US Politics

Amid widespread outcry over Donald Trump’s pardon of Michael Flynn, speculation surged about who might be next for clemency from the defeated president.
Rick Gates, Trump’s 2016 deputy campaign chair, told the New York Times the president “knows how much those of us who worked for him have suffered, and I hope he takes that into consideration if and when he grants any pardons”.
Gates was one of many Trump aides convicted under the former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. After pleading guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators, he was sentenced to 45 days in jail.
Gates also told the Times his motivation for criticising Mueller in a recent book “was not to seek a pardon; it was to expose the truth about the Russia investigation”.
Flynn, a retired general who was fired from the Defense Intelligence Agency by Barack Obama in 2014, became a trusted campaign surrogate for Trump. But Trump fired him as national security adviser after just 24 days on the job, for lying to Vice-President Mike Pence about contacts with Russian officials.
He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI but was not sentenced before Trump pardoned him on Wednesday, saying: “Have a great life General Flynn!”
Trump has already commuted a more than three-year sentence handed to Roger Stone, a longtime ally, for obstruction, lying to Congress and witness intimidation. More

Shortly after Biden was declared president-elect, he announced that he would reach a hand across the aisle. “We must stop,” he said, “treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” This is the Biden playbook at work, honed through years of compromises made with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell: appealing to the Republican elite in office, while trying to appeal to moderate Republicans on the ground.Having stretched out its hand to the Republicans, the center of the Democratic party then turned to its real enemy – the left that it blames for its poor showing in the election. Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger led the charge, contending that “no one should ever say ‘defund the police’ ever again”. Despite the fact that progressive candidates did well across the ticket, and Biden ran a campaign modelled on Hilary Clinton’s neoliberal program, centrist Democrats blamed the core demand of the Black Lives Matter movement for alienating moderates. In centrist Democrats’ telling, the problem is the left – and the answer is to reach out to that poor soul, the moderate Republican.The moderate Republican is a myth. For all the Lincoln Project’s assertions that it would peel away Republican voters, the president actually secured a larger share of the Republican vote than he did in 2016. Some 94% of Republicans looked back on the debacles and racism of the last four years and concluded that they wanted more. This is not a delusion; it is the core of the Republican party. Biden would like to frame his presidency as a return to normality after the Trumpian exception. The reality, however, is that Trump doesn’t represent something new; it emerges from the long shadow that white supremacy cast over American history.We need to acknowledge that the core white Republican voter knows exactly why they vote for Trump. Propelled by Fox News and talk radio, the Republican voter chooses their party because the Republicans guarantee the continuity of white supremacy both economically and culturally. When Trump campaigned to save the suburban (white) woman from the urban poor, he was mocked as hopelessly out of touch. Despite the promises of the pollsters, however, his strategy worked: Trump’s share of the white female vote increased to 55%.While white supremacy is not novel in America, it is likely to become increasingly vitriolic. The US is projected to become minority white by 2045, and the Republican party has decided to resist this demographic shift by rallying its base and using the tools of American politics to hang on to minority white government for as long as it can.If the Democratic party is not going to squander the opening that the people have made, it must change how it orients itself to the American peopleFor instance, as Biden was fervently appealing to moderate Republicans, two white Republican canvassers refused to certify electoral results from Michigan’s overwhelmingly black Wayne county. Trump’s post-election strategy is indicative of that of the Republican party more generally: disenfranchise voters of color by any means possible, and use gerrymandering and the unrepresentative alchemy of the electoral college system to produce Republican political power.When Biden reaches across the aisle, it is likely his hand will be met by turned backs; most Republicans haven’t even acknowledged the election result yet. There is little for the Republican establishment to gain from working with Biden. With the Senate liable to remain in Republican hands, and the Democrats seemingly more worried about appealing to Republicans that taking substantive action over the economic crisis brought about by Covid-19, Mitch McConnell can rub his hands together at the thought of the 2022 mid-terms.For the Republican party to actually want to work in a bipartisan way would require the Democrats gaining support for the kind of systematic political reform – of the electoral college system, for instance – that the very gesture of reaching across the aisle is likely to prevent.We have been down this road before. While Biden spent the 2020 election campaign insisting he wasn’t a socialist, in 2008, Obama came to power having distanced himself from the “radical” agenda of Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor. Obama also faced an economic crisis, and took a bipartisan approach, shoring up the banks and creating only a modest stimulus package. The result? After a two-year campaign of determined obstruction by Mitch McConnell, the Republicans rode a Tea party wave all the way to a midterm majority in the House of Representatives in 2010.It doesn’t have to be this way. In the 2020 election, voter turnout was the highest it has been since 1908. Black voters were crucial in delivering a Democratic victory, and preventing a continuation of white minority rule. If the Democratic party is not going to squander the opening that the people have made, it must change how it orients itself to the American people. Rather than exploiting black support while marginalizing the black voices that push against a neoliberal political agenda, the Democratic party should give black voters the respect that it has thus far reserved only for that fantasy: the moderate Republican.The Democratic party cannot have it both ways. There are red and blue states. There are Americans who want to defend white supremacy, and Americans who are struggling over what the refusal of white supremacy looks like on American soil. Biden can commit the Democratic party to building a genuinely post-white America, or he can try and placate the white supremacist project of the Republican party. But he must choose.Joshua Craze is a writer-in-residence at the Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva
Ainsley LeSure is an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Brown University specializing in post-civil rights racism and democracy More

After Dwight Eisenhower had been sworn in as United States president on Capitol Hill in January 1953, he recited a prayer to the watching crowd that he had written himself that same morning. The words embodied how Eisenhower hoped to govern. “Especially we pray,” he told them, “that our concern shall be for all the people regardless of station, race or calling. May cooperation be permitted and be the mutual aim of those who … hold to differing political beliefs.”To a 2020s audience those words may now seem anodyne and pious, the usual politician’s guff that we barely listen to. Race, in particular, would remain an unhealed wound through Eisenhower’s eight years in the White House. Nevertheless, the prayer truthfully embodies an approach to politics that actually worked for much of 1950s America.Those years are widely seen – the unignorable exception of race apart – as marking, amid a certain mom-and-pop dullness, a high tide of shared national values, prosperity and political depolarisation. As Robert D Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett have put it in their recent book The Upswing, the 1950s are at the swelling summit in the middle of the “I-we-I” bell curve of American life between the economic free-for-all of the 1890s, the era of greater cooperation in the mid-20th century, and the turbocharged renewal of individualism, inequality and hyperpartisanship of the 2020s.Donald Trump and Eisenhower are both Republican presidents. Yet as leaders, and in the lives they have led, they could hardly be more different in every way. It is completely impossible to imagine Trump uttering the kind of words Eisenhower used in 1953. It is, though, possible to imagine Joe Biden speaking them. Indeed, it would be a surprise if Biden does not make a commitment to cooperation of this kind when he himself swears the oath, in less than two months’ time.Yet is there the slightest possibility that such an approach would have any effect today, or that it would endure? The question of whether governments in advanced capitalist democracies can bring entrenched and bitterly divided polities together is now the single most important issue facing our politics. America is by far the most urgent and important example of this. But it is true of countries beyond the US too – Britain undoubtedly included.The odds on Biden – or other consensual leaders in other countries – achieving this are long. Today we are not at the summit of The Upswing’s 130-year-long “I-we-I” curve of economic equality, political cooperation, social cohesion and public altruism, as Eisenhower was in the 1950s. We are instead heading rapidly down the curve to new depths of inequality, partisan intransigence, individualism and selfishness. We may even have passed a point of no return.Many therefore assert that those more unified and civil days are simply over. Some on all sides actually welcome this, thinking that the downward descent of the old, unified, liberal capitalist state in the early 21st century presents a cathartic opportunity to clear the debris and failures of the past and create a ground zero for a different kind of brave new future.My answer to those zealots is to be very careful indeed about what they wish for. Putnam’s book speaks for the many millions who don’t think the way the zealots do. It speaks for those who want the tide of the last decade to be slowed, stopped and turned – and who want to believe the restoration of a “we” society, based on liberal democratic managed capitalism, can happen, although in a less unequal and less rancorous way.One good reason for saying this is that something like it has happened before. The upward trajectory of the “I-we-I” curve in the early years of the 20th century did not descend from out of a clear blue sky, in the US or anywhere else. Instead, it was built on, among other things, economic innovation and greater equality (including for women), laws that broke up monopolies, political leadership that was not afraid of taxing the super-rich, the creation of effective nation state and private-sector institutions, high-quality education, a boom in charity and philanthropy and a media that people broadly trusted to tell them the truth.Another reason for confidence is that the destroyers have not yet triumphed. Much of what sustained the earlier, more cooperative era endures. What the EU might call the acquis of liberal democracy and internationalism – the body of principles, institutions and civic habits that the present day has inherited from the not-so-distant past – is actually more resilient than the shocks inflicted on it may suggest.The transition from Trump to Biden illustrates this. Trump’s assault on the electoral process and its credibility has been epochal and terrible, but in the end the transition seems to be happening. The electoral process was tested to the limits, but it proved robust and decisive. Its institutions and principles have survived. Something a little similar may now be happening in Britain over Brexit’s disregard of laws and treaties too.And yet the divides remain. How can these embittered certainties be eased and eventually bridged? Changing people’s minds may seem to be the answer, but changing a mind is a very long-term process. Opening one’s own mind is more important. And this needs to apply on all sides. Denunciation, lecturing, labelling, and obsessing over language all make things worse, not better.The key is to prioritise listening and then talking to others. Michael Sandel’s recent book The Tyranny of Merit argues that humility must be central to the reconstruction of the notion of the common good, without which no “we” society can prosper. People don’t need to be humiliated or denied a voice by being told they are bad, stupid, bigoted or unsuccessful. The aim should be to find things we can all agree about, perhaps including such things as fairness, patriotism, helping one another and trying to agree about facts.Respect for the truth is indispensable. Social media are the chief accelerator in this area of catastrophic decline. Much stronger control over online untruth will be a precondition for rebuilding the common good. This is as true of politics in general as of ensuring a full take-up of any Covid vaccine. But there is material to work with. Public trust has survived in many places. Ipsos Mori reported this week that more than 80% of us trust what nurses, doctors, engineers, teachers, judges, professors and scientists tell us. By contrast, around 80% mistrust journalists, government ministers, politicians generally and advertising executives. The problem lies with politics and media.Perhaps the Bidens of the world have it in them to change this. Let us hope so. But they need the help of thousands of local citizens if so, meeting at local level to rebuild confidence in the common good. Government matters very much indeed. But the way we treat each other matters just as much. We don’t just need to build up herd immunity to viruses. We need to build up herd immunity to untruth, and to glib easy answers too, and to all those who purvey them, in whatever form. More

The US reported 181,490 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, a third daily rise in a row, as hospitalisations hit a record for a 16th day in succession, at 89,959.
There were 2,297 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, the largest single-day rise since May, bringing the pandemic toll to 262,065 out of nearly 12.8m cases. The death rate is still lower than in the spring.
The alarming numbers were reported as millions of Americans defied official advice against travel and gatherings for Thanksgiving.
In an address to the nation on Wednesday, Joe Biden appealed for resilience and sympathised with those contemplating a holiday without loved ones.
“I know this time of year can be especially difficult,” said the president-elect, whose wife and daughter were killed in a car crash in December 1972. “Believe me, I know. I remember that first Thanksgiving. The empty chair, silence that takes your breath away. It’s really hard to care. It’s hard to give thanks … It’s so hard to hope, to understand.
“I’ll be thinking and praying for each and every one of you this Thanksgiving.”
Biden’s transition team were unable to coordinate with federal authorities for two weeks after the election was called, as Donald Trump refused to concede. The president still has not taken that step, but has allowed transition funds to be released.
Biden heralded the approach of apparently effective vaccines. The US was “on track for the first immunisations to begin by late December, early January”, he said.
“We’ll need to put in place a distribution plan to get the entire country immunised as soon as possible, which we will do. It’s going to take time. And hopefully the news of the vaccine will serve as incentive to every American to take simple steps to get control of the virus.”
Biden listed such steps, including wearing a mask, social distancing and more, which the Trump administration has been loath to seek to enforce, even at its own events. Trump, members of his family, aides and senior Republicans have fallen sick.
“There’s real hope,” Biden insisted. “Tangible hope.”
Later, in Washington, the newly 6-3 conservative supreme court sided with religious communities who sued to block New York state Covid restrictions on attendance at houses of worship. Amy Coney Barrett, the devout Catholic justice who replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month, sided with other conservatives on the ruling.
Avi Schick, an attorney for Agudath Israel of America, told the Associated Press: “This is an historic victory. This landmark decision will ensure that religious practices and religious institutions will be protected from government edicts that do not treat religion with the respect demanded by the constitution.”
On Wednesday, New York saw more than 6,000 daily Covid cases for the first time since late April. Pennsylvania recorded more than 7,000 cases, its second-highest total since the pandemic began. Massachusetts and Nevada saw record case numbers.
In Wyoming, the Republican governor, Mark Gordon, has opposed a mask mandate. On Wednesday, it was announced that he had tested positive.
US airports saw around 900,000 to 1 million people a day pass through checkpoints from Friday to Tuesday, down around 60% from last year but some of the biggest crowds seen since the pandemic took hold. Typically, more Americans drive for Thanksgiving than fly.
Officials – among them New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo – have been forced to cancel their own Thanksgiving plans in order to set an example. One who did not, Denver’s mayor, Michael Hancock, issued an apology on Wednesday.
Having asked city staff and residents to avoid holiday travel, Hancock flew to Mississippi to spend the holiday with his wife and youngest daughter.
“I made my decision as a husband and father,” he said, “and for those who are angry and disappointed, I humbly ask you to forgive decisions that are born of my heart and not my head.” More

Donald Trump’s pardon for his former national security adviser Michael Flynn has ignited speculation that he may be planning a broader swath of pardons in his last weeks in office, especially given – most controversially – his own previously expressed view that it is within his own power to pardon himself.Trump’s pardon of Flynn, who was convicted of lying to the FBI, follows his commutation of the jail sentence of his ally and self-professed political dirty trickster, Roger Stone.The renewed speculation, however, raises numerous issues, both legal and practical. Questions about whether Trump is considering pardons for associates, members of his family and even himself have been driven in large part by his own apparent obsession with the issue, which has been well documented since at least 2017.According to a CNN report earlier this month, which featured interviews with unnamed former aides, Trump has asked both about self-pardons as well as pardons for his family, even asking if he could issue pardons pre-emptively for things people could be charged with in the future.“Once he learned about it, he was obsessed with the power of pardons,” the former official told the cable network. “I always thought he also liked it because it was a way to do a favour.”Trump himself has been explicit about his view he can pardon himself, tweeting in 2018: “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?”As legal experts have made clear as well in recent days, Trump is not facing any active criminal investigation, with the attorney general, William Barr, following US Department of Justice guidelines that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime.But can Trump actually pardon himself?Those legal scholars who believe it is within his power, point to the open-ended text of the clause in the constitution on pardon rights that says: “The president … shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment,” which – theoretically at least – suggests no explicitly described limits on pardon power.One issue, however, Trump is likely to run into, which he acknowledged himself in his 2018 tweet, is a supreme court ruling dating back to 1915 that concluded that any pardon carries an implicit imputation of guilt. In Trump’s case, this could only be for criminal acts committed in office and could hamper his plans to run again for president in 2024.That meaning was recognised by Richard Nixon, who was initially wary of accepting the preemptive pardon offered by Gerald Ford at the time of his resignation from the presidency after the Watergate affair, believing himself innocent.And while legal experts have suggested there is no explicit constitutional prohibition on a president self-pardoning, they point to a justice department memo written in 1974 in the light of the Nixon crisis.“Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the president cannot pardon himself,” the Office of Legal Counsel wrote in August 1974.As Keith Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University specialising in constitutional theory told the Guardian in 2018: “The president could surely issue a valid pardon to his own associates (though abusing his pardoning power might itself be an impeachable offence).“It is less clear that the president could issue a pardon to himself. Conceptually, the pardon is an act of mercy, and that would seem to imply that it is only possible to bestow mercy on someone else and so there is an implicit bar against a self-pardon.“Certainly, attempting to do so could be regarded as an impeachable offence as an abuse of power, but whether a court should ultimately respect the validity of such a pardon is a much more difficult question.”Finally, even if Trump were to try to pardon himself it might be of only limited value. His power to pardon applies only to federal statutes, still leaving him vulnerable to criminal and civil prosecution in state courts, not least in Manhattan, where Trump and the Trump Organization are under active investigation.Trump’s pardon plansWho can President Trump pardon?The constitution is vaguely worded on the issue of pardon power. Previous presidents have pardoned relatives (Bill Clinton pardoned his brother Roger), aides, businessmen, and Gerald Ford famously pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon.How does it work?There is an office at the Department of Justice that deals with pardons but it has largely been short-circuited by Trump, who has responded to requests from rightwing allies and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian. Jared Kushner has been put in charge of the pardons issue and some speculate that might mean a pardon for his father, Charles, who was convicted in 2005 of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering.So who is in the frame?Trump has made it clear he still holds a grudge over the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and some names that have come up are related to that. Michael Flynn was pardoned on Wednesday and Roger Stone’s sentence has already been commuted. Others reportedly seeking pardons include campaign advisers Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos. Steve Bannon, his former strategist, who has been indicted for defrauding donors, and Elliott Broidy, a top fund-raiser, have also been mentioned.Is that all?Far from it. Lists of names are reportedly circulating. The media has mentioned a plethora of Trump and Trump family associates, and Trump has reportedly asked aides about the issue of pardons for members of his own family, although it is not clear what for. Finally Joe Exotic, the former Oklahoma zoo keeper convicted of hiring a hitman to kill a rival, has apparently also been campaigning to get Trump’s attention in a bid for clemency. More

The Republican establishment, despite being unfairly advantaged by the skewed composition of the electoral college, by over-representation in the House due to partisan gerrymandering and in the Senate due to equal State suffrage, has been in no hurry to reject Donald Trump’s ludicrous allegation that the American electoral system is rigged to favor Democrats. Sweating the make-or-break Georgia runoffs, the party’s leaders are apparently frightened to cross the mad king, who owns their voters, lest he cause their ratings to plummet as he is doing with Fox News. But Republican complicity with this unprecedented attack on American democracy is not a matter of short-term expediency or fear of reprisals. It is much worse than that. Mitch McConnell and the others are not merely humoring the president until his mania subsides. Trump’s voters are the Republicans’ voters and the Republican party cannot easily cut them, and their deranged conspiracy theories, loose even after 20 January.This has important implications for how Biden should respond to the incalculable damage Trump has inflicted on the country, including how his Department of Justice approaches the restoration of the rule of law.The Republican party is deeply committed to the outrageously tilted playing field that allows a minority of voters to choose a majority of senators and, indirectly, a majority of supreme court justices, not to mention the occasional president as in 2000 and 2016. They are an unabashedly anti-democratic party in that sense alone, even if we set aside their brazen efforts at voter suppression and voter intimidation. This is perhaps the main reason why its leaders have proved so reluctant to dissociate themselves from Trump’s specious allegation that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. They know that the system is rigged. It is rigged to favor Republicans. And they relish not only the irony of Trump’s audacious reversal of the truth, but also the way it distracts attention from the genuinely unconscionable rigging that gives an American minority the power to impose its will on the American majority.Republican officials are slowly distancing themselves from the embarrassingly delusional president’s refusal to accept the reality of his defeat. But the fact that it is taking them so long reflects a deep truth about the country’s politics, namely that Americans are still fighting the civil war. When Trump and his madcap surrogates cry “voter fraud”, they do not mean fraud in the technical sense of ballot stuffing or the miscounting of legal votes. What they mean is that Democrats have debased the composition of the electorate by making it easier for African Americans in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, the most reliably Democratic voters in the country, to register and vote. Trump would have been elected in a landslide, they imply, if only “real Americans”, meaning exactly who you think, had been allowed to vote.Nixon’s famous “southern strategy”, crafted with the support of Strom Thurmond, the infamous South Carolina segregationist, suffices to remind us that Republican pandering to white fears of demographic inundation did not begin, and will not end, with Donald Trump. Key to the historical origins of Republican acquiescence in Trump’s efforts to wreck American democracy is his last-ditch and doomed gambit to convince Republican controlled state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to replace the pro-Biden delegates to their state’s electoral college with a pro-Trump slate of electors.Trump’s advisers evidently believe that this anti-democratic maneuver is perfectly constitutional since article II, section 1, clause 2 of the US constitution declares that “each state shall appoint” presidential electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct”. That clause seems straightforward enough until we recall, as Republicans are apparently loath to do, that the framers’ constitution was radically revised by the civil war amendments. In particular, section 2 of the 14th amendment of 1868 was designed to penalize any state that attempted to deny any American citizen “the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for president and vice-president of the United States”. Allowing Republican-controlled state legislatures to appoint the electors would run grievously afoul of this all-important clause. It was bitterly contested in the states of the former Confederacy for the same reason that Trump’s diehard supporters are refusing to accept his defeat. Section 2 of the 14th amendment was seen at the time, and is apparently still seen today, as a betrayal of the racial solidarity of the white majority because crafted to reshape the American electorate by enfranchising African Americans. Shamelessly echoing the South’s post-civil war howls of betrayal, Trump shows why he should forever be remembered as the second president of the Confederacy.While none of this implies that Joe Biden’s well-meaning appetite for some measure of bipartisanship is completely hopeless, it does suggest that he may be thinking about it in the wrong way. The Republican establishment, as mentioned, is panicked by the prospect of alienating Trump’s voters. But they also have strong reasons, after 20 January, to consign Trump himself to political oblivion. This is the wedge that the president-elect should exploit. After all, the presidential hopes of Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and even Mike Pompeo depend on the current darling of their electorate being swept from the scene. And if his strident voice can be silenced, the party can hope to retreat into its pre-Trump habits of making only the kind of discreet appeals to white resentment acceptable in polite company.Although Biden says that he wants to restore the rule of law that has been desecrated by the outgoing attorney general, William Barr, he may imagine that the best way to convince at least some Republicans to cooperate with his administration is to close the books on the past by directing his new justice department to let bygones be bygones. But attempting to “heal the soul of the nation” by discouraging a thorough inquiry into Trump’s potential violations of federal law recalls Robert Frost’s definition of a liberal as “a man who can’t take his own side in an argument”.If retreat from confrontation is what Biden has in mind, he may be underestimating the tacit desire of the Republican leadership to rid themselves of the rabble-rouser who is keeping their electorate hostage. They may well silently but heartily approve if Biden keeps his promise to abstain from interfering with his new attorney general’s efforts to uncover the extent of Trump’s malfeasance in office. Even criminal prosecution, if it comes to that, might be an act of bipartisanship since, by publicly disgracing Trump, it would free a few more Republicans to be occasionally cooperative. This possibility should appeal to a president-elect who, with 80 million voters at his back, is not only willing to reach across the aisle but eager to take his own side’s side in an argument. More

When Minnijean Brown-Trickey looks back at old pictures of 4 September 1957, she remembers the day her courage kicked in. “I look at the photos of the nine of us, standing there, in contrast to those crazy people,” she says. “And what I say is that they threw away their dignity and it landed on us.”Brown-Trickey, now 79, was one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of African American children to go to the city’s Central high school in September 1957 – and in doing so, desegregate it. On the teenagers’ first day at the Arkansas school, white residents were so furious they amassed in a 1,000-strong mob at the gates. In preparation, eight of the teenagers had been instructed by Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to meet at her house, so they could travel to the school in a group. But one of the nine, Elizabeth Eckford, had no telephone and so was not told of the safety plan. Instead she was forced to run the gauntlet of the mob’s hatred alone. The pictures of the young girl encountering the baying crowd is the enduring image of that day for many. But to Brown-Trickey, despite its power, it cannot completely capture all nine children’s fear. “Still photos cannot show how we are shaking in our boots, sandwiched between the Arkansas National Guard and a mob of crazy white people,” she says.As they tried to walk into school, the children were subject to verbal abuse, spat on and denied admission. Three black journalists watching were also attacked. One, L Alex Wilson, was hit on the head with a brick, developed a nervous condition and died three years later aged only 51.It took a further three weeks for the students to actually step inside the building, thanks to fierce resistance from the Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who used the mob as a pretext for barring the nine, putting the state’s National Guard in their way. Brown-Trickey recalls how he warned of “blood in the streets” should the children be allowed to go to school. More

This terrific history of strongmen since Mussolini makes it clear that despite a horrific pandemic and massive economic disruption, ordinary democratic Americans have more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than ever before.Comparing the gruesome, granular details of the reigns of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Gaddafi, Pinochet, Mobuto, Berlusconi and Erdoğan to the acts and aspirations of Donald Trump, New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes a powerful argument that on the scary road to fascism, America just came perilously close to the point of no return.Almost everything Trump has done has come straight from the authoritarian playbook. Every dictator, for example, has built on the accomplishments of his predecessors.“Just as Hitler watched Mussolini’s actions carefully,” Ben-Ghiat writes, “so did Gaddafi learn from Lt Col Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt.” Then in the 1980s and 90s, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich served as models for Europeans looking for “a more radical form of conservatism”. Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America was echoed a year later by the Front National, with its “contract for France with the French”. Berlusconi’s Contract with Italians followed six years later.In Egypt, Nasser hired “former Nazi propagandists for their expertise in antisemitic messaging”. In Zaire, from 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko’s media handlers reimagined Leni Riefenstahl’s image of Hitler descending from the sky by opening the television news each night with a picture of the dictator’s face, hovering up in the clouds.The parallels between Trump and his role models are endless. Ben-Ghiat writes of “watching Trump retweet neo-Nazi propaganda, call for the imprisonment [of Hillary Clinton] and lead his followers in loyalty oaths at rallies seemed all too familiar”– and how it filled her “with dread”.Before the Putin-Trump bromance there was Putin and Berlusconi, grinning at each other from Zavidovo to Sardinia. The way Trump talked about Mexicans was hardly different from Hitler’s words about the Jews or Berlusconi’s about Africans. The Italian media mogul and prime minister was himself just a pale imitation of Mussolini. In the pre-war period, he was responsible for the deaths of 700,000 Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians.Every authoritarian regime has seen a crucial alliance between big business and the dictator, from Putin and his oligarchs to Hitler and German industrialists and Trump and the Wall Street elite. The German businessman Ernst von Hanfstaengl, Ben-Ghiat writes, introduced a “cleaned-up Hitler to the moneyed social circles that mattered” – just as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman helped legitimize Trump with tens of millions in campaign contributions to him and his Republican allies.Like all his role models, Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they … fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.”The US has done so much to promote authoritarianism abroad during the last 100 years, it’s actually surprising it took so long before we had to confront it at home.When Mussolini desperately needed international legitimacy and economic aid in 1926, it was a fascist proselytizer and JP Morgan partner Thomas Lamont who rescued him, brokering a $100m US government loan. Fifty years later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms to make Chile’s “economy scream”, so Gen Augusto Pinochet could overthrow the socialist Salvador Allende. Kissinger and William F Buckley became fervent Pinochet apologists, even as thousands were tortured and disappeared. More