US Politics

When Joe Biden, a 78-year-old white male moderate, was sworn in as US president, it was seen as only a matter of time before progressives became restive and “Democrats in disarray” headlines were dusted off.But two months in, the party remains uncharacteristically united. Biden is being hailed as an unlikely radical, drawing comparisons with transformative presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson – his very reputation as a steady centrist enabling him to move further and faster.How long can the Democratic honeymoon last?One key arbiter of this grace period is the influential figure of Nina Turner, a longtime backer of Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-declared democratic socialist beaten by Biden in last year’s party primary. She believes the signs are encouraging – so far.“He’s doing all right but we’re going to press on, we’re going to keep pressing,” says Turner, 53, currently campaigning for election to Congress in Ohio. “We haven’t got all that we need but this is a good start. The people are the north star, not those of us who are politicians, and their needs are great. You got 33 million people out there who need a $15-an-hour minimum wage. So, a good start but we got many more miles to go.”A former Ohio state senator, Turner was a national surrogate for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, led its spin-off grassroots organisation Our Revolution and served as national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 run. Her own shot at national office in Ohio’s 11th congressional district has come about after Marcia Fudge resigned to become housing secretary under Biden.Turner was endorsed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, including Jamie Raskin of Maryland. If successful in the Democratic primary in August and the special election in November, she would cement her position as a leader of the left of the party.Ohio voted twice for Barack Obama but then twice for Donald Trump as Republicans made gains among blue-collar voters. Turner reflects: “When I ran for secretary of state in 2014, what I heard in the rural areas of the state was there is a need for Democrats to show that it’s not just two corporate parties that people are choosing between, that the Democratic party really does get it.“We got to go back to the roots of FDR and the roots of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm – that kind of service speaks to the people of the great state of Ohio, whether they’re urban, suburban or rural. I know that it does because I was out there on the stump for President Obama, especially in 2012.”Biden’s sweeping $1.9tn coronavirus relief package, including direct cash payments to millions of Americans and measures to cut child poverty nearly in half, was seen as a win for working families. But it was not an unalloyed victory: Sanders’ amendment to include increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour was struck down by Republicans and moderate Democrats.Turner says: “The Covid relief bill is certainly a good start. That $1.9tn is a big deal; I think it’s 10% of GDP. It’s strong and the reason why we’re there is because progressives were pushing. Now we need to get that $15-an-hour minimum wage over the finish line because it’s the floor and not the ceiling.“We got to address the systemic problems that were there before the pandemic with systemic solutions and I believe the Democratic party can do it. And I’m going to Congress to help them along the way.”Biden’s bold advance may soon stall, however, on Capitol Hill. Senate Republicans in the minority can use a procedural mechanism called the filibuster to block his legislative agenda on gun control, healthcare, voting rights and much else. Many on the left regard the filibuster as a relic of the Jim Crow era and are calling for it to be abolished so that Democrats could pass bills with a simple majority.But Democratic senators such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema continue to support it. “They are on the wrong side of history,” Turner says. “Senator Joe Manchin needs to get a spine. People deserve to have robust debate in both chambers and not have it prohibited by people who want to play games with people’s lives.“While they collect their salary off the taxpayer’s dime, people like Manchin and Sinema have the pure and unadulterated gall to stand in the way of the people getting the resources that they need. There’s a moral contradiction there that must be addressed.”Manchin, from pro-Trump West Virginia, has defended the filibuster by articulating hopes of reviving bipartisanship. Biden promised to unify the nation but found Republicans unyielding in their opposition to the coronavirus relief bill. Turner warns the president against over-stretching to accommodate the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.“President Obama came in as the diplomat that he is – ‘I want bipartisanship’ – and tried to negotiate with these Republicans. Dr Maya Angelou said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’ They already showed us Democrats who they are and we ought to believe them and so I don’t want to see President Biden fall into that trap.“It was tried and tested under President Obama: the Republicans under Senator McConnell are just not going to do right and so Democrats are going to have to take the rein for these two years that we have and use the people’s power on the people’s behalf.“That is why the people gave us the presidency. That is why they answered the call in Georgia and that is why they allowed Democrats to keep control of the House. Now we’re going to have to show people something or we might be in for a rude awakening in 2022.”Turner, an assistant professor of history and podcast host, argues that opinion polls show a majority of Americans agree with progressives on issues ranging from the Green New Deal to canceling student debt, from increasing the minimum wage to reforming the legal system, especially for racial justice.“The thing that we are seeing coming from President Biden, even though it might not be all that progressives want, the progressives cast the die. The American people might not call themselves progressives, but when we drill down to talk to them about the issues, they are right where we are.“What we’re talking about is not radical. The people who are out of touch are people like Senator Joe Manchin and Senator Mitch McConnell because the last time I checked, there are poor people in Kentucky and there are poor people in West Virginia, just as there are poor people in Ohio who need their elected leaders to provide relief for them. That’s all we’re asking.”In the New York Times, Ezra Klein has noted that the $1.9tn stimulus package looks a lot like the proposals Sanders has fought for all his career. “Bernie Sanders didn’t win the 2020 election,” he wrote. “But he may have won its aftermath.”Does Turner believe that, after all these years, Sanders has been vindicated?“Sometimes visionaries are ahead of their time and, whether it was popular or not, he has stayed consistent and now the people have caught up with his vision,” she says. “The progressive movement – but America, by extension – is right where Senator Bernard Sanders is on these issues. We’re going to keep pushing.”An intrigue of the next four years is whether Biden will backslide – and whether Sanders will call him out on it. Turner adds: “You can both recognise somebody saying that President Biden’s on the right path and at the same time continue to push. Those things are not mutually exclusive. So I wouldn’t say the progressives are necessarily keeping their powder dry; they’re saying we are off to a good start but we got to make this thing better.” More

‘It’s bold, yes, and we can get it done.” So declared President Joe Biden launching his $2tn plan last week to overhaul US infrastructure – ranging from fixing 20,000 miles of roads to remaking bridges, ports, water systems and “the care economy”, care now defined as part of the country’s infrastructure. Also included is a vast uplift in research spending on eliminating carbon emissions and on artificial intelligence. And up to another $2tn is to follow on childcare, education and healthcare, all hot on the heels of the $1.9tn “American Rescue Plan”, passed just three weeks ago.Cumulatively, the scale is head-spinning. Historians and politicians are already comparing the ambition with Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programme. In British terms, it’s as though an incoming Labour government pledged to spend £500bn over the next decade with a focus on left-behind Britain in all its manifestations – real commitments to levelling up, racial equity, net zero and becoming a scientific superpower.Mainstream and left-of-centre Democrats are as incredulous as they are joyful. Bernie Sanders, congratulating Biden, declared that the American Rescue Plan “is the most significant legislation for working people that has been passed in decades”. It was “the moment when Democrats recovered their soul”, writes Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the progressive magazine the American Prospect, ending a 45-year embrace of “Wall Street neoliberalism”. He concludes: “I am not especially religious, but I am reminded of my favourite Jewish prayer, the Shehecheyanu, which gives thanks to the Almighty for allowing us to reach this day.”What amazes the party and commentators alike is why a 78-year-old moderate stalwart such as Biden has suddenly become so audacious. After all, he backed Bill Clinton’s Third Way and was a cheerleader for fiscal responsibility under both him and Barack Obama, when the stock of federal debt was two-thirds of what it is today.Covid-19 has exposed the precariousness of most Americans’ lives. It has re-legitimised the very idea of governmentNow, the debt is no longer to be a veto to delivering crucial economic and social aims. If Trump and the Republicans can disregard it in their quest to cut taxes for the super-rich, Democrats can disregard it to give every American child $3,000 a year.It is not, in truth, a complete disregard. Under pressure from centrist Democrats, the infrastructure proposals over the next 15 years are to be paid for by tax rises, even if in the first stages they are financed by borrowing. Corporation tax will be raised progressively to 28%, a minimum tax is to be levied on all worldwide company profits, along with assaults on tax loopholes and tax havens.If others have better ideas, says Biden, come forward, but there must be no additional taxing of individual Americans whose income is below $400,000 a year. It’s an expansive definition of the middle class, witness to the breadth of the coalition he is building. But even these are tax hikes that Democrats would have shunned a decade ago.It is high risk, especially given the wafer-thin majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate. With implacable Republican opposition, it requires a united Democratic party, which Biden is orchestrating with some brilliance, his long years in Washington having taught him how to cut deals, when and with whom. He judiciously pays tribute to Sanders, on the left, for “laying the foundations” of the programme and flatters a conservative Democrat centrist such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who insists on tax rises to pay for the infrastructure bill. What will be truly radical is getting the programme into law.Yet, still: why, and why now? The answer is the man, the people round him, the gift of Donald Trump and, above all, the moment – the challenge of recovering from Covid. Biden’s roots are working class; beset by personal tragedies, charged by his Catholicism, his politics are driven by a profound empathy for the lot of ordinary people. He may have surrounded himself with superb economists – the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, Cecilia Rouse and Jared Bernstein at the Council of Economic Advisers, Brian Deese at the National Economic Council, Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission – who are the intellectual driving forces, but he himself will have been influenced as much by the Catholic church’s increasingly radical social policy, represented by Pope Benedict XVI’s revision of the famous encyclical Rerum Novarum. What makes the politics work so well is Trump’s legacy in uniting Democrats as never before while dividing Republicans. Biden knows the danger of the midterm elections in 2022, having seen his Democrat predecessors lose control of the Senate, House or both, so introducing gridlock. His bet is that his popular programme, proving that big government works for the mass of Americans, rather than wayward government by tweet, will keep divided Republicans at bay. Better that than betting, like Clinton and Obama, on the merits of fiscal responsibility, which Republicans, if they win power, will torch to serve their own constituency.But the overriding driver is the pandemic and the way it has exposed the precariousness of many Americans’ lives. It has re-legitimised the very idea of government: it is government that has procured and delivered mass vaccination and government that is supporting the incomes of ordinary Americans. Unconstrained US capitalism has become too monopolistic; too keen on promoting fortunes for insiders; too neglectful of the interests, incomes and hopes of most of the people. An astute politician, Biden has read the runes – and acted to launch a monumental reset. Expect more to come on trade, company and finance reform and the promotion of trade unions.The chances are he will get his programmes through and they will substantially work. The lessons for the British left are clear. Left firebrands, however good their programmes, may appeal to the party faithful. But it takes a Biden to win elections and then deliver. With that lesson learned, we, too, may one day be able to invoke the Shehecheyanu. More

As a prospective conservative candidate for the US Senate from Ohio, author JD Vance can claim a rarely authentic connection to the white working-class voters who helped make Donald Trump president.In his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told the tale of his escape from generations of poverty and addiction in the shadow of Appalachia, thanks to a fiercely loving grandmother and a stroke or two of lonesome luck. (The Netflix film adaptation was less well received than the book.)Even if Vance, 36, were a Democrat, his life story – the Marines, Yale law school, venture capital, national renown – would make for political biography gold.But as the Republican party embarks on a highly tenuous makeover, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, from being “the party of the country clubs” to the party of the working class, Vance and his political fortunes have attracted a disproportionate share of excitement in conservative circles – and a mounting pile of actual gold.Before he has even confirmed that he will run for office, Vance has built a campaign slush fund worth at least $10m on the strength of donations from the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a formerly ardent Trump supporter, and the hedge fund heiress-slash-Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, Forbes magazine first reported.The new working-class face of the Republican party, it seems, will be rolled out on a distinctly ruling class budget.But a successful Vance candidacy might be worth a very large sum indeed for Republicans, who could see a rare opportunity to confer blue-collar legitimacy on the tricky project of sweeping decades of hostility on workers’ issues – from wages to unions to health care to the giant economic relief package signed into law by Joe Biden just last month – behind a red curtain.“They’re not going to get there on the standard worker issues,” said David Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic party, of the Republican attempt to rebrand. “There’s no way.”The conventional wisdom among political strategists has long been that the Republican party, whose supporters are disproportionately white, faces a demographic timebomb as the US electorate diversifies. Trump knocked down the theory a bit last year by making inroads among Latinos and, to a lesser extent, African American men.The “working-class” pitch is partly an appeal to those new Republican-curious voters. But Trump also pointed to another, powerful way for the Republican party to extend its reach: by winning an ever-greater share of working-class white voters, the kind who might have once belonged to a union and voted Democratic, but who backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020 by a margin 40 points greater than the national spread.Republican strategists are brainstorming about how to retain those voters. An internal Republican memo revealed this week by Axios, called Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party, advised that “House Republicans can broaden our electorate, increase voter turnout, and take back the House by enthusiastically rebranding and reorienting as the Party of the Working Class.”Plutocrats inside the party who might disagree are keeping mum for now, or placing their bets discreetly, while the party’s leading firebrands in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election – senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – have taken up the message and are running with it.“The Republican party is not the party of the country clubs, it’s the party of hardworking, blue-collar men and women,” Cruz hypnotically declared in February, in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).“We are a working-class party now,” Hawley tweeted a day after the November election. “That’s the future.”Democratic partisans snipe that a half-century long commitment by Republicans to increasing the comfort of America’s wealthiest combined with a more recent strategy of trying to prevent voters from voting cannot be erased with simple assertions of newborn political intent.But unfortunately for Democrats, in a world where politics has largely come detached from policy – taken over by culture wars and other more sinister currents roiled by Trump, including racist resentments and the scapegoating of immigrants – the Republican strategy is not dead on arrival, as top Democratic strategists themselves admit.“The Democratic party envisions themselves as the party of working people,” said David Axelrod, former Barack Obama adviser, in a debrief of the 2020 election, “but it doesn’t feel that way to a lot of working people, and the party needs to figure that out.”Both sides acknowledge that branding is important, and in 2022 in Ohio, that could be where Vance comes in. The Senate seat in play unexpectedly opened earlier this year, when incumbent Republican Rob Portman, a mild-mannered Trump skeptic who nevertheless supported the former president, indicated he had had enough of Washington.Older-style conservatives, who dislike Trump but might nod knowingly at the scenes in Vance’s book describing people who “gamed the welfare system”, have encouraged him to get in the race.“I hope Vance will run for Ohio Senator Rob Portman’s seat in 2022,” tweeted Rod Dreher, senior editor of the American Conservative magazine. “He is exactly the kind of new Republican we need.”Assuming that Vance’s Yale law degree or Silicon Valley money would not torpedo his working-class credibility with Ohio voters, however, he could face a second crisis of authenticity, one that could stop his candidacy short before he gets to face a single Democratic opponent.To get to the general election, if he runs, Vance must first survive a Republican primary race – and in the cutthroat world of base Republican politics, where fealty to Trump is all-important, Vance is distinctly vulnerable.“I think that I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump,” Vance told NPR on book tour in 2016. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”Perhaps even worse, Vance wrote admiringly of Barack Obama in the New York Times in 2017, saying he would “miss” the former president “and the example he set”.His primary opponents would hammer him relentlessly on plentiful past statements such as those, and in recent months a new version of JD Vance has been scrambling furiously away from the old JD Vance. He has tweeted broadsides against the “ruling class”; suggested that immigrants represent a pandemic threat; appeared on Fox News to trash Meghan and Harry, and bash Biden on immigration; gone after big tech, as he takes Silicon Valley money; and even played Twitter footsie with QAnon.“He’s clearly trying to mimic this Trump genuflection that we’re seeing from some of the other candidates, which is kind of embarrassing for JD Vance, because his brand was very different just a couple years ago,” said Pepper, the former Democratic party chair.It remains to be seen whether the internal tensions – not to say hypocrisies – of a Vance candidacy funded by coastal cash, or of the greater Republican rebranding project, will prove too great to sustain in real life. For now, they are both untested political theories.But with a $10m war chest, Vance has enough to get in the game.“That’s a lot of money, that will help him a lot,” said Pepper, adding that Vance’s popularity as an author belied a low name-recognition, for now, among Ohio voters. “But if the only reason he’s in the game is because of coastal big tech, it kills the ‘I’m-a-Trump-guy’ narrative – but it also kills his narrative about representing the working man.” More

When Donald Trump and his allies pushed the “big lie” of voter fraud and a stolen election, it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity.Politicians and activists’ pleas fell on deaf ears. TV networks and newspapers fact-checked in vain. Social media giants proved impotent.But now a little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for billions of dollars.“Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.”The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion Voting Systems, an election machine company named after Canada’s Dominion Elections Act of 1920. Its main offices are in Toronto and Denver and it describes itself as the leading supplier of US election technology. It says it serves more than 40% of American voters, with customers in 28 states.But the 2020 election put a target on its back. As the White House slipped away and Trump desperately pushed groundless claims of voter fraud, his lawyers and cheerleaders falsely alleged Dominion had rigged the polls in favour of Joe Biden.Among the more baroque conspiracy theories was that Dominion changed votes through algorithms in its voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chávez.The truth matters. Lies have consequencesIt was laughable but also potentially devastating to Dominion’s reputation and ruinous to its business. It also fed a cocktail of conspiracy theories that fuelled Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, as Congress moved to certify the election results. Five people died, including an officer of the Capitol police.The company is fighting back. It filed $1.3bn defamation lawsuits against Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, for pushing the allegations without evidence.Separately, Dominion’s security director, Eric Coomer, launched a suit against the Trump campaign, Giuliani, Powell and some conservative media figures and outlets, saying he had been forced into hiding by death threats.Then came the big one. Last month Dominion filed a $1.6bn defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the bogus claims.“The truth matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”The suit argues that Fox hosts and guests “took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire” by broadcasting wild assertions that Dominion systems changed votes and ignoring repeated efforts by the company to set the record straight.“Radioactive falsehoods” spread by Fox News will cost Dominion $600m over the next eight years, according to the lawsuit, and have resulted in Dominion employees being harassed and the company losing major contracts in Georgia and Louisiana.Fox fiercely disputes the charge. It said in a statement: “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”Other conservative outlets have also raised objections. Chris Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax, said: “We think all of these suits are an infringement on press freedom as it relates to media organisations. There were the years of Russian collusion investigations when all of the major cable networks reported unsubstantiated claims. I think Fox was reporting the news and certainly Newsmax was.”But some observers believe Dominion has a strong case. Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said: “Dominion has an outstanding prospect in its litigation against Fox for the simple reason that Fox knowingly broadcast over and over again the most outrageous and clear lies.You should not have a major television outlet that is a megaphone for outrageous falsehoods about the election“Certainly there are protections under the first amendment and otherwise but this is so far outside the bounds, such a clear case, that I think Fox is looking at a very serious legal exposure here and that’s the way it should be.“You should not have a major television outlet that is able day after day to provide a megaphone for outrageous falsehoods having to do with the election, one that helped trigger a violent insurrection on 6 January. They should not be able to feed a steady stream of those pernicious lies into the body politic without any legal consequences.”‘A real battleground’Eisen, a former White House “ethics czar”, suggests that the Dominion case could provide at least one model for dealing with the war on truth.“The United States and the world need to deal with disinformation,” he said.“There can be no doubt that every method is going to be required but certainly libel law provides one very important vehicle for establishing consequences and while there’s no such thing as a guarantee when you go to court, this is an exceptionally high risk for Fox with a large price tag attached as well.”There are signs that the legal actions, and their grave financial implications, have got reckless individuals and outlets on the run.Powell asked a judge to throw out the lawsuit against her, arguing that her assertions were protected by the right to free speech. But she also offered the unusual defence that she had been exaggerating to make a point and that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process”.Two days after voting machine maker Smartmatic filed a $2.7bn defamation suit that alleged TV host Lou Dobbs falsely accused it of election rigging, Fox Business abruptly canceled Lou Dobbs Tonight, its most viewed show. It has also filed a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic suit.Meanwhile pro-Trump outlets have begun using prepared disclaimers or prerecorded programmes to counter election conspiracy theories spouted by guests. When Lindell launched into an attack on Dominion on Newsmax in February, co-anchor Bob Sellers tried to cut him off and then walked off set.RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, told the Washington Post: “We are seeing the way that libel has become a real battleground in the fight against disinformation.“The threat of massive damages for spreading probably false conspiracy theories on matters of public concern could turn out to be the one tool that is successful in disincentivising that behaviour, where so many other tools seem to have failed.”The defamation suits will provide another test of the judiciary as a pillar of American democracy. The courts’ independence proved robust regarding dozens of lawsuits by Trump and his allies seeking to overturn the election outcome.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “It is such an under-appreciated illumination of the multiple avenues for pursuing politics. Sometimes we get understandably absorbed by what Congress can do, which is obviously significant at times, but mostly fairly kind of deadlocked.“But we’re going to see the legal system prosecuting the 6 January perpetrators, prosecuting Donald Trump and prosecuting these libel charges by Dominion over the monstrous lies that were told after the election.“Thank goodness for the courts because the elected branches have really botched it.” More

Robert Hunter Biden is not a rock star. Instead, the sole surviving son of Joe Biden – senator, vice-president, president – is a lawyer by training and a princeling by happenstance. Regardless, life on the edge comes with consequences.As Hunter Biden grudgingly acknowledges in his memoir, comparisons to Billy Carter, Roger Clinton or the Trump boys, appendages to power who sought to capitalize on proximity, may be apt. Indeed, Biden cops to the possibility that his name might have had something to do with his winding up on third base without hitting a triple.“I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a moment in history,” he writes, defensively, channeling the mantra of those with parents in high places: “I’ve worked for someone other than my father, rose and fell on my own.”But Biden is not content to leave well alone. Instead, he announces: “Having a Biden on Burisma’s board was a loud and unmistakable ‘fuck you’ to Putin.” He protests too much.Glossed over by Beautiful Things is that while his overseas venture may have ended up at the heart of Donald Trump’s first impeachment, it also discomforted Barack Obama’s White House. Confronted with Hunter’s foray into Ukraine and the energy business, the 44th president’s spokesman, Jay Carney, declined to express support.“Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice-president or president,” said Carney, back in 2014.Hunter possesses little filter. His craving for absolution is hardwiredBiden also portrays the relationship between his father and the Obama crowd as uneven to say the least. He points a finger at David Axelrod, an Obama counselor who played naysayer to Joe Biden’s chances in 2020, on CNN.Hunter recounts the aftermath of a conversation between his father and then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, about Afghanistan: “Goddamnit … Axelrod’s gotten in her ear!”As for Clinton, Biden elides the tension that existed between his father and the 2016 nominee. It wasn’t just about Obama encouraging Clinton. Back then, Joe Biden was scared of running against her.In Chasing Hillary, written by Amy Chozick in 2018, Joe Biden is paraphrased as saying to the press, off the record: “You guys don’t understand these people. The Clintons will try to destroy me.” Hell hath no fury like a Clinton crossed.The younger Biden’s book shows flashes of his grasp of power politics. But he also demonstrates a continuous blind spot for his own predicament. Confession should not be conflated with self-awareness.Biden recounts a conversation with Kathleen, his first wife, after the funeral in 2015 of Beau, his brother. He goes so far as to muse about running for office – despite his multiple addictions, all now detailed extensively on the page, and the ups-and-downs of his marriage.She responds: “Are you serious?”That Biden even went there is beyond puzzling. Or as he puts it, “I underestimated how much the wreckage of my past and all that I put my family through still weighed on Kathleen.”This was before Biden commenced an affair with his late brother’s wife.Hunter possesses little filter. His craving for absolution is hardwired.Describing a series of interviews he granted to the New Yorker’s Adam Entous, regarding Burisma, Ukraine and all that, he writes that he “didn’t know how cathartic the experience would be”. For good measure, he adds: “It was my opportunity to tell everyone out there, ‘This is who I am, you motherfuckers, and I ain’t changing!’”The italics are his.Through it all, Joe Biden is shown as a loving and caring father, like the dad in the story of the prodigal son. Biden depicts his father’s efforts to intervene in his personal nightmare and the times he rebuffed such entreaties. The family’s Catholicism is present throughout his book.The empathy and emotion Joe Biden conveys on television are part of who he is. His own setbacks and suffering helped elect him amid a terrible pandemic. Whatever facade exists is thin – and transparent.That said, the president’s capacity to forgive his son’s trespasses makes recent stories of his low tolerance for prior marijuana use among political appointees hard to comprehend.Beautiful Things is smoothly written and quickly paced. We know how and where the story ends. Hunter Biden appears to have found happiness in his second marriage. His father is now president.Still, the son cannot hide his bitterness in being turned into the whipping boy of the Trump campaign. The ex-president is “a vile man with a vile mission” who sank to “unprecedented depths” in his bid to retain power. The 6 January insurrection was vintage Trump. Charlottesville was prelude.Recent events offer Hunter Biden some measure of personal vindication and schadenfreude. A report by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) assessed that he and his father were targeted by Russia as part of campaign to swing the election in favor of Trump.According to the NIC, Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence” –including “some close to former President Trump and his administration” – “to push influence narratives including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden”. Rudy Giuliani looks like a Kremlin dupe.But it doesn’t end there. In December 2019, the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz belittled Hunter Biden for his substance abuse. It was a no-holds barred takedown, unleavened by Gaetz’s own history of drinking and driving.Timing is everything. Biden returns the favor in his book, calling Gaetz a “troll”. On Tuesday night, Gaetz admitted to being under justice department investigation “regarding sexual conduct with women” and allegedly trafficking a 17-year-old girl. More

Joe Biden is embarking on the biggest government initiative in more than a half-century, “unlike anything we have seen or done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades go”, he says.But when it comes to details, it sounds as boring as fixing the plumbing.“Under the American Jobs Plan, 100% of our nation’s lead pipes and service lines will be replaced – so every child in America can turn on the faucet or fountain and drink clean water,” the president tweeted.Can you imagine Donald Trump tweeting about repairing lead pipes?Biden is excited about rebuilding America’s “infrastructure”, a word he uses constantly although it could be the dullest term in all of public policy.The old unwritten rule was that if a president wants to do something really big, he has to justify it as critical to national defense or else summon the nation’s conscience.Dwight Eisenhower’s National Interstate and Defense Highway Act was designed to “permit quick evacuation of target areas” in case of nuclear attack and get munitions quickly from city to city. Of course, in subsequent years it proved indispensable to America’s economic growth.America’s huge investment in higher education in the late 1950s was spurred by the Soviets’ Sputnik satellite. The official purpose of the National Defense Education Act was to “insure trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States”.John F Kennedy launched the race to the moon in 1962 so that space wouldn’t be “governed by a hostile flag of conquest”.Two years later, Lyndon Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty” drew on the conscience of America reeling from Kennedy’s assassination.But Biden is not arousing the nation against a foreign power – not even China figures prominently as a foil – nor is he basing his plans on lofty appeals to national greatness or public morality.“I got elected to solve problems,” he says, simply. He’s Mr Fix-it.The first of these problems was a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans – Biden carries a card in his pocket with the exact number – and its ensuing economic hardship.In response, Congress passed Biden’s $1.9tn American Rescue Plan – the most important parts of which aren’t $1,400 checks now being mailed to millions of Americans but $3,600 checks a child paid to low-income families, which will cut child poverty by half.Now comes his $2tn American Jobs Plan, which doesn’t just fund roads and bridges but a vast number of things the nation has neglected for years: schools, affordable housing, in-home care, access to broadband, basic research, renewable energy and the transition to a non-fossil economy.Why isn’t Biden trumpeting these initiatives for what they are – huge public investments in the environment, the working-class and poor – instead of rescue checks and road repairs? Why not stir America with a vision of what the nation can be if it exchanges fraudulent trickle-down economics for genuine bottom-up innovation and growth?Even the official titles of his initiatives – Rescue Plan, Jobs Plan and soon-to-be-unveiled Family Plan – are anodyne, like plumbing blueprints.The reason is that Biden wants Americans to feel confident he’s taking care of the biggest problems but doesn’t want to create much of a stir. The country is so bitterly and angrily divided that any stir is likely to stir up vitriol.Talk too much about combating climate change and lose everyone whose livelihood depends on fossil fuels or who doesn’t regard climate change as an existential threat. Focus on cutting child poverty and lose everyone who thinks welfare causes dependency. Talk too much about critical technologies and lose those who think the government shouldn’t be picking winners.[embedded content]Rescue checks and road repairs may be boring but they’re hugely popular. Sixty-one per cent of Americans support the American Rescue Plan, including 59% of Republicans. More than 80% support increased funding for highway construction, bridge repair and expanded access to broadband.Biden has made it all so bland that congressional Republicans and their business backers have nothing to criticize except his proposal to pay for the repairs by raising taxes on corporations, which most Americans support.This is smart politics. Biden is embarking on a huge and long-overdue repair job on the physical and human underpinnings of the nation while managing to keep most of a bitterly divided country with him. It may not be seen as glamorous work, but when you’re knee-deep in muck, it’s hard to argue with a plumber. More

Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign used pre-checked boxes and obscure design on fundraising emails to wring millions of dollars out of unwitting supporters, detonating a “money bomb” which allowed the Republican to compete against Joe Biden in the last months of the race.The practice, pursued by the campaign and WinRed, a for-profit company, was detailed in an extensive report by the New York Times on Saturday. It is legal, but Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, told the paper it was “unfair, unethical and inappropriate”.Another expert quoted by the Times said such “dark pattern” digital marketing “should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do” in politics.The “money bomb” did not bring victory, as Trump lost the electoral college by 306 votes to 232. He also lost the popular vote by more than 7m ballots.But, the Times said, “the recurring donations swelled Mr Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.”Trump still claims his defeat was caused by massive electoral fraud. It was not, as a succession of court cases concluded.After escaping conviction in his second impeachment trial, for inciting the Capitol riot of 6 January, the former president is free to run for office again. He continues to seek donations, leading to friction with the party he dominates.The Republican WinRed operation was conceived as a response to ActBlue, an online fundraising platform set up by Democrats to attract small-dollar donations.As the Times reported, refunds to donors are not unusual and can be made when individuals give more than the legal limit. The paper said that at the end of 2020, after Trump’s defeat, the Biden campaign and Democratic bodies made 37,000 online refunds worth $5.6m.The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee made more than 530,000 refunds, returning $64.3m.“In effect,” the Times wrote, “the money that Mr Trump eventually had to refund amounted to an interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.”Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, told the Times: “Our campaign was built by the hardworking men and women of America and cherishing their investments was paramount to anything else we did.”The Times reported that the practice was used for the Georgia Senate runoffs in January and continues to be used by the Republican party.It also detailed distressing experiences affecting Trump donors hit by surprise deductions and consequent trouble with banks and credit card companies.Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old from California, donated $990 in September. It recurred seven times for a total of almost $8,000, the Times said.Calling the Trump campaign and the RNC “bandits”, Amelino told the paper: “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.” More

Washington woke on Saturday shaken by another deadly attack at the US Capitol, an incident which left a police officer and a suspect dead and stirred memories of 6 January, when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the building in an attempt to overturn the election.The incident on Friday was on a much smaller scale but it still spread confusion and fear. Early in the afternoon, a man rammed his vehicle into two Capitol police officers standing in front of a barricade. Exiting the vehicle, the suspect then lunged at officers with a knife. He was shot dead.Yogananda Pittman, acting chief of Capitol police, told reporters two officers were taken to hospital after the attack. One, William “Billy” Evans, an 18-year department veteran and the father of two young children, died from his injuries.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Evans a “martyr for democracy”.“America’s heart has been broken by the tragic and heroic death of one of our Capitol police heroes,” Pelosi said in a statement. “Once again, these heroes risked their lives to protect our Capitol and our country, with the same extraordinary selflessness and spirit of service seen on 6 January.“On behalf of the entire House, we are profoundly grateful.”A neighbour of Evans, Bob Epskamp, told the Washington Post he was a “loving and caring father”. After the insurrection at the Capitol, he said, he told Evans he “was glad he was fortunate enough not to be on duty that day”.Police did not immediately name the suspect and the motive remained unclear. Multiple news outlets, however, named the attacker as Noah Green, who was 25 and from Indiana.Friends and family members told news outlets they had been concerned about Green’s mental health in recent years, especially after he posted disturbing comments to social media.Green’s Facebook profile was public until it was suspended on Friday. Two weeks before the attack at the Capitol, he reportedly wrote: “These past few years have been tough, and these past few months have been tougher.“I have been tried with some of the biggest, unimaginable tests in my life. I am currently unemployed after I left my job partly due to affiliations, but ultimately, in search of a spiritual journey.”Green reportedly grew up in Virginia and played football in college. Andre Toran, a former team-mate, told USA Today he was a “really quiet guy” who would occasionally crack jokes with the team but mostly just smiled when listening to conversations.“I know people say this all the time, but the guy who I played with is not the same person who did this,” Toran said.[embedded content]According to other friends and family members, Green became paranoid after alleging he had been drugged with Xanax by former room-mates. The experience, he claimed, made him addicted to the drug and led to withdrawal symptoms.Toran showed USA Today a Facebook post he said Green wrote during the pandemic, in which Green said that withdrawal symptoms included seizures, a lack of appetite, paranoia, depression and suicidal ideation.Green’s brother told the Washington Post Green moved around after college, going from Virginia to Indianapolis and even to Botswana. Green moved in with his brother two weeks before he attacked the Capitol, his brother said, and in the hours before the attack sent a text message that read: “I’m sorry but I’m just going to go and live and be homeless. Thank you for everything that you’ve done. I looked up to you when I was a kid. You inspired me a lot.”On his Facebook page, Green claimed to be a follower of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and said his faith in Farrakhan and the extremist group was “one of the only things that has been able to carry me through these times”.The Nation of Islam is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, for its “deeply racist, antisemitic and anti-gay rhetoric of its leader”.On Friday, acting chief of the Metropolitan police Robert Contee said the attack did not appear to be terrorism-related, though police were still investigating.Only three months have passed since the Capitol breach on 6 January by hundreds of supporters of Donald Trump. Then, lawmakers, staff members and journalists were forced to hide as rioters roamed the building, allegedly looking for politicians to kidnap and even kill, until police were able to clear the building.Five people, including a US Capitol police officer who confronted rioters, were killed. At least 350 people have been charged in relation to the attack.Security around the Capitol was greatly increased. A tall fence now surrounds the building, and thousands of members of the national guard have been stationed in the area. The national guard plans to stay at the Capitol until May at the request of US Capitol police, whose small force struggled to handle the January riot.While Friday’s attack was much smaller in scale, it renewed concerns over the Capitol being a target for violence.Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, was at the Capitol on Friday despite most representatives and senators being away for Easter.He told MSNBC: “The question we have to ask is what is happening in our country, where we have people coming in, trying to use violence and knives and arms [at] the heart of American democracy.” More