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    Go-to author on White House reverses take on Biden and slams former president

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    “Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail,” Chris Whipple wrote in The Fight of His Life, his 2023 book on the 46th president, who was then warming up his re-election bid at the age of 80.In that book, Whipple quoted Bruce Reed, a senior aide, describing a long-distance flight. When others appeared exhausted, Biden was raring to go, Reed said. Biden showed “unbelievable stamina”.Speaking to the Guardian in January 2023, Whipple said Biden’s “inner circle” was “bullish about Biden’s mental acuity and his ability to govern. I never heard any of them express any concern and maybe you would expect that from the inner circle. Many of them will tell you that he has extraordinary endurance, energy.”Put it this way: much has happened since.Obviously, there was that whole 2024 election thing. You know – the one when Biden dropped out after a disastrous debate exposed his decline for all to see. There was also the day in February, before the campaign kicked off, when the special counsel Robert Hur declined to charge Biden with mishandling classified documents, because he found him too addled and sympathetic a prospective defendant.Hur wrote: “He did not remember when he was vice-president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘If it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice-president?’) and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘In 2009, am I still vice-president?’) … He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”Whipple, a former CBS producer, has emerged as a go-to author on the White House and those who work there. In The Gatekeepers, he examined the lives of chiefs of staff. Then came The Fight of His Life. With hindsight, Whipple seems to have missed key evidence of Biden’s decline.But Whipple is back with a vengeance. Uncharted, his third book, hits Biden and his aides like a bludgeon. Kamala Harris, who became the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew, fares little better: Whipple depicts a candidate who never should have been there, a sentiment repeatedly expressed by senior Democrats.Whipple had access. People talked. Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, is a key source – and demonstrates startling cognitive dissonance about Biden’s mental and physical decline. Klain says Biden should have stayed in the race – but also gives an absolutely withering account of debate prep at Camp David.At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, Klain describes Biden as “startled”. Whipple writes: “He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.” He fell asleep.“‘We sat around the table,’” says Klain in the book. “‘And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with Nato leaders.’” Klain, Whipple writes, “wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of Nato instead of the US”.Come the debate against Trump, Biden gave perhaps the worst performance of all time. He shuffled, he stared, he made verbal stumbles and gaffes. He handed Trump the win.Klain also tags Biden for skipping a post-debate meeting with progressives in favor of a family photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz.“‘You need to cancel that,’” Klain says he told Biden. “‘You need to stay in Washington. You need to have an aggressive plan to fight and to rally the troops.’” Biden rebuffed him and instead held a Zoom call with the progressives. It went badly.“‘All you guys want to talk about is Gaza … What would you have me do?’” Biden said. “‘I was a progressive before some of you guys were even in Congress.’”How do you remind people you’re old without saying you’re old?Whipple also pays attention to Trump. Susie Wiles, now Trump’s chief of staff, and Karl Rove, a veteran of the George W Bush White House, speak on the record. So does Paul Manafort, a campaign manager in 2016, later jailed and pardoned.“Democrats wanted to know why Harris had lost to Trump and his MAGA movement,” Whipple writes. “Susie Wiles wanted to know why Harris and her team had run such a flawed campaign.”Wiles did not view a Trump victory as inevitable. Whipple asks Wiles: “‘Did that mean Harris couldn’t have won?’”Trump’s campaign chair didn’t mince words.“‘We’ll never know,’” she replies, “‘because it didn’t seem like she even tried.’“‘Voters want authenticity … and they didn’t get that from her.’”Leon Panetta, chief of staff to Bill Clinton, echoed Wiles.“‘I thought they were thinking they could tiptoe into the presidency without getting anybody pissed off at them,’” he tells Whipple. “‘Baloney. You’ve got to make the American people understand that you’re tough enough to be president of the United States.’”Rove does take a jab at Trump and Chris LaCivita, the ex-Marine who became a senior adviser. Rove introduced LaCivita to Trump, via the late megadonor Sheldon Adelson, but didn’t think LaCivita would take the gig. “‘I’m surprised because I know what he thinks of Trump,’” Rove tells Whipple. “‘He thinks Trump’s an idiot.’”LaCivita condemned January 6, after which he “liked” a tweet that urged Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment and remove him from power. LaCivita deleted the post – but did not join the second Trump administration.Back in 2023, in The Fight of His Life, Whipple wrote: “Presidents do not give up power lightly.” Andy Card, chief of staff to George W Bush, weighed in: “‘If anybody tells you they’re leaving the White House voluntarily, they’re probably lying. This applies to presidents, of any age, who are driven by vast reserves of ego and ambition.’”Biden did go – but not voluntarily. In Uncharted, in merciless detail, Whipple shows he should have gone much sooner.

    Uncharted is published in the US by HarperCollins More

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      ‘Shock to the system’: farmers hit by Trump’s tariffs and cuts say they need another bailout

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      Farmers across the United States say they could face financial ruin – unless there is a huge taxpayer-funded bailout to compensate for losses generated by Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts and chaotic tariffs.Small- and medium-sized farms were already struggling amid worsening climate shocks and volatile commodities markets, on top of being squeezed by large corporations that dominate the supply chain.In recent weeks, farmers in Texas and across the midwest have suffered millions of dollars of crop losses due to unprecedented heavy rainfall and flooding.The climate crisis-fueled extreme weather is compounded by the US president’s looming trade war and the administration targeting popular federal programs and staff, leaving farmers reeling and resigned to needing another bailout.“There’s a lot of uncertainty around and I hate to be used as a bargaining chip. I am definitely worried,” said Travis Johnson, who lost more than 1,000 acres of cotton, sorghum and corn after a year’s rain fell within 48 hours in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) in southern Texas last month, turning parched fields into lakes.RGV farmers sell sorghum, wheat, corn and vegetables to Mexico among other crops, while buying fertilizer and equipment – and relying on Mexican farmhands for cheap labor. Mexico is the US’s largest trading partner, while China is the main buyer of American sorghum and cotton. All US products destined for China face a 125% tax thanks to Trump’s tariff war, and could cut farmers off from core markets.View image in fullscreen“I can see how some tariffs might help us compete with Mexico but are we really getting targeted by every other country or are we on the wrong side of this? We’ve already had two years of absolute disaster with falling prices and weather patterns … no farmer wants this but without a bailout this could be devastating and a lot more people could go under,” Johnson said.Rural counties rallied behind Trump in 2024, giving him a majority in all but 11 of the 444 farming-dependent counties last year, averaging 78% support, according to analysis by Investigate Midwest.Trump’s vote share rose among farming communities, despite his last trade war which required a $23bn taxpayer bailout for farmers in 2018-19.Yet anxiety is mounting among the agricultural base.First came widespread cuts to oversubscribed and chronically underfunded federal climate and conservation schemes designed to reduce costs and greenhouse gases, and improve yields and environmental health.Trump is also shuttering local food programs which provide farmers with stable domestic markets like public school districts and food banks, helping make farms more resilient to global economic shocks. The USAID, which purchased about $2bn every year in agricultural products particularly wheat, sorghum and lentils for humanitarian aid programs, has been dismantled.The loss in federal programs alone would have been tough to cope with, but then came the trade chaos. Trump’s tariff announcements began when most farmers already had spring crops in the ground – or at the very least had prepared the land and purchased inputs such as seeds and pesticides, making it impossible to switch to crops that could potentially find a market domestically.View image in fullscreenConsensus is growing among experts that the turmoil represents an opportunity for rival agriculture economies – and disaster for US farmers.“It’s all happening so fast and in the middle of the growing season, it’s a shock to the system that’s going to be tough for farmers, especially those growing commodities for export,” said Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). “Tariffs are not magical, they need to be used strategically as part of wider reforms to the domestic economic agenda.”“The volatility of the tariff policy decisions, with new tariffs frequently being announced, paused and placed will take a toll on the American agricultural industry,” writes economist Betty Resnick in an article for Farm Bureau, a right-leaning lobby group. “Without direct support from USDA or a farm bill with an updated safety net, farmers will almost certainly bear the brunt of these tariffs.”Ben Murray, senior researcher with the consumer advocacy group Food and Water Watch, said: “Without a bailout, we can only imagine how bad this will be for farmers and what an opportunity for Brazil – and this is all being done for a tax cut for the wealthy.”For decades now, US farmers have been heavily incentivized through the Farm Bill to grow commodity crops destined for export such as wheat, corn, soy, sorghum, rice and cotton, rather than produce for domestic consumption. The price of commodities is tied to the global market, even if sold domestically. Meanwhile US imports of fruits and vegetables mostly from Latin America have risen, now accounting for more than 50% of consumption, according to USDA data.This globalized agricultural system favors large and corporate-owned operations, as smaller farms struggle more with boom and bust prices, and access to government subsidies and other credit. The number of farms continues to decline, while the average size continues to rise. Market consolidation and corporate profits tend to surge in the agriculture industry after every economic shock including the Covid pandemic, Trump’s last trade war and the banking crisis.Biden implemented a range of modest, imperfect policies to try to ease the pain for smaller-scale farmers including a greater focus on anti-trust, local and regional food systems, and climate resilience – all of which are under attack by the Trump administration.The vast majority of a $19.5bn funding package by the Biden administration for evidence-based conservation practices that improve soil health, air quality and reduce the use of costly fertilizers, pesticides and water will not be honored. The 10-year fund allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act was an addendum to money ring-fenced in the Farm Bill for four oversubscribed programs, after years of pressure from farmers to expand access to the initiatives.Two Biden-era healthy eating schemes worth a combined $1bn to local farmers have been canceled: the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) program matching producers to food banks, and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program which helped public schools add healthy, locally grown produce on to lunch menus. (The USDA recently agreed to unfreeze funding for existing contracts.)View image in fullscreen“My farm will survive because we’ve been working with school districts for 20 years, but for others in our coalition the funding cliff is very real,” said Anna Knight, who owns an 80-acre citrus farm in southern California.Piling on further misery are mass layoffs within the USDA that were seemingly orchestrated by the billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk.More than 10% of USDA staff have already reportedly agreed to voluntary buyouts, with more expected in coming weeks. This is in addition to several thousand probationary employees who were laid off last month – a move which disproportionately hit local offices beefed up under the Biden administration, and is being challenged in the courts.USDA field offices play a crucial role in rural communities, the place where farmers go for tailor-made technical help from agencies including the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and the Farm Service Agency (FSA) on the latest pest control and planting practices, conservation programs, loans and disaster assistance programs.“It makes no sense taking billions of dollars off the table for programs that improve long-term farm viability and resilience – and which farmers have been lining up for years for – and then spend billions bringing back farmers from financial collapse,” said Jesse Womack, policy expert at the National Sustainable Agricultural Coalition. “It’s looking really bleak with a lot of pain ahead for farmers.”A coalition of environmental and agricultural groups is suing the USDA after it purged an array of climate-related online resources including information on the NRCS website helping farmers access federal grants for conservation practices, and technical guidance on cutting emissions and strengthening resilience to extreme weather like floods and drought.Even if there is a bailout, getting the money to farmers in time to avoid bankruptcy will be much more complicated this time, according to Lilliston from IATP.“Another bailout seems inevitable but there are serious questions about how quickly it could be implemented with such a dysfunctional Congress, local USDA offices shuttered and fewer staff. It’s a very messy situation and farmers are already experiencing harm.”And in the medium and long term: “The US reputation has taken a huge hit. We can no longer be considered a reliable trading partner which is terrible for farmers,” added Lilliston.Even before the current mayhem, almost two-thirds of US rural bankers surveyed in March expected farmer income to decline in 2025, with farm equipment sales dropping for the 19th straight month, according to the latest Rural Mainstreet Economy survey by Creighton University. Grain and cotton prices have plummeted since 2022.View image in fullscreen“We were already in a precarious situation but now, unless there’s a bailout or this trade war is resolved by harvest time, it will be disastrous and a critical mass of farmers could go out of business,” said Adam Chappell, 46, a commodities farmer growing corn, cotton, soybean and rice in Arkansas, where dozens of local USDA staff have reportedly been furloughed or fired in recent weeks.Chappell’s town Cotton Plant was hit with 13in of rain in early April, causing crop losses for many farmers. Chappell’s fields survived the rain but he spent a nervous few weeks after the USDA froze all conservation funds, unsure whether the government would reimburse him, as agreed, for an upfront investment in cover crops and a compost operation. Eventually, after a backlash, the administration backtracked and agreed to honor existing contracts.“The weather is getting stranger and more challenging to deal with every year, while big monopoly corporations are allowed to manipulate the system and squeeze us at every part of the supply chain. Farmers like me lean heavily on the NRCS conservation programs to improve soil health and reduce input costs,” said Chappell. “The tariffs are like adding salt on the wound.”Despite last week’s partial U-turn, Trump’s ongoing and increasingly chaotic trade war risks causing irreparable harm to international markets for farmers, especially but not exclusively China, as well as pushing up the cost of agricultural imports such as pesticides, fertilizer and machinery.China is the US’s third biggest agricultural export market, worth $24.7bn in 2024, down 15% from 2023, as soybean, corn and sorghum sales fell amid rising competition from South America, according to USDA data. China’s top imports from the US are oilseeds and grains. US exports to China supported almost a million US jobs in 2022, according to the US-China Business Council, mostly around agriculture and livestock production.As of Friday, at least 15 agricultural department programs worth billions of dollars to American farmers and rural communities remain frozen, according to Politico, more than two months after they were halted for review to ensure compliance with Trump’s priorities opposing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts as well as his crackdown on climate change initiatives.This includes the Biden-era partnerships for climate-smart commodities (PCSC) program – a five-year $3.2bn real-life study into the effectiveness of conservation practices such as cover cropping and reduced tillage for commodity farms.“PSCS was about increasing our evidence base on climate benefits that also help commodity farmers improve soil health, air and water quality – and their bottom line,” said Omanjana Goswami, a scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Abandoning this will come at a cost to American farms and the taxpayer.”On Monday, the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, defended dismantling PSCS, claiming it amounted to a Biden-era “climate slush fund” of which less than half the money went to farmers.A spokesperson added: “The USDA has a variety of programs available to producers who have been impacted by recent disasters … [and] is currently building a framework to deliver over $20bn in congressionally appropriated funds to producers who suffered losses during the 2023/2024 crop year. With 16 robust nutrition programs in place, USDA remains focused on its core mission: strengthening food security, supporting agricultural markets, and ensuring access to nutritious food.”And some Trump supporters are keeping the faith.“There are some concerns out there but our farmers are willing to make sacrifices for long-term gains,” said Sid Miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner. “Tariffs are a temporary tool, they won’t be permanent, China needs our grains, they are prideful but will come around like last time.” More

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      Two visions within Trump world are battling for primacy. Which will win? | Ben Davis

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      The start of the second Trump administration has been chaotic, to put it mildly. It is difficult for Americans to understand what exactly the administration is trying to do and how it will affect them. It has been simultaneously a colossal remaking of the US state and the entire global order, but also seemingly haphazard, with significant policy decisions such as spending cuts and tariff rates clearly made with little thought or preparation. Analysts and commentators of all stripes have speculated on the motives and strategy behind the Trump administration’s huge overhaul of society. But what is the Trump administration’s plan for the US?The primary moves the administration has made are major cuts to federal government capacity through the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and now an unprecedented tariff regime that has sent financial markets into a free fall. Some view these changes as part of a grand overarching strategy to rebuild some version of an imagined past America: globally hegemonic and able to exercise power nakedly over other countries, economically self-sufficient with a large manufacturing base, and a reassertion of the previous social norms and order around gender, race, and sexuality. But a deeper dive into the Trump administration’s explanation of their policies and vision reveals that rather than a single, coherent ideological project, the Trump administration is sclerotic and being used as a vehicle for more than one competing ideological project.While the first Trump administration had no real ideological project, with Donald Trump’s surprise win being based on a personalist coalition without the backing of an organized movement, and different factions within the administration battling for control over policy and favor from the president, the second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major ideological projects, representing different segments of capital: the oft-discussed “national conservatism” of the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, and tech capital, which has used Trump as a vehicle for its own priorities.These two overarching political projects and visions both see Trump as able to advance their goals, but these projects are competing with each other. Both have accepted that Republicans will lose the midterms in 2026, as the president’s party nearly always does, and are thus trying to radically reshape society in that time in ways that can’t easily be reversed. They have deeply different visions for the future, and whether one wins out or both of their incompatible sets of policies are carried out will have enormous implications for the lives of Americans and people around the globe.On tariffs, the administration has offered multiple, mutually exclusive visions: with some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to rebuild US manufacturing by incentivizing producers to build in the US; some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to raise revenue, cut the deficit, and in the long-term replace the income tax entirely; and some viewing tariffs primarily as a negotiating tool to force countries to make concessions to the US on a variety of issues.Trump personally has suggested that the US become an autarky, with no trade of any kind with the outside world. It’s unclear which of these will be the plan because they each have dramatically different implications for how the tariffs are structured in the long-term, how long they will last, and their effects on US workers.In the first two views, the tariffs are a part of the national conservative project of returning the US to a previous social order. They view the nation-state as the primary actor in a zero-sum anarchic global order of competing nation-states seeking to dominate each other. Tariffs are then a way of reasserting US national power relative to other states. This fits in with Trump’s rhetoric about the US, taking the country back and reasserting American nationhood, and is the primary way analysts and commentators have viewed the administration.The tech capital that oversees Doge, however, has a different project entirely. Elon Musk, who has personally overseen the large-scale slashing of the federal government, rejects tariffs entirely. The Doge project and the tariff project are at odds. The Doge project is cloaked in the rhetoric of retro America First nationalism that would seem on its face (and is understood as by its supporters) to be precisely the opposite of what it is in practice: the outmoding of the nation-state entirely.It’s notable that the first target for Doge’s cuts were not the New Deal programs conservatives have long wanted to cut, but instead the cold war-era nodes of American state power: scientific research, funding for education and the arts, foreign aid, and other programs that were created to allow the US to outcompete the Soviet Union and other countries. Musk does not care about American great power competition, such as with China, as Trump does. Indeed, Musk has close ties with the Chinese state.For Musk and his cohorts, the US must progress past the nation state model – where the state exist to project power against other nation states and part of this bargain is keeping a certain social compact of living standard with citizens – to the vendor state model where international firms are paramount and states exist instead to compete for their favor. The Doge project of Silicon Valley technolibertarianism aims to sublimate the state to capital entirely and to outsource state capacity to transnational tech firms. This is, rather than an end of globalization as the national conservatives want, the final conclusion of globalization, where international capital exists above and beyond the bounds of the nation-state.This is the reason large swathes of tech capital reversed course on Trump during the Biden administration and became his biggest financial backers. For them, Trump exists as a vehicle for their overall project.Both of these projects are disastrous for the American people on their own, but both being partially implemented in opposing ways is even worse and will lead to disaster for US workers and our society’s basic capacity to function.While the tariffs by themselves are devastating to US consumers and could lead to a major economic crisis, the Doge cuts strip state capacity that would be needed to implement the most positive vision of tariffs returning manufacturing jobs. While tariffs drive up prices on things like semiconductors or electric vehicles, the government is simultaneously slashing the programs designed to encourage these goods to be manufactured domestically. And while the Doge cuts have slashed the state and led to the direct capture of swathes of the state by tech capital, their overall project of global tech hegemony cannot progress in a world where international trade has broken down completely.Trump and the national conservative’s dream of a return to a pre-financialization manufacturing-based economy, where the US has security through economic self-reliance, and the tech right’s commitment to creating shareholder value at all costs, and whose entire model is based entirely on the result of financialization, are incompatible and on a collision course. Different sections of capital – tech on the one hand, and the revanchist small capital class who form national conservatism’s base on the other – have different and competing interests and control of different sections of administration policy. The consequences of this intranecine competition are enormous, but either way, the next four years look dire for the American working class. The damage may take generations to fix.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign More

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      Democrats’ deference to Biden was a disaster. They still haven’t learned their lesson | Norman Solomon

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      Joe Biden’s insistence on running for re-election was certainly disastrous. It kept credible contenders out of the Democratic presidential primaries and prevented the selection of a nominee who had gained momentum in the winnowing process. Even after his stunningly feeble debate performance on 27 June last year, Biden took several weeks before finally opting out of the race. That left Kamala Harris a mere 107 days between the launch of her campaign and election day.Ample evidence shows that the Biden team was riddled with obstinate denial and misrepresentation aimed at the public. But tales of tragic egomania in high places can take us only so far. What’s essential is to scrutinize how – and why – the Democratic party, its leaders and its prominent supporters enabled Biden and his inner circle to get away with such momentous stonewalling for so long.Democrats in Congress, with few exceptions, refused to jump off the Biden 2024 bandwagon until the debate disaster. Similar enabling also came from state party chairs and Democratic governors. Likewise, a wide range of party-allied organizations toed the Biden party line. Meanwhile, many activists took on the role of spectators, if not cheerleaders for another Biden campaign, in an unfolding tragedy of vast proportions.A common denominator was fear. Fear of being accused of disloyalty to the Democratic president. Fear of being ostracized by fellow Democrats or denounced by anti-Trump commentators. Fear of being accused of weakening the party by pointing out Biden’s evident frailty. Fear of damaging personal ambitions or future access to halls of power. And on and on.The silence and compliance helped Biden to coast toward renomination. Yet by midway through his term, polling numbers and increasingly shaky public behavior were clear signals that he would be a weak candidate. Support from working-class voters, the young, and people of color drastically eroded.Notably, leading progressives in Congress assisted Biden in fending off a serious primary challenge. Representative Pramila Jayapal, then chair of the congressional Progressive caucus, made a very early endorsement. “I never thought I would say this, but I believe he should run for another term and finish this agenda we laid out,” she said in November 2022. Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed Biden in April 2023. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed him three months later.Polls routinely showed that most Democratic voters did not want Biden to run again. But party leaders were on autopilot, choosing discretion over valor, benefitting their relations with the White House but undermining the party’s prospects of retaining it – as is now painfully and undeniably clear.A few weeks ago, speaking at a Harvard Kennedy School forum, Jayapal said: “I do think had the president just served one term, he would have gone out a hero, he would have passed the torch, he would have been celebrated for his accomplishments, we would have had a really strong Democratic primary with a lot of good candidates, and then we would have had the full election season to fight it out and to actually get somebody who could win.”Now, an open question is whether crucial lessons have been learned and will be heeded. At stake is the capacity of the Democratic party to defeat Trumpist forces in the midterm elections next year and in 2028.The outlook is not good. A grim reality is that the Democratic party and its loyalists have developed an enduring corrosive culture – which had everything to do with the insistence on continuing to fuel the faulty Biden 2024 locomotive as it dragged the party toward a calamitous defeat.I am not writing from a vantage point of hindsight alone. In November 2022, days after the midterm elections, my colleagues and I at the progressive non-profit RootsAction launched the Don’t Run Joe campaign (renamed Step Aside Joe when Biden announced his candidacy the following spring). During the next 20 months, not one other sizable national organization was willing to push for Biden to forego a re-election bid.We began in New Hampshire, the longtime first-in-the-country presidential primary state. (Biden had finished fifth with only 8.4% of the vote in the 2020 Democratic primary there. For 2024, he demoted New Hampshire to make South Carolina first.) On 9 November 2022, our kickoff digital ads reached Democrats across New Hampshire. Within days, upwards of 2,000 Democratic voters in the state had signed a Don’t Run Joe petition, conveying this message: “We cannot risk losing in 2024. We shouldn’t gamble on Joe Biden’s low approval rating.”That was the gist of our messaging that continued for more than a year and a half via online advertising, email blasts, social media, news releases, media interviews, mass texting to Democratic voters, leafleting at state party conventions and TV ads in several key states and Washington DC. A mobile Don’t Run Joe billboard circled the Capitol and White House as well as the site of a Democratic National Committee meeting.Don’t Run Joe placed full-page print advertisements in the Hill, aimed at congressional Democrats. One ad included a picture of men in suits with their heads in the sand. Presented as An Open Letter to Democrats in the House and Senate, the ad declared that “evasion is no solution” and concluded: “Conformity and fear of a White House rebuke have never served Democrats or the nation well. It is time to stop muffling genuine concerns and start being honest about the pivotal downsides of a prospective Biden ’24 candidacy. The future of the Democratic Party – and the country – is at stake.”Today, conformity and fear are still contagions afflicting the Democratic party, now impairing its capacity to roll back Donald Trump’s autocratic rule and effectively fight for a progressive agenda. The rebellion against Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, while encouraging, has not shaken the party’s underlying power structure. And habitual deference to uninspiring party leadership does not bode well.The day after the president’s recent demagogic speech to Congress, the new Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, were the featured speakers for “a virtual National Update and Call to Action”. The next morning, I received a text from a progressive Democratic party activist, who summarized the event as “sad and weak,” adding: “Jeffries and Martin’s delivery was anemic, content essentially pablum.” The activist signed off with the words “Really frightened”.I asked if it would be OK to use the activist’s name while quoting from the text in an article. The reply was both understandable and symptomatic of how fear prevents the kind of open debate that the Democratic party desperately needs: “No, I am working inside the party … ”

      Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine More

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      Capitol Hill hearing on ‘censorship industrial complex’ under Biden based on ‘fiction’, says expert

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      A Capitol Hill hearing held to explore supposed government censorship under Joe Biden was based on a “fiction”, a leading expert on countering online disinformation told members of Congress on Tuesday.Nina Jankowicz, head of the American Sunlight Project, a pro-democracy organization, went on the offensive at a House of Representatives foreign relations subcommittee meeting held to examine the existence of an alleged “censorship industrial complex”, which Republicans claim was established to stifle rightwing views on social media, rather than combat foreign propaganda, as officially stated.Having been labeled a “spearhead” and “tsarina” of such efforts by the committee’s Republican chair, Bill Huizenga, Jankowicz – who briefly led the Department of Homeland Security’s disinformation unit under the Biden administration – said the hearing was being held at a time when Donald Trump was attempting aggressive free speech restrictions.“The premise of this hearing, the so called censorship industrial complex, is a fiction that has not only had profound impacts on my life and safety, but on our national security,” she said in her opening statement at a fractious hearing that exposed the width of the chasm between Republicans and Democrats on the issue.“More alarmingly, this fiction is itself suppressing speech and stymieing critical research that protects our country.“I want to acknowledge the irony that we’re having this discussion as we witness an assault on the first amendment we have not seen in decades. The Trump administration has directed far more egregious violations of our constitution than the imagined actions of the Biden administration on which this hearing is premised.”She singled out the detention and attempted deportation of Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, who wrote an opinion article critical of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which she compared to the actions of authoritarian regimes in Russia, Belarus and Hungary.Republicans have used their control of the House and Senate to stage a series of hearings in different congressional committees on the alleged existence of a censorship complex – whose name derives from the military industrial complex described by president Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell speech before leaving the White House in 1961. Opponents dismiss the notion as a conspiracy theory.The committee hearings have coincided with the Trump administration’s dismantling of safeguards designed to stop the spread of influence and disinformation in cyberspace by Russia in particular, but also widely attributed to China and Iran.Even before Trump returned to office, the Republican-controlled Congress declined last December to renew the mandate of the state department’s global engagement center (GEC), the leading government agency fighting Russian and Chinese propaganda.Huizenga, a representative from Michigan, called on two other witnesses, Matt Taibbi and Benjamin Weingarten, to support the Republican contention that the body had been subverted to instead suppress rightwing opinion in America.As evidence, Taibbi, a former Rolling Stone journalist who was among the recipients of the so-called “Twitter files” released by Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, to show evidence of alleged censorship, cited the case of Alex Berenson, a former New York Times journalist.Berenson had been expelled from platform following White House pressure after posting that the Covid-19 vaccine did not prevent infection or the virus’s transmission, Taibbi claimed.Weingarten, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a rightwing thinktank, condemned the GEC as a “truth squad … designed to suppress any information that countered national policy and to identify people who may have had opinions that were controversial or unwanted as foreign inspire”.Democrats lined up to denounce the hearing as “hypocrisy” and “waste of taxpayers money” in light of the Trump administration’s attempts to deport foreign students who had expressed pro-Palestinian views, moves that Jankowicz said violated the US constitution first amendment, which protects free speech.Sydney Kamlager-Dove, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, said the hearing was “out of touch with the concerns of everyday Americans.“I’ve been to the state department, and I do have concerns about censorship – – censorship of the employees who are terrified to say the wrong thing, to say anything, or have the wrong word in their job title and be terminated by an administration that publicly relishes punishing people for their speech,” she said. “If we want to talk about censorship, we should begin with Trump’s unprecedented assault on the first amendment and rule of law.”Keith Self, a Republican representative from Texas, provoked anger among Democrats by appearing to liken the Biden administration’s anti-disinformation efforts to steps by the Nazi to construct public opinion in 1930s Germany.“A direct quote from Joseph Goebbels [the Nazi propaganda minister]: ‘It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion,’ and I think that may be what we’re discussing here,” he said. More

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      Clean energy spending boosts GOP districts. But lawmakers are keeping quiet as Trump targets incentives

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      Billions of dollars in clean energy spending and jobs have overwhelmingly flowed to parts of the US represented by Republican lawmakers. But these members of Congress are still largely reticent to break with Donald Trump’s demands to kill off key incentives for renewables, even as their districts bask in the rewards.The president has called for the dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act – a sweeping bill passed by Democrats that has helped turbocharge investments in wind, solar, nuclear, batteries and electric vehicle manufacturing in the US – calling it a “giant scam”. Trump froze funding allocated under the act and has vowed to claw back grants aimed at reducing planet-heating pollution.Republicans who now control Congress have to decide if they will eliminate the IRA’s grants and, more crucially, the tax credits that have spurred a boom in clean energy activity in their own districts. A total of 78% of this spending has gone to Republican-held suburban and rural districts across the US, according to data from Atlas Public Policy.Of the 20 congressional districts that have attracted the most clean energy manufacturing investment since the IRA passed in 2022, 18 are represented by Republicans, according to Atlas. The top three districts, in North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada, represented by Richard Hudson, Earl Carter and Mark Amodei, respectively, have collectively seen nearly $30bn in new investments since the legislation.Despite this, none of the 18 Republican representatives contacted by the Guardian would comment on whether they agree with Trump that clean energy incentives should be scrapped.“Members aren’t necessarily looking for opportunities to disagree with the White House at the moment,” said Heather Reams, the president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a center-right group that advocates in favor of clean energy.The Atlas data set is the newest in a series of reports showing the IRA benefitted Republican-led districts the most. And the largest individual pools of money from the bill also went to projects in red communities, according to a separate data set shared with the Guardian by an anonymous source at the Department of Energy (DoE).The top grant from the IRA, worth $500m, went to a General Motors plant in Lansing, Michigan – represented by Republican Tom Barrett – the DoE data shows. And though the biggest loan of $15bn went to California’s Pacific Gas and Electric Company utility to expand clean power and modernize infrastructure, the second and third largest went to battery plants in Glendale, Kentucky, and Kokomo, Indiana, represented by conservatives Brett Guthrie and Victoria Spartz, respectively. Hageman, Guthrie and Spartz did not respond to requests for comment.Some Republicans have publicly lauded the tax credits’ impacts on their districts even as they have attacked the IRA. The ultraconservative Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, praised the IRA-funded expansion of solar manufacturing in her district but called the bill itself “dangerous”, winning her scrutiny from Joe Biden in 2023. Her district saw more investment than all but 14 others, the Atlas data shows.In a sign of private nervousness among conservatives about a repeal of the tax credits, though, a group of 21 Republican lawmakers, including Carter and Amodei, signed a letter to colleagues warning that axing the IRA risks planned projects and would escalate energy bills. Some conservatives made similar calls during a January hearing in the House ways and means committee.But these voices have gotten quieter in recent weeks, with some Republicans who privately supported the letter refusing to sign it for strategic reasons, and some letter signatories saying the IRA tax credits should not necessarily be a major priority.Ongoing budget concerns have made it especially difficult for conservatives to defend the credits. Republicans’ fiscal year 2025 proposal authorized $4.5tn in tax cuts through 2034 and called on committees to partially offset the cost with $2tn in spending reductions. A full repeal of the IRA’s green energy tax credits would slash about $850bn in spending the Tax Foundation thinktank recently found.“They’re trying to kind of balance finding the money so that they’re not adding to the federal debt, while also trying to protect these beneficial and popular tax credits and provisions,” said Dana Nuccitelli, the research coordinator at the non-partisan advocacy group Citizens’ Climate Lobby. “It’s not easy.”Reams, of the Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions thinktank, said that as the realities of lost jobs and increasing energy costs become clear, Trump may change his mind about the need to repeal the credits. “There’s what Donald Trump says – remember, he hated EVs, but he just bought a Tesla – and what he does,” she said. “You’ve got to not take it all so literally and bide some time to get a sense of what really is going on.”Still, there are already signs that Trump’s hostile stance towards renewables – he has halted approvals of wind and solar projects on federal land and waters – – is starting to dampen clean energy activity in the US.Approximately $8bn in clean energy manufacturing activity has been canceled so far this year, Atlas has calculated, with a separate analysis by Climate Power finding that 50,000 jobs have been lost or are threatened.A full repeal of the IRA would hike energy bills for households and imperil a further 1.5m jobs in the US, according to yet another recent report, by Energy Innovation. “Many of those jobs will be at risk if the IRA is repealed,” Jim Farley, the chief executive of Ford, warned recently about the company’s plans to expand its electric vehicle factories.“The Trump administration aims to restore US manufacturing jobs, but cutting existing federal energy incentives could really undermine that goal,” said Tom Taylor, a senior policy analyst at Atlas.It’s a message some climate advocates have been bringing to Republican lawmakers in recent weeks in an attempt to save the tax credits. Citizens’ Climate Lobby, for instance, this month lobbied 47 Republicans on Capitol Hill calling on them to protect the tax credits, and is now asking its members to call their Republican representatives, focusing not on their climate benefits but on their potential to spur economic growth.“Everybody loves manufacturing jobs,” Nuccitelli said.In their lobbying, Citizens Climate Lobby is also highlighting the low price of building clean power, the need for abundant energy amid forecasted spikes in energy from the artificial intelligence boom, and the fact that repealing the incentives could cause household electricity bills to increase by about 10% over the next decade.Despite the lack of public support for the tax credits from GOP lawmakers, the organization said they enjoy significant support on Capitol Hill, with some GOP lawmakers calling to protect them in private meetings and personal phone calls with other congressional colleagues.Only two Democratic-led districts were on the list provided by the Atlas Public Policy. One was Arizona’s Raúl Grijalva, who was a strong advocate for the IRA’s green incentives before he died this month.“The Inflation Reduction Act is a vital investment in the future stability of the planet,” his office wrote in a statement to the Guardian before his passing. “As a self-proclaimed business genius, Trump should easily be able to understand the high financial and humanitarian costs of increasing climate catastrophes.” More

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      The Trump team group chat news is obscuring an essential question | Mohamad Bazzi

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      The revelation that top members of Donald Trump’s administration disclosed secret US military plans against the Houthi militia in Yemen in a private group chat that included a prominent journalist has generated predictable outrage in Washington. Democrats are calling for a congressional investigation and the resignation of some of the officials involved in the breach, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the national security adviser, Mike Waltz.In an article published on Monday, the Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, outlined how he was able to follow the conversation among members of Trump’s cabinet over two days leading up to a series of US airstrikes on 15 March. But in the widespread outrage over the sharing of military information on a Signal chat, one essential question is getting lost: why is Trump bombing Yemen in the first place? Five consecutive US presidents and administrations (George W Bush, Barack Obama, the first Trump administration, Joe Biden and the second Trump administration) have ordered military attacks on Yemen, which is the poorest country in the Middle East.Collectively, these leaders have continued more than two decades of failed US policies toward Yemen, centered on repeated bombings, counter-terrorism operations and support for a dictator who ruled the country for decades. Trump, who portrayed himself throughout the last presidential campaign as “the candidate of peace”, appears almost eager to repeat past US mistakes in Yemen. During Yemen’s long civil war, years of intense bombing by two US allies – Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – failed to dislodge the Houthis from power. By the end of 2021, the UN estimated that the Yemen conflict had killed 377,000 people – nearly 60% of whom died not in fighting but from indirect causes, including famine, cholera outbreaks and destruction of the health system. And while Yemeni civilians suffered, the Houthis emerged stronger after each military confrontation.Why aren’t Democrats and other critics of the Trump administration asking this basic question: what have two decades of regular US attacks on Yemen achieved, beyond more death and misery in a country where Washington already helped instigate one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters? Anyone interested in real accountability for US policymaking should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.The Trump administration says the latest US strikes on Yemen are intended to pressure the Houthi militia to stop attacks on international shipping lanes in the Red Sea. After the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, the Houthis began firing missiles and drones at commercial vessels sailing around the Bab el-Mandeb strait, where the Red Sea comes closest to Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen. The Houthis said they were acting in support of besieged Palestinians and pledged to stop targeting shipping lanes once Israel ended its war on Gaza.The attacks disrupted global shipping, as companies rerouted hundreds of vessels around South Africa, which can add thousands of miles to a freighter’s journey between Asia and Europe. In January 2024, the Biden administration, along with Britain, launched missile strikes against dozens of targets in Yemen. But Houthi leaders did not back down, and they stepped up their attacks on shipping vessels and continued to fire drones and missiles at Israel, most of which were shot down before reaching Israeli territory. Starting in July 2024, Israel carried out four rounds of airstrikes against Yemen, including attacks on the international airport in Sana’a, power stations and several ports.For more than a year, Biden avoided the most clear-cut path to stopping the Red Sea attacks and US escalation against the Houthis: his administration failed to apply pressure on the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to end Israel’s assault on Gaza and accept a ceasefire with Hamas. Biden refused to withhold billions of dollars in US weapons or to stop providing political cover for Israel at the UN security council and other international bodies. Instead, the Biden administration continued to insist that it could bring the Houthis to heel by force.Biden’s strategy failed to secure international shipping in the Red Sea. And the Houthis, who were losing support inside Yemen before the Gaza war, turned US attacks into a public relations bonanza. Houthi leaders portrayed themselves as one of the few movements in the Arab world willing to defend the Palestinian cause and fight Israel and its western allies – in contrast to Arab governments that stayed on the sidelines and occasionally issued statements condemning Israel’s war. The Houthis also used the Gaza conflict to elevate their profile within the so-called “axis of resistance”, a network of regional militias supported by Iran. Two of the main factions in this alliance, Hamas and the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, were decimated by the Israeli military over the past 18 months, providing a new opening for Houthi leaders to enhance their popularity throughout the Middle East.The Biden administration – along with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy – finally persuaded Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas, which took effect on 19 January, a day before Trump’s inauguration. After the truce in Gaza, the Houthis stopped their attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea, as they had promised for more than a year. But as the ceasefire’s first phase expired on 2 March, Netanyahu refused to start the second phase of negotiations, which required a complete Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza and talks over a permanent truce. Instead, with the Trump administration’s support, the Israeli government imposed a new siege on Gaza, banning all food and other aid deliveries. Netanyahu backed out of the deal he had initially agreed to, and tried to pressure Hamas into accepting a six-week extension of the ceasefire’s first phase.By 18 March, Israel resumed its brutal war on Gaza with airstrikes that killed more than 400 Palestinians in a single day. In the days leading up to the ceasefire’s collapse, Houthi leaders warned that they would restart their attacks on shipping vessels if Israel resumed its war. And that’s when the Trump administration began threatening renewed US military strikes against Yemen.Trump is now repeating the same failed approach to Yemen as Biden and previous US presidents. In the Signal group chat messages revealed this week by the Atlantic’s editor, Trump cabinet members – who included the vice-president, JD Vance; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; and the CIA director, John Ratcliffe – expressed disdain for European allies and debated the timing of US attacks on the Houthis. But none of these top officials raised the possibility that pushing for a renewed ceasefire in Gaza would remove the Houthis’s rationale for their aggression against commercial shipping in the Red Sea.The most senior officials on Trump’s national security team did not seem to consider the idea of taking the Houthi leaders at their word: that they would cease disrupting global trade once Israel stops bombing Gaza, as they had done in January. Instead, the US security establishment continues bombing Yemen as it has done for two decades – and somehow hoping for a different outcome this time.

      Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies and a journalism professor at New York University More

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      ‘I escaped one gulag only to end up in another’: Russian asylum seekers face Ice detention in the US

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      For most of the four years of Joe Biden was in office, citizens of Russia and other post-Soviet states seeking asylum in the US were generally released into the country while they awaited hearings on their claim in immigration court.But since last summer, many have been detained upon entering the US, and some of them have been held for more than a year, lawyers, activists and detainees say. Some children have been separated from their parents.“My Russian clients tell me, ‘Now our prison is 80% Russian, the remaining 20% are from rotating nationalities who stay for a while,’” said immigration attorney Julia Nikolaev, who has been advocating for detainees’ rights alongside representatives of the Russian opposition. “Only Russians and a few other post-Soviet nationals remain in detention until their final hearings.”Alexei Demin, a 62-year-old former naval officer from Moscow, was detained in July of last year.In the last 20 years, Demin rarely missed an anti-Vladimir Putin protest in the Russian capital. He had become concerned almost immediately after Putin, a former KGB agent, rose to power, he said. For years, he criticized Putin’s regime on Facebook, and he was detained twice at protests. Still, he never imagined that he would end up fleeing his homeland for fear that Putin’s regime would imprison him. Or that he would end up imprisoned in the US.When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a colleague asked Demin why he wasn’t enlisting to fight. He replied: “If I go, it will be on Ukraine’s side.” Soon, as the crackdown on dissent in Russia intensified amid the war, Demin and his wife, like many others who had long openly opposed Putin, fled to the US to seek political asylum. For years, Russians have been among the top five nationalities granted asylum.The couple arrived in the US in the summer of 2024, after securing an appointment through CBP One, the app launched by the Biden administration (and since then shut down by Donald Trump) allowing asylum applicants to schedule to meet with immigration officials. At their appointment, Demin and his wife were detained, separated and sent to detention centers in different states. They haven’t seen each other since.His predicament, Demin said, was “a trap and a blatant injustice”.“This is how the US treats people who protest against Russia’s policies,” he said in a call from a detention center in Virginia in January.US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) does not release public data on the number of people from post-Soviet countries it holds in detention. But Nikolaev said that law enforcement officials have privately acknowledged to her that asylum seekers from those countries are being held longer.Other activists say they have seen similar patterns. The non-profit Russian America for Democracy in Russia (RADR) has played an active role in assisting detainees in immigration detention centers, finding lawyers and working with the government officials.Dmitry Valuev, president of RADR, said it was an issue that affected not only Russians, but also citizens of several other post-Soviet countries.There have been reports that some immigrants arriving from post-Soviet states are facing increased scrutiny over fears they are connected to Islamist terrorist organizations. It’s unclear what prompted US authorities to keep the Russian asylum seekers in detention. One theory is that immigration officials are targeting Russians and other post-Soviet nationals as spies.Eric Rubin, former US ambassador to Bulgaria who also served as a deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Moscow, said that the complicated history of US-Russia diplomacy can hurt Russian asylum applicants.“When you meet Russians in the United States, obviously you need to wonder whether some of them are actually working for Russian intelligence. Some of them are, most of them are not,” said Rubin.Nikolaev isn’t so sure. “Russian spies can enter the country with European passports, visas and all the right documents,” she said.Nikolaev in January took her concerns to US government officials, alongside Ilya Yashin, a leading Russian opposition figure. They met with officials at the national security council, who requested a list of separated families, Nikolaev said.The Department of Homeland Security, Ice and the national security council did not respond to repeated questions about detention policies or the specific cases outlined in this article.In a statement, the White House said that the duration of cases varies based on legal proceedings and any protections sought. The White House also said there had been “zero instances of children from any of the countries you mentioned being separated from their families by US immigration authorities in this entire fiscal year”.View image in fullscreenBut Galina Kaplunova, 26, an illustrator and anti-Putin activist, was detained and separated from her child and mother at the US border last August.In the summer of 2024, Kaplunova’s husband, a Kremlin supporter, had threatened to take her child away and report her to the police for her political activism, Kaplunova said. A native of St Petersburg, she had been detained multiple times at protests and had volunteered in opposition leaders’ campaign offices. Two days after her husband made the threat, Kaplunova, her four-year-old son and her mother fled to the US.At the US border with Mexico, Ice agents separated Kaplunova from her son, she said. He was placed in foster care, while she and her mother were sent to different detention centers in separate states.After being separated, her son was placed with a Mexican American family, she said. He didn’t speak English, so communicated with them through Google Translate.“I fled Russia so they wouldn’t take my child or jail me. But the US did,” she said.About two months after being detained and separated, Kaplunova was released and reunited with her son, she said. It was a miracle, she said.Now Kaplunova and her son now live in California. Her mother is still detained. Her son is afraid of being abandoned. Whenever she tries to discuss his time in foster care, he simply says he doesn’t remember it.“It’s as if he erased that part of his life so he wouldn’t have to remember it,” she said.He learned some English in foster care, but refuses to speak it with his mother.“Maybe he associates English with something bad, something negative,” she said.Valuev, the president of RADR, said that long periods of detention can hurt applicants’ asylum cases. Hiring a lawyer from within a detention center is nearly impossible due to the lack of internet access, he said. “Detainees are given a list of contacts, but most of these numbers don’t answer the phone,” he said.Additionally, many detainees have no access to materials for their asylum cases because their documents were stored on computers and phones that were confiscated.Vladislav Krasnov, a protest organizer and activist from Moscow, said he spent 444 days in a Louisiana detention center. Krasnov fled Russia in 2022 after Putin announced a draft. He crossed the border with the CBP One appointment and was swiftly detained. Now free, he is still waiting for a court hearing to review his asylum case.Reflecting on his experience, he said he was shocked by the welcome he got in the United States. “I escaped one gulag only to end up in another,” Krasnov said.He was also angry at Russian opposition leaders for not paying attention to his plight until recently.“Last summer, I watched Yulia Navalnaya hugging Biden in the Oval Office. Then she talked on the phone with [Kamala] Harris, and Harris declared that America supports people fighting for Russia’s freedom. To put it mildly, I had a complete breakdown at that moment, sitting in detention,” Krasnov said.About 300 detainees from Russia and other post-Soviet countries filed a lawsuit last November, calling their detention discriminatory, and demanding freedom for people they argue were held without a justification. A federal judge ruled in February that the court lacked the jurisdiction to review the detention policy and dismissed the case.View image in fullscreenAmong those mentioned in the lawsuit was Polina Guseva, a political activist and volunteer on the team of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Guseva arrived in the US in July 2024, applied for asylum and was sent to a detention center. She said Ice officers at the Louisiana detention facility where she’s being held “openly say that Russians are not being released”.Still, she does not regret coming to the US, she said, adding safety concerns in Russia left her with no other choice.“Two thoughts help me a lot. First, better to be here than to be raped with a dumbbell in a Russian prison,” Guseva said. “And second, my friend Daniil Kholodny is still in prison in Russia. He was the technical director of the Navalny Live YouTube channel. He was tried alongside Alexei Navalny in his last trial and sentenced to eight years. He has been imprisoned for more than two years now. If he can hold on, why shouldn’t I?”Alexei Demin, the former naval officer and longtime protester, was supposed to have his first asylum court hearing reviewing his asylum case in early February, but the hearing was rescheduled to mid-April because of the judge’s sickness. By that time, he will have been in detention for more than 300 days. More

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      ‘Will Trump give up the store?’ Edward Fishman on how US economic warfare works – and doesn’t

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      Edward Fishman’s first book, Chokepoints, is a study of American economic warfare. Densely reported but fast-moving, the book examines recent US sanctions policy regarding Iran, Russia and China, and how the dollar’s dominance of international financial systems has allowed administrations to pursue political aims.Fishman’s own service under Barack Obama, at Treasury, Pentagon and State, stands him in good stead. So does teaching at Columbia and being a Washington thinktank fellow.As Chokepoints comes out, Donald Trump is beginning talks with Russia aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. Russia is seeking relief from US sanctions, which Trump seems inclined to give, and Ukraine and Europe are increasingly isolated from the US.“The record of the first Trump administration on Russia is not particularly strong,” Fishman said, diplomatically, when asked what the US might expect from a president widely held to be in thrall to Vladimir Putin – and speaking before Trump’s spectacular Oval Office argument with Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and subsequent suspension of US military aid.Fittingly, as the author of a history of modern sanctions, Fishman looked back to look forward – and did not find encouraging signs.View image in fullscreenIn 2018, “under pressure from Congress, Trump imposed sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate in Russia … Deripaska owned Rusal, which is the largest aluminum company in Russia, and produced almost 10% of the world’s aluminum. And overnight, basically, aluminum prices skyrocket, Rusal stock collapses, and there’s significant chaos in metal markets.“And Trump gets all these calls from the Russians, from CEOs, saying, ‘What are you doing? Stop.’ And he just pulls back the sanctions.”Years later, that episode is “concerning” to Fishman, “for a few reasons. One is, I think it signals to Russia that as soon as [Trump’s US faces] even the slightest amount of blowback, he will cave, even absent any concessions. It wasn’t like Putin gave any political concessions [in 2018]. It wasn’t like, ‘OK, we’re gonna free these prisoners overnight, we’re gonna stop this bombardment in Ukraine,’ because there was a low, simmering conflict being fought at the time. Trump just pulled back the sanctions.“And after that is when Russia shifts basically all of its foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar and into the euro and the yuan, the Chinese currency, and gold. So that was the key moment. Putin realizes [about Trump], ‘This guy, he doesn’t have the stomach to do anything, but also he’s so erratic.’ I think that was when the US lost leverage it needs with Russia, though I think it contributed to Putin underestimating the sanctions he would face in 2022”, from Biden, when he ordered a full invasion.US sanctions have hurt Russia deeply – and therefore should be among Trump’s strongest cards to play. Typically, he has been inconsistent. Usually friendly to Moscow, on Friday, Trump used his social media platform to say that because Russia was “absolutely ‘pounding’ Ukraine on the battlefield” he was “strongly considering large scale” sanctions and tariffs on Russia until a ceasefire could be reached.Fishman pondered the issue: “Do I think that Trump will give up the store? I don’t know … I would say I’m not confident that he’s going to get a just peace in Ukraine. But I’m not yet saying, ‘This guy is failing, we’re about to give up everything to Russia in exchange for nothing,’ though I think it’s possible and it’s certainly what the Russians want. It’s very clear they want to cut a deal with Trump that basically couches sanctions relief as a favor to the US, to say, ‘We should have open trade and investment with you. It’s good for America. It was Biden who put on all these restraints. He was just restraining US-Russia relations for no good reason.’“They want to basically get the US to give up their biggest bargaining chip before full negotiations over Ukraine even start.”Fishman studied at Yale, Cambridge and Stanford after 9/11. He noticed that “Iran’s nuclear program shot to the top of the foreign policy agenda”, even though “it was very obvious that the US was not willing to fight another war in the Middle East. And as a result, a number of people were thinking, ‘OK, what do we do about it?’”Joining the US government, Fishman found himself looking for a good book on sanctions.“I had an interesting mix of roles. Some were in the action, doing sanctions, diplomacy, and in others I was more of an adviser to really senior people. I worked for Secretary of State John Kerry and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey … And what I noticed was in the Situation Room, when the top leaders were discussing US foreign policy, whenever it turned to economic warfare, sanctions, etc, the level of conversation was so low, and I think it was because most people in the room had no idea what sanctions were.“It felt arcane. It felt mysterious. And so a big goal [with Chokepoints] was to demystify this and to create a way for average people just to read a book and say, ‘OK, I get it enough that I can develop my own opinions.’”The book is written to keep the reader moving, short chapters introduced with journalistic flourishes. Character traits are sharply noted, short anecdotes from lives away from work help present diplomats and bureaucrats in sharp relief.The importance of the sanctions policy such characters have shaped over the last 20 years is hard to overstate. The first part of Fishman’s book concerns the Iran nuclear deal, reached under Obama through diplomacy and economic pressure, meant to stop the Islamic Republic getting the bomb, dumped by Trump in 2018. Fishman also considers Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the US-led response – one subject of angry debate in the Oval Office when Zelenskyy visited last week – then switches to how Obama and Trump approached China.Fishman is a proud Obama alum but he is not afraid to apportion criticism.“Trump was significantly less risk-averse than Obama was when it came to sanctions. And I think that hopefully the Obama-Russia section [of Chokepoints] shows that in some ways, that risk aversion did not serve American interests.“The Obama administration also toward the end started to become quite concerned about China building islands in the South China Sea, all kinds of other aggressive acts. I think some Obama people would say this was too late in the administration to do anything about it but I would have been surprised, honestly, if you had seen a kind of frontal assault on Chinese economic aggression, even if Obama had more time.“So I think the benefit of Trump, with respect to China, was that he showed us that we have more leverage than we think we do, that we have more flexibility to actually push back against things that China was doing to hurt American interests, because I think it was well documented that Chinese IP theft was one of the ways that they were damaging American business interests, damaging the US economy, and we really hadn’t done anything about it.“So I do think that what Trump got right on China was that you can punch back without necessarily destroying the relationship … the US-China relationship didn’t really collapse during the Trump administration until the very end, until Covid, because they had signed the phase one trade deal in January 2020.“The thing that strikes me about the first Trump administration, and I think is going to be true about this one, is that Trump … on most issues, he vacillates. And China’s one of them. He goes back and forth from being extremely tough to being like, ‘Xi Jinping is my best friend.’”Trump is inconsistent toward other countries too, particularly those he threatens with tariffs, adversaries and friends alike, as demonstrated this week by 25% tariffs slapped on Mexico and Canada, then partially delayed.“Tariffs are taxes on imports,” Fishman said. “Let’s say we were to impose a tariff on Russian oil of 20%. That would mean that US companies could buy Russian oil, but if they were to do so, they’d have to pay a 20% tax. So a US refinery, down the street from me in New Jersey, could pay a tax to the US government to buy that Russian oil.“A sanction would be basically saying you can’t buy any oil at all. So a tariff is a significantly weaker form of a sanction. Historically, as a result, tariffs have not been used for national security reasons. They’re an economic bargaining chip. Sometimes you use tariffs to protect important domestic industries.“What Trump has done is basically just made tariffs yet another weapon in the US economic arsenal, alongside sanctions and export controls. And I think that’s OK. But it’s important for people to realize that tariffs are a significantly weaker tool than sanctions or export controls, so the idea of using them to address key national security problems is somewhat ludicrous.“Trump recently threatened tariffs on Russia. We import $2bn or $3bn worth of goods from Russia. So what good is that going to do? The tariff threat against the Brics countries – a lot of these things don’t make a lot of sense. I think he has a fixation with tariffs. Let’s see if one of his red lines is crossed, if he actually just relies on tariffs, or if there’s sanctions too.”A “chokepoint” is a point at which trade can be squeezed: physically, in corridors such as the Bosphorus or the Panama canal, electronically, through financial networks from which the US can freeze enemies out.“Geographic chokepoints have never fully lost their relevance,” Fishman said. “With the invention of the airplane, there are ways to ship commodities without access to chokepoints. But a lot of things, like oil, still travel by sea or by pipeline. And so that’s why the Bosphorus today is still a really important chokepoint. The Suez canal is very important, and the Strait of Hormuz.“What’s different about economic warfare today is that throughout almost all of human history, up until 20 years ago, cutting off any of these chokepoints would have required taking a navy vessel and parking it there, and saying, ‘OK, thou shall not pass.’ The difference now is you can have an official in the treasury department sign a document and block a chokepoint from thousands of miles away. That’s why you’ve seen this sort of unchained economic warfare, because it’s not like military force, it’s not like you’re actually putting US troops and US ships in harm’s way.”Trump has implied willingness to use US troops, to seize the Panama canal or Greenland. Fishman sees actual deployments as a possible consequence of Trump fueling a breakdown of economic order.“The thing I worry about, about some of Trump’s rhetoric, not just about Panama but Greenland … is that I think that we are certainly headed toward a breakdown in globalization. I think that in order to regain a sense of economic security, we’re going to see an erosion of economic interdependence.”Economic nationalism is on the rise. Fishman worries that “Trump may be driving us towards deploying these weapons of economic warfare not just against the Chinas and Russias of the world, but against Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Colombia, Brazil – all these different countries he’s threatened tariffs and sanctions against.”His book ends on a pessimistic note. In conversation, he warns: “History shows us that when states can’t acquire markets and resources through open trade and finance, that’s when wars break out. They try to conquer them. If you have that mindset, if you say, ‘We don’t feel like we can access these resources unless we physically plant our flag there,’ then that’s not a world that any of us is going to be happy living in.”

      Chokepoints is out now More