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    Melania Trump passionately defends abortion rights in upcoming memoir

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    Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump has rarely expressed political views in public. The book, which reveals the former first lady to be so firmly out of step with most of her own party, Melania, will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.View image in fullscreenHer decision to include a full-throated expression of support for abortion rights is remarkable not just given her proximity to a Republican candidate running on an anti-abortion platform, but also given the severe deterioration of women’s reproductive rights under Donald Trump and the GOP.In 2022, in the supreme court case Dobbs v Jackson, three justices installed when Donald Trump was president voted to strike down Roe v Wade, the ruling which had protected federal abortion rights since 1973. Republican-run states have since instituted draconian abortion bans.Donald Trump has tried to both take credit for the Dobbs decision – long the central aim of evangelical and conservative Catholic donors and voters – and avoid the fury it has stoked, saying abortion rights should be decided by the states.But Democrats have scored a succession of election wins by campaigning on the issue, even in conservative states, and threats to reproductive rights, among them threats to fertility treatments including IVF, are proving problematic for Republicans up and down this year’s ticket.Amid a blizzard of statements opponents deem misogynistic and regressive, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, has indicated he would support a national abortion ban – a move it seems his boss’s wife would be against.Donald Trump himself recently got into a tangle over whether he would vote in November to protect abortion rights in Florida, a ballot his wife will also cast given their residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He eventually said he would vote no. Judging by her own words, Melania Trump appears likely to vote yes.Her memoir is slim, long on descriptions of her youth in Slovenia, life as a model in New York and love for the man whose third wife she became, correspondingly short on policy discussion. But Donald Trump provides a blurb, praising his wife’s “commitment to excellence … insightful perspective … [and] entrepreneurial achievements”.Before discussing abortion, Melania Trump says she disagreed with her husband on some aspects of immigration policy, not least as an immigrant herself.“Occasional political disagreements between me and my husband,” she says, are “part of our relationship, but I believed in addressing them privately rather than publicly challenging him.”And yet, later in her book, she states views on abortion and reproductive rights diametrically opposed to those of her husband and his party.“I have always believed it is critical for people to take care of themselves first,” Melania Trump writes of her support for abortion rights. “It’s a very straightforward concept; in fact, we are all born with a set of fundamental rights, including the right to enjoy our lives. We are all entitled to maintain a gratifying and dignified existence.“This common-sense approach applies to a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health.”Melania Trump says her beliefs about abortion rights spring from “a core set of principles”, at the heart of which sits “individual liberty” and “personal freedom”, on which there is “no room for negotiation”.After outlining her support on such grounds for abortion rights, she details “legitimate reasons for a woman to choose to have an abortion”, including danger to the life of the mother, rape or incest, often exceptions under state bans, and also “a congenital birth defect, plus severe medical conditions”.Saying “timing matters”, Melania Trump also defends the right to abortion later in pregnancy.She writes: “It is important to note that historically, most abortions conducted during the later stages of pregnancy were the result of severe fetal abnormalities that probably would have led to the death or stillbirth of the child. Perhaps even the death of the mother. These cases were extremely rare and typically occurred after several consultations between the woman and her doctor. As a community, we should embrace these common-sense standards. Again, timing matters.”More than 90% of US abortions occur at or before 13 weeks of gestation, according to data from the CDC. Less than 1% of abortions take place at or after 21 weeks.On the campaign trail, Republicans have blatantly mischaracterized Democrats’ positions on abortion. Last month, debating Kamala Harris, Donald Trump falsely said his Democratic opponent’s “vice-presidential pick … says that abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. [Tim Walz] also says: ‘Execution after birth’ – execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born – is OK.”He was factchecked: it is not legal in any state to kill a baby after birth.On the page, Melania Trump issues a distinctly un-Trumpian appeal for empathy.“Many women opt for abortions due to personal medical concerns,” she writes. “These situations with significant moral implications weigh heavily on the woman and her family and deserve our empathy. Consider, for example, the complexity inherent in the decision of whether the mother should risk her own life to give birth.”Recent reporting has highlighted cases of women who have died in states where abortion has been banned.She goes on to appeal for compassion.“When confronted with an unexpected pregnancy, young women frequently experience feelings of isolation and significant stress. I, like most Americans, am in favor of the requirement that juveniles obtain parental consent before undergoing an abortion. I realize this may not always be possible. Our next generation must be provided with knowledge, security, safety, and solace, and the cultural stigma associated with abortion must be lifted,” writes the former first lady.Finally, Melania Trump offers an expression of solidarity with protesters for reproductive rights.“The slogan ‘My Body, My Choice’ is typically associated with women activists and those who align with the pro-choice side of the debate,” she writes. “But if you really think about it, ‘My Body, My Choice’ applies to both sides – a woman’s right to make an independent decision involving her own body, including the right to choose life. Personal freedom.” More

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      All in the Family by Fred Trump review – when dollars are thicker than blood

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      Forget about the sanctity of the human family or its sticky glue of love. If you’re a Trump, the institution is a convenient mechanism for ensuring inheritance, whether of gilded financial assets or brazen moral defects. Trumps are branded merchandise, and their dynastic DNA is a double helix of greed, graft and feuding malice.Since numbers on ledgers are what matter to this mercenary dynasty, they advance arithmetically. In All in the Family, the last in a series of Fred Trumps identifies his great-grandfather – who absconded from Germany to avoid military service and founded a property empire by establishing a chain of brothels in Canada – as Fred Zero. His son Fred I, a rack-renting landlord in the New York suburbs, then begat Fred II, who defied the family by preferring a career as an airline pilot; then, after being reduced to a “second-tier Trump”, he drank himself to an early death, which made his younger brother Donald the heir apparent. Fred III, the author of this memoir, aspires to be “a different kind of Trump” but coyly trades on his tainted surname, describing himself on LinkedIn as “a third-generation member of a prominent New York real estate family”.Trumpism consists, as Fred III puts it, of “name promotion”. Fred I advertised the homes he built by anchoring a yacht emblazoned with Trump signs off Coney Island on summer weekends. The logo has since been affixed to hotels, golf clubs, a failed airline, a dodgy university and several bankrupt casinos; it currently sells Bibles, high-top sneakers that yell “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” and a Victory cologne that purports to waft out the intimate essence of Donald.What Fred III calls the “T-word” – almost as odious as the forbidden N-word, which he remembers Donald using when enraged by vandals who damaged his car – undergoes some slick mutations in the course of this chronicle. Fred Zero was born Friedrich Drumpf, which sounds like a belch or sneeze. Anglicised, the surname evokes trump cards and trumped-up accusations, a better match for the family’s ruthlessly competitive creed. Fred I’s middle name was Christ, rhyming with mist, which he derived from his German mother. But he worried that this might repel the Jewish tenants in his New York apartment blocks, so he dropped the “h” and called himself Crist instead. Fred III adopted the new spelling when he bizarrely christened his first son Cristopher; there would be no Fred IV, he decided, because “it was time to stop counting”.The other Trumps remained at their adding machines, policing the succession. Donald’s sister, Maryanne – a judge who retired from the bench after a charge of misconduct, foiling his whimsical scheme to appoint her to the supreme court – complained because Fred III jumped the queue by producing Cristopher: according to her dotty theory of primogeniture, her own son, Fred I’s oldest grandchild, had the right to marry and procreate first. Then when Donald’s creditors threatened to foreclose on his debts during the 1990s, Maryanne and the other siblings produced a will altered by the already senile Fred I that disinherited Fred II’s offspring and cruelly cut off the medical insurance for Fred III’s severely disabled son William.View image in fullscreenFred III and his sister, Mary, sued to claw back a portion of the spoils to which they felt entitled. Mary, a trained psychologist, additionally declared war on the family in her book Too Much and Never Enough, published as a spoiler during Donald’s re-election campaign in 2020; in it, incensed by his mismanagement of the pandemic, she accuses him of “mass murder”. Her brother’s charges against their uncle are milder. Anxious to maintain a semblance of peace, Fred III reminiscences fondly about his access to the Oval Office and takes pride in his complimentary membership of a Trump golf club. The family’s handed-down anecdotes about Donald’s bratty behaviour amount, as Fred III sees it, to little more than “stupid kid stuff”: hyper-aggressive and liable to tantrums, he delighted in “the pain he hoped he had caused” by stealing toys from other children or hurling an eraser at a teacher he disliked. That might sound trivial, but these infantile urges still activate the old man who itches to regain power and they will be converted into vengeful authoritarian policies if he is re-elected.Despite a settlement, the financial dispute with the aunts and uncles continues to rankle. For the Trumps, Fred III realises: “Blood only went so far – as far as the dollar signs.” Arguing about his grandfather’s will, he defends the protocols of “multigenerational wealth”, but that very terminology splices together genetic and economic heritage. As he ought to know, families pass on congenital failings as well as stocks and shares. His father once told him that he had “inherited a bad gene” and warned him to be careful about drinking; Fred III admits to having had his own foreordained struggle with alcoholism.Donald, like Hitler, trusts in eugenics. At a recent rally in Minnesota, he promoted himself as a pure-bred product of “the racehorse theory”, and he fancies that his genes make him “a very stable genius”. His apostles agree. He recovered from Covid, according to the self-styled Maga life coach Brenden Dilley, because “he’s got God-tier genetics, top fucking one percentile genetics, right?” This insane conceit explains Donald’s spasm of disgust when Fred III tells him that William’s affliction is “some kind of genetic thing”. “Not in our family,” Donald replies with a snort, “there’s nothing wrong with our genes!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe most lethal moment in the book occurs when Donald helpfully suggests that Fred III, rather than spending money on William’s care, should “just let him die and move down to Florida”. The advice comes from a remote-control executioner: after the death of the Iraqi terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Fred III listens to Donald exultantly telling the king of Jordan on the phone: “I killed him, I killed him like a dog.” What shocks me most, reading the exchange about William, is the casual logic of the follow-up. Why Florida? It’s Donald’s home, now that he is such a pariah in New York, and he commends it to his nephew as a moral Bermuda Triangle, a swamp for human alligators.Fred III makes a final attempt to redeem his tarnished lineage by citing “something that William inherited from our family”. No, this is not a trust fund; it is the young man’s “heart-melting blue eyes”, his only means of communicating with the world. It’s a nice try, but a harsher truth is proclaimed by the book’s epigraph from The Godfather, which quotes Michael, soon to be installed as mob boss, when he shrugs that the gangsterism of the Corleones is “not personal, it’s strictly business”. Donald, who customarily deflects condemnation by projecting it on to others, used to rant about “the Biden crime family”; indirectly exposing the self-disgust that skulks behind his self-love, he was of course describing the vicious, venal conduct of his own clan. More

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      One Way Back review: Christine Blasey Ford faces down Brett Kavanaugh again

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      In September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified that Brett Kavanaugh, then an intermediate appellate judge nominated by Donald Trump to the US supreme court, sexually assaulted her 36 years earlier when they were high school students, fixtures of the suburban-DC country club set.“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford, then 51, told the Washington Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”Kavanaugh vehemently denied it. He also professed his penchants for suds.“We drank beer … I liked beer,” the judge memorably told Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, at his Senate hearing. Pressed by Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota over whether he had ever blacked out because of drinking beer, Kavanaugh ratcheted up the heat. On SNL, Matt Damon memorialized the rabid performance. PJ, Squi, Handsy Hank and Gang-Bang Greg: all are now part of TV lore. The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh anyway, 50-48, a party-line vote.Ford now returns to retell her story, in One Way Back: A Memoir. In essence, she dares Kavanaugh to sue her for defamation. Both know truth constitutes an absolute defense.Kavanaugh is not a “consummately honest person”, Ford writes. “The fact is, he was there in the room with me that night in 1982. And I believe he knows what happened. Even if it’s hazy from the alcohol, I believe he must know.”Ensconced on the high court, Kavanaugh holds his peace.Ford is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a faculty member of Stanford medical school. She is an avid surfer. Metallica is her favourite band. She invokes personal circumstance to explain why she delayed coming forward, electing not to bring her story to the attention of law enforcement as Kavanaugh rose in the Washington legal firmament.“Honestly, if it hadn’t been the supreme court – if my attacker had been running for a local office, for example – I probably wouldn’t have said anything,” Ford writes, adding that this is “a sad, scary thing to admit”.From Kavanaugh’s clerkship to Anthony Kennedy, his immediate predecessor on the supreme court, to his time in the White House of George W Bush and on the US court of appeals, Ford stayed silent. Even with her explanation, the reader is left wondering why.Ford also sheds light on her own college days.“I’d tried mushrooms and pot occasionally before, but now also explored MDMA, which helped me get outside of myself,” she writes, adding: “At the time, I just knew that they seemed to call bullshit on everything, including my self-esteem issues … I never got into anything harder, since cocaine didn’t help with my anxiety and heroin never crossed my path until I was out of college, and by that point I’d kind of missed the window of experimentation that heroin would have required.”Should any rightwingers seeking vengeance think of pouncing on such admissions, it should be noted that Trumpworld is littered with tales of drugs and alcohol. Consider the very public cases of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer, and Ronny Jackson, the Trump White House physician turned congressman from Texas. The GOP likes to hound Hunter Biden, who has struggled with addiction. But he never held office.For Ford, the Kavanaugh confirmation fight took a heavy personal toll. There were threats on her person and family. There were wounds to her psyche. One day, she recalls, she stared at a construction site and imagined it to be a Lego set. “That’s so cool,” she thought. “I wish I was a construction worker. Perhaps people were right. Perhaps I was crazy.”Ford writes favorably of meeting Anita Hill, the staffer who in 1991 confronted Clarence Thomas over his alleged sexual harassment, stoking another epically nasty supreme court nomination fight. Like Kavanaugh, Thomas was confirmed. In 2019, in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh fight, Hill told Ford time can help salve wounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFord’s politics shade left. In One Way Back, she records her satisfaction with the “blue wave” of 2018, “progressive wins” and in particular the victory in a New York House race that year of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, praises One Way Back on its jacket. So does Hill.Kavanaugh is a consequential and controversial figure. In 2022, he cast his lot with four other conservatives in Dobbs v Jackson, voting to overturn Roe v Wade. Those five justices eviscerated the concept of a constitutionally protected right to privacy. In a separate concurrence, Kavanaugh said that in doing so the court had not undercut precedents protecting contraception, interracial marriage and same-sex unions. Other justices differed.The tremors of Dobbs reverberate across the political divide. In the 2022 midterms, a much-anticipated red wave failed to materialize, thanks in part to Dobbs. In reliably Republican Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio, voters have conferred legal protections for abortion rights.On Capitol Hill, Pelosi’s successors as House speaker are also subject to the whims of Republican zealots. Kevin McCarthy is no longer even a congressman. Mike Johnson holds the gavel by the narrowest of margins. In February, Democrats flipped the seat previously held by George Santos, the indicted fabulist. Postmortems found that abortion rights played an outsized role in that Republican defeat. The threat of a national abortion ban drove voters to the polls. For the moment, for Democrats, Dobbs is a gift that keeps on giving – thanks to Kavanaugh and co.“I’d like to believe we’re in the middle of a revolution that will only be recognizable in the years to come,” Ford writes.Maybe sooner than that.
      One Way Back: A Memoir is published in the US by Macmillan More

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      ‘I don’t think most Americans realize what a coup is’: Edel Rodriguez takes on Trump

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      Did you know Cuba has a Capitol in Havana that closely resembles its American counterpart? Edel Rodriguez does, and that’s one more reason why he, a Cuban American political cartoonist, was so disturbed by what happened in his adopted homeland on January 6.Rodriguez grew up in the shadow of a different sort of insurgency, the revolution that swept Fidel Castro to power in January 1959. He knew what it was like for a people to lose their freedoms under a dictatorship, and he knew the resulting desire to seek liberty, which he and his family did in the Mariel boatlift in 1980. So after 2016, when Donald Trump won the White House, uncomfortable memories from the not-so-distant past began to surface, never more so than on 6 January 2021.Now, Rodriguez has put it all down in a graphic-novel memoir, Worm: A Cuban-American Odyssey.“I don’t think most Americans realize what a coup is, or a coup attempt, how dangerous it is,” he says.In Worm, compelling artwork revisits January 6 and its immediate aftermath, when barbed wire surrounded the US Capitol and the national guard patrolled. Red-and-black images juxtapose Castro’s revolutionary soldiers, fists and rifles raised, with the QAnon Shaman and an American flag at half-staff.Ask Rodriguez which panels he is most proud of and he holds up a pair of two-page spreads. One, at the beginning of the narrative, depicts the Cuban revolution, Castro’s bearded army storming Havana atop tanks, that familiar-looking Capitol in the background. A panel found near the end of the memoir, meanwhile, shows the US Capitol rioters charging the seat of Congress, wearing Maga caps and brandishing multiple flags: American, Confederate, “Back-the-Blue” pro-police. The images are inverses of each other, the crowds marching in opposite directions.“It really does go to what I’m trying to say – two sides of the same coin,” Rodriguez says.“When it was back in 2015, and Trump appeared on the scene, my ears perked up. He would call people ‘scum’. In Cuba, Castro called his enemies ‘scum’. The press was the ‘enemy of the people’. These were the kind of words Castro would use.”Rodriguez’s depictions of Trump are now famous, making the covers of Time and Der Spiegel. The most striking is up for debate. Is it Trump’s face as a melting blob, which MSNBC likened to the Wicked Witch of the West? Trump holding a bloody knife in one hand and the severed head of the Statue of Liberty in the other, inspired by a picture of an Islamic State terrorist? Trump draped in an American flag, giving the Nazi salute?“I think he brought a certain kind of extremism to politics in America,” Rodriguez says. “I felt that it needed to be addressed … I’m just not a fan of extremism of any sort.“The best way to deal with problems,” he says, is to hold democratic elections, and if your candidate doesn’t win, to try again in the next go-round. What he’s seen far too often instead is the authoritarian alternative of “men with guns – communists in Cuba, the Maga crowd in the US, or Isis”.In Worm, Rodriguez examines his first-hand experiences with dictatorship. In cold war Cuba, he lived an hour away from the capital, in the small town of El Gabriel. Although he remembers being far more tuned in to nature there than in the US, he also describes being indoctrinated in school, from the red beret he wore to the Castro personality cult that was instilled by teachers. His parents lived in fear that his father’s entrepreneurial streak might get them in trouble, including neighborhood snoops who put their curiosity to the use of the Communist party.A tip-off alerted Rodriguez’s father to stepped-up scrutiny, accelerating the decision to leave. The Mariel boatlift made things easier in some ways, harder in others, as Rodriguez now explains in Worm, which unfolds memories of tense exit negotiations with authorities; a state of limbo in a tent city; and the miraculous day when a rescue vessel came. For the Rodriguez family, it was a shrimp boat called Nature Boy. Castro released prisoners to join the exodus to America, some of whom packed the boat. It and a convoy of other vessels made it to US shores.As Cubans willingly left their homeland, Castro insulted them with a choice barb, the “worm” of the book’s title.“It’s what they would call us, being underground, taking from the system,” Rodriguez says.In Spanish, it’s gusano, which the author considered for a title.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Of course, gusano has, to me, a much more guttural sound,” he says. “I wanted it to translate for an English-speaking audience.”Decades later – after studying at the Pratt Institute, getting a big break at Time, marrying and raising a family and even going back to Cuba to see family and friends – Rodriguez felt familiar enough with authoritarianism in his birthplace to speak out against it in his new home. That desire increased over the course of Trump’s 2016 campaign and ensuing four years in power. The verbal attack on a Muslim Gold Star family … the Access Hollywood tape … the Muslim ban … it’s all there, and so are Rodriguez’s graphic-art ripostes. He gives Trump a distinctive look: yellow hair, orange skin, no eyes or nose, just a wide-open mouth.Rodriguez has found approval – and backlash. He realized just how big the backlash had grown when he fielded a sympathetic audience question about his safety after giving a lecture in another country with a troubled history.“I was surprised when the man in Germany asked what was going to happen to me when I returned to America,” he says. “I did not think about it, I did not process it. It was sort of like telling a writer or an artist, ‘What’s going to happen to you if you do your work?’ … What else am I going to do with my life?”Noting that “some of my family questioned what I was doing, very close family members, including my mother,” he adds: “I don’t really think about people’s perceptions of my work as a stumbling block that will get me in trouble or go to jail. It’s hard enough being an artist.”Rodriguez will keep making waves with his art, even if it is now tinged with a sense of betrayal and loss, from an American dream that became a nightmare.“I think January 6 really did puncture a lot of what America means to people – not just myself, but many people in the world,” he says. “The US is the place you go to hope and dream. To see the US Congress get attacked, like some country in some other part of the world that has been attacked, like the parliament in Moscow getting attacked in the 1990s – to feel that shock, to see that in the US … I’m very sad, very disappointed.“At the same time, I’m very scared. I don’t think Americans have processed how messed up Trump is, if you consider the same candidate could come back. The most recent polls have him ahead.”
      Worm is published in the US by Metropolitan Books More

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      Enough review – inside story of the Trump White House by star witness at Capitol riot hearings

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      Every legal drama needs a surprise witness. Until June last year, the congressional hearings to investigate the attempted coup at the US Capitol in January 2021 were unsurprising: Democrats presented evidence that Trump had riled up the incendiary mob, to which Republicans responded with regurgitated abuse. Then into the room walked Cassidy Hutchinson, a Republican true believer who had worked as an aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. No one gasped, because the then 25-year-old woman was unknown, but her testimony, provoked by an uneasy conscience, quietly confirmed that Trump and his henchmen had knowingly lied about the outcome of the presidential election, then summoned loony militias from the backwoods and dispatched them, armed with bear spray and flagpoles sharpened into spears, to disrupt the certification of Biden’s victory.Hutchinson’s memoir adds many greasy, sleazy details to the more sanitised account she gave in Congress. Trump, she recalls, smashed plates in his dining room beside the Oval Office, squirting ketchup on the walls to express his exasperation. She observes Meadows illicitly incinerating bags of telltale documents that should have been passed to the government archives; his wife complains about the cost of dry-cleaning his suits to remove the stench from so many bonfires. And as Trump exhorts his horde to invade the Capitol, Rudy Giuliani, for whom the mayhem was like a double dose of Valium, leers at Hutchinson with jaundiced eyes and slides his hand up her thigh. Disillusioned and disgusted, she decides, as the title of her book tersely puts it, that she has had enough of the president and his thuggish praetorian guards.Her earlier glimpses of Trump are killingly candid, exposing the tough guy as a weakling, even a sissy. He disdained face masks during the pandemic because the stained straps drew attention to his second skin of bronzer. During the winter he required a valet to blow-dry the insides of his leather gloves, to ensure that his tiny fingers stayed warm; volunteering tips like a chatty beautician, he even advised Hutchinson to add some blond streaks to her dark hair. In a casual aside, she notes that Trump dislikes animals – a symptom of his quaking cowardice, and of his reluctance to confront creatures unimpressed by his inflated wealth and his equally puffed-up celebrity. Titanically petulant, he sought to overturn the US constitution because he felt “embarrassed” by his lost bid for re-election.About herself, Hutchinson is less clear-eyed. Born to a working-class family in New Jersey, she was exposed during childhood to the alienation and festering resentment that eventually produced the Unabomber, QAnon and Trump’s Maga fanatics. Her father taught her to distrust anyone sporting a government-issued badge, and also anyone in a white coat: he once offered to perform an appendectomy on her with a pocketknife. On hunting trips he schooled her in what he called “the warrior spirit”, and toughened her by using turtles for target practice and feasting on the deer he shot.Despite her college education, Hutchinson surrendered to Trump’s rants and was pleased to serve as his “loyal foot soldier”. Too late, she realised she had enrolled in a movement – or perhaps in a nihilistic death cult – whose aim was to foment chaos. First, she crashed a golf cart at Camp David when drunk, while one of her colleagues almost burned down a cabin at the presidential retreat. Then Meadows solemnly asked if she would take a bullet for Trump. “Yeah,” Hutchinson replied, adding after a pause that she’d prefer to take it in the leg. The cheeky proviso revealed that she was not the kind of diehard that Trump demanded.At the end of the book, Hutchinson’s Trump-worshipping father sells his house and vanishes without trace. She is relieved to be rid of him; it doesn’t occur to her that he might be somewhere in the wilderness with the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, limbering up for the next battle. After months in hiding, she re-emerges into society and buys herself a new friend – a cockapoo puppy, which she names George in homage to Washington, founding father of the currently foundering republic. I hope that George’s lapping tongue has comforted Hutchinson, but it will take more than a puppy’s licks to clean up Washington. More

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      Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger review – self-help tips that are more gain than pain

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      Arnold Schwarzenegger wants you to know that you’re a lazy piece of shit. But he’s going to tell you politely; with care and a few encouraging suggestions. He’s going to be good-natured and nonjudgmental about it. Or a bit judgmental about it. But only because he doesn’t want you to be a lazy piece of shit any more. Instead, he wants you to be useful.If that titular phrase sounds like something a parent tells their kid when said kid is hovering about after school, that’s because it’s exactly what Schwarzenegger’s disciplinarian policeman father used to tell him (and, indeed, Arnie went on to sponsor a nationwide after-school programme). Schwarzenegger, 76, is now in the “fourth act” of his life. He’s been the world’s most famous bodybuilder, a Hollywood movie star, a surprise (mostly hit) governor of California and now an author and quasi-motivational speaker – the catalyst for which was the viral videos he posted during the US pandemic lockdown.I remember, in April 2020, watching Schwarzenegger on Twitter with his pet donkey Lulu and miniature horse Whiskey. The animals were “demonstrating” social distancing guidance, while their owner radiated warmth in a terrifying time. Then came a different register: his stirring, home-filmed speech after January 6 in which he compared the storming of the Capitol to Kristallnacht and pleaded for the protection of US democracy. Maybe we had underestimated him. Zeitgeist-capturing animal lover; rhetorician for the ages. Who knew?Arnie knew. Because people – “naysayers” – have underestimated him his whole life and he doesn’t want you to doubt yourself for a second. Be Useful is a hybrid work. Part Jordan Peterson’s bro life-hack manual slash pop philosophy (the book’s subtitle, Seven Tools for Life, is very similar to Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life); part Instagram motivational quotes slash Arianna Huffington’s obsession with “thriving”, it is threaded through with relevant memoir.Self-help can be a dubious scene to be a part of. Not financially – the industry is booming to the point where life coaches will charge money for others to take their life-coaching courses in what is, as far as I can tell, a Ponzi scheme for dream-journaling. But there’s the toxic masculinity of an Andrew Tate (and, to a lesser extent, Peterson) or the woo-woo of the wellness crew. Much of it is uncomfortably gendered, with polar extremities of dangerous and twee.But Schwarzenegger, far from the cyborg killing machine of his catchphrase film role, is an amiable instructor. A lot of the basic stuff here works. His idea to beget ideas is walking, which, as he points out, is not an original one (he must have thought of it while standing still); he’s just seconding Nietzsche and Aristotle. He recommends incremental changes at first, which is what most primary care doctors might suggest. Lots of advice is similar to that found in 1980s and 90s classics of the genre that either attempted to compensate for the booming rat-race class or else leaned into it. He talks about surrounding yourself with supportive people. All this is good, sound practice. There are the usual Nelson Mandela and Dalai Lama citations. There is, mercilessly, nothing wacky.And there’s plenty of humour to offset the more Sandhursty bits. When he talks about “putting the work in” during drama training, he jokes that he wants his money back for the accent-removal classes. He chops off the bottom half of every pair of his joggers so he can work on his calves more easily. He’s also extremely smart (it still bums him out that bodybuilders are dismissed as airheads) and obsessed with knowledge. One section is called Be a Sponge. His approach is the opposite of Goveism; Schwarzenegger can’t get enough of experts. Whether it’s being taught how to bricklay to make ends meet, or being schooled on the history of gerrymandering as a rookie politician, Schwarzenegger wants your help. And, in turn, he’ll pay it forward. Sometimes literally, as when donating $1m to Covid relief efforts or in time and mentorship, when teaching kids with learning disabilities to bench-press. He hates the phrase “self-made” because, while he recognises it’s meant as a compliment, he believes the opposite – namely, it takes a village (specifically, in his case, Thal in Austria, and then a man called Fredi Gerstl).There’s always a concern with books such as these: will they acknowledge the discriminatory nature of social hierarchical structures and institutions, economic circumstances, health issues and various other impediments to fulfilling potential? Schwarzenegger nods towards them, but more so takes the line that if he, a kid who grew up in a house with no running water, can make it, then anyone can. People will have their views on that, although he’s transparent that one person’s version of fulfilment (pushing through groundbreaking environmental legislation) might differ from another’s (wholesome family; a good job that pays the bills). He loves pain, because “pain is the measure of growth potential”. I sort of love pain in the service of growth – which is why I’m happy to swim in 4C open water – but most of us would be a bit pissed off if, say, a lackadaisical surgeon butchered our aorta during what was supposed to be a routine procedure. Arnie just sets about counting how many laps he can do to the bathroom while stuck in hospital.The triumph of this book is that it’s quite rare in the self-help canon – or what publishers now term personal development – to not make a cynic such as myself roll their eyes, and this one doesn’t. It’s a shame that whoever was responsible for the jacket blurbs takes a shoving-a-finger-in-your chest approach that isn’t replicated by the variable tone inside, which is sometimes dogmatic but often reflects the genuine kindness and enthusiasm of its author. Be Useful, it turns out, is very helpful. More

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      Five things about Michelle Obama revealed in her new book

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      ExplainerFive things about Michelle Obama revealed in her new bookFormer first lady writes on love, knitting and being tall in The Light We Carry Almost four years after her memoir, Becoming, Michelle Obama is once again giving readers insight into her life. In The Light We Carry, Obama shares practical tips and wisdom about everything from overcoming fear to how exactly you can “go high”.Peppered among the advice – from Obama herself and vicariously from family members, friends and colleagues – are stories about her life.Here are five things we’ve learned about the former first lady.She took up knitting during the pandemicObama was “never one for hobbies”, she writes in the first chapter of The Light We Carry, but during the pandemic she found herself ordering a pair of knitting needles online. Knitting was “buried” in her DNA, as she is “the descendant of many seamstresses”.“This was less about passion and more about practicality; sewing was a simple hedge against falling into poverty,” she writes.The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama review – lessons in lifeRead moreWith the pandemic stripping away the structure of her days and feeling like it was “harder to access my own hope or to feel like I could make an actual difference” because of Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Obama says she was “in a low place when I finally got around to picking up the two beginner-sized needles I’d ordered online”.Learning to knit via YouTube videos, Obama discovered knitting narrowed her focus and allowed “my hands to drive the car for a while”.Obama began knitting while speaking on the phone, in Zoom meetings and while watching the news. Among the things she made was a “soft crewneck sweater you give to your Hawaiian-born husband who gets chilled easily in winter”.She and Barack have never been ‘everything’ to each otherObama says in her book that people often approach her “seeking relationship advice”, asking how she and the former president have “managed to stay both married and unmiserable for 30 years now”.Obama says she does not “have the answers”, but one thing she touches on in the book is how she and her husband “have never tried to be each other’s ‘everything’ in life – to single-handedly shoulder the entire load of care that each of us requires”.Instead, writes Obama, the pair “distribute the load” and are “carried by a wide array of friendships”.The Obamas have their own version of the OlympicsA few years into the presidency, Obama organised a surprise birthday trip for the president, inviting 10 of his “guy friends to Camp David for a weekend to celebrate and have some fun”.The trip saw Barack Obama “unplug” with his friends, who all “hurled themselves into every activity Camp David had to offer”.“They played basketball,” writes Obama. “They played cards and threw darts. They did some skeet shooting. They bowled. They had a home-run derby and a football toss.“They kept score on every last thing, trash-talking their way through each event, boisterously reviewing various plays and upsets late into the night.”The gathering would soon become known as “campathlon”, and is now an annual gathering the Obamas host on Martha’s Vineyard, which “has grown to include trophies and an opening ceremony”.Even Michelle Obama has been cheated onLet’s first make clear: not by Barack Obama.But prior to meeting Barack, Obama had dated “men who were less sure of themselves and what they wanted”.Among them was a “player or two”, men she describes as “nice to look at and exciting to be around, but who were often peering over my shoulder, trying to see who else was in a room, what further connections could be made”.Obama says that she had been “cheated on and lied to a few times” by “early loves”. So Barack, who was “direct and clear about what he wanted”, was different from anyone she had known before.Her height often made her feel self-consciousObama writes that many of her early memories of feeling different were connected to her height (she is 5ft 11in). She “showed up tall for the first day of kindergarten and grew steadily from there”.Michelle Obama admits to hating her appearance in new bookRead more“The attention given to my height brought about a new self-consciousness in me, a slight sense of otherness,” she writes.It was her father’s advice – that “no one can make you feel bad if you feel good about yourself” – that helped Obama to overcome her uncertainty around her height, and about other spaces where she felt she stood out for various reasons.
      The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama is published by Viking (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
      TopicsMichelle ObamaBarack ObamaAutobiography and memoirBiography booksUS politicsexplainersReuse this content More

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      Michelle Obama admits to hating her appearance in new book

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      Michelle Obama admits to hating her appearance in new bookIn The Light We Carry, the follow-up to her bestseller Becoming, the former first lady reveals her ‘fearful mind’ and experience of depression during the pandemic Michelle Obama “hates” how she looks, “all the time and no matter what”, she has revealed in her new book.The Light We Carry, the former First Lady’s second memoir, builds on her 2018 title Becoming, and aims to be a “toolkit to live boldly”. In the new book, which was extracted in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, Obama discusses ways to overcome one’s “fearful mind”, which she likens to “a life partner you didn’t choose”.“I’ve lived with my fearful mind for 58 years now,” she writes. “She makes me uneasy. She likes to see me weak.”This part of her mind is constantly having negative thoughts about her appearance, Obama writes. There are “plenty of mornings” when she turns on the bathroom light, takes one look at herself in the mirror, and “desperately want[s] to flip it off again”.‘Is everyone doing this perfectly but me?’ Michelle Obama on the guilt and anxiety of being a mother – and her golden parenting rulesRead moreHer appearance, and her height in particular (she is 5’11”) is something Obama has always been insecure about, she explains in the book. Always “bringing up the rear” at school “created a small wound in me, the tiniest kernel of self-loathing that would keep me from embracing my strengths”.Obama also admits to experiencing a “low-grade form” of depression during the coronavirus pandemic. “I kept with the work I’d been doing – speaking at virtual voter registration drives, supporting good causes, acknowledging people’s pain – but privately I was finding it harder to access my own hope or to feel like I could make an actual difference,” she writes. When she was approached by the Democrats to speak at the party’s national convention in 2020, she put off responding – although she eventually agreed, calling Donald Trump the “wrong president” in her speech.Any time she thought about the offer to speak at the convention, she felt “stalled out”, she has now disclosed in The Light We Carry. She describes being “caught up in frustration and grief for what, as a country, we’d already lost”.“I felt a blanket of despondency settling over me, my mind sliding toward a dull place,” she writes. “I was less able to muster optimism or think reasonably about the future. Worse, I felt myself skirting the edges of cynicism – tempted to conclude that I was helpless, to give in to some notion that when it came to the epic problems and massive worries of the day, nothing could be done.”Five things about Michelle Obama revealed in her new bookRead moreIn The Light We Carry, Obama also reflects on the 2016 presidential election. “Whether or not the 2016 election was a direct rebuke” of her husband, who became the US’s first Black president, “it did hurt. It still hurts”, she writes. “It shook me profoundly to hear the man who’d replaced my husband as president openly and unapologetically using ethnic slurs, making selfishness and hate somehow acceptable, refusing to condemn white supremacists or to support people demonstrating for racial justice”, she adds. “It felt like something more, something much uglier, than a simple political defeat.”Later in the book, she describes watching the “devastating” 2021 attack on the Capitol, which was “perhaps the most frightening thing [she had] ever witnessed”.Since its publication, her first book Becoming has been translated into 50 languages and more than 17m copies have been sold worldwide. The Light We Carry is expected to similarly top bestseller charts. In 2020, she was named the most admired woman in America, according to Gallup’s poll, for the third year running.TopicsBooksMichelle ObamaAutobiography and memoirUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump said Pence was ‘too honest’ over January 6 plot, says ex-vice-president in book

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      Trump said Pence was ‘too honest’ over January 6 plot, says ex-vice-president in bookPence also seems to blame anti-Trump Lincoln Project for angering former president with political ad, fueling Capitol attack Shortly before the January 6 insurrection, Donald Trump warned Mike Pence he was “too honest” when he hesitated to pursue legalistic attempts to stop certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and would make Trump’s supporters “hate his guts”, the former vice-president writes in his memoir.The winner of the midterms is not yet clear – but the loser is Donald TrumpRead morePence also seems, bizarrely, to blame the anti-Trump Lincoln Project for enraging Trump with a political ad, thereby fueling the anger that incited the Capitol attack.Pence’s book, So Help Me God, will be published in the US on Tuesday. An extract was published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.Describing a conversation on New Year’s Day 2021, five days before supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” stormed the US Capitol, Pence writes that he and Trump discussed a lawsuit filed by Republicans, asking a judge to declare the vice-president had “‘exclusive authority and sole discretion to decide which electoral votes should count”.Pence says Trump told him that if the suit “gives you the power, why would you oppose it?”Pence says he “told him, as I had many times, that I didn’t believe I possessed that power under the constitution”.“You’re too honest,” Trump chided. “Hundreds of thousands are gonna hate your guts … People are gonna think you’re stupid.”In the end, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, some chanting that Pence should be hanged. Nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides, have been linked to the riot.Pence’s book emerges as he seeks to establish himself as an alternative to Trump in the Republican presidential primary for 2024.Trump has indicated he will announce his third consecutive run soon, a plan possibly delayed by midterm elections on Tuesday in which the GOP did not succeed as expected and high-profile Trump-backed candidates failed to win their races.Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and a much stronger rival to Trump in polling than Pence, provided a bright spot for Republicans with a landslide win that thrust his name back into the spotlight.In hearings held by the House January 6 committee, Pence has been painted as a hero for refusing to attempt to block Biden’s win, even after his life was placed in danger.In the extract published on Thursday, Pence said the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump conservative operatives, angered Trump with an ad which said Pence would “put the final nail in the coffin” of his re-election campaign by certifying Biden’s win.Rick Wilson, a Lincoln Project co-founder, told the Guardian: “It’s no secret that the Lincoln Project has lived rent-free in Donald Trump’s head since 2019. Mike Pence telling this story is one more powerful testimony to just how our ‘audience of one’ strategy unfailingly disrupts Trump world.”On Twitter, Wilson linked to the ad.On the page, Pence describes events inside the Capitol as Trump’s supporters attacked. His account parallels reporting by news outlets and testimony presented by the House committee, to which Pence has not yet testified.The devoutly Christian Pence gives his version of a call with Trump on the morning of 6 January in which Trump has widely been described as calling his vice-president a “pussy”.Pence writes: “The president laid into me. ‘You’ll go down as a wimp,’ he said. ‘If you [don’t block certification], I made a big mistake five years ago!’”Pence describes his refusal, also widely reported, to get in a Secret Service vehicle, lest his protectors drive him away while the attack was in motion.He describes meetings with Trump after the riot, when Trump’s second impeachment was in train. On 11 January, Pence writes, Trump “looked tired, and his voice seemed fainter than usual”. He says Trump “responded with a hint of regret” when he was told Pence’s wife and daughter were also at the Capitol during the deadly attack.“He then asked, ‘Were you scared?’“‘No,’ I replied, ‘I was angry. You and I had our differences that day, Mr President, and seeing those people tearing up the Capitol infuriated me.’ He started to bring up the election, saying that people were angry, but his voice trailed off. I told him he had to set that aside, and he responded quietly, ‘Yeah.’”Pence claims the Capitol rioters, more than 900 of whom have now been charged, some with seditious conspiracy, were “not our movement”. He says Trump spoke with “genuine sadness in his voice” as he “mused: ‘What if we hadn’t had the rally? What if they hadn’t gone to the Capitol? … It’s too terrible to end like this.’”Pence may risk angering Trump by presenting something approaching presidential contrition. Trump claims to regret nothing about his actions on 6 January, denying wrongdoing in the face of multiple investigations, pursuing the lie that his defeat was the result of electoral fraud and presenting rioters as political prisoners.Pence also describes a meeting on 14 January, “the day after President Trump was impeached for the second time”.“I reminded him that I was praying for him,” Pence writes. Trump, he says, answered “Don’t bother” but added: “It’s been fun.”Pence said he told Trump they would “just have to disagree on two things” – January 6 and the fact Pence would “never stop praying” for Trump.Pence says Trump smiled and said: “That’s right – don’t ever change.”TopicsBooksMike PenceDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS Capitol attackUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More