine.It was the first trial of a sitting congressman since the Democratic representative Jim Traficant of Ohio was convicted of bribery and other felony charges in 2002.Fortenberry and his wife, Celeste Fortenberry, praised the court’s decision.“We are gratified by the ninth circuit’s decision,” Jeff Fortenberry said in a statement. “Celeste and I would like to thank everyone who has stood by us and supported us with their kindness and friendship.”Representatives from the US attorney’s office in Los Angeles did not have an immediate comment. More