US Politics

Donald Trump was at his Florida resort on Saturday, beginning post-presidency life while Joe Biden settled into the White House. But in Washington and beyond, the chaos of the 45th president’s final days in office continued to throw out damaging aftershocks.In yet another earth-shaking report, the New York Times said Trump plotted with an official at the Department of Justice to fire the acting attorney general, then force Georgia Republicans to overturn his defeat in that state.Former acting US defense secretary Christopher Miller, meanwhile, made an extraordinary admission, telling Vanity Fair that when he took the job in November, he had three goals: “No military coup, no major war and no troops in the street.”The former special forces officer added: “The ‘no troops in the street’ thing changed dramatically about 14.30 [on 6 January]. So that one’s off [the list].”That was the day a mob incited by Trump smashed its way into the US Capitol, in some cases allegedly looking for lawmakers to kidnap or kill. More than 100 arrests have been made over the riot, which also saw Trump impeached a second time.A deal between Democratic and Republicans in the Senate, announced on Friday night, means Trump’s second trial will begin in the week of 8 February. If convicted, a prospect unlikely given his grip on his party but not impossible given statements by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, Trump will most likely be barred from running for office again.The president’s persistent and possibly illegal efforts to overturn his loss to Biden in Georgia had been widely reported. Had he been successful, he would not have gained enough electoral votes to overturn his overall defeat.On the day Trump’s supporters broke into the Capitol, leaving five people dead, 147 Republicans in the House and Senate lodged objections to electoral college results. That attempt to overturn the election also failed.The law enforcement and Pentagon response to the Capitol riot has been questioned, regarding the ease with which security was breached and the time it took the national guard to get to the scene. One police officer died after confronting the rioters. Another gained national fame after leading attackers away from lawmakers.“We had meetings upon meetings,” Miller told Vanity Fair. “We were monitoring it. And we’re just like, ‘Please, God, please, God.’ Then the damn TV pops up and everybody converges on my office: [Joint Chiefs of Staff] chairman [Gen Mark Milley], Secretary of the Army [Ryan] McCarthy, the crew just converges.“We had already decided we’re going to need to activate the national guard, and that’s where the fog and friction comes in.”Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist installed as Miller’s chief of staff – and accused of obstructing the Biden transition – said: “The DC mayor finally said, ‘OK, I need more.’ Then the Capitol police … a federal agency and the Secret Service made the request … and we did it. And then we just went to work.”Miller called accusations the Pentagon was slow to respond “complete horseshit” and said: “I gotta tell you, I cannot wait to go to the Hill and have those conversations with senators and representatives … I know when something doesn’t smell right, and I know when we’re covering our asses. Been there. I know for an absolute fact that historians are going to look … at the actions that we did on that day and go, ‘Those people had their game together.’”By the time of the inauguration, two weeks later, 25,000 guard members were in the capital, an unprecedented display which put central Washington on lockdown. Troops also guarded state capitols against pro-Trump protests and plots that did not transpire.As the Capitol riot failed to overturn the election, so, according to the Times, Trump’s alleged plot against acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen did not work out either.The report detailed “stunned silence” among DoJ leaders as they were told of moves by Trump and “unassuming lawyer” Jeffrey Clark to “cast doubt on the election results and bolster … legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians”.Rosen became acting attorney general after the resignation of William Barr, who was widely seen as a Trump crony but who crossed the president by saying there was no evidence of the election fraud he baselessly alleged, claims which were repeatedly thrown out of court.Georgia Republicans including Governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger – the recipient of a wheedling and bullying call from Trump – also refused to accede to the president’s demands.[embedded content]In November 2018, Clark became assistant attorney general of the DoJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. In September 2020, he became acting assistant attorney general of the civil division. On 14 January, six days before the Biden inauguration, he resigned.In an interview with Clark published on 19 January, Bloomberg Law said he had “a reputation for pushing aggressive conservative legal principles and taking a hands-on approach that drew kudos from some colleagues but often frustrated career lawyers on his team”.The website of the rightwing Federalist Society lists Clark as a contributor.Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond in Virginia, told the Guardian: “The allegations would have been outlandish in a normal administration, but for Trump it was par for the course.”Of Clark’s future prospects, Tobias added: “Outlets have reported that he does not yet have post-government employment, a situation that last night’s revelations may exacerbate.”According to the Times, DoJ leaders decided that if Rosen was fired and replaced by Clark, they would resign en masse.“For some,” the paper reported, “the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.”Nixon resigned before he could be impeached over the Watergate scandal. After the Capitol attack, Trump refused to resign. Vice-President Mike Pence refused to invoke the 25th amendment, which provides for the removal of a president deemed unfit for office.Out of office, Trump is vulnerable to investigations at federal and state levels. On Friday, a Washington Examiner reporter found him “at his regular table in the grill room of the Trump international golf club” in West Palm Beach.“We’ll do something, but not just yet,” the ex-president reportedly said, his first comment since leaving the White House, before an aide “swooped in and swiftly, but politely, ended the interaction”.Ezra Cohen, another Trump appointee at the Pentagon, told Vanity Fair: “The president threw us under the bus. And when I say ‘us,’ I don’t mean only us political appointees or only us Republicans. He threw America under the bus. He caused a lot of damage to the fabric of this country.” More

A Pennsylvania legislator has apologised for sharing an image mocking the appearance of the recently departed state health secretary, Dr Rachel Levine, a transgender woman nominated to serve in the Biden administration.State representative Jeff Pyle, a Republican from Armstrong and Indiana counties in western Pennsylvania, said on Facebook he “had no idea” the post mocking Levine “would be … received as poorly as it was”, and said “tens of thousands of heated emails assured me it was”.“I owe an apology and I offer it humbly,” Pyle said, not specifically apologizing to Levine or other transgender people. He later apologized “to all affected”.Levine has not commented. The state health department did not immediately respond to an email seeking a reaction to Pyle’s post or his apology. Comments on his Facebook page had called for him to resign.Joe Biden tapped Levine a day before his inauguration be assistant secretary of health, leaving her poised to become the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the US Senate.Pyle, who was first elected in 2004, cited a conversation with the Democratic leader in the state House “who explained the error of my post”. He said he did not come up with the meme but merely shared it, though he said he should not have done so.“From this situation I have learned to not poke fun at people different than me and to hold my tongue,” he wrote. “Be a bigger man.”Pyle wrote that he would leave Facebook “soon” but was not resigning and would focus on a Butler Community College project and the economic revitalization of Pennsylvania amid the Covid-19 pandemic. More

Dr Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus task force co-ordinator under Donald Trump, “always” considered quitting as the US lurched into disaster under the 45th president – but didn’t.Speaking to CBS in an interview to be broadcast in full on Sunday, Birx said: “I had to ask myself every morning: is there something that I think I can do that would be helpful in responding to this pandemic? And it’s something I asked myself every night.“And when it became a point where … I wasn’t getting anywhere and that was like right before the election, I wrote a very detailed communication plan of what needed to happen the day after the election and how that needed to be executed. And there was a lot of promise that that would happen.”Joe Biden won the election and was sworn in as the 46th president on Wednesday. Another senior US public health official, Dr Anthony Fauci, has since spoken of his relief over the change of administration.According to Johns Hopkins University, by Saturday morning 413,791 people had died of Covid-19 in the US, out of nearly 25m cases. There were 3,758 deaths on Friday. It was also reported that hundreds of national guard troops who provided security for Biden’s inauguration have tested positive for the virus.[embedded content]“There are national guard troops here from every state in the union, probably,” Birx said. “Young individuals who are most likely to have asymptomatic infection if they do get infected. And they’re congruently living and eating mask-less, 25,000 to 30,000 of them from all over the United States.”Birx said the inauguration could prove to be a massive super-spreader event, because it had brought “30,000 people together where you know that they’re most likely to have asymptomatic infections and you haven’t pre-screened, pre-tested and serially tested.“These are dedicated troops. They’re going to do their mission. I can promise you that they will sacrifice their own health to do their mission, because … that’s what I came from. You sacrifice for others out of the military.”Birx, a US army physician, joined the Trump White House task force after a stellar career in public service, particularly in the fight against Aids.On Friday, as Biden signed executive orders to tackle hunger and economic pressure during the pandemic, the new president predicted a US death toll of more than 600,000. Vaccines were developed quickly under Trump but their rollout has been slow. Biden has promised to oversee 100m vaccinations in his first 100 days in office.The botched vaccination rollout has hit states with the capacity to vaccinate far more people than are currently receiving shots.On Saturday, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said a Trump-era decision that extended eligibility beyond healthcare and essential workers to seniors wasn’t working because of limited supplies. While 7 million New Yorkers are now eligible for vaccines, the state is only receiving 250,000 doses weekly, down from 300,000, Cuomo said.“They said they would increase the supply,” Cuomo told reporters in Albany. “They never did.”Like Fauci and other experts thrust on to the media front line, Birx became a familiar face in a task force all too evidently at the mercy of a mercurial president given to lies, conspiracy theories and the politicisation of every aspect of the public health response.Birx came under fire both from the president, who called her “pathetic”, and Trump’s critics. Nancy Pelosi was reported to have called her “the worst”.Asked by CBS’s Face the Nation if she had considered quitting, Birx said: “Always. I mean, why would you want to put yourself through that, um, every day?“Colleagues of mine that I had known for decades in that one experience, because I was in the White House decided that I had become this political person, even though they had known me forever.”Asked if she thought “the election was a factor in communication about the virus”, she said: “Yes. Yes.”Birx said she had been “censored” by the White House. Asked if she ever withheld information from the public, she said: “No.”Birx was criticised in December for a visit to family despite pandemic restrictions. She told CBS she would “need to retire” from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “probably within the next four to six weeks”. More

Sign up for the Week in Patriarchy, a newsletter​ on feminism and sexism sent every Saturday.Trump is gone but the violence he incited remainsThe Republicans have always been the party of law and order: they love ordering other people around while acting as if the law doesn’t apply to them. Over the past couple of weeks, Republicans have been having temper tantrums about new safety protocols that have been put in place in the US Capitol following the deadly 6 January insurrection. Lawmakers are now supposed to walk through metal detectors to enter the chamber and vote but a number of Republicans have been ignoring the rules. “You can’t stop me,” Louie Gohmert, a Texas congressman, reportedly sneered at Capitol police, as he shamelessly skirted a metal detector. Just imagine going to an airport and doing what Gohmert did: it would not end well.Think Gohmert is brazen? Some Republican lawmakers have been setting off the metal detectors but refusing to be searched. “Nah, I’m not going to do that,” the Georgia congressman Rick Allen reportedly told officers who attempted to scan him after he set off the machine. Similarly, the newly elected congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who tweeted earlier this year that she was going to carry a loaded Glock handgun to Congress, refused to have her bag searched. Congressman Andy Harris, meanwhile, did consent to a search on Thursday afternoon: a concealed weapon was found in his suit coat. Harris then asked a colleague to hold his gun while he went and voted on a bill. (Very normal behaviour; very normal country.) His colleague declined because he didn’t have a firearm license.House members that refuse to comply with safety protocols now face hefty fines. But fines are a woefully inadequate response to a worryingly incendiary situation; trying to smuggle guns into the Capitol isn’t just disrespectful, it’s dangerous. Particularly as there are still questions being asked about whether some members of Congress aided and abetted the violent attack on the Capitol earlier this month.Nobody should have to go to work every day wondering whether one of their colleagues is going to kill them. And yet, that’s precisely what some Democrats – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Squad, in particular – are having to do. The Squad are a favourite target of rightwingers; they’ve had reason to worry about their safety long before the Capitol riots. Last year, for example, the QAnon supporter and new congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted an image on Facebook of her holding an assault rifle alongside Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. “We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart,” her post’s caption read. A Florida Republican running for Congress also openly suggested that Omar be executed for treason. “The fact that those who make these violent threats very publicly without hesitation reaffirms how much white supremacy has spread within the [Republican party],” Tlaib tweeted at the time.Following the Capitol riots, AOC spoke out about how she feared for her life. She wasn’t just afraid of the rioters, she was worried that “white supremacist members of Congress” would disclose her location and endanger her safety. Squad member Ayanna Pressley was probably thinking the same thing: somehow every panic button in her office had been torn out before the riots.“[Many of us] still don’t yet feel safe around other members of Congress,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Thursday. “One just tried to bring a gun on the floor of the House today.” Gun culture in America is so warped that instead of agreeing that bringing guns to work was bad, Cuomo suggested the armed congressman might have been trying to keep everyone safe. “I don’t really care what they say their intentions are,” AOC replied. “I care what the impact of their actions are and the impact is to put 435 members of Congress in danger … it is absolutely outrageous that we even have to have this conversation.”I know the last four years have warped our idea of “normal” but there is absolutely nothing normal about members of Congress having to worry that their colleagues might murder them. “GOP lawmakers campaigned with images of them cocking guns next to photos of myself,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Friday. “Now they are trying to violate DC law and House rules to sneak guns onto the House floor two weeks after a white supremacist insurrection that killed 5 people. Why?”Why, indeed? That’s a question that we all need to be asking. Trump may have left the White House but the violence he helped incite has not been eliminated. The Capitol isn’t just a hostile working environment at the moment, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.Joe Biden will end the awful ‘global gag rule’The president (how nice it is to say that and not refer to Trump!) is repealing a policy banning groups that receive US aid from doing anything abortion-related. Trump had expanded the global gag rule to cover almost all US bilateral aid for global health, affecting as much as $12bn (£8.9m) in funding.A Gwyneth Paltrow vagina candle reportedly exploded“There was an inferno in the room,” the victim of the incident told the Sun. The woman eventually got the situation under control by throwing the vagina candle out of her front door.Egyptian pastry chef arrested for making indecent cupcakesThe female chef was interrogated by security forces after making cakes with penis decorations for a private birthday party. The arrest is part of a worrying crackdown by the Egyptian authorities to control “public morality”, which involves policing everything women do.Twitter locks Chinese embassy’s account over tweet about Uighur womenRemember when the Chinese embassy in the US tried to claim forced sterilization was actually feminism? Twitter has now said it violated company policy against dehumanization and locked the Chinese embassy’s account.How Amanda Gorman became the voice of a new American eraAmerica’s youth poet laureate was a highlight of the inauguration and Gormania has now swept the country. “The right words in the right order can change the world; and you proved that,” Lin-Manuel Miranda told Gorman on Good Morning America. “Keep changing the world, one word at a time.” Gorman intends to: she’s got plans to run for president. “Save the 2036 date on your iPhone calendar,” she said.The week in mittenarchyGorman may have been the start of the inauguration but Bernie Sanders’ mittens were a close second. The Vermont teacher who made the gloves, which are fashioned out of repurposed sweaters and recycled plastic, has been inundated by requests from people looking to get their hands on them. Too bad, she’s said, they’re unique: “sometimes in this world, you just can’t get everything you want.” Perhaps you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get the wholesome recycled mitten story you need. More

The devastation of the Trump administration – to norms and values and public safety, to the climate and the environment and the rights of marginalized groups – is huge and undeniable. But Pablo Neruda’s old axiom “You can cut down the flowers but you can’t stop the spring” might describe what happened. Despite opposition, persecution and real losses, movements for liberation and justice continued to expand not only in power and achievement but in vision.People looked upward, in awe, during the last days of 2020, and I saw them again and again, watching the full moon of late December, the rare planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn around that time, and here in the Bay Area a magnificent murmuration of starlings above an old Catholic cemetery in San Rafael, tens of thousands of birds swirling together in coordinated flight at sundown, evening after evening. In looking at these tangible spectacles, I believe people were, during this time of political strife and pandemic confinement, seeking the spaciousness of freedom and possibility.Looking back over the past four years, another kind of expansive and hopeful spaciousness can be found. Mostly these four years will be recounted as far-right brutality against truth, fact, rights and bodies, and that brutality and its consequences mattered. But that’s not all that happened since 2016. Grassroots movements for racial and gender justice, economic justice, climate justice and intersectional understanding of the relationships between these things grew in power, achievement and perspective.The white-supremacist and cult-follower assault on the Capitol on 6 January was historic, but so was the election the night before of the Rev Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff as Georgia’s first two Democratic senators in decades. Several young Sunrise Movement climate activists went to Georgia to work for their campaigns, recognizing the long game: that electing of this Black man and this Jewish man meant giving the Democrats a majority in the US Senate, which meant the possibility of passing strong climate legislation and supporting international climate agreements, which meant that this mattered for the fate of the world.Even in electoral politics, the last four years and last four November elections broadened the Democratic coalition in numbers and diversity, including an unprecedented eight trans people elected to public office in the election of 2017, the birth of “the Squad” with the 2018 election of Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Oman and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and its expansion in 2020 with victories by Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, election of the first Native American women to the House, of an out gay governor in Colorado, of two Democratic senators to Nevada (including the Senate’s first Latina, Catherine Cortez Masto), then Arizona, then Georgia, and more elected officials who were truly progressive around racial and environmental justice, and a more progressive vision overall. That came from outside, from the grassroots, the movements, the young.I believe that when we look back in 10 or 20 years, it is likely that the rightwing rage will be seen as backlash against the ripening vision and movement toward a more just and equal world. This is not a given, but it is a possibility; what we do going forward determines whether it is so.Many of the seeds planted in the Obama era bore fruit in the Trump era. Black Lives Matter came together in 2014, and the summer of 2016 saw its message amplified when sports stars began to speak up – and in the case of Colin Kaepernick, kneel down. The size of the protests was measurable, but something immeasurable mattered at least as much: the transformation of public consciousness. In the summer of 2020, after the public killing of George Floyd that erupted into the biggest protests in the history of this country, not only in the major cities, but in small towns across the country.One of the most important and least tangible effects of activism is introducing and popularizing new ideas and changing minds. For example, the racism behind unequal treatment by police and the courts and unequal sentencing, is now far more widely recognized than it was 20 years ago. Many cities have looked seriously at what defunding the police would look like – and in some it has already started. For example, in the Bay Area, where the 2009 murder of Oscar Grant by a transit policeman prompted strong reaction, the transit system has decided to hire 20 social workers rather than fill vacancies in its police force.Feminism has also been energized during the Trump years. At the beginning of 2017, the nationwide Women’s March – the biggest single-day protest in this country’s history, with marches in small towns from Alaska to Alabama as well as major cities – established that the Trump administration would be resisted, and women led much of the next four years of anti-Trump organizing. In October of 2017, what got dubbed #MeToo opened up unprecedented space to recognize both that some of the most powerful and famous men in the country were criminal sexual predators and that systemic injustice that had protected them.Some real legal reform resulted, including expanding or removing the statute of limitations for some sexual abuse crimes in 15 states, but more broadly, that machinery of silencing – the ways that victims have been routinely disbelieved, discredited, intimidated, harassed, shamed – became far more recognized, a first step in dismantling it. Once again the changes that will matter most will be hardest to measure – the crimes that don’t happen, at a minimum because would-be rapists are less confident that they can override their victim’s testimony or escape legal and professional consequences, ideally because the desire to violate other human beings and the entitlement to do so wither away.These were years of victory and defeat, of gain and loss. With Betsy DeVos dismantling Title IX rights for sexual assault victims on college campuses and a widespread war against reproductive rights, women lost as well as gained in the last four years. But abortion is one arena in which you can take away access, but you can’t so easily take away belief in the right to that access. The next four years will see a continued struggle around reproductive rights and other issues of gender justice.The climate movement grew remarkably in the last four years. The Trump era began as the Lakota water protectors’ encampment and resistance at Standing Rock had become a focal point and a powerful intersection between indigenous rights, environmental justice, the fight against pipelines specifically and the climate movement. More came out of Standing Rock than will ever be measured: education of non-Native people about Native rights and history, a sense of hope and possibility for Lakota and other Native youth, inspiration to decide to run for office for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who came to Standing Rock (as did the Laguna Pueblo organizer and then future congresswoman Deb Haaland, now Biden’s nominee to head the Department of the Interior), an apology for US military genocide by veterans of that military, alliances and visions. I remember in 2011, when KXL protesters were told that their activism was futile and the pipeline’s completion was inevitable. They were wrong.Activists helped bring the fossil fuel industry to the brink of collapse. Politico recently reported: “In 2017 when Donald Trump entered the White House, the US oil and gas industry was on a tear, with output climbing to record levels, while clean energy sources were still carving out their niche. Now, oil and gas producers are struggling amid weak prices and growing pressure to address climate change, while wind and solar technologies are soaring – a trend that will assist Biden in making a U-turn in energy policy from the Trump administration’s.” On 6 January, while insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol, the Trump administration held an underwhelming auction of drilling leases in the Arctic national wildlife refuge: all the big oil companies stayed away, in part because activists got banks to pledge not to finance Arctic drilling.As the industry crumbled, the climate movement grew. New voices emerged – Sweden’s uncompromisingly tough Greta Thunberg most prominent among them, and ranging from octogenarian Jane Fonda with her fire-drill Fridays to twentysomething Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement. The Sunrise Movement introduced and amplified the messages of the Green New Deal (GND), including that profound change was not only necessary but pragmatically possible and beneficial. The GND model has had an international impact, and it has undone the old arguments that jobs and the environment are conflicting goals.Progressive change, then, can happen at the worst of times. And often the process of change is so subtle we don’t even realize it’s happening until we look back. Just think of all the films and books and other works of art we once admired, but which we now see strewn with prejudices and oppressions that we hadn’t noticed before. That act of noticing something that we didn’t notice before – that is the result of a shifted consciousness, transformed through activism and progress.Sometimes we have specific new tools to measure oppression by – the Bechdel Test being the most famous among them – but often it’s just that we have subtly, slowly been educated to see more clearly and more inclusively than we did before, to recognize not only other viewpoints, but their exclusion, and the nuances of representation and discrimination.Such processes are invisible in their slow increments until you return to an artwork from the past and see that it is still what it was but you are no longer who you were. Looking back at 2016, I see that it was long ago, because these have been a long four years of destruction and conflict, but also of generation and transformation. We should feel a sense of accomplishment, not so that we can rest, but so that we can go forward. More

Rich Fitzgerald, the elected executive of Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, has achieved viral internet fame – for rebuking the Republican senator Ted Cruz but also for looking remarkably like the Emmy-winning actor Jeff Daniels.
When Joe Biden took the US back into the Paris climate accord this week, Cruz, from Texas, repeated a familiar rightwing complaint, saying the new Democratic president was “more interested in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh”.
Such barbs have been deflected before – not least by the mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto, who reacted to Trump’s Paris withdrawal in 2017 by committing the city to the accord’s ambitious climate-related goals.
Fitzgerald, a Democrat who attended Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, told local TV Cruz’s tweet was “outrageous”.
“You know,” he said, “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s a climate denier. He was a Covid denier. We believe in science round here, and why Senator Cruz thinks he could tell Pittsburgh … we’re doing just fine.”
Fitzgerald also pointed out Cruz’s role in encouraging Trump’s baseless claims that the presidential election was stolen, and his objections to electoral college results even after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, leaving five dead. Cruz nurtures presidential ambitions of his own but now faces calls for expulsion from the Senate.
“This is a guy who was really part of the insurrection,” Fitzgerald said, “part of the denial of elections. So I don’t think this guy has any credibility. So, we’ll run what we need to do here, senator, and keep your nose out of our business.”
Fitzgerald’s words reached a huge audience but, such are the ways of the internet, perhaps more for his distinct resemblance to the star of The Newsroom and To Kill a Mockingbird than for his appropriately Aaron Sorkin-esque decision to face down a rightwing bully.

Jason Stapley
(@jstaples01)
He does have a Jeff Daniels vibe, should have ended the interview yelling this: https://t.co/sojkSlnyRL pic.twitter.com/ZcHEvtckvb

January 22, 2021

“Some days just shine down,” wrote Ryan Deto, a news editor for the Pittsburgh City Paper. “Rich Fitzgerald went viral for criticising Ted Cruz … then everyone on Twitter called him Jeff Daniels, and Daniels started to trend. #blessed.”
Writing for the City Paper, Deto praised Fitzgerald’s “yinzer accent” and asked: “With his floppy mop of red hair and dad-like demeanour, who can fault anyone from making the comparison?”
He also recounted another “humorous celebrity story” about the county executive, revealing: “A fun fact about Fitzgerald is that he once sang on stage with John Cougar Mellencamp at the Star Lake Amphitheater, just outside of Pittsburgh.
“Jeff Daniels will never have that much yinzer cred.”
Helpfully, in April 2019 the same paper offered readers a guide to “the yinzer vocabulary”. “Yinz”, it explained, is Pittsburgh for “y’all”. More

Now that Donald Trump has gone, what will his ride-or-die supporters in Australian media do? How will they “own the libs” when the libs have their hand at the tiller? Whose ideas will they crib as US conservatism falls deeper into a post-Trump fugue?
The recent output of high-profile Australian Trumpists suggests that the solution will be to gradually back away from Trump himself, even as they double down on aspects of the Trumpist movement.
That’s necessary because, even for the diehards and the know-nothings, since the 6th of January, Trump the man has revealed himself to be a spectacularly toxic liability.
He departed, according to Gallup’s numbers, as the least popular US president in the history of opinion polling: he had the lowest average approval rating over the life of his presidency and, unlike every other president since Roosevelt, he never enjoyed majority approval.
Most of his lame duck period was spent trying to overturn the election he lost, culminating in his incitement of a mob that stormed the Capitol building in DC. More than 100 people are facing federal charges, with prosecutors alleging some intended “to capture and assassinate elected officials”.
Canny as ever, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell conceded, a day before Trump left the White House, that that crowd was “fed lies” and “provoked” by Trump.
Trump spent the balance of his time since the election indulging in, on the one hand, an execution spree in federal prisons and, on the other, handing out pardons to cronies or mercenaries who wantonly murdered Iraqi citizens.
It seems likely that state attorneys general and federal prosecutors alike will be jostling each other to serve him subpoenas and summonses.
And a defanged, de-platformed Trump can’t even prosecute his case in the court of public opinion.
So what’s a branch office culture warrior to do? Defending Trump directly would not only telegraph their moral bankruptcy but demand the kind of ingenuity that subsidised rightwing media neither demands nor rewards. If defending Trump is beyond the powers of a McConnell, it’s surely beyond the likes of a Sky News host?
Some Australian conservatives simply sprinted from the blast area following the Capitol assault. Former US ambassador and treasurer Joe Hockey, who golfed with Trump through the Muslim ban, Charlottesville, the separation of children from parents, and the Covid-19 disaster, did well enough in his appointed role to earn a reputation as a “Trump whisperer”. But the riot, apparently, was too much to stomach. Hockey was, now, “appalled at the behaviour and incitement” of Trump, his family and his camp followers.
Hockey followed up with an op-ed in the Nine newspapers which opined that “Biden’s calm but firm response to the attack on the Capitol is the leadership that most Americans want.”
Perhaps the Capitol violence brought about an authentic change of heart for Hockey. Or perhaps he’s concerned about who will now be buttering his bread. His DC lobbying firm, Bondi Partners – staffed with cherry-picked Australian diplomatic talent – can no longer pitch the possibility of Hockey buttonholing Trump on the links.
In the less rarefied air of Holt Street, Greg Sheridan also rapidly turned on Trump. Throughout last year’s election campaign, Sheridan held out the prospect of a Trump victory, claiming on 1 November that the “genuine authoritarian threat” came from Biden supporters, since his campaign was backed with the threat of “a plague of violent riots all through the big cities from people who won’t accept democracy if it yields Trump.”
As late as 14 November, Sheridan was arguing that Trump offered a series of important lessons to conservatives around the world, including that “nationalism and patriotism are powerful forces that galvanise voters in a positive direction”.
When nationalism and patriotism galvanised voters in the direction of sacking a federal building in order to overturn the election result, Sheridan dropped them like so many hot yams. Suddenly, the deplorables he had previously celebrated as “Trump’s liberty-loving base” were depicted as “clowns, thugs and street-fighting fascists”.
For those who over-indexed on the president and his movement, and who cannot cut him loose quite so cleanly, it makes some sense to imagine the possibility of Trumpism without Trump. Enter James Morrow, whose work is difficult to talk about without courting paradox: its signature tone can only be described as low-energy histrionics.
Morrow has shamelessly barracked for Trump both on Sky News and in the Daily Telegraph, and like all such rightwing Trumpists in Australia, he has done so safe in the knowledge that Trump’s failures, such as his catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic, will never have any effect on him.
As the quick spread of coronavirus among White House staff and cronies in October amply showed, those who spruiked for Trump in the United States at least had skin in the game.
A week ago, in a column addressing the fallout from the Capitol riots, Morrow wrote that “while it is a long bow to say Trump incited the incident (he in fact tried to calm protesters down), it is also true that his conduct since the election will forever mar his achievements from Middle East peace to wage growth.”
This dead-ender nonsense might be worth a chuckle if it didn’t erase the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands, and the way that Trump and his enablers bequeathed so many domestic and foreign policy nightmares to Biden.
In the Middle East, Trump simply gave carte blanche to longstanding US clients like Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He approved – and even boasted of – a series of massive arms deal with the kingdom, raking in another half a billion dollars’ worth of blood money in the dying days of his administration.
Saudi Arabia will use some of these weapons in their ongoing war on their neighbours in Yemen, where 13 million people are at imminent risk of starvation.
In another parting blow on 10 January, Mike Pompeo declared the kingdom’s enemies, the Houthis, a terrorist group, which will make it even harder to provide them with aid. The Financial Times editorial board – hardly a den of communists – described this as “a cynical effort to scupper Mr Biden’s ability to ease Middle East crises and reset US policy”.
And whatever wage growth there may have been has been wiped out by the cratering of employment, in an economy whose destruction was hastened by Trump’s fecklessness and lies (remember when he told people to inject bleach?)
On Thursday Morrow offered a piece of whataboutism that laid much responsibility for what Biden calls America’s “uncivil war” not on conservative media outlets and United States senators who encourage the baseless belief that the November election was stolen, but on “radical campus politics … violent demonstrations in American cities that were often dismissed as ‘mostly peaceful protests’ [and] social media platforms doing everything they can to silence conservative voices”.
Having read that, it was diverting to see Morrow in the same article criticising the prose style of Biden’s inauguration speech.
It’s embarrassing, of course, that this kind of commentary occupies such a prominent place in Australia’s national political discussion. But it’s just one example of the kind of thing that would have no home, and no constituency, without the active subsidy of News Corporation. That company’s role, over decades, in bringing us the disaster of Trumpism cannot be overstated.
From my place in the US, which I have not been able to safely leave for a year due to an unchecked pandemic, I can say unambiguously that the Trump administration was incompetent, racist and corrupt from the moment it was sworn in, as many predicted it would be. We shouldn’t forget which Australian commentators carried water for a disastrous presidency until the second that it became inconvenient to be seen to do so.
We shouldn’t let them forget, either. More

The election of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States was received across much of the world with a mixture of relief and exuberance, though often laced with apprehension. A common theme in news headlines and Twitter feeds was that normal service was being resumed in the US and in international affairs.
In France, the newspaper Le Monde ran with the headline: “American Elections 2020: Joe Biden’s victory sparks huge relief in Europe.” On Twitter, Paris’ mayor, Anne Hidalgo, tweeted out: “Welcome Back, America.” In Germany, the cover of the news magazine Der Spiegel depicted Biden putting the severed head of the Statue of Liberty back on the torso (referencing an infamous cover from 2017 that depicted Trump severing the head). The image is accompanied with the ironic text “Make America Great Again.”
The theme of an American restoration was repeated in news and social media across the world. The symbolism is strong, but it is less clear what is being restored. In this it echoes the “return to normalcy” theme in Biden’s election campaign in the US, a nostalgic nostrum that vaguely promises a reset of American principles and policies. What is at issue in these desires to go back to a pre-Trump America?

In the US, the desire for normalcy surrounding the election of Biden reflects an existential anxiety – that Trump ignited a devastating attack on liberal democracy that may prove epochal.
The contradictions and tensions in American liberal democracy have been forcefully revealed with his presidency, which took advantage of the gap between declared liberal values and political reality. Trump not only exploited that gap, he spoke to latent desires and emboldened expressions of identity in both politics and people that had long been marginalised or silenced.
With Trump’s ousting, the liberal desire for a return to normality has been amped up via the figure of Joe Biden. It was clearly articulated by the new president at his inauguration, in his pleas for national unity and his promise to end the “uncivil war” in the US. David Sanger, in the New York Times, noted that: “Mr Biden’s inauguration was notable for its normalcy, the sense of relief that permeated the capital over an era of constant turmoil and falsehood ending.”
But there was little that was normal in the scene of a scaled-down inauguration taking place with only a handful of socially distant, masked participants and surrounded by the militarised landscape of a post-riot Capitol. The image was not of national healing but of a national emergency.
Pride and relief: a shopkeeper in Kamala Harris’ ancestral village in India catches up with the news. EPA-EFE/Jagadeesh NV
Accompanying the desire for normalcy and sense of relief is the implication that the “Trump era” was an aberration, a temporary deviation in the natural political order of things.
This is an attractive and tempting palliative for those who resisted Trump’s spell and disavow the significance of his political rise and appeal to millions of Americans. In this view, Trump was “the cat in the hat” – an unwelcome visitor and unruly avatar of instincts for disorder, evicted once the parents return. Enter Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
But Trump (and Trumpism) was and is something more than a temporary eruption in the order of things or mere symptom of a malaise in American public life. Trump unleashed the libidinal forces of “illiberal democracy”, undermining America’s commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of law and individual rights. He supported these forces in the US and encouraged them elsewhere, transforming the landscapes of American political culture and foreign affairs in ways we are still trying to understand.
American myopia
Americans pay little heed to external perspectives on their country and by and large do not respond well to critical views of it or of their leaders. That may be viewed as stubbornly patriotic, but it is more fundamentally due to a deep-seated ignorance founded on a myth of national exceptionalism, a myopia that is quintessentially American.
Trump’s presidency should remind Americans of the fragility of the social and political order that so many take for granted. Is it not a little shocking that Americans should need to be reminded of this? Perhaps not, perhaps the amnesia is a component of the American worldview, which commonly displaces the most serious challenges to democracy on to others elsewhere.
As the American writer Tom Wolfe once quipped, the “dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” Of course, “it can’t happen here”.
Funny way of ‘returning to normality’: impeaching the outgoing president. EPA-EFE/ Shawn Thew
Might it be that the importance of Trump’s election and presidency has been better or at least more readily understood in other countries where there is a living memory of the pains of populist authoritarianism, where people are more familiar with how reality can be dismantled?
The Slovenian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon suggests as much when, in the wake of Trump’s election, he commented:

In America, a comfortable entitlement blunts and deactivates imagination – it is hard to imagine that this American life is not the only life possible, that there could be any reason to undo it.

Hemon filters his perspective through his experiences and insights from living in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war “through a time when what cannot possibly happen begins to happen, rapidly and everywhere”. Observing the disorienting impact of the early days of Trump’s presidency, he wryly notes that: “‘Reality’ has finally earned its quotation marks.”
Reality did indeed earn its quotation marks in “Trump’s America”, a fantasy world in which Trump supporters imaginatively and emotionally invest. It’s a world in which conspiracy theory and social media combine to create an alternative reality, a world that is self-contained and self-reinforcing – and impervious to facts.
Galvanised by Trump’s near messianic leadership, the fantasy has become pervasive and is deeply embedded in the imaginations – the fears and desires – of millions of Americans. It cannot simply or swiftly be undone.
Back to reality
“America is back, ready to lead the world, not retreat from it”, Biden stated in November as he introduced his foreign policy team. The “America is back” refrain has been repeated ad nauseum by Biden’s surrogates in the past few months.
What it means in terms of policy remains unclear. More symbolically, it is declared as a rebuttal of Trumpist foreign policy, infamously sloganed as “America First”, suggesting a renewed era of US global engagement and leadership. But the meaning remains open and opaque and, as Julian Borger observes in The Guardian: “How a slogan as all-encompassing as ‘America is Back’ is received around the world will inevitably be a Rorschach test for what is perceived to be the ‘real America’ that has been absent in the past four years.”
How The Conversation covered the inauguration of Joe Biden. The Conversation
The perception of what constitutes the “real America” is both a domestic and foreign policy dilemma for the US. Assumptions about liberal democracy at home and about a liberal world order abroad are no longer acts of faith.
As we head into a “post-American world”, global enthusiasm for democracy cannot be assumed, nor can the ability of the US to set an example, for that has been undone by the spectacles of civil unrest and the disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The domestic “uncivil war” will, as political scientist Francis Fukuyama warns, have “consequences for global democracy in the coming years”.
Biden’s foreign policy team are talking up democratic solidarity between states as the basis for a new internationalism but this cannot be a restoration of liberal hegemony. It must reckon not only with the damage done by the starkly nationalist “America First” doctrine: it must also acknowledge the failings of liberal internationalism before Trump became president. After all, neoliberal globalisation gave rise to the political and cultural blowback called Trumpism in the US and its ethnonationalist cousins across the world.
Making a fetish of normalcy is a form of American exceptionalism. “America is back” may prove as myopic and delusional as “Make America Great Again”. More