US Politics

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has said US Congress is in a “unique moment” and “better poised than ever” to pass a paid family and medical leave bill that would make the benefit permanently accessible to all American workers for the first time, as she and congresswoman Rosa DeLauro reintroduced the legislation on Friday.Currently, the US is the only industrialised nation in the world not to have a national paid family and medical leave policy.The two Democrats first introduced the Family Act in 2013 and in every Congress since then, but it has so far failed to gain sufficient support to become law. Now, however, following the pandemic and the change of administration, they believe the momentum is finally with them and paid leave could soon become a permanent reality for American workers.“I see this as a unique moment in time … Not only is paid leave understood, it’s something supported by the majority of Americans – Democrats and Republicans,” Gillibrand said in a video press conference.So far the legislation, which they reintroduced on Friday, has the support of more than 230 members of Congress. It would entitle every worker, regardless of company size and including those who are self-employed or work part-time, to up to 12 weeks of partial income – including for their own health conditions, pregnancy, birth or adoption, or to care for a child, parent or spouse.Nearly 80% of US workers – a disproportionate share of whom are women and people of colour – do not have access to paid leave through their employer, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF).“This first introduction has more co-sponsors in the Senate and the House than we’ve ever had, so we are better poised than ever before to actually pass this bill,” Gillibrand said. “It’s something that Joe Biden believes in, Kamala Harris believes in, I have the support of the entire Senate leadership.”Following the pandemic, an emergency paid leave scheme was introduced last year as part of the Cares Act. Biden has since pledged to expand and extend it as part of the $1.9tn Covid-19 relief package that is making its way through Congress.Gillibrand said it was a good “first step”, but next they want to see paid leave become permanent. When asked about a timeline for getting it passed, the senator said: “We want to get the pandemic paid leave in this next Covid bill and then we want to get the permanent paid leave in whatever the next budget funding spending bill that exists.”She said they are “open to every legislative avenue”, adding: “We are ready and waiting to work collaboratively with all our colleagues.”DeLauro said they met with Biden, Harris and White House staff on Friday morning and talked about how they would get the bill passed.“We’re going to work it out so that it happens and we’ve got the support of the administration on making sure we can get it across that finishing line,” she added.Gillibrand said being able to address Biden and Harris directly is “exactly what is making this moment ripe for success”.They said the pandemic – and the emergency leave – has helped the issue gain traction as more members of Congress, across the political spectrum, realise how critically it is needed.Gillibrand said: “Getting it in the Covid relief bill, even in a pandemic form, is extremely valuable because it lays the groundwork for a permanent paid leave.”DeLauro added: “If there’s anything that this pandemic has done is to shine a light on the inequities that are out there, making paid family leave more important than ever …“Several years ago this was at the fringe, it was not discussed. Today, paid family and medical leave is at the centre of the discourse with every opportunity to see it become a reality.”Joycelyn Tate, senior policy adviser at Black Women’s Roundtable, said paid leave is a critical issue for many Black women.“Many Black women are working in these frontline jobs like home healthcare aids, grocery store workers, janitorial service workers and delivery drivers and they do not earn a single day of paid leave,” she said. “Now this forces Black women to make the agonising choice between our health and the health of our families, or our economic security if we or our family members get sick.”Debra Ness, president of the NPWF, said “the time is now” to take action.“The time is now to pass an inclusive paid family and medical leave policy so workers no longer have to make the impossible choice between caring for themselves or a loved one and their financial security.” More

Republicans in the House of Representatives remain enthralled to Donald Trump and fearful of his base. On Thursday, 95% of the chamber’s Republicans refused to strip the freshman member Marjorie Taylor Greene – a gun-brandishing, hate-spewing, conspiracy-monger – of her committee assignments. The deadly aftermath of the 6 January insurrection changed nothing.Trump is out of office but his spirit lives on. The anger and resentment of the Republican rank-and-file will likely define the party’s trajectory in the coming months and years. QAnon is now a pillar of the party, as much as the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, may disavow knowledge of its existence.Greene’s sins are real, not imagined. Over the years she has blamed California’s wildfires on a Jewish laser beam from space, claimed 9/11 was an inside job, and suggested that school shootings were staged. In 2018 and 2019 she endorsed social media comments that appeared to support the assassination or execution of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. (Recently, Greene has partly walked back some of her more disturbing past remarks.)Sadly, the Republican party has morphed into a fever swamp fueled by racially driven animus tethered to a fear and loathing of modernity. A normal political party would not have someone like Greene holding office. But Republicans these days function like a fringe grouping.Likewise, the mob that attacked the Capitol cannot simply be discounted as an outburst of conspiratorial rage. The insurrectionist horde left a trail of dead and wounded. Military veterans, real estate brokers and seemingly upstanding members of America’s middle class filled the rioters’ ranks. Deep-pocketed Republican donors reportedly helped make the carnage possible.Yet the discontented-disconnect that propelled Trump’s 2016 electoral upset threatens to undermine Republican efforts to reclaim the House and Senate. In January, tens of thousands of voters exited the Republican party. In Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Utah, the party suffered a cumulative loss of more than 30,000 voters from its rolls.The Republican party has morphed into a fever swamp fueled by racially driven animus tethered to a fear and loathing of modernityPolitics is about addition, not subtraction. An exodus of college-educated suburban moms and dads is not what McCarthy needs to wrest the speaker’s gavel. Likewise, this hemorrhaging will not assist Mitch McConnell in dethroning Chuck Schumer from his perch as the Senate majority leader.Liz Cheney retaining the no 3 slot in the Republican House leadership does not alter this pocked and toxic landscape. Cheney’s hard-fought victory over 61 benighted colleagues is testament to her own grit and the desire of the Republican party’s top-guns to keep the existing power structure intact. Nothing more.Cheney and Greene each carried the day among the House Republicans, but the Georgia freshman actually garnered more of their backing. Cheney’s upward arc is done, while Greene is free to embark on an endless fundraising binge and tweet to her heart’s content. Freedom can be another word for nothing left to lose.Indeed, on the state level, religious-like devotion to Trump is the operative creed of the realm. Those who refuse to kiss the ring are the new heretics.Arizona Republicans censured Cindy McCain, the late senator’s wife, for backing Joe Biden. They also blasted Doug Ducey, the state’s Republican governor, for refusing to steal the election.In Wyoming, 10 Republican county organizations have censured Cheney for supporting Trump’s impeachment, and more are expected in the coming weeks. Already, Cheney faces a primary challenge.Meanwhile, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse confronts possible censure in his home state. He earned their wrath for condemning Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy. Once upon a time, Sasse wrote a book subtitled Why We Hate Each Other.For the record, Sasse is one of only five Senate Republicans who opposed dismissing impeachment charges against the 45th president. He also declined to back Trump four years ago and last November too. A church-going Presbyterian, Sasse framed things this way: “Politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude.”Really?Even now, Trump is the top choice for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination. Beyond that, more than three-quarters of Republicans believe there was widespread voter fraud despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For many, the truth is too much to handle.Regardless, Trump’s big lie has taken root and will not soon disappear. The demographic tectonics and disparities that spurred Trump to power are still with us. Biden’s election didn’t change that.Practically speaking, only a string of consecutive electoral losses may snap the Republicans out of their enchantment with the ex-television reality show host. Until then, Trump will remain the Republican party’s dominant force. In Greene’s words, it is his party, “it doesn’t belong to anybody else.” More

Awaiting punishment for her lengthy history of extreme and violent commentary on Thursday, Marjorie Taylor Greene rose to introduce herself to the Congress. Wearing a mask embroidered with the words “FREE SPEECH”, the freshman congresswoman from Georgia regretted that she had not yet had a chance to tell her House colleagues “who I am and what I’m about”.Over the next eight minutes, Greene sought to untangle herself from the litany of dangerous and unfounded conspiracy theories that she had peddled on social media in recent years – “words of the past” that did not represent her.Greene renounced her embrace of QAnon, an ideology the FBI has called a potential domestic terrorism threat. She said school shootings in Parkland and Sandy Hook were “absolutely real”, and not so-called “false flag” events designed to build support for gun control laws, as she once suggested. “I also want to tell you 9/11 absolutely happened,” she declared, somewhat sheepishly, after previously questioning whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon.Despite a show of contrition, however, she offered no explicit apology. Instead, a defiant Greene warned that those seeking to “condemn me and crucify me in the public square for words that I said and I regret” were wading into dangerous political territory that would haunt them should Republicans reclaim the majority.She remained in the chamber for the debate, as her colleagues litigated her past – and sought to tie it to her party’s future.“The party of Lincoln, the party of Eisenhower, the party of Reagan is becoming the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the party of violent conspiracy theories,” the House rules committee chairman, Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a floor speech.Hours later, the House rendered its verdict, stripping Greene of her committee assignments in an extraordinary rebuke of the first-term lawmaker who Donald Trump once praised as a “future Republican star”.Yet Greene’s exile – over the objection of all but 11 House Republicans – has only exacerbated the growing chasm within the party, between an emboldened extremist movement that flourished under Trump’s presidency and an increasingly isolated group of conservatives who want to move beyond the divide-and-conquer politics of the last four years.As pressure built on Republicans to discipline Greene, Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, called her “looney lies” a “cancer” to the party and the nation. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, also condemned Greene’s statements, but ultimately declined to take any punitive action, arguing that she should not be punished for remarks made before she was elected.In those social media posts and videos, only some of which she disavowed and many of which came to light before she was elected, Greene indicated support for executing top Democrats, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi; claimed that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in government; and compared Black Lives Matter activists to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.She also trafficked in a slew of conspiracy theories, many of which are rooted in antisemitism, Islamophobia and white nationalism. Most notably, she embraced QAnon, a conspiracy that claims Trump is trying to save the world from a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. In posts unearthed recently, Greene wrote in 2018 that a devastating California wildfire was caused by a Jewish-controlled “laser” beamed from space.fIn another video, she accosts the gun-control activist David Hogg, who survived the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, as he walked down a street in Washington. He was there to lobby lawmakers in support of passing gun safety measures, while she was there to oppose them. “He’s a coward,” she said of Hogg.Greene represents an ascending far-right movement within the Republican ranks that carries the banner of Trump’s grievance politics – and the support of his loyal supporters who are now critical to the party’s future.“We’re thankful for her,” said Dianne Putnam, chair of the Whitfield county Republican party, which is situated in Greene’s district. “We’ve been waiting to have a congressman [sic] that would take a stand for conservative causes and be a voice for us that we felt we’ve never had.”In her telling, Greene was not particularly political before 2016, when she was galvanized by the billionaire’s “plain talk”. She became increasingly political – and radical.In 2017, disenchanted with mainstream news coverage of Trump’s presidency, she turned to online message boards where she discovered QAnon, at the time a fringe internet subculture. She began writing for a now defunct conspiracy blog called American Truth Seekers, publishing articles that expressed support for QAnon and other outrageous theories, among them that Hillary Clinton was behind John F Kennedy Jr’s 1999 death in an airplane crash.Greene told the House on Thursday that she “walked away” from QAnon in 2018 after discovering “misinformation, lies, things that were not true”. But as recently as late last year, she spoke openly and favorably of the movement.In 2019, Greene decided to run for Congress. She initially launched a campaign in the district where she lived, a competitive seat in suburban Atlanta held by the Democratic congresswoman Lucy McBath. But when the Republican congressman Tom Graves announced his retirement, she switched to run in Georgia’s 14th congressional district, a deep-red corner of the state that borders Tennessee to the north and Alabama to the west.Running on a “pro-Life, pro-Gun, pro-Trump” platform, the political novice cast herself as a deeply Christian mother of three who was the first in her family to graduate from college. She touted her success as a businesswoman, running a commercial construction company founded by her father, and later, a CrossFit gym.After placing first in a crowded primary field, Greene advanced to a runoff against John Cowan, a neurosurgeon who pitched himself as equally conservative and pro-Trump minus the “circus act”. “She is not conservative – she’s crazy,” he told Politico ahead of the election, adding: “She deserves a YouTube channel, not a seat in Congress.”Though her messaging raised concern among some national Republicans, there was never a concerted strategy to defeat her. A handful of party leaders and conservative groups intervened to endorse Cowan, but many remained neutral. She earned crucial support from the members of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, including Jim Jordan, the group’s founder, and Andy Biggs, its chairman.Greene won the runoff with nearly 60% of the vote, and coasted to victory in November.Since her arrival in Congress, she has continued to build on her brand as a far-right provocateur. Sporting masks that said “Stop the Steal”, Greene was a vocal proponent of the baseless claim that Trump won the presidential election, and was among a handful of conservatives who met with him at the White House to discuss overturning the election results.Greene referred to 6 January, the day Congress was set to formalize the election results, as Republicans’ “1776 moment” before a rally to defend the president turned into a deadly riot on Capitol Hill. Even after the assault, she continued to claim Trump would remain in office and decried his impeachment. Days later, she announced that she would file articles of impeachment against Joe Biden – before he was even sworn into office.Far from being a fringe figure, Greene represents the “tip of the spear” of a radical movement that is building power within the Republican party, said Adele Stan, director of Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way.In Congress, she is joined by Lauren Boebert, a freshman Republican from Colorado who has also expressed support for QAnon conspiracy theories. Across the country, local parties and elected officials are rushing to embrace – rather than confront – the swirl of toxic conspiracy theories and disinformation coursing through their grassroots.By failing to unilaterally punish Greene, Stan said Republicans were giving “passive affirmation” to the ideology promulgated by the web of far-right and white nationalist groups who organized and led the deadly siege at the Capitol on 6 January.“If you don’t hold people accountable, then things will continue to spiral out of control, which is what we’re seeing happen in the Republican party right now – and why there was an insurrection at the Capitol,” she said. “People need to be held accountable for what they say.”Banished from her committees by House Democrats and 11 Republicans after just a month in Congress, Greene said she felt liberated. At a news conference on Friday, Greene said she would use her political sway and social-media savvy to grow the pro-Trump movement and push Republicans further to the right.“I woke up early this morning literally laughing thinking about what a bunch of morons the Democrats (+11) are for giving some one like me free time,” Greene wrote on Twitter. “Oh, this is going to be fun!” More

The blue door at the side of the White House podium slid open. “Hi everyone!” exclaimed Jen Psaki with a congeniality seldom heard in the briefing room in recent years.The press secretary introduced Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, and stepped away from the podium only to hastily reach back for a face mask she had momentarily forgotten there. Warning reporters that their time with Sullivan was limited, she quipped: “I will be the bad cop as per usual over here.”“Bad cop” is one of Psaki’s trademark phrases, along with “circle back” and “I don’t have anything more for you”. All are now becoming familiar to cable news viewers at the restored daily White House press briefing. After four madcap years of Donald Trump, the sessions are disorientingly civil, fact-based and unnewsy. In a word, “normal”.“To actually hear questions and substantive answers is refreshing,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster. “It does feel like something from a different era.”Psaki is the most prominent public face of a Joe Biden administration that has pledged to restore order and trust with a press castigated by Trump as “the enemy of the people”. Its communications strategy has involved a blitz of speeches, briefings and policy documents, including thrice-weekly virtual sessions with experts on the coronavirus pandemic. Whereas Trump’s White House was a theatre of anarchic improvisation, Biden’s is a set where everyone sticks to the script.At Thursday’s press briefing, Sullivan previewed Biden’s announcement cutting off support for Saudi military operations in Yemen. Psaki wielding a giant briefing book, reeled off facts and figures about why the president’s $1.9tn Covid relief plan is essential. Then she took questions, starting with the Associated Press, another quietly revived tradition.For the dozen or so reporters – masked and physically distanced due to coronavirus precautions – sitting in the blue seats of the compact briefing room, the back and forth is crisper than in the Trump era. There is a sense of kinetic energy that was lacking when the president himself could be rambling and soporific and when his press secretaries aimed sound bites mostly at cable news and YouTube.But there is also a fast chess game taking place, with reporters moving pieces forward in search of a weakness and Psaki marshaling her defenses to dodge questions or avoid a headline-generating gaffe. And when the pressure mounts, she has a queen’s gambit.She told National Public Radio’s (NPR) humorous Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! program last weekend: “I have a little secret thing I do – maybe not secret because I’m telling all of you. But when reporters are getting really loud, or they’re starting to ask crazy questions, I just slow down my pace, and I talk very quietly, and I treat them like I’m an orderly sometimes in an insane asylum.”But it is not all smooth-sailing.There was a minor clean-up required this week when Psaki was asked about Trump’s much-mocked space force. The press secretary replied with more than a hint of sarcasm: “Wow. Space force. It’s the plane of today!” – a reference to a past question about the color scheme of Air Force One.Republicans demanded an apology with the Alabama congressman Mike Rogers fulminating: “It’s concerning to see the Biden administration’s press secretary blatantly diminish an entire branch of our military as the punchline of a joke.” Psaki did not say sorry but did feel compelled to tweet recognition of the space force’s “important work”.If the 42-year-old from Connecticut is a polished performer, it is because she has deep experience. She was a traveling press secretary for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, a state department spokesperson and, from 2015 to 2017, White House communications director. She was then a political commentator for CNN and a fellow at Georgetown University in Washington.Mike McCurry, a former White House press secretary under Bill Clinton, is an acquaintance who has offered Psaki occasional advice such as “keep a good sense of humour” and “don’t let it consume every bit of your life”.He said: “Two weeks in, she’s doing very well. She’s gives good, complete answers, She’s taken on some tough subjects. She knows how to kind of parry and thrust, as you have to do from the podium, and I think that the press appreciates it. There’s a requisite amount of spin that goes with the job to try to put things in a favorable light for the president but she doesn’t overdo that.”That could not be said for Psaki’s predecessor, Kayleigh McEnany, who pushed false conspiracy theories about a stolen election and ended each briefing with a tirade against the “fake news” media. Compared to such cartoon villains, as they were perceived by critics, the new team of professional bureaucrats were bound to enjoy a honeymoon period.Jen Psaki has become must-see TV. I think many people are glued to these press conferencesWendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “Jen Psaki has become must-see TV. I think many people are glued to these press conferences. They’re longer than they used to be and she’s very good at what she does and, to the extent that she answers questions as truthfully as she can, it’s like being in a rainstorm after a drought.”Communications strategy is an early case study in the question of whether Trump did change the presidency forever or the White House and other institutions are more resilient than often supposed and able to revert to Bush and Obama-era norms.Those norms were hardly flawless. All presidents lie, argued Adam Serwer in the Atlantic magazine, providing a list of examples from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama and concluding that Biden will inevitably lie too when the public interest conflicts with the political interest of the White House. Trump’s narcissistic mendacity was hardly a solution to the problems of political doublespeak, but a snap back to the previous norm of evasiveness and spin may not be it either.Where the Biden White House will also break from the immediate Trumpian past, Schiller predicted, is by giving a more prominent role to other officials. “Biden has explicitly chosen very experienced politicians for most of his key positions, people who have been in front of cameras before, people who know how to communicate for the most part. He will rely heavily on a lot of those cabinet secretaries to get out his message on particular policies and give them some autonomy and freedom to do that,” Schiller said.Trump, by contrast, was often said to be his own communications director, press secretary and all-round salesman. He tormented his staff by upending their message of the day with heat-of-the-moment tweets that announced firings, threatened wars and dominated news cycles. But even some detractors admitted that it provided a real-time window on the president’s thinking unlike anything seen before.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There’s no doubt that Donald Trump was a pioneer in the use of social media. He was able to drive the agenda in a way that few presidents have ever been able to do using Twitter.”Meanwhile Biden generated the headline on the Mashable website: “Joe Biden’s first @POTUS tweet is refreshingly boring.” Indeed, Biden’s conventional tweets lack the personal authenticity not only of Trump but of social media savvy politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Given the president’s history of gaffes, this may be no bad thing, Jacobs added.“With Biden there’s really no choice because he’s a guy who shares Trump’s problems with agenda control. Biden is only effective as a communicator as long as he’s being handed talking points. When he’s gone off script, it’s been a wild ride. He doesn’t have the communication skills of Trump and he is prone to seat-of-the-pants comments that are damaging.”The Biden communications team was spared potentially troubling distraction last month when Trump was banned from Twitter, effectively cutting his mic. Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, does not miss him. “We didn’t learn anything from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed except that the man was an egomaniacal, hypersensitive petulant child,” he said.“As president there is a way to use it that doesn’t come off like you’re sitting in your underwear at two in the morning tweeting manically because you just saw something online that that pissed you off.” More

The time is out of joint. When lost for words, as many have been over the past five years, William Shakespeare is a useful go-to guy. His plays have helped us make sense of plague, political upheaval and a mad monarch, delivering soliloquies by tweet.
“While maintaining his career as the most-produced playwright in the world, he is also moonlighting as the most-cited provider of metaphors for the Trump era – and particularly its denouement,” Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of the New York Times, observed last month. “Hardly a thumb-sucking political analysis goes by without allusion to one of the 37 canonical plays, however limited or far-fetched the comparison may be.”
But as the dust settles on the Trump presidency, Green’s exhortation – brush down your Shakespeare, stop quoting him now – seems unlikely to gain much traction.
Books have been written. Jeffrey Wilson, a Harvard academic, is the author of Shakespeare and Trump, published last year. The book’s cover features its title emblazoned on a red cap, in lieu of the words “Make America great again”, beneath a pair of donkey’s ears.
“The thesis of the book is tragedy but we’ve got a little bit of comedy in there too,” Wilson says. “So the cover alludes to Shakespeare’s character Bottom, who’s this kind of huckster blowhard who gets his head turned into a donkey to symbolise the stupidity. Plus, Bottom’s just obsessed with building a wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Which other characters parallel Trump? “There’s going to be Julius Caesar, who thinks he’s a god over people, not one of them. There’s going to be Richard III, this power-hungry criminal whose clownishness seduces supporters. There’s going to be Macbeth, whose thirst for power is wrapped up in his fragile masculinity.
Book embed
“There’s going to be Henry VI, this child king whose weak leadership creates this fractious counsellor infighting all around him. There’s going to be Angelo in Measure for Measure, a self-declared law-and-order guy who is himself a criminal. And there’s going to be King Lear, who so completely binds the personal and the political that the collapse of his government is also the collapse of his family.”
When the pandemic finally ends and theatres spring back to life, that list will offer rich pickings to directors. There is a long tradition of holding up the mirror of Shakespeare to specific cultures, from Akira Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well and Ran to irreverent productions in South Africa that critiqued apartheid.
Some are subtle, others on-the-nose. In 2017, the director Oskar Eustis’s production of Julius Caesar in New York’s Central Park depicted the eponymous character with blond hair and red tie. It all caused a brouhaha in conservative media: corporate sponsors pulled support, protesters stormed the stage and Eustis received death threats.
Wilson reflects: “When I asked [Eustis], he insisted he wanted it to be a very blunt instrument. The fascinating thing for me about that production is that it may or may not have helped us better understand Donald Trump but it helped me better understand Julius Caesar as a text.
“It allowed us to use Trump as a lens for understanding the way that Shakespeare wrote this play, which is so filled with comedy in the first half, the kind of outrageous, obnoxious, satirical comedy that is so associated with Trump. That’s how Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar should be performed.”
The play, he says, “is drawing upon tropes of the 17th-century clown, the antichrist who comically comes on stage and thinks that he’s the most glorious thing ever invented and is revealed to be a total fraud.
“You don’t really get that sense of Julius Caesar when you watch most Shakespearean stagings of the play but by using Trump as a lens to understand that, we can use the accessible emotions and knowledge that we have from current events to rethink how we should read this distant, old, obscure literature.”
Wilson’s book also considers how America has seen Shakespeare in the age of Trump. A month after his victory in 2016, for example, students at the University of Pennsylvania took down a portrait of Shakespeare and replaced it with a photo of Audre Lorde, an African American writer, feminist and civil rights activist.
Steve Bannon, who led Trump’s winning campaign and became a White House strategist, was previously a banker, media executive and Hollywood producer who in the 1990s co-wrote two Shakespearean adaptations: a Titus Andronicus set in space, complete with ectoplasmic sex, and a hip-hop Coriolanus, based in South-Central LA.
The screenplays are not publicly available but Wilson tracked them down – and found an insidious racism. He writes: “Specifically, Bannon’s Coriolanus suggests that African Americans will kill themselves off through Black-on-Black crime, while his Andronicus tells the story of a ‘noble race’ eliminating its cultural enemies on the way to securing political power.”
Wilson adds: “NowThis did a table read of Coriolanus and actors were just sprinting to get through the lines. One of them said, ‘It sounds like he’s never met a Black person in his life.’” More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden has said that he doesn’t believe his predecessor, Donald Trump, should have access to any intelligence briefings due to his “erratic behavior”.“I think not,” Biden said in a Friday evening interview, when asked by the CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell if Trump should get the briefings.[embedded content]“Because of his erratic behavior unrelated to the insurrection,” Biden said, referring to the 6 January storming of the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters.Former US presidents traditionally receive some intelligence briefings even after they have left office.Trump frequently denigrated the intelligence community and was not known for taking long briefings during his White House tenure. The Republican is facing his second impeachment trial next week, this time charged with sparking an insurrection at the Capitol by calling on people to “fight” the results of the election he lost.Asked what his biggest concern would be if Trump received classified information, Biden demurred.“I’d rather not speculate out loud. I just think that there is no need for him to have the … intelligence briefings. What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?” Biden said.The interview came as Congress approved a budget that would pave the way for Biden to pass his $1.9tn Covid-19 relief bill, though he conceded in the CBS interview that he did not expect his proposal for a hike in the minimum wage to $15 an hour to be included.“My guess is it will not be in it. But I do think that we should have a minimum wage, stand by itself, $15 an hour,” Biden told CBS.Increasing the minimum wage may run afoul of Senate rules on reconciliation, a tool Democrats plan to use to pass Biden’s coronavirus relief bill without Republican support in the closely divided Senate.Biden said he would be prepared to negotiate the wage rise separately and the increase could be phased in.“No one should work 40 hours a week and live below the poverty wage. And if you’re making less than $15 an hour, you’re living below the poverty wage,” Biden said. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. More

The US Senate is set to formally begin its second impeachment trial of Donald Trump next week on charges that he helped incite a riot at the Capitol on 6 January. The formal article of impeachment is a charge of incitement of insurrection that the US House approved, with support from 10 Republicans, earlier this month.Trump is the first US president to face an impeachment trial after leaving office and the votes of 67 senators are needed for a guilty verdict and conviction. Trump abruptly hired a new legal team on Sunday, less than two weeks before his impeachment trial was set to begin. He parted ways with Butch Bowers, a well-known South Carolina lawyer who was set to lead his defense. There are reports the breakup was over strategy and legal fees. Trump’s new lawyers have filed a flimsy 14-page brief arguing Trump cannot be impeached because he has already left office and was not responsible for inciting violence at the Capitol. Trump told supporters they needed to “fight like hell” before the riot.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has tapped nine Democrats to be House impeachment managers and essentially serve as prosecutors against Trump. Here’s a look at some of the major players in the trial.Trump’s counselDavid Schoen The Georgia-based attorney is no stranger to controversy. He briefly represented Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime ally, during an appeal of Stone’s criminal conviction last year. He told the Atlanta Jewish Times that Stone, who was eventually, pardoned by Trump was “was very bright, full of personality and flair” and that the case against him was “very unfair and politicized”. During the same interview, he touted his work defending unsavory clients.“I represented all sorts of reputed mobster figures: alleged head of Russian mafia in this country, Israeli mafia and two Italian bosses, as well a guy the government claimed was the biggest mafioso in the world,” he said.In 2019, Schoen met with Jeffrey Epstein in jail after Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges. After Epstein died by suicide, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he planned to get into the case to fight and win. In the interview with the Atlanta Jewish Times, he embraced a conspiracy theory, saying he believed Epstein was murdered.Schoen told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he considers himself primarily a civil rights lawyer.Bruce Castor A former prosecutor in Pennsylvania, Castor is best known for declining to bring sexual assault charges against Bill Cosby when Andrea Constand, a Temple University employee, accused him of drugging and raping her in 2005. Castor has said he did not believe he could win the case and secured an agreement from Cosby not to plead the fifth amendment in a civil case. Dozens of women would come forward to say Cosby sexually assaulted them and in 2018, Cosby was convicted on three counts of sexually assaulting Constand.Castor, who briefly became Pennsylvania’s acting attorney general during a 2016 scandal, has a flair for the spotlight, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2015, when reporters came to his home amid scrutiny of the Cosby case, he threatened them. And in 2008, he made it known that he hung the certificate marking his position as Montgomery county commissioner above his toilet, according to the Inquirer, symbolizing his feelings about the local government.Castor’s cousin is Stephen Castor, who questioned witnesses on behalf of House Republicans during Trump’s first impeachment. Stephen Castor reportedly recommended his cousin for the job to Trump, according to the New York Times.Senate party leadersMitch McConnell The cunning House minority leader, McConnell won’t be making a case for or against Trump during the trial, but will remain one of the most powerful Republicans. In a significant move, McConnell has left the door open towards voting for impeaching Trump, which could encourage other Republicans following along. Even if they do get McConnell’s vote, Democrats would still need to get at least 16 other senators to vote for impeachment – a high bar.Chuck Schumer The newly elected Senate majority leader, Schumer will be responsible for keeping his caucus aligned and trying to win over Republican support, all while helping to maintain messaging during the trial. Schumer has been outspoken about the need to impeach Trump.House impeachment managersJamie Raskin The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, tapped Raskin, a Maryland congressman first elected in 2016, to be the lead House impeachment manager to make the case for convicting Trump. A longtime constitutional law professor at American University, Raskin has been unsparing in his criticism of the role Trump played in inciting the 6 January riot. He reportedly began drafting the article of impeachment against the president hours after the attack.Raskin is taking on the role at a time when his family is in mourning – his 25-year-old son Tommy died by suicide on New Year’s Eve. Raskin has pointed to his son as one of the reasons why he chose to take on leading the impeachment effort. “I’ve devoted my life to the constitution and to the republic. I’m a professor of constitutional law, but I did it really with my son in my heart, and helping lead the way. I feel him in my chest,” he told the Guardian.Diana DeGette DeGette has represented Denver and some of its suburbs since 1997. A former civil rights and employment law attorney, has called Trump “one of the greatest threats to the future of our Democracy”.David Cicilline A Democrat on the House judiciary committee, Cicilline has represented Rhode Island in Congress for the last decade, and before that served as the first openly gay mayor of Providence. A former public defender, Cicilline signed on to the article of impeachment days after the 6 January riot.Joaquín Castro The Texas congressman from San Antonio has been in Congress since 2013 and serves on the intelligence and foreign affairs committees. He is also the twin brother of Julián Castro, the former HUD secretary and presidential candidate. In an interview on ABC’s This Week earlier this month, Castro defended impeaching Trump after he left office, saying impeachment was in part about making sure Trump could never run for office again. If Trump is convicted, senators can take another vote on whether to bar him from holding public office again.Ted Lieu A four-term congressman representing the Los Angeles area, Lieu reportedly helped organize the impeachment effort while the Capitol was still under attack. Hiding in an office, Lieu sent text messages to every member on the House judiciary committee, saying it should immediately begin drafting articles of impeachment, with or without the blessing of House leadership, according to the Los Angeles Times. Lieu, an immigrant from Taiwan and an air force veteran who frequently needled Trump on Twitter, told the New York Times that on the day of the attack he was unbothered over whether or not top Democrats would support his effort. “I was just super pissed off,” he said.Stacey Plaskett A delegate representing the US Virgin Islands, Plaskett was picked by Pelosi to serve as an impeachment manager after passing her over for Trump’s first trial. A former prosecutor in the Bronx and litigator at the justice department, Plaskett said in 2019 being picked to be an impeachment manager would be symbolic to her constituents, who do not get to cast votes for president (as a delegate, Plaskett also does not get to vote on House legislation), according to BuzzFeed. Plaskett also told Pelosi in 2019 it would be symbolic to pick a Black woman to serve as an impeachment manager. “I understand the importance of being a House manager and know that there will be quite a few young ladies and women for that fact of color who will be looking to me as I take on the position of House manager,” she wrote to Pelosi, according to BuzzFeed.Eric Swalwell A former prosecutor and outspoken critic of Trump, Swalwell has represented his Bay Area California district for almost a decade. A member of the House judiciary committee, he worked on the first Trump impeachment and briefly ran for president but ended his campaign in July 2019.Madeleine Dean First elected in the 2018 Democratic wave, Dean represents a district that includes the Philadelphia suburbs and sits on the House judiciary committee. A lawyer, she reportedly requested to serve on the committee to apply her legal skills. “The first impeachment was serious and grievous and amounted to high crimes and misdemeanors against our country, but this one is so much worse,” she told the Philadelphia Inquirer.Joe Neguse A second-term congressman from Colorado, Neguse is the son of Eritrean refugees who ran for Congress in response to Trump’s immigration policies, according to the Washington Post. The 36-year-old will be the youngest lawmaker to ever serve as an impeachment manager, according to the Post. More

Joe Biden urged Congress to swiftly pass a $1.9tn relief package, emphasizing the collective financial and emotional stress millions of Americans face as the pandemic that has claimed more than 450,000 lives continues into its second year.“I know some in Congress think we’ve already done enough to deal with the crisis in the country,” he said. “Others think that things are getting better and we can afford to sit back and either do little or do nothing at all. That’s not what I see. I see enormous pain in this country. A lot of folks out of work. A lot of folks going hungry.”By a party-line vote of 219-209, the House of Representatives passed a budget plan, after the Senate approved it in a pre-dawn vote. Vice-President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the first time.Congress can now work to write a bill that can be passed by a simple majority in both houses, which are controlled by Democrats. Mid-March has been suggested as a likely date by which the measure could be passed, a point at which enhanced unemployment benefits will expire if Congress does not act.“The simple truth is, if we make these investments now with interest rates at historic lows, it will generate more growth, higher incomes, a stronger economy, and our nation’s finances will be in a stronger position,” Biden said.Biden’s speech today marked an important shift in his tone about bipartisanship when it comes to providing coronavirus relief at a time when thousands of Americans are still dying from the virus every day and hospitals struggle to handle patient loads.Earlier this week, the president met with a group of Republican senators who had proposed a $600bn relief bill, much smaller than Biden’s plan. Biden said he was open to the senators’ ideas, but the White House acknowledged the president made clear in the meeting that he considered the Republican package to be too small to address the country’s financial needs right now.Biden, a longtime senator who based his presidential campaign around the idea that he could work with Republicans to achieve bipartisan compromise, is now saying Democrats are willing to go it alone on coronavirus relief.[embedded content]“What Republicans have proposed is either to do nothing or not enough,” Biden said. “All of the sudden, many of them have rediscovered fiscal restraint and concern for the deficits. Don’t kid yourself, this approach will come with a cost: more pain for more people for longer than it has to be.”Larry Summers, a former economic adviser to Barack Obama, has warned that Biden might be spending too much. The Republican representative Michael Burgess said Congress should wait until all of the previous $4tn in pandemic relief had been spent. He said $1tn had yet to go out the door.“Why is it suddenly so urgent that we pass another $2tn bill?” Burgess demanded.But Nancy Pelosi predicted the final Covid-19 relief legislation could pass Congress before 15 March, when special unemployment benefits that were added during the pandemic expire. In a letter to her fellow Democratic caucus members, the House speaker celebrated the Senate’s passage of the budget resolution early on Friday morning.“As we all know, a budget is a statement of our values. Our work to crush the coronavirus and deliver relief to the American people is urgent and of the highest priority. With this budget resolution, we have taken a giant step to save lives and livelihoods,” Pelosi said in the letter.Biden’s announcement comes amid more worrying signs about the jobs market. On Friday the labor department announced the US had added an anemic 49,000 new jobs in December. The US added an average of 176,000 jobs a month in 2019, before the pandemic hit the US.The latest numbers did show growth after job losses in December. The revised figures for the last month of 2020 showed 227,000 jobs had been lost, up from an initial estimate of 140,000.Officially, about 10 million people are now out of work but the Economics Policy Institute calculates that, in fact, 25.5 million workers – 15% of the workforce – are “either unemployed, otherwise out of work due to the pandemic, or employed but experiencing a drop in hours and pay”, according to a report released on Friday.The head of the International Monetary Fund on Friday warned that the US faced a possible “dangerous wave” of bankruptcies and unemployment if it did not maintain fiscal support until the coronavirus health crisis ended.“There is still that danger that if support is not sustained until we have a durable exit from the health crisis, there could be a dangerous wave of bankruptcies and unemployment,” said the IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva.Biden’s proposed budget also brought test votes on several Democratic priorities, including a $15 minimum wage. The Senate by voice vote adopted an amendment from Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, opposed to raising the wage during the pandemic. Ernst said a wage hike at this time would be “devastating” for small businesses.None of the amendments to the budget are binding on Democrats as they draft their Covid plan, but passage of a wage increase could prove difficult. Even if a $15 wage can get past procedural challenges in the final bill, passage will require the support from every Democrat in the 50-50 Senate, which could be a tall order.Senator Bernie Sanders, a vocal proponent of the wage increase, vowed to press ahead. “We need to end the crisis of starvation wages,” he said. More