US Politics

For the former prime minister Theresa May, one of the most pressing matters she confronted during her encounter with Donald Trump a few days after his inauguration went beyond mere diplomacy.May had travelled to Washington in 2017 with the intention of persuading the new US president to make a supportive statement about Nato. Little did she expect that she would be calling her husband, Philip, to warn him that images of the US president of holding her hand as they walked through the White House would soon be flashing around the world.With Trump out of power, those who had ringside seats during four years of dangerous and often chaotic foreign policy are now describing their – often bruising – encounters in a major new documentary series.The three-part BBC series, Trump Takes on the World, by the award-winning documentary maker Norma Percy, reveals extraordinary access to key observers of the president.With testimony from a who’s who of world leaders and senior US officials, it offers an unmediated reflection of Trump shorn of political hypocrisies.It was not just May who found Trump unsettling: to European diplomatic observers, he seemed a “strange creature”. And he also triggered alarm among some American officials in the room with him, with one defence official noting that the president’s notoriously short attention span suggested a “squirrel careening through the traffic”.May’s encounter with Trump, which is described to Percy by British aides as well as Trump insiders, was a taste of what was to come. May was seen as “not strong” by Trump, according to KT McFarland, the former US deputy national security adviser. But the prime minister had gone into the meeting determined to persuade the president to make a statement backing Nato and warn him over his closeness to Vladimir Putin.The meeting took a bizarre twist as they walked through the White House. “He held her hand going through the colonnades, which took us all by surprise, and as it turns out, took Theresa by surprise,” Fiona McLeod Hill, the former joint chief of staff at No 10, told Percy.“She couldn’t really take her hand back, so she was stuck … And the first thing she said [afterwards] was ‘I need to call Philip just to let him know that I’ve been holding hands with another man before it hits the media’.”Before May had the opportunity to call her husband, Trump hosted her for lunch, where another boundary-shattering episode was waiting. First May was treated to the “full bloom” – one of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness rants, described by Thomas Shannon, then US undersecretary for political affairs, as running “the gamut from his own inauguration to his disdain for the press”.Then, keen to raise the issue of Putin, May asked Trump if he had spoken to the Russian leader, which Trump denied. At that point, however, Trump’s chief of staff intervened to tell the president that Putin had actually called, but not been put through.Hill takes up the story of the “toe-curling” outburst. “Trump at this point looks not orange but red. He flipped. Furious.” In front of May, he scolded his advisers in what Shannon recalled as “an unseemly moment”. “He said: ‘You’re telling me that Vladimir Putin called the White House and you’re only telling me now during this lunch?… Vladimir Putin is the only man in the world who can destroy the United States and I didn’t take his call’.”May was far from alone in being exposed to Trump’s flagrant disregard for boundaries. From his unilateral withdrawals from the Iranian nuclear treaty and the Paris climate accord to his dealings with the Palestinians, Russia and China, few – even those close to him – could ever fully grasp the extent of his unpredictability or his disdain for detail.The former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was thrown off balance by Trump’s behaviour during an encounter at a G20 meeting in Hamburg also in 2017.Like May, Turnbull had important issues on his mind, in this case steel tariffs. Taking his chance, Turnbull collared Trump, who was obsessing about something else. “Donald said: ‘Malcolm, do you want to see my SCIF? It is so cool.’ I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought he was talking about a boat [a skiff]. We turned around a corner and there was this big steel box about the size of a shipping container.”Trump pulled Turnbull into what turned out to be a “sensitive compartmented information facility”, an ultra-secure communications hub, with the new French president, Emmanuel Macron, also in tow.“He said: ‘This is so cool – when you’re in there, nobody can hear you, not even the Chinese. It’s so secret.”Expectations of Trump from European leaders were not so much low as non-existent. For the former French president François Hollande, who dealt with Trump only briefly, an early red flag was raised when the US leader asked him in all earnestness who he should appoint to his team in the White House. “I thought he was just being courteous; it was pretty outrageous. Imagine I phoned Obama and said: ‘You know France well, who should I appoint as an adviser?’” Later, briefing his successor Macro during the transition, Hollande was clear how he regarded the US leader – sentiments Percy herself regards as a summing up how many foreign leaders viewed the Trump era.“I said to [Macron],” Hollande recalls, “don’t expect anything from Donald Trump. Do not think you’ll be able to change his mind. Don’t think that it’s possible to turn him or seduce him. Don’t imagine that he won’t follow through with his own agenda.”“Some friends asked me why I was doing it,” said Percy, who has made the documentaries The Death of Yugoslavia, End of Empire and Watergate, and who filmed the new series under lockdown. “The view was that we knew what Trump was like. He was on the news every night. But this is the inside story of those who had to deal with him.”Trump Takes on the World begins on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC Two More

It might be tempting to call it the trial of the century but it is just as likely to invoke a sense of deja vu. This week Donald Trump faces an impeachment trial in the US Senate. Yes, another one.Trump stands accused of inciting an insurrection when he urged supporters to “fight” his election defeat before they stormed the US Capitol in Washington on 6 January, clashed with police and left five people dead.In some ways it will be a replay of his first impeachment trial a year ago. Again Trump himself will not be present and again the outcome, given his subjugation of the Republican party, has an air of inevitability – acquittal.But there are crucial differences the second time around. Trump is now a former president, the first to be tried by the Senate after leaving office. For this reason the sessions will be presided over not by John Roberts, the chief justice of the supreme court, but 80-year-old Patrick Leahy, the longest-serving Democratic senator.Whereas Trump offered running commentary on the first trial via Twitter, he has now been banned from the platform for incendiary statements. And whereas his first trial, on charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress, turned on whether phone records and paper trails showed that he pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, the sequel promises to be more raw and visceral.Proceedings will unfold at the scene of the crime: the hallowed Senate chamber that was invaded by rioters including white supremacist groups. The nine Democratic impeachment managers are expected to present new video footage and eyewitness testimony that will vividly evoke the terror felt by members of Congress as they barricaded themselves inside offices and feared for their lives.“If the Democrats do what’s being reported and present the visual evidence, it will be nothing a Senate trial has ever seen before,” said Charlie Sykes, founder and editor-at-large of the Bulwark website. “It’s going to be a graphic narrative of the build-up and the attack and the violence and the scope of the threat and it’s going to be very difficult to minimise that, especially because every one of those senators was a witness to it in some way.“So I actually think that it’s going to be more powerful than some people expect. The result is preordained – I don’t have any illusions about that – but, because the evidence has been mounting over the last several weeks, I am expecting it to be dramatic.”There have only been four presidential impeachments in American history and Trump owns half of them: his second came last month in a vote by the House of Representatives, with all Democrats and 10 Republicans charging him with inciting violence against the US government.That set the stage for Tuesday’s Senate trial where legal briefs filed by both sides offer a preview of the territory that will be contested. House prosecutors argue that that Trump was “singularly responsible” for the sacking of the Capitol – where Biden’s election win was being certified – by “creating a powder keg, striking a match, and then seeking personal advantage from the ensuing havoc”.If the Democrats do what’s being reported and present the visual evidence, it will be nothing a Senate trial has ever seen beforeIt is “impossible” to imagine the attack taking place as it did without Trump whipping up the crowd into a “frenzy”, they argue, citing the same view expressed by the Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, a Republican who defied the party line by voting for impeachment.But in a 14-page brief that uses the word “denied” or “denies” some 29 times, Trump’s hastily assembled legal team contend that he cannot be blamed because he never incited anyone to “engage in destructive behavior”. The people “responsible” for the attack are being investigated and prosecuted, they add.But the Democrats’ brief carries detail of the horror felt by politicians and their staff during the mayhem. “Some Members called loved ones for fear that they would not survive the assault by President Trump’s insurrectionist mob,” they write.The anguish was on vivid display in recent days as members such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib recalled the traumatic events of 6 January during speeches on the House floor. Tlaib broke down in tears as she pleaded with colleagues: “Please, please take what happened on January 6 seriously. It will lead to more death, and we can do better.”Trump’s conduct not only “endangered the life of every single member of Congress”, the impeachment managers say, but also “jeopardized the peaceful transition of power and line of succession”.Their brief details threats to Mike Pence, the then vice-president, and Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, as the pro-Trump mob rampaged through the building and “specifically hunted” them. Some chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” and branded him a traitor for refusing to overturn the election result, video footage shows.But how ever emotive the evidence, Trump’s team denies that the Senate has the authority to hear the case because he is now a private citizen and no longer in office. Democrats reject this, pointing to the example of William Belknap, a war secretary whose resignation in 1876 did not prevent him being impeached by the House and tried the Senate.They also argue that the constitution explicitly allows the Senate to disqualify a convicted former official from holding office in the future, a vital consideration given that Trump has not ruled out running for president again in 2024.The defence’s challenge to the constitutionality of the trial, however, looks certain to clinch Trump’s acquittal. Already 45 out of 50 Senate Republicans, including the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, voted on that basis in an effort to end the trial before it began.A two-thirds majority of the 100-member Senate would be required to support the charge to convict Trump, meaning that 17 Republicans would need to join all 50 Democrats. Most Republicans have repeatedly shown they are loyal to Trump and wary of retribution from his base.Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, predicted: “You may be able to get seven or eight Republicans at the end of the day voting to convict but they’re weak and afraid that they may lose their little precious seat. ‘So the country be damned, I’m still going to be a senator, I have to get re-elected.’“That’s the most important thing for them. If their mama were on trial, they would sacrifice their mama if they get to keep their seat: that’s what it boils down to. Tell me, what are you willing to sacrifice your re-election for, if not the country?”Even so, there is still some suspense around whether Trump will pressure his legal team to push “the big lie” of a stolen election. Over two months his bogus claims of election fraud were rejected by courts, state officials and his own attorney general.What are you willing to sacrifice your re-election for, if not the country?The defence’s legal brief points to the first amendment, which protects freedom of speech, to assert that Trump was entitled to “express his belief that the election results were suspect”. Pushing this hard at the trial could prove a spectacular own goal that will make it harder for Republicans to defend him.Steele added: “If they present that as an argument, they’ll get laughed out of the out of the chamber. They would actually be lying. They would be presenting false evidence because they could make the allegation and, if I’m a senator, ‘Show me the proof. You mean to tell me you have proof that 60 courts and the supreme court didn’t have?’”A key figure in the trial will be Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor who, despite being a relatively new member of the House, has risen to prominence as lead impeachment manager. His 25-year-old son, Tommy, a Harvard law student who struggled with depression, took his own life on New Year’s Eve. Raskin told CNN last month: “I’m not going to lose my son at the end of 2020 and lose my country and my republic in 2021.”Raskin requested that Trump, now living at his luxury estate in Florida, testify under oath at the trial but the ex-president’s lawyers, Bruce Castor and David Schoen, rejected the idea as a “public relations stunt”. It remains unclear whether the prosecutors will be able to call other witnesses, such as police officers still recovering from serious injuries.Impeachment is inescapably a political process and the fact that Leahy, a Democrat, is presiding rather than the neutral chief justice is only like the fuel the partisan fires among senators who always have an eye on the next election.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “The key audience for this trial, if it exists, is suburban voters. They defected from the Republicans at the presidential level and defected from them in Georgia at the Senate level in the runoff.“If the Democrats can gain with suburban voters by tying the incumbent Republican senators to Donald Trump for the next two years, it helps them keep the Senate and that’s the whole reason this trial is happening.”Schiller added: “You can see why the House impeached Donald Trump: a, he was still in office and b, it was to safeguard the country against any abuses of power that he might commit in the 10 days between impeachment and January 20. [But] It’s very hard to make the argument that this trial is meaningful.” More

Craig Unger’s new book has already made headlines, in this newspaper and elsewhere, because of a charge from an ex-KGB colonel, Yuri Shvets, that Donald Trump has been a KGB asset for 40 years.But as Unger himself points out, former CIA director Michael Morell has called Trump an “unwitting agent” of the Russians; former national security director James Clapper has described him “in effect … an intelligence asset”; and former CIA director John Brennan has said Trump is “wholly in the pocket of Putin”. So Shvets’ accusation isn’t really very surprising.Many other Trump-Russia books have dated Trump’s initial contact with the Russians to a visit to Trump Tower by then Soviet ambassador to the United Nations Yuri Dubinin, in 1986. Unger – through Shvets – reports that the association actually began six years earlier when Trump purchased 200 television sets from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue. According to Shvets, Kislin was actually a spotter agent for the KGB. Kislin denies any connection.In any case, the meaning of this transaction – like scores of anecdotes recorded in these pages – is never fully explained. The subtitle of Unger’s book is How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power and Treachery – a rubric that enables the author to throw in almost every bit of unconfirmed gossip ever published about everyone from convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to former British press magnate Robert Maxwell. And Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine, who was – or wasn’t, depending on which page of this book you’re on – Epstein’s girlfriend as well as allegedly his collaborator in recruiting underage girls to sate Epstein’s seemingly unquenchable sexual appetite.As well as being a publisher, according to Unger, Maxwell was extremely close to the Israeli secret service, Mossad, and the KGB. And perhaps Mossad was actually responsible for killing Maxwell, whose drowning off his yacht was officially ruled an accident.Unger’s sourcing for this is typical of the book. He writes: “According to the Sunday Age, in Melbourne, Australia, on 2 November 1991 … an unnamed source close to the Israeli cabinet told Hersh that Maxwell would soon be eliminated. The author did not know how seriously to take the threat. Three days later, Robert Maxwell went missing …”Hersh is Seymour Hersh, probably the most famous investigative journalist of his generation, but in the copious source notes of Unger’s book there is no indication Unger ever contacted Hersh to confirm this Australian bulletin. Since Hersh is in the phone book, and he actually answers his own phone, I found it quite easy to reach him.Did he remember being contacted “by a source close to the Israeli cabinet” who told him Maxwell was about to be knocked off?“I have absolutely no memory of getting such a tip,” Hersh told me. “And I must note that most people, so I gather, who want to kill prominent others do not usually discuss such in advance.”And so it goes throughout Unger’s book: dozens and dozens of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all “too good to check”, in the parlance of old-time journalists.This is particularly true of the lengthy section about Epstein, who is here because he had the largest collection of kompromat of anyone in history. Or did he?Unger writes that it was “widely known” that Epstein “was making tapes of grave sexual crimes”. But Unger has never seen any of the tapes, or found any reliable witness who says that he has.: “The people who knew weren’t talking,” Unger writes. “There was speculation that it was used to facilitate deals with Wall Street power brokers and to cement the loyalty of various actors in the drama, be they high-powered lawyers, heads of state, royalty, billionaires, media moguls, or operatives in any intelligence service.”On page 186, we are treated to a barrage of bold-faced names from Epstein’s notorious black book – everyone from Deepak Chopra, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson to Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth and Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud. And that sounds very exciting – until you get to page 195, when Unger admits that “being on Epstein’s contact list meant nothing in and of itself. It’s far more indicative of the power brokers he and Ghislaine were cultivating than whether they actually had knowledge of or participated in Epstein’s nefarious activities.”Unger is much more interesting in a long section about Opus Dei, the secret Catholic society with origins in fascist Spain which the lawyer and Columbia lecturer Scott Horton describes as “the most effective secret society in American history, especially when it comes to changing the nature of the judiciary and filling vacancies with people who are their picks”.There is also the remarkable story of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, the most successful Soviet double agent of modern times, who belonged to Opus Dei and whose brother-in-law, John Paul Wauck, got a job writing speeches for then acting attorney general William Barr in 1991. At that moment, Unger writes, Barr was overseeing “the greatest mole hunt in FBI history, yet presumably [was] unaware that the mastermind spy they were hunting was his own speech writer’s brother-in-law, and that all three of them were closely tied to Opus Dei”.Details like that keep you turning the pages. But Unger’s willingness to include almost anything to titillate makes this book wildly uneven, and ultimately unsatisfactory. More

The Republican rebellion failed: Donald Trump won.“I was disappointed over the last few weeks to see what seemed like the Republican party waking up,” the Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger observed on NBC’s Meet the Press last week, “and then kind of falling asleep again”.Kinzinger is among a band of Republican dissidents who openly defy the former US president’s continued dominance of the party. They are small, bullied and vastly outnumbered. But in a finely balanced Congress where anti-Trump sentiment is wider than it first appears, they are likely to play an outsized role in the future of American politics.The known “Never Trump” resistance consists of 10 members of the House of Representatives who last month voted to impeach him for inciting an insurrection at the US Capitol. They include Liz Cheney, the most senior woman in the Republican caucus, who declared “there has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the constitution”.I would hate to see what the mailbox of someone like a Mitt Romney isThen there are five senators who rejected spurious process arguments and voted to press ahead with the impeachment trial: Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. The group will soon shrink because Toomey has announced that he will not seek re-election next year.But it is an open secret in Washington that they have many fellow travelers: Republican traditionalists who privately despise Trump, and may well convict him if only the vote could be held by secret ballot, but dare not speak out for fear of retribution from rightwing media and increasingly radicalized state parties. This can take the form of primary election challenges, heckling in public places and even death threats.Charlie Sykes, editor-at-large of the Bulwark website and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “I would hate to see what the mailbox of someone like a Mitt Romney is. We’ll see more scenes of folks harassing the moderates at airports but, within the leadership ranks, they understand what the stakes are. I’m guessing that rather a large number of senators share Romney’s view and are probably telling him that they wish they could say the same thing.”This well of tacit sympathy is one reason why Romney and other senators are unlikely to face personal hostility from colleagues. Another is that, with the Senate evenly split at 50-50 – the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris, holds the tie-breaking vote – Republicans cannot afford to ostracize or alienate any members.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, explained: “Neither party can afford to shun a single member of their caucus in the Senate because to overcome a filibuster you need 51 votes – a legislative filibuster is 60 – so every party needs every senator.“That’s why the Senate is, at least for now, a safer place to be a maverick than the House of Representatives, although now with the margin in the House, you need every vote on each side as well.”The Republican caucus in the House is more overtly Trumpian, as evidenced by the newcomer Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has espoused racist and antisemitic views and expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory. That indicates why Cheney – the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney – has faced a more severe backlash from Trump loyalists than any senator.Although she survived an attempt this week to oust her as the party’s No 3 in the House as punishment for endorsing impeachment, an Axios-SurveyMonkey poll found that Cheney is far less popular than Greene among Republicans and those who lean Republican.There are more of us than there are of themShe could still face censure from the Wyoming state party and a primary challenge. The Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, a fervent Trump backer from Florida, even flew to Wyoming to urge supporters to vote her out. “Washington DC mythologises the establishment power brokers like Liz Cheney for climbing in a deeply corrupt game,” Gaetz told a rally of about a thousand people in Cheyenne. “But there are more of us than there are of them.”Sykes observed: “When you have somebody like Matt Gaetz flying to Wyoming, he’s doing that because he thinks that that strengthens his brand in the GOP [Grand Old Party] to attack other Republicans, which tells you about the toxic nature of this civil war.”It is debatable whether, as Kinzinger posited, the Republican party really was close to waking up from its Trumpian fever dream. Although the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, both stated that Trump bears responsibility for the deadly violence at the US Capitol, McConnell then voted against holding an impeachment trial and McCarthy visited the ex-president at his Florida redoubt to mend fences.Taking McConnell’s cue, a further 44 Republican senators supported a resolution declaring the trial unconstitutional because Trump is now a private citizen. It meant that his eventual acquittal is all but certain, just as it was at his first impeachment trial a year ago when Romney was the sole senator to break from the party line.Such is the Trump base’s hold on the party that while some establishment Republicans stay and fight, others often retire and walk away. In recent years they have included Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, senators from Tennessee and Arizona respectively, soon to be joined by Rob Portman, an Ohio senator who recently announced he would not run for election again. Justin Amash, a Trump critic in the House, left the Republican party in 2019.But the current crop of Never Trumpers in the Senate are likely to keep speaking out because of a mix of pragmatism and principle. In November Collins and Sasse won the cushion of six-year terms; Murkowski comes from a state that uses ranked-choice voting, meaning that she could leave the Republican party and still have a strong chance of re-election next year; Romney is wealthy and has already had a shot at the presidency so has little to lose.Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who ran a Senate campaign against Romney in Massachusetts in 1994, said: “He’s a conservative: that’s clear from how he votes on issues, from how he’s reacted to the Covid-19 relief. But in terms of the norms and standards of democracy, he’s going to do what he believes and, if it turns out that it hurts him in Utah, I don’t think he cares.”Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney have been the standard bearers and we need to reinforce their leadership as much as possibleSimilarly unapologetic, Kinzinger has announced a new political action committee called Country First, urging Republicans to cast off their mantle as the “Trump-first party” and “unplug the outrage machine”. In his Meet the Press interview, the congressman warned that the party had peddled “darkness and division” and “lost its moral authority in a lot of areas”.Though they often seem like voices in the wilderness, the rebels can point to reports that thousands of people have quit the Republican party since the US Capitol riot on 6 January. They also have the support of former party officials and outside groups that worked for Trump’s defeat last year and continue to oppose him.Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney have been the standard bearers and we need to reinforce their leadership as much as possible.“It’s not about establishment Republicanism versus pitchfork Republicanism – that’s just a false flag argument. The Republican party either is or isn’t something. Either Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney stand for what that something is or they don’t. Either Marjorie Taylor Green and Jim Jordan [a pro-Trump congressman] stand for what that is or they don’t. And that’s the battle.”Steele, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, added: “I happen to think that Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney represent the opportunity for a governing majority in the future. I think Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene and all that Trumpist bullshit isn’t the future of the party. I stand with Adam Kinzinger. Let’s have that fight.” More

After Donald Trump had exhausted all of his claims of voter fraud and could contrive no more conspiracy theories that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, and after his revolving menagerie of legal mouthpieces had all of their motions tossed out of every venue up to the supreme court, and after his reliable enabler, Attorney General William Barr, informed him his accusations were false and he had reached the end of the line, and resigned, Trump came as a last resort to rest his slipping hold on power on his most unwavering defender and ceaseless flatterer, who had never let him down: his vice-president, Mike Pence.
Nobody was more responsible for fostering the cult of Trump. The evangelical Pence had been Trump’s rescuer, starting with his forgiveness for the miscreant in the crisis during the 2016 campaign over Trump’s Access Hollywood “grab them by the pussy” tape and then over the disclosure of the “Individual One” hush money payoff to a porn star about a one-night stand to shut her up before election day – AKA “the latest baseless allegations”. Pence was the indispensable retainer who delivered the evangelical base, transforming it through the alchemy of his faith into Trump’s rock of ages. After every malignant episode, from Charlottesville (“I stand with the president”) to coronavirus (“The president took another historic step”), the pious Pence could be counted on to bless Trump for his purity of heart and to shepherd the flock of true believers.
“Trump’s got the populist nationalists,” Stephen Bannon, Trump’s pardoned former senior adviser, remarked. “But Pence is the base. Without Pence, you don’t win.”
Withstanding the howling winds of narcissism, the unshakably self-abasing Pence upheld the cross over Trump. On the evening of 3 May 2017, Trump welcomed his evangelical advisory board for dinner in the Blue Room of the White House.
“I’ve been with [Trump] alone in the room when the decisions are made,” Pence testified to the assembled pastors. “He and I have prayed together. This is somebody who shares our views, shares our values, shares our beliefs.”
Nobody more than Pence had modeled adulation of Trump to become the standard for sycophantic imitation. At the first meeting of members of Trump’s cabinet, on 12 June 2017, the president called on each to offer praise.
“I’m going to start with our vice-president. Where is our vice-president?” Trump asked. “We’ll start with Mike and then we’ll just go around, your name, your position.”
“This is just the greatest privilege of my life,” Pence said, setting the tone for the others. More

Next week’s Senate trial is unlikely to convict Donald Trump of inciting sedition against the United States. At least 17 Republican senators are needed for conviction, but only five have signaled they’ll go along.Why won’t Republican senators convict him? After all, it’s an open and shut case. As summarized in the brief submitted by House impeachment managers, Trump spent months before the election telling his followers that the only way he could lose was through “a dangerous, wide-ranging conspiracy against them that threatened America itself”.Immediately after the election, he lied that he had won by a “landslide”, and later urged his followers to stop the counting of electoral ballots by making plans to “fight like hell” and “fight to the death” against this “act of war” perpetrated by “Radical Left Democrats” and the “weak and ineffective RINO section of the Republican Party”.If this isn’t an impeachable offense, it’s hard to imagine what is. But Republican senators won’t convict him because they’re answerable to Republican voters, and Republican voters continue to believe Trump’s big lie.A shocking three out of four Republican voters don’t think Joe Biden won legitimately. About 45% even support the storming of the Capitol.The crux of the problem is Americans now occupy two separate worlds – a fact-based pro-democracy world and a Trump-based authoritarian one.Trump spent the last four years seducing voters into his world, turning the GOP from a political party into a grotesque projection of his pathological narcissism.Regardless of whether he is convicted, America must now deal with the monstrous predicament he left behind: one of the nation’s two major political parties has abandoned reality and democracy.What to do? Four things.First, prevent Trump from running for president in 2024. The mere possibility energizes his followers.An impeachment conviction is not the only way to prevent him. Under section three of the 14th amendment to the constitution, anyone who has taken an oath to protect the constitution is barred from holding public office if they “have engaged in insurrection” against the United States. As constitutional expert and former Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman has noted, a majority vote that Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States is sufficient to trigger this clause.Second, give Republicans and independents every incentive to abandon the Trump cult.White working-class voters without college degrees who now comprise a large portion of its base need good jobs and better futures. Many are understandably angry after being left behind in vast enclaves of unemployment and despair. They should not have to depend on Trump’s fact-free fanaticism in order to feel visible and respected.A jobs program on the scale necessary to bring many of them around will be expensive but worth the cost, especially when democracy hangs in the balance.Big business, which used to have a home in the GOP, will need a third party. Democrats should not try to court them; the Democratic party should aim to represent the interests of the bottom 90%.Third, disempower the giant media empires that amplified Trump’s lies for four years – Facebook, Twitter and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its imitators. The goal is not to “cancel” the political right but to refocus public deliberation on facts, truth and logic. Democracy cannot thrive where big lies are systematically and repeatedly exploited for commercial gain.The goal is not to ‘cancel’ the political right but to refocus public deliberation on facts, truth and logicThe solution is antitrust enforcement and stricter regulation of social media, accompanied by countervailing financial pressure. Consumers should boycott products advertised on these lie factories and advertisers should shun them. Large tech platforms should lose legal immunity for violence-inciting content. Broadcasters such as Fox News and Newsmax should be liable for knowingly spreading lies (they are now being sued by producers of voting machinery and software which they accused of having been rigged for Biden).Fourth, safeguard the democratic form of government. This requires barring corporations and the very wealthy from buying off politicians, ending so-called “dark money” political groups that don’t disclose their donors, defending the right to vote and ensuring more citizens are heard, not fewer.Let’s be clear about the challenge ahead. The major goal is not to convict Trump for inciting insurrection. It is to move a vast swath of America back into a fact-based pro-democracy society and away from the Trump-based authoritarian one.Regardless of whether he is convicted, the end of his presidency has given the nation a reprieve. But unless America uses it to end Trumpism’s hold over tens of millions of Americans, that reprieve may be temporary.Thankfully, Joe Biden appears to understand this. More

Liz Cheney, the third-highest-ranking Republican leader in the House, was censured by the Wyoming Republican party on Saturday for voting to impeach Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January riot at the US Capitol.The overwhelming censure vote was the latest blowback for Cheney for joining nine Republican representatives and all Democrats in the US House in the 13 January impeachment vote.On Saturday only eight of the 74-member state GOP’s central committee stood to oppose censure in a vote that did not proceed to a formal count. The censure document accused Cheney of voting to impeach even though the US House didn’t offer Trump “formal hearing or due process”.“We need to honor President Trump. All President Trump did was call for a peaceful assembly and protest for a fair and audited election,” said Darin Smith, a Cheyenne attorney who lost to Cheney in the Republican US House primary in 2016. “The Republican party needs to put her on notice.”Cheney in a statement after the vote said she remained honored to represent Wyoming and would always fight for issues that matter most to the state. “Foremost among these is the defense of our constitution and the freedoms it guarantees. My vote to impeach was compelled by the oath I swore to the constitution,” Cheney said.Republican officials said they invited Cheney but she did not attend. An empty chair labeled “Representative Cheney” sat at the front of the meeting room.Cheney will remain as the third-ranking member of the House GOP leadership, however, after a 145-61 vote by House Republicans on Wednesday to keep her as conference committee chair.In Wyoming just three months after winning a third term with almost 70%, Cheney already faces at least two Republican primary opponents in 2022. They include the Republican state senator Anthony Bouchard, a gun-rights activist from Cheyenne, who was at the meeting but not among those who spoke. Smith also has said he is deliberating whether to run for Congress again.On 28 January the Republican US Representative Matt Gaetz, of Florida, led a rally against Cheney in front of the Wyoming Capitol. About 1,000 people took part, many of them carrying signs calling for Cheney’s impeachment though several were supportive.Trump faces trial in the US Senate on Tuesday over allegedly inciting insurrection when a mob of supporters stormed into and rampaged through the Capitol after a nearby rally led by Trump and close allies.Censure opponents mainly came from Casper, Wyoming’s second-largest city, and the Jackson Hole area near Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks.“Let’s resist this infusion of leftwing cancel culture to try to censure and get rid of anybody we disagree with,” said Alexander Muromcew with the Teton county GOP.Momentum for censure had been growing for weeks as local Republicans in around a dozen of Wyoming’s 23 counties passed their own resolutions criticizing Cheney’s impeachment vote. More

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Ivanka wants to be the next Kim Kardashian
Ivanka Trump is done empowering women. For years the heiress styled herself as a sort of Susan B Anthony in stilettos, working tirelessly to advance women’s rights. That mission has apparently been accomplished, and Ivanka has now moved on to a new passion project: criminals.
Ivanka spent her final hours in the White House frantically working with her daddy to grant pardons and commutations to 143 people. Some of those people had been locked up for decades for nonviolent drug offenses; many others, however, were Trump cronies and white-collar crooks. According to a new report from Axios, Ivanka wasn’t just helping these people out of the goodness of her heart; it was a calculated strategy. Ivanka apparently plans to use the platform of criminal justice reform to rehabilitate her image and re-emerge into public life.
Tying her brand to criminal justice reform, which is a bipartisan issue, is a savvy move by Ivanka. It gives her a way of worming herself back into liberals’ good books without alienating conservatives. It also doesn’t hurt that criminal justice reform has become rather glamorous. Over the last few years big-name celebrities like Kevin Hart, Jay-Z and Meek Mill have spoken out on the issue. And Kim Kardashian, of course, has made criminal justice reform her life’s work. (Although she still finds time to hawk shapewear and promote dubious diet products.)
And then there’s the fact that, unlike most things she sets her sights on, crime is something Ivanka appears eminently qualified to speak out on. There is, after all, a convicted felon in the family: her father-in-law, Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to tax evasion and intimidating a witness (he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, videotaped it, then sent the video to his sister to try to stop him testifying). Kushner, of course, got a pardon from Trump.
Criminal justice reform may theoretically be a bipartisan issue, but it’s important to note that there are very different interpretations of what that reform looks like in practice. For the left it means things like addressing structural racism and reallocating funding from police departments to community support. For the right it often seems to mean cutting costs by reducing the number of people in physical jails while finding new ways to police people. Ways which, conveniently enough, make private corporations and tech companies a lot of money. In 2018, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, warned that many recent criminal justice reforms contain the seeds of a frightening system of “e-carceration”.
Replacing cash bail with expensive ankle monitoring devices is one example of this. “Many reformers rightly point out that an ankle bracelet is preferable to a prison cell,” Alexander wrote. “Yet I find it difficult to call this progress. As I see it, digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery.”
As for Ivanka’s approach to criminal justice reform? One imagines that, just like her approach to women’s empowerment, it will be vacuous and self-serving. Still, she may need to serve herself sooner rather than later: the Trump Organization is facing a number of legal issues. One imagines a get-out-of-jail-free card would be very useful.
Man who talks a lot of rubbish thinks women talk too much
Yoshiro Mori, head of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics organizing committee, reckons women talk too much and cause meetings to “drag on”. When asked why he thinks that he replied: “I don’t talk to women that much these days, so I don’t know.” Seems like he doesn’t know a lot of things: while women are often stereotyped as chatty plenty of research shows men are by far the more garrulous sex in meetings and public forums.
Rashida Tlaib, AOC and the power of vulnerability
Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered emotional speeches about the US Capitol attack this week. These speeches weren’t just powerful; in many ways they were historic. As Moira Donegan wrote: “Vulnerability and power do not often go together, and certainly not in female politicians.” However, by opening up about her trauma, “AOC demonstrated that she was unwilling to concede that female vulnerability is incompatible with the dignity of power. Refusing to separate those two was a demonstration of her feminist vision, a gesture at what an authentic kind of power might look like.”
‘Sew bros’: the wholesome rise of men who stitch
George Clooney is one of them: he recently revealed he’s been sewing clothes for his kids during lockdown.
Mike Pence is starting a podcast to share good news about conservatism
Couldn’t he just take up sewing instead?
New Zealand’s Māori foreign minister is the perfect diplomat
Nanaia Mahuta is impossible to miss: she’s the first woman to sit in the country’s parliament wearing a moko kauae, an ancient Māori tattoo form. But it’s not just her tattoo that sets her apart. Morgan Godfery argues that, under Mahuta’s ministership, New Zealand’s commitment to prioritizing trading arrangements over global human rights issues may be changing.
French 106-year-old pianist to release sixth album
Colette Maze began playing the piano at age four to find warmth absent in her strict upbringing: she’s been going strong ever since and has a new album out in April.
US toddler to release debut album recorded in the womb
At the other end of the age spectrum a Brooklyn toddler is about to release her debut album, the world’s first LP made from sounds inside the womb.
The week in rodent-archy
Naked mole rats, I’m sorry to say, are absolutely hideous. Turns out they’re also pretty xenophobic. Scientists have discovered that naked mole rats speak in accents unique to their colonies and ignore rodents from different colonies. The accent of each colony is determined by the queen but can change if she is overthrown. This may be the first time that cultural transmission of dialect has been seen in small rodents and the study is causing quite a stir in the naked mole rat community. More