US Politics

In a new book, the senator and former presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar condemns Donald Trump for “a whole lot of bluster with limited results” on her chosen subject, antitrust.Klobuchar cites his appointment of the conservatives Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court as proof Trump never had any intention of reining in giant companies for pursuing anti-competitive practices, whatever he told the little guy out on the campaign trail.Antitrust matters will come into focus on Capitol Hill this week, with a confirmation hearing on Wednesday for Lina Khan, a 32-year-old Columbia law professor and “tech antitrust icon” nominated by Joe Biden for a seat on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).The Minnesota Democrat’s book, Antitrust, will be published next week, beating the Missouri Republican Josh Hawley’s similarly themed The Tyranny of Big Tech to US shelves by a week.The two senators are ideologically poles apart – Hawley lost a publisher over his support for Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat – but both have introduced antitrust legislation.The Guardian obtained a copy of Klobuchar’s book. Noting Trump’s campaign rhetoric against big companies, the former candidate for the Democratic nomination writes that he failed to deliver in office.“Trump’s business career had one major thing in common with his ultimate antitrust impact,” Klobuchar writes, recounting Trump’s famous antitrust lawsuit against the NFL in 1986. “A whole lot of bluster with limited results.”Klobuchar also criticises Trump for demanding investigations of companies or mergers for political reasons, notably when inveighing against a merger between Time Warner, owner of CNN, and AT&T.“The president’s comments and, at times, actual actions and involvement,” she writes, “repeatedly raised serious questions about the integrity of his administration’s antitrust work, no matter how hard the [Department of Justice] and FTC antitrust staff worked.”She also says Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, two of three rightwingers Trump appointed to the supreme court, have “extremely conservative views on antitrust”.This, she writes, makes them likely to rule in favor of big companies in an era of mega-mergers and shrinking consumer choice, as major antitrust cases involving tech giants Google and Facebook move through the US court system.At confirmation hearings, Klobuchar writes, Gorsuch dodged her questions on antitrust. Of Kavanaugh – with whom Klobuchar had a famously testy exchange about the judge’s liking for beer – she writes that she “was not impressed by what I saw”.Kavanaugh, Klobuchar writes, seemed a disciple of Robert Bork, the author of The Antitrust Paradox and a conservative whose bitter confirmation hearings in 1987 ended with his withdrawal.Groups including the American Antitrust Institute opposed Kavanaugh but amid allegations of sexual assault, which he strenuously denied, he made it on to the court. With the addition of Amy Coney Barrett in place of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the panel is now tilted 6-3 to conservatives.On antitrust, though, there was a small sting in the tail. In May 2019, Kavanaugh joined the court’s liberals in a 5-4 ruling which said consumers could sue Apple for monopolising the market for iPhone apps. More

As the California gubernatorial recall effort heats up, Gavin Newsom is preparing to face off against a motley mix of political challengers – including a reality TV star, a former Facebook executive, a Los Angeles billboard model and a Republican businessman who lost the last gubernatorial race by 24 points.California election officials are expected to verify by the end of April that Newsom’s opponents have collected enough signatures to force a recall later this year – probably sometime in November.But the political opportunity it offers has already drawn out all manner of “celebrities, billionaires and multimillionaires, gadflies”, as well as some serious contenders, said Fernando J Guerra, a political scientist at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.The race has so far attracted three traditional Republican candidates: John Cox, a businessman who lost to Newsom by 24 points during the last gubernatorial election, the largest margin in a California governor’s race since the 1950s), Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego and Doug Ose, a former US representative.Then there’s everyone else. Caitlyn Jenner, a former Keeping Up with the Kardashians star and Olympic champion, is working with former Trump campaign figures to plot out a potential run. The porn actor and reality TV star Mary Carey, who ran against the Democrat Gray Davis in the 2003 recall, has also thrown her hat in. And Angelyne, the model who rose to prominence in the 1980s after she was featured in a series of billboards around LA, is also running.“All you really need to run is $4,200 for the filing fee and a dream,” said Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at the Hugh L Carey Institute for Government Reform who studies recall elections. The 2003 recall election against Davis attracted 135 such dreamers, including the HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington, the former child actor Gary Coleman and the pornographer Larry Flynt. The actor Arnold Schwarzenegger won that year, in the first successful recall of a US governor.The latest recall campaign, spearheaded by Republicans who opposed the governor’s Covid-era business shutdowns, as well as his immigration and tax policies, gained steam in the winter as California faced its most severe phase of the pandemic. But as the pandemic abates, and the economy shows promising signs of recovery, Newsom remains fairly popular among Californians despite scandals and setbacks. He was elected to office in 2018 with a whopping 62% of the vote and recent polling from the Public Policy Institute of California found that he remains fairly popular. Fifty-six per cent of likely voters oppose recalling the governor, and 5% are unsure – only 40% would vote to remove the governor from office“I am convinced that Newsom is going to beat the recall,” Guerra said, though, he added, a stagnating economy or major political blunder (say, a repeat of Newsom’s infamous dinner party at the Michelin-starred French Laundry at the height of the pandemic) could knock the governor off his sturdy perch.Notably missing from the governor’s cast challengers is a Democrat. So far, the party has formed a united front, with moderates and progressives, including the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, backing Newsom. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, warned Democrats not to turn against one of their own, dismissing the idea of a Democratic challenger to Newsom as an “unnecessary notion” that doesn’t even rise “to the level of an idea”.That hasn’t squashed speculation that the former LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who ran against Newsom in 2018, could join the race. The former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, a big Democratic donor who recently redirected his wealth toward the amplifying petition to gather signatures for the recall, also says he wants to run. And Tom Steyer, the billionaire former hedge fund manager and climate change campaigner who ran in the Democratic presidential primaries, is also reportedly considering a candidacy.A liberal candidate who wouldn’t outshine Newsom could serve as an insurance policy for the state’s Democrats, Guerra said. “A Democratic candidate would not peel off enough votes from Newsom in the recall, but could beat out Republicans if voters choose to remove Newsom could be strategic,” he said. “Because what happens if there’s another one or two scandals that drag Newsom down – without another Democrat in the race, you’re left with Caitlyn Jenner or John Cox as governor.”But Spivak said that based on recall history, Democrats would do well to avoid such a strategy. In the 2003 recall, Davis’s lieutenant governor, Cruz Bustamante, tried the campaign line “No on Recall, Yes on Bustamante”, and it failed spectacularly. Bustamante trailed Schwarzenegger by 17 points. “And it killed his political career,” Spivak said. The Democrat spectacularly tanked his only other bid for political office since the recall, losing the 2006 election for insurance commissioner to a Republican by 12 points.On the other hand, for Republicans hoping to gain a foothold in deep-blue California, the only chance comes from the chaos and confusion of a crowded, messy election, Spivak said. “Republicans can’t win a straight, regular election – so having 400 candidates, including maybe some Democrats, running against Newsom helps them,” he said.In a recall, voters are asked two questions: first, whether they want to recall Newsom, and then, who should replace him? If at least 50% of voters agree to remove Newsom from office, whichever of is opponents gets the most votes would replace him – even if they’ve collected a tiny fraction of the total ballots cast. More

Editor Bob Moore sits at his desk in El Paso, Texas, and turns up the volume on his Zoom meeting English-language channel, where a simultaneous interpreter helps him understand his Spanish-speaking counterpart, Rocío Gallegos, who also sits at her desk, across the border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.It’s Monday, time for another editorial meeting at the first binational, bilingual border journalism project in the US – or maybe anywhere.Called “Puente,” or “bridge”, the newsgathering collaboration consists of seven digital, TV and radio outlets from the area. “We have long talked about El Paso and Ciudad Juárez as being one region,” said Moore, one of the project’s directors. “But this has never been true with journalism.”That has had consequences. “National media covers the border badly, with a distorted view that comes from what it means in the context of current political views,” said Moore, who was an editor at the El Paso Times for 25 years before one too many corporate-driven budget cuts drove him out of newspapers in 2017 and toward non-profit, digital news.With most national and international coverage, Moore said: “We lose the richness and nuance of the border.”The Puente Media Collaborative hopes to change that, and the project, only several months old, may have come about at just the right time, as the subject of immigration has once again centered national and international attention on the region.The idea came about during the pandemic, said Gallegos, when she talked to Moore about Covid restrictions on crossing the border that were stopping her from sending reporters to El Paso. “You can’t cross the border; I can’t either,” she remembers telling him. They began discussing collaborating on reporting.Gallegos had also led Juárez’s main newspaper, El Diario de Juárez, until 2018. She then became director at La Verdad, or The Truth, a digital outlet – mirroring Moore, who launched the website, El Paso Matters, in 2019.Their ideas on joining forces got a boost in October when their project proposal received $300,000 in funding plus technical support from Microsoft, as part of an initiative focused on supporting local journalism that includes outlets in Mississippi’s Delta region, Yakima, Washington, and Fresno, California – and aimed at helping counteract the loss of 2,100 newspapers in the last 15 years.Puente’s journalists recently released their first stories on the impact of Covid on the region, a year into living with the pandemic – including how border restrictions have affected drug trafficking, and what it means to tighten border crossing in a region that normally sees 50,000 people go back and forth for work and other reasons. There was also a story on how the two countries squandered opportunities to face Covid together.Next, Moore said, “we will be looking at immigration – through a different lens than most of the national media”. The newsgathering itself has been different, since reporters have been collaborating on sources and ideas, and gathering information in both languages. While a final decision hasn’t been reached, Moore thinks the upcoming stories on immigration may be written in Spanish, and translated into English.The collaboration has also led to sharing perspectives on how to frame stories. Gallegos pointed to a recent editorial planning meeting on the upcoming immigration stories. Shoe-leather reporting had already been done in both cities. Discussion turned to sending cameras from Channel 26, the local Univision affiliate and Puente partner, to federal government shelters where children who had crossed the border are being kept.“We were sensitive to what they had been through,” Gallegos said, adding that many were indigenous people who spoke neither Spanish nor English. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t victimize or traumatize them once again” with a camera crew, she said. The Mexican journalists “had a better grasp of what their lives are like”, said Moore. The camera crew agreed to approach the assignment with care.Kathleen Staudt, former professor of political science at the University of Texas, El Paso, and author of nine books on the border, said that she hopes the Puente Media Collaborative provides a lens from the other side of the border, since “too often Mexico is portrayed as the ‘other’” in English-language media.”Brenda de Anda-Swann, news director and 22-year veteran at the El Paso ABC affiliate KVIA – and part of Puente – said “the people who are part of this collaborative have worked on the border for a long, long time … We trust each other. This doesn’t feel unfamiliar, while at the same time it is new.”She said that her news station’s participation in the project will give the outlet “some time to sit back, explore how things work, why they’re happening” – without turning attention away from the news of the day, such as a recent dust storm.Working in collaboration with La Verdad “reflects who we are as a community”, she added. “Having newsrooms on both sides of the border is a perfect reflection of the community, on a personal, business and political level.”She hopes to see the project “bridging the communities through storytelling and information”, and that it serves to “provide best practices for other parts of the world”. More

Joe Biden’s promise to nominate an African American woman to the supreme court for the first time holds broad symbolic significance for Darlene McDonald, an activist and police reform commissioner in Salt Lake City, Utah.But McDonald has specific reasons for wanting a Black woman on the court, too.When Chief Justice John Roberts asserted in 2013 that federal oversight of voting in certain southern states was no longer needed because “things have changed dramatically” since the civil rights era, McDonald said, he revealed a blindness to something African American women have no choice but to see.“I believe that if Chief Justice Roberts had really understood racism, he would never have voted to gut the Voting Rights Act,” McDonald said, adding that hundreds of voter suppression bills introduced by Republicans in recent months suggest things have not “changed dramatically” since 1965.“Myself, as an African American woman, having that representation on the supreme court will be huge,” McDonald said, “especially in the sense of having someone that really understands racism.”The gradual diversification of US leadership, away from the overwhelming preponderance of white men, towards a mix that increasingly reflects the populace, was accelerated by the election last November of Kamala Harris, a woman of color, as vice-president.Black women have been overlooked in terms of their values and what they have to bring to society as well as to the benchNow enthusiasm is building around a similarly historic leap that activists, academics and professionals expect is just around the corner: the arrival on the court of a justice who would personify one of the most historically marginalized groups.“Black women have been overlooked for decades and decades in terms of their values and what they have to bring to society as well as to the bench,” said Leslie Davis, chief executive of the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms. “We should be able to look at our highest court in the land and see the reflection of some of the folks who have made America great. And that absolutely includes Black women.”Out of 115 justices in its history, the supreme court has counted two African American justices, one Latina and just five women. The court has no vacant seats but calls are growing for Stephen Breyer, a liberal who turns 83 this year, to retire. Last month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden’s campaign commitment to nominating a Black woman “absolutely” holds.“This is a big moment in the making,” said Ben Jealous, president of People For the American Way, which recently launched the Her Fight Our Fight campaign to support and promote women of color in government and public service roles.“The presumption is that whomever Biden nominates, the first Black woman to the supreme court would be filling both the shoes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall,” said Jealous.The late Ginsburg, a pioneering lawyer for women’s rights, was succeeded last fall by the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett. Marshall was succeeded in 1991 by the George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas, who “is anathema to everything that the civil rights community stands for”, Jealous said.“It would be both glorious and a relief to have a Black woman on the supreme court who actually represents the values of the civil rights community, and the most transformative lawyers in our nation’s history.”Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a civil rights historian, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and professor of constitutional law, said having qualified federal judges who “reflect the broad makeup of the American public” would strengthen democracy and faith in the courts.“It’s an important historical moment that signifies equal opportunity,” Brown-Nagin said. “That anyone who is qualified has the chance to be considered for nomination, notwithstanding race, notwithstanding gender. That is where we are. In some ways, we shouldn’t be congratulating ourselves, right?”Brown-Nagin pointed out that a campaign was advanced in the 1960s to nominate Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to sit as a federal judge, but some Democratic allies of President Lyndon Johnson opposed such a nomination because they saw it as too politically risky.“This moment could have happened 50 years ago,” Brown-Nagin said.Daniel L Goldberg, legal director of the progressive Alliance For Justice, said to call the moment “overdue” did not capture it.“It is stunning that in the entire history of the republic, that no African American woman has sat on the highest court in the country,” Goldberg said. “For way too long in our nation’s history, the only people who were considered suitable and qualified for the court happened to be white males.”The first Black woman supreme court justice is likely to be nominated at a time when a renewed push for racial justice brings renewed focus on the court, which has played a key role in enforcing desegregation and reinforcing anti-discrimination laws.I would like to see someone like Sherrilyn Ifill or Lia Epperson – a woman who comes out of Thurgood Marshall’s old law firmThe killing of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, by a white police officer outside Minneapolis last weekend during the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin has sharpened cries for a national answer to serial injustice at the local level – precisely the kind of conflict that typically lands before the supreme court.“As we sit here today, and watch the trial of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, that precipitated a summer of protests for the lives of Black people to matter – it feels that it is time for there to be a Black woman on the supreme court, because of the moment that we are in right now,” said McDonald, the Utah activist.Davis said it was “imperative” the country make strides toward racial justice after the invasion of the Capitol in January by white supremacists intent on overturning the 2020 presidential election, goaded on by a former president.“That shows that there are folks who are intentional about not seeing diversity, equity and inclusion thrive,” Davis said. “Now is the time for us as a country to recognize that until we value the voices of everyone, including Black women, we are silencing a very important part of the fabric of America.”‘A significant pool’The percentage of Black women who are federal judges – a common stepping-stone to a high court nomination – is extraordinarily small.According to the federal judicial center, the US circuit courts count only five African American women among sitting judges out of 179. There are 42 African American women judges at the district court level, out of 677.Those numbers are partly owing to Republican obstruction of Black women nominated by Barack Obama, including former seventh circuit nominee Myra Selby. She was denied a hearing in the Senate for the entirety of 2016 – a year later Republicans filled the seat with Donald Trump’s nominee: Amy Coney Barrett.“There is a significant pool of lawyers, law professors, public officials who would be viable nominees for the federal courts,” said Brown-Nagin. “The problem is not the pool.”Last month, Brown-Nagin co-signed a letter to the Senate judiciary committee supporting the nomination of district court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the court of appeals for the DC district, sometimes informally referred to as the second-highest court in the land.“Her resumé virtually screams that she is an ideal nominee for an appellate court or even the supreme court, and that is because she has the combination of educational and professional experience on the federal courts that feasibly fits the mold of typical supreme court nominees,” Brown-Nagin said.“I would say it goes beyond what we’ve seen, frankly, in recent nominees to the court.”Jealous, a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said he would like to see a nominee “who cut their teeth defending the people, not corporations”.“I would like to see someone like Sherrilyn Ifill or Lia Epperson – a woman who comes out of Thurgood Marshall’s old law firm, the NAACP legal defense fund, with a courageous commitment to defending the rights of all Americans,” he said.McDonald said having a Black woman on the supreme court would mean American history had “come full circle”.“I feel in my heart that it’s time,” she said. “Everything takes its time. And everything happens at its time. I was raised in a church, so I’m just going to say it like that.” More

Walter F Mondale, the former vice-president and liberal leader who lost to Ronald Reagan in one of the most lopsided presidential elections, has died at the age of 93.A towering figure in the Democratic party who resolutely put humility and honesty before the glitz of mass communication, Mondale’s death marked something of an end of an era in US politics. He was described by a biographer as the last major American politician to resist the allure of television.The death of the former senator, ambassador and Minnesota attorney general was announced in a statement on Monday from his family. No cause was cited.Mondale followed the trail blazed by his political mentor, Hubert H Humphrey, from Minnesota politics to the US Senate and the vice-presidency, serving under Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981.His own try for the White House, in 1984, came at the zenith of Ronald Reagan’s popularity. His candidacy made history, hammering a crack into the nation’s glass ceiling as he chose Geraldine Ferraro, then a US representative from New York, as his running mate – making Mondale the first major-party presidential nominee to put a woman on the ticket.But his insistence on telling voters the truth hurt him badly, notably with his frank declaration that he would raise taxes to counter Reagan’s budget deficit. Reagan, by contrast, led his campaign with one of the great political jingles: “It’s morning again in America.” On election day, Mondale carried only his home state and the District of Columbia. The electoral vote was 525-13 for Reagan – the biggest landslide in the electoral College since Franklin Roosevelt defeated Alf Landon in 1936.“One of my opponents called me a media Luddite. I wasn’t good at it,” Mondale recalled in a 2008 interview with the Guardian looking back on his overwhelming defeat. “Reagan, he was a genius at it. He could walk in front of those cameras and it would come out magic. I would walk in and it would be a root canal.”On Saturday afternoon, Walter Mondale sent this note to his former staffers and campaign alumni, saying: “Together we have accomplished so much and I know you will keep up the good fight. Joe in the White House certainly helps.” pic.twitter.com/PdYk42NXtK— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) April 20, 2021
Affectionately known as Fritz, Mondale was born on 5 January 1928, the son of a Methodist minister and a music teacher. He grew up in several small southern Minnesota towns.Tributes poured in on Monday evening as news of his death emerged. In a statement, Jimmy Carter called him a “dear friend, who I consider the best vice-president on our country’s history”.“Fritz used his political skill and personal integrity to transform the vice presidency into a dynamic, policy-driving force that had never been seen before and still exists today,” the former president said.In a tweet, Barack Obama said Mondale “championed progressive causes and changed the role of VP”.Mondale’s great-grandfather migrated to the US from Norway. The dourness of Norwegian culture stayed with the family – he recalled that in his childhood, kids were spanked for the sin of bragging about themselves.He was only 20 when he served as a congressional district manager for Humphrey’s successful Senate campaign in 1948. Mondale started his career in Washington in 1964, when he was appointed to the Senate to replace Humphrey, who had resigned to become vice-president to Lyndon Johnson. Mondale was elected to a full six-year term with about 54% of the vote in 1966, although Democrats lost the governorship and suffered other election setbacks.In 1972, Mondale won another Senate term with nearly 57% of the vote.His Senate career was marked by advocacy of social issues such as education, housing, migrant workers and child nutrition. Like Humphrey, he was an outspoken supporter of civil rights.Mondale tested the waters for a presidential bid in 1974 but ultimately decided against it. “Basically I found I did not have the overwhelming desire to be president, which is essential for the kind of campaign that is required,” he said in November 1974.In 1976, Carter chose Mondale as No 2 on his ticket and went on to unseat Gerald Ford.As vice-president, Mondale had a close relationship with Carter. He was the first vice-president to occupy an office in the White House, rather than in a building across the street. Mondale traveled extensively on Carter’s behalf and advised him on domestic and foreign affairs.Mondale never backed away from his liberal principles.“I think that the country more than ever needs progressive values,” Mondale said in 1989.After his White House years, Mondale served from 1993-96 as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Japan, fighting for US access to markets ranging from cars to cellular phones.Despite his long and varied career in politics, it will be his epic defeat to Reagan, and his honorable but ultimately disastrous resistance to the small screen, for which he will be remembered. “I think, you know, I’ve never really warmed up to television,” he once said. “In fairness to television, it never really warmed up to me.”In his Guardian interview, Mondale recalled that his campaign staff in the 1984 race had tried hard to drag him into the TV era. They pleaded with him to change his hairstyle and his smile to charm more on camera.“I didn’t like it, and I told them so,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Look, I’m all I’ve got. I can’t be someone I’m not.’” More

In 1944, George Orwell felt that the word fascism had “lost the last vestige of meaning” so liberally had it been used. But fascism remains very much alive. Decades after Orwell’s message, one of the challenges today is to identify and name it. Whether the label could be applied to Donald Trump had divided expert opinion, until the 6 January assault on Capitol Hill by a mob whose passions had been inflamed by his speech earlier that day. This melted the resistance historians of fascism like Columbia University’s Robert Paxton felt to using the f-word. The use of violence against democratic institutions, he wrote, “crosses a red line”.If anyone wondered what American fascism might look like then they could start with the proposed congressional “America First Caucus”, which emerged this weekend from the office of extremist Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Carrying the torch for Trumpism, this fringe agenda conceals its racial argument behind muscular populist ones. The caucus plans were welcomed by legislators who had fanned the flames of the Capitol riot. Before being elected to Congress, Ms Greene peddled conspiracy theories, made racist statements and indicated support for the execution of Democratic leaders and FBI agents. She renounced those beliefs on the eve of being kicked off congressional committees but made no apology for having held them.The proposed caucus platform contained not so much dog whistles as foghorns for white supremacy. America, the document claims, is based on “respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and decries “post-1965 immigrants” for depressing workers’ wages, highlighting the year when the US ended its policy of giving preferential treatment to western European migrants. It calls for rebuilding the US with an “aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture”. Thankfully the plan exploded on the launch pad. Republican leaders calculated it would hurt their electoral chances in moderate swing seats. Ms Greene disowned the caucus proposals.Fascism not only pursues rightwing policies, it seeks to build up mass-mobilising movements and paramilitary organisations with the aim of establishing a single-party dictatorship. Mr Trump saw armed citizens as a political asset. His heirs see despotism as a viable alternative to the current political structure. In Congress 147 Republican lawmakers promoted Mr Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Republicans in 47 states have 361 proposed laws to restrict voting access on grounds of baseless claims of electoral fraud.Around the world electorates will have to become reacquainted with fascism. Voters must attune themselves to what it looks and sounds like. In the UK, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer was caught out earlier this year on a national radio phone-in when he failed to recognise a conspiracy theory popular with fascists, and Fox News star Tucker Carlson, known as the “great replacement”. It falsely claims that dwindling white birthrates have been orchestrated by multicultural global elites in an attempt to make whites a minority. There’s no suggestion that Sir Keir agreed with the racist caller but there was criticism in the way he handled the call. There is an urgent and pressing need to recognise both the real threat of fascism as well as the rhetorical and emotional motifs it employs. More

The former attorney general William Barr and supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett have reportedly signed book deals – with Barrett paid a reported $2m for a volume on how judges should not bring their personal feelings into the way they rule.Barrett was appointed to the court in a hurried, politicized and bitter process last year, after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of progressive values.Barrett is a strict Catholic and her presence on the 6-3 conservative court has given rightwing campaigners hope it will soon strike down Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which established the right to abortion.An unnamed source who spoke to Politico said Barrett’s advance was “eye-raising”. A spokesperson for the court did not comment.Barr, who was also attorney general under George HW Bush, is also a strict Catholic conservative. Politico reported that he had begun work on his memoir about working for Donald Trump.Legal analysts decried Barr’s actions in service of the 45th president, including a highly selective handling of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report about Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow and support for Trump’s authoritarian impulses in response to protests for racial justice last summer.Barr resigned in December, over the president’s lies about voter fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden.One legal professional who clashed publicly with Barr and Trump, former New York prosecutor Geoffrey Berman, is reported to have sold a book for “a lot of money”.A source told Politico Berman’s book would be “part Paul Giamatti and Billions” – a reference to a hit TV series about corporate crime in New York – “and then sort of the Trump show in the southern district [of New York]”.Books about Trump’s time in power have proved lucrative, ever since in January 2018 the Guardian broke news of Fire and Fury, the first of two White House tell-alls by the reporter Michael Wolff.The Russia investigation has been retold in print by members of the special counsel’s team including Andrew Weissmann and Peter Strzok.Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is reportedly working on a book and former vice-president Mike Pence has signed a deal for two volumes. But Politico said a number of former Trump aides are struggling to find buyers.Peter Navarro, formerly a senior adviser to Trump on economics and trade, told the website: “The reports of my publishing death are greatly exaggerated. I have a major publishing agreement with an attractive advance and my book will be out shortly after Labor Day.”It was not immediately clear if Navarro would again co-operate with Ron Vara, an anti-China policy hand he has quoted liberally in previous books but who turned out both not to exist and to have for his name an anagram of “Navarro”. More