US Politics

Ben Rhodes was Barack Obama’s speechwriter and became one of the former president’s closest aides, a constant presence at his shoulder as he toured the world and sat down with the powerful and famous. Three years ago, soon after leaving the White House, Rhodes wrote a compelling insider account of that era called The World As It Is. He has now written the sequel, and has opted for the apocalyptic title After the Fall. It is the story of an aftermath, of the acolyte still travelling the globe with the greying former president as he garners awards, mobbed by adoring fans. A rueful Obama muses about his transition from political force to celebrity, adored but virtually powerless.After the Fall is a cleverly chosen title. It is about the ending of an administration and the aspirations of those who served in it, who look on aghast at the reign of Donald Trump. But it also has the suggestion of original sin – in this case, the US’s. The subtitle is Being American in the World We’ve Made, and the central theme of the book is a contemplation of the seeds of the country’s fall from grace in the world. Trump’s crassness is not the cause of the descent, but a symptom.Rhodes traces much of the decline to the 9/11 attacks and the George W Bush administration’s reaction to them, which sought to “reorient America’s entire national purpose to the task of fighting terrorism”. The Iraq invasion, in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, “cracked open the facade that elites in the United States knew what they were doing” and called into question “why Americans were the stewards of world order”. Then came the largely made-in-America financial crash of 2008, destabilising politics-as-usual around the world. At home, a pivotal 5-4 vote by the US supreme court in 2010 opened the floodgates to unaccountable “dark money” saturating politics. Meanwhile ever more extreme politics were facilitated by Facebook, Twitter and the like.“Profit-driven social media algorithms, like unchecked political contributions, were treated as free speech beyond the reach of government regulations,” Rhodes writes. He travels around the world observing the plight of other frail societies, such as Myanmar, Hungary, Russia and Hong Kong, where democracy is in retreat or has been routed altogether. He talks to dissidents trying to push back against the tide, and finds common strands in the American malaise and the rest of the world’s. Little of the analysis is new or original, but it is certainly elegantly expressed. This is the man, after all, with a degree in creative writing, who wrote so many of Obama’s soaring speeches.And Rhodes does have an interesting personal tale to tell. He found out from reporting by the Observer in May 2018 that a shady firm of Israeli ex-spooks-for-hire called Black Cube was sniffing around him and another Obama staffer, Colin Kahl. The firm had been hired by the Trump camp to discredit the top officials involved in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The abortive smear effort involved sending creepy fake emails to Rhodes’s wife. She did not fall for it but the experience so unnerved her that she insisted on moving their young family out of the political crosshairs to Los Angeles. Rhodes cannot help wondering if the family’s decision to flee politics is what his persecutors wanted all along. To kill off political engagement and drive an activist generation towards apathy and cynicism. He comes to the realisation that he is “a casualty of a war over identity – who defines it and who doesn’t, what is true and what isn’t, what happened and what didn’t, who you are and who you aren’t.”There is a very personal element to After the Fall in which Rhodes admits to disorientation and a desire for purpose in the long spiralling descent from the Oval Office. “I was a thirty-nine-year-old with as little idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life as I’d had as a twenty-three-year-old,” he reflects. “History was no longer something that took place in rooms where I sat.” The introspection, coupled with an itinerary of venerable European destinations, such as Paris, Budapest and Baden-Baden, sometimes gives the book the feel of a melancholy Chekhovian tale: the young courtier in the retinue of a revered, recently ousted monarch, touring old watering holes. He meets like-minded contemporaries, including Hungarian, Russian and Hong Kong dissidents, and they try to come to terms with the implosion of the world they had once hoped for.Throughout, Rhodes struggles with a certain ennui. On a trip to Yangon, he wanders into a pagoda and “sat staring at a Buddha, waiting to feel something”. Some of the best passages arise when he is back together with his old boss, and we are given an insight into what Obama thinks of it all, including the acerbic and memorable observation that “Trump is for a lot of white people what OJ’s acquittal was to a lot of black folks – you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.”We can also sit in while Obama considers the leadership challenge facing the progressive democratic cause in the US and further afield. Surveying the candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries, the former president says he agrees with Bernie Sanders in his diagnosis of America’s malaise, a system chronically rigged to benefit the very rich. “But there’s something missing when Bernie talks about it,” Obama adds. “A spiritual component, a national identity that’s not nationalist.” Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are better at invoking national unity but don’t have Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s fire in the belly, their outrage. Searching for a historical precedent of a progressive leader who could offer both, Obama has to go all the way back to Bobby Kennedy.It illustrates a certain nostalgia pervading the book, looking back at the times before the fall, and the allure of the apparent certainties of Rhodes’s youth, when America seemed to have all the answers. They still exert their pull on him, even though he now knows them to be hollow. More

Jonathan Freedland and Prof Sarah Binder discuss why two Democratic senators are proving a thorn in Joe Biden’s side

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

President Biden is facing some barriers in passing his rather ambitious agenda, namely senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are refusing to toe the party line on abolishing the filibuster and on issues such as voting rights. So, which side is most likely to win out? Sarah Binder, professor of political science at George Washington University, brings us up to speed on what is happening. Watch some of the campaign adverts by Joe Manchin mentioned by Prof Binder Listen to the first episode of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

The US will officially recognize Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in America, as a federal holiday after Joe Biden signed a bill into law on Thursday.At a jubilant White House ceremony, the president emphasized the need for the US to reckon with its history, even when that history is shameful.“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments,” Biden said, before he established what will be known as Juneteenth National Independence Day. “Great nations don’t walk away. We come to terms with the mistakes we made. And remembering those moments, we begin to heal and grow stronger.”Just before signing the bill, Biden added: “I’ve only been president for several months, but I think this will go down for me as one of the greatest honors I will have had as president.”Kamala Harris, also in attendance, reflected on the historic nature of the day and the presence of Black lawmakers who worked diligently to advance the bill.Harris, who is the first Black woman to serve as vice-president, told those at the White House for the bill signing: “We are gathered here in a house built by enslaved people. We are footsteps away from where President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.“And we are here to witness President Joe Biden establish Juneteenth as a national holiday. We have come far, and we have far to go, but today is a day of celebration.”[embedded content]Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the people of Galveston, Texas, freeing slaves in the last rebel state. Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but the proclamation wasn’t enforced in Galveston until federal soldiers read it out on 19 June 1865.Black Americans are rejoicing at the move, but many say more is needed to address systemic racism.Republican-led states have enacted or are considering legislation that activists argue would curtail the right to vote, particularly for people of color. Legislation to address voting rights issues, and institute policing reforms demanded after the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans, remains stalled in the Congress that acted swiftly on the Juneteenth bill.“It’s great, but it’s not enough,” said Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Kansas City. “We need Congress to protect voting rights, and that needs to happen right now so we don’t regress any further,” she added. “That is the most important thing Congress can be addressing at this time.”Federal recognition of Juneteenth also comes as Republican officials across the country move to ban schools from teaching students “critical race theory”, the history of slavery and the continuing impacts of systemic racism.The Senate unanimously passed the bill earlier this week, but in the House, 14 Republicans voted against it.Most federal workers will observe the holiday on Friday. The Washington DC mayor, Muriel Bowser, and Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, announced that state and city government offices would be closed on Friday in honor of Juneteenth. District of Columbia public schools will also be closed on Friday.Before 19 June became a federal holiday, it was observed in the vast majority of states and the District of Columbia. Texas was first to make Juneteenth a holiday, in 1980.In Texas, residents celebrated the role their state played in the historic moment.“I’m happy as pink,” said Doug Matthew, 70, a former city manager of Galveston who has helped coordinate the community’s Juneteenth celebrations since Texas made it a holiday.He credited the work of state and local leaders with paving the way for this week’s step by Congress.“I’m also proud that everything started in Galveston,” Matthew said.Pete Henley, 71, was setting up tables on Thursday for a Juneteenth celebration at the Old Central Cultural Center, a Galveston building that once was a segregated Black school. He said the Juneteenth holiday would help promote understanding and unity.He said his family traced its roots back to enslaved men and women in the Texas city who were among the last to receive word of the Emancipation Proclamation.“As a country, we really need to be striving toward togetherness more than anything,” Henley said. “If we just learn to love each other, it would be so great.” More

A Republican congressman “ran as quickly as he could, like a coward” when a police officer injured in the attack on Congress on 6 January saw him and tried to shake his hand, the officer said.“I was very cordial,” Michael Fanone told CNN on Wednesday of his interaction with Andrew Clyde, in a Capitol elevator earlier that day.Fanone, of the DC metropolitan police, was assaulted and injured after he rushed to help defend the Capitol from supporters of Donald Trump who rioted in service of his attempt to overturn his election defeat.Fanone returned this week with a colleague from the US Capitol police, in an attempt to speak to Republicans including Clyde who voted against awarding the congressional gold medal to officers who defended the building.When he saw the Georgia representative, Fanone said, he “extended my hand to shake his hand. He just stared at me. I asked if he was going to shake my hand, and he told me that he didn’t who know I was. So I introduced myself.“I said that I was Officer Michael Fanone. That I was a DC Metropolitan police officer who fought on 6 January to defend the Capitol and, as a result, I suffered a traumatic brain injury as well as a heart attack after having been tased numerous times at the base of my skull, as well as being severely beaten.“At that point, the congressman turned away from me.”Fanone said Clyde “pulled out his cellphone and started thumbing through the apps”, apparently trying to record the encounter. Once the elevator doors opened, Fanone said, the congressman “ran as quickly as he could, like a coward”.Clyde has not so far provided comment.Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, and the Illinois anti-Trump Republican Adam Kinzinger tweeted in support of Fanone.Swalwell said: “To honour Trump, House Republicans will dishonour the police.”Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, told CNN the congressional gold medal vote on Tuesday was “a new low” for the 21 Republicans who voted no.“They voted to overturn an election,” he said. “But in their vote today, they kind of sealed the deal of basically affiliating with the mob. They now are part of the insurrectionist mob.”Clyde made headlines in May when he told a congressional hearing many in that mob on 6 January behaved as if there for “a normal tourist visit”.As the Washington Post reported, pictures taken as rioters searched for lawmakers to capture and kill showed Clyde rushing to barricade a door. More

Michael Wolff’s third book about Donald Trump, focusing on the final days of his presidency, will be published in July under a provocative title: Landslide.Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college – a result he called a landslide when it was in his favour against Hillary Clinton in 2016.Trump has pursued the lie that Biden’s victory was the result of electoral fraud – a speech on the subject fuelled the deadly attack on the US Capitol in Washington on 6 January, leading to a second impeachment trial.Though Trump told Fox News on Wednesday night he “didn’t win” and wished Biden well, he also said the election was “unbelievably unfair”.Wolff published his first Trump tell-all in January 2018, rocking the White House when the Guardian broke news of the book, Fire and Fury.Trump sought to block publication, calling Wolff “a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book”. The reading public ignored him: the explosive exposé sold 1.7m copies in its first three weeks.In 2019 Wolff published Siege, which looked at a “presidency under fire”, tackling topics including Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and ties between Trump and Moscow.Wolff no longer enjoyed unfettered West Wing access but he did produce a bombshell, again first reported by the Guardian: that Mueller’s team had prepared and shelved an indictment of the president, on three counts of obstruction of justice.Wolff said he obtained the documents from “sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel”. The special counsel rejected his claim, a spokesman saying: “The documents that you’ve described do not exist.”Amid such controversy, and with competitors having flooded the shelves with reportage on the chaotic Trump presidency, Siege did not sell as well as Fire and Fury.Like its predecessor, Siege used Steve Bannon as a major source. By then, however, the far-right provocateur was no longer a White House strategist or even, thanks to his cooperation for Fire and Fury which enraged the president, a major figure in Trumpworld.On Thursday, Wolff’s publisher said he had interviewed the former president. It also said Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, would focus on his “tumultuous last months at the helm of the country”.Out on 27 July from Little, Brown in the UK and Macmillan in the US, the book is based on what the publishers called “extraordinary access to White House aides and to the former president himself, yielding a wealth of new information and insights about what really happened inside the highest office in the land, and the world”.Trump has claimed to be writing “the book of all books” himself. In a statement last week, he claimed he had “turned down two book deals, from the most unlikely of publishers”, adding: “I do not want a deal right now. I’m writing like crazy anyway, however.”After major publishers said they would not touch a Trump memoir, he insisted “two of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses have made very substantial offers which I have rejected”.“That doesn’t mean I won’t accept them sometime in the future,” he said. “… If my book will be the biggest of them all … does anybody really believe that they are above making a lot of money?”Possibly to Trump’s chagrin, those who served him in office have found publishers eager to release their memoirs – and to pay a lot of money to do so.Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, has a “seven-figure”, two-book deal – despite a staff rebellion at Simon & Schuster.Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has a deal for a “definitive” account of the Trump presidency. Broadside Books, a conservative imprint at HarperCollins, has said the book will come out in early 2022. The price of the deal was not disclosed.Last November, shortly after Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, Barack Obama published the first volume of a projected two-part memoir that was sold to Penguin Random House with books by his wife, Michelle Obama, for a reported $65m. The former president’s book, A Promised Land, sold strongly.Another former president, Bill Clinton, has moved into fiction. The President’s Daughter – his second thriller, in this case about a president who also happens to be a former Navy Seal – is again written with James Patterson. This week, it debuted at No1 on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestsellers list. More

Happy Thursday,In the United States, a quiet army of people work in towns, cities, and states across the country to make sure that elections hum along smoothly. They’re responsible for all the mechanics that ensure Americans can exercise their right to vote – like keeping track of complex data files, making sure that mail-in ballots get printed and go out on time, ensuring that polling places have enough workers, and making sure that every valid vote gets counted.For a long time, these officials – elected in some places, appointed in others – have been largely invisible. That invisibility evaporated last year.When Donald Trump began raising baseless claims about things like ballots being smuggled in and votes being flipped, these election officials became the target of his supporters’ rage. From state election officials to lower-level workers, they started receiving death threats, were followed in their cars, and even had people break into family-members’ homes, according to a harrowing Reuters report. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, even had to move out of his home because of vicious threats.About a third of election officials surveyed this spring said they felt unsafe because of their job, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Brennan Center for Justice. And about a fifth of the 223 officials described threats to their lives as a concern related to their work.Nearly 80% of the officials surveyed said social media conspiracy theories and misinformation made it harder for them to do their jobs. And more than half said the platforms had made their jobs more dangerous.US attorney general Merrick Garland condemned attacks against election workers in a speech last week, and pledged law enforcement would investigate when federal laws were violated.“We have not been blind to the dramatic increase in menacing and violent threats against all manner of state and local election workers, ranging from the highest administrators to volunteer poll workers,” he said. “Such threats undermine our electoral process and violate a myriad of federal laws.”The Brennan Center report offers a range of suggestions for reform that can better protect election officials, including establishing a DoJ taskforce focused on threats against election workers, passing laws that give workers more privacy protections, and implementing measures that insulate officials from political pressure.But the attacks have already taken their toll – many election officials retired or left their jobs after a bruising 2020 election. That’s alarming to many voting rights groups because it could lead to a loss in institutional knowledge as well as a drop in the polling place workers and other staff needed to ensure elections run smoothly.A swell of candidates who embraced the baseless idea that the election was stolen are also running for key election administration positions. If elected, those officials would be able to wield enormous power over implementation of election rules, including ballot counting.“A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count,” Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in an op-ed earlier this month. “The danger of manipulated election results looms.”Also worth watching…
The New York Times had an extraordinary story detailing how GOP-backed voting restrictions moving through state legislatures would curtail ballot access for people with disabilities.
Senator Joe Manchin released a list of provisions he would support in a sweeping voting reform bill in congress. That’s a welcome sign to many advocates, who feared Manchin’s recalcitrance would kill any hope of voting reform. Manchin still does, however, support the filibuster, which would block Democrats from advancing any measure.
Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives, heralded for halting a sweeping voting restrictions bill in their state, met with both Senate Democrats and Kamala Harris this week to urge them to pass sweeping voting reforms in Washington.
Attorney General Garland gave a speech last Friday on increasing voting rights enforcement by the department. Garland announced that the department’s voting section was doubling the number of attorneys there in the next 30 days. While that was a welcome announcement, observers are still waiting to see what kinds of voting challenges and cases the DoJ chooses to bring. More

Whatever Republican politicians and rightwing media are referring to when they talk about “critical race theory”, it has little to do with critical race theory as an actual discipline. Developed in the 1970s and 80s by law professors – notably Derrick Bell and his acolyte, Kimberlé Crenshaw, at Harvard – the real CRT is analytic framework through which academics can discern the ways that racial disparities are reproduced by the law, and how the legacies of historical racism can persist even after discriminatory policies are revised.But maybe the very obscurity of this genuine critical race theory is the point: before it became the object of the American right’s latest moral panic, few people had heard of critical race theory, and even fewer understood what it really was. The phrase itself sounds distant, lofty, and abstract – “critical”, “theory” – the kind of thing that comes out of the mouths of people in tweed blazers who think they’re better than you. The very opacity of the words made them the perfect vehicle for what the right wing wanted: a new vessel for white racial anxiety and grievance.And so it is that something Republicans are calling “critical race theory” became the center of a series of statehouse bills – some proposed, others already signed into law – that aim to ban honest conversations about race and sex oppression in America from classrooms. Casting themselves in opposition to a supposed ideology of white sinfulness and inferiority that they claim is sweeping through the nation and indoctrinating children, Republicans are using “critical race theory” as a catch-all for any discussions of America’s past or present that have the potential to render their base uncomfortable.Laws claiming to ban critical race theory from public school curriculums have been passed in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, and have been advanced in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia. The bills themselves are patently unconstitutional and will not hold up in court, and they are so non-specific regarding what exactly they oppose that it’s also hard to imagine how they could ever be meaningfully enforced, even if they were not destined to be thrown out.But the bills gesture towards a chilling willingness on the American right to revoke speech protections and crush academic freedom, a tendency that has recently been modeled in other nations with rising authoritarian sentiment. Some instructors have already been affected by the bans.The wording of the bans is vast enough to prohibit vast swaths of discursive territory. In the North Carolina law, among those “concepts” that public schools “shall not promote” are “the belief that the United States is a meritocracy is an inherently racist or sexist belief” and “that the United States was created by members of a particular race or sex for the purpose of oppressing members of another race or sex”. A proposed bill in Connecticut, meanwhile, bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” or content that causes “any individual to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex”.This last item – with its concern for the emotions of white, male students – may be the most telling. The move to ban discussions of racism and oppression as systemic and socially foundational comes on the heels of the University of North Carolina’s decision to deny tenure to the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, following the interventions of a major donor. It comes, too, a year after the nationwide uprisings in response to the police murder of George Floyd. Both of these events garnered a passionate backlash in rightwing media, which have depicted them as assaults on police, “order” and white people. Packaged together as “critical race theory”, these conversations have been demonized on the right in an attempt to reassert understandings of race, racism, and American history that center white people as the primary moral players.The bills gesture towards a chilling willingness on the American right to crush academic freedomFor Republicans, the preferred narrative of race and American history is one that minimizes the harm done to Black people, overstates white virtue and insists that racism is a personal prejudice in the minds of misguided or amoral people, rather than a system that structures cultures and institutions. Racism was a problem, this story tells us (with an emphasis on the past tense) because some white people made an error; it’s not a problem any more, because those white people have been edified. This version of American history has placed racist injustice squarely in the past, but also, it quarantines racism in individual minds, rather than recognizing it as an infection that has contaminated our culture. Racism, in this telling, is primarily a matter of personality, of individual white people’s souls.But much modern anti-racist thinking rejects this. The 1619 Project positions Black people, and their enslavement, as central to America’s history, positioning the enslaved not merely footnotes or minor characters, but protagonists. And the real critical race theory that is practiced in law schools does not seem to be concerned with white people’s souls so much as with Black people’s material conditions. Maybe this is part of what Republicans don’t like about these versions of anti-racist thought: they remove white people, and white people’s feelings, from the center of the story.After all, when racism is merely a personal idiosyncrasy, and not a systemic condition, nothing is required of white people, or of the institutions they control, except to deny that they feel hate in their hearts. But if racism is a foundational reality, and not just a personal prejudice, then much bigger changes have to be made – and more is required of white people than personal innocence. More