More stories

  • in

    Book Review: “The Unfolding,” by A.M. Homes

    “The Unfolding” takes readers inside the homes and meeting rooms of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative with big plans for change.THE UNFOLDING, by A.M. HomesWe are living in fractious times. Two decades into the new century, our nation is bitterly divided and our political institutions have never seemed more fragile. The genesis of these fissures in the American body politic is the central concern of “The Unfolding,” a sharply observed, wickedly funny political satire by the reliably brilliant A.M. Homes.The novel opens on election night, 2008. Candidate John McCain has just conceded to Barack Obama, and not everyone is celebrating. In a Phoenix hotel bar, our protagonist — a 60-something business tycoon referred to only as the Big Guy — is drowning his sorrows and contemplating next steps. “Something big,” he tells a stranger he meets in the bar. “A forced correction.” He scribbles notes on a napkin: “A patriot’s plan to preserve and protect.”The Big Guy is an old-school Republican — in his own words, “the last of an era.” His conservatism is sentimental, backward-looking, patriotic to its core. Fantastically rich, he bounces between Palm Springs and his ranch in Wyoming, an affable fellow who adores his teenage daughter and is largely faithful to Charlotte, his clever, acerbic and extravagantly alcoholic wife. For the Big Guy, McCain’s defeat sparks an existential crisis. “I can’t live like this,” he tells Charlotte. “I can’t spend the next 30 years watching it all come undone.” The “it” in question is an idealized version of the American past. Though the phrase is never uttered, it’s clear that the Big Guy hopes to Make American Great Again.Homes is a gifted satirist, a keen observer of bourgeois manners and mores. Here, she nails the psychic particularities of the politically conservative American male: the glorification of American military conquests, the quasi-religious reverence for the Founding Fathers. (“How much do you love George Washington?” the Big Guy’s daughter teases him.) Hoping to school her in his ideals, “he doesn’t talk about himself or his childhood. He talks about historical figures, battles, wars, treaties and the three branches of government.”In one of the novel’s most indelible scenes, the Big Guy indulges in his favorite pastime — staging miniature battle re-enactments on his basement pool table, with toy soldiers and orange Jell-O powder standing in for Agent Orange. “This is his idea of a good time, re-enactments, skirmishes,” Homes writes. “His men are the highest quality, tin, lead, mixed metal.”As he plays, the Big Guy ruminates on military strategy and ethics: “Today he is using rainbow herbicides, orange and strawberry mixed together, to defoliate the trees. People were allergic to it. Vietnamese babies were born deformed. Soldiers claimed it gave them everything from acne to diabetes to heart disease. Maybe the stuff wasn’t perfect or wasn’t handled properly, but people have to quit complaining; they can’t be expecting everyone to take care of them. This is war.”While the Big Guy plays with his Army men and ponders the future of the nation, his family is quietly coming apart. His daughter goes AWOL from boarding school and begins to question his conservative values. After finding Charlotte drunk and nearly drowned in the family pool, he packs her off to the Betty Ford Center. (Gerry and Betty were family friends.) Thus unencumbered, he is free to devote all his energies to saving America from ruin.He assembles a quorum of consiglieri reminiscent of the Eisenhower Ten, the group of civilians secretly tapped by the president to run the government in case of national emergency. Ike’s picks were titans of corporate America, captains of industry. The Big Guy chooses billionaires, a rogue general, a speechwriter and a tax attorney. The group’s first meeting is “like a eulogy for an America that perhaps never was. The air is awash with the unsmoked scent of cigars chewed on, gone wet — damp with the drool of men still dreaming.”To fans of the overheated telenovela that is American politics, “The Unfolding” is studded with Easter eggs, miniature romans à clef: a defeated John McCain thanking his supporters on election night, Condoleeza Rice eating Thanksgiving dinner, George W. Bush cleaning out his desk in the Oval and gifting the Big Guy’s daughter several boxes of commemorative White House M&M’s.Fittingly, the novel ends on Inauguration Day. At a restaurant in Great Falls, Virginia, the Big Guy’s cronies plot ways to foment revolution, swapping dire predictions of the chaos to come. “A slow-moving wave, a coup of sorts that will sweep across the country largely unnoticed until the American people have been decimated economically, intellectually and spiritually,” says one of his co-conspirators. (Which one is hard to discern and doesn’t really matter; like characters in a David Mamet play, they all speak in the same voice.) “People will be ordered to stay home, not to congregate. It will be difficult to reach consensus about anything; no one will know what is fact and what is fiction. Between the plague and the toxic waste and the decentralization of the government, America will be a dead zone.”The Big Guy finds these predictions appalling. “We’re not here to self-destruct,” he protests. “We are here to protect and preserve.”“Sometimes you have to rebreak a bone to set it right,” his henchman counters. “We are breaking the back of America to set it straight.”In “The Unfolding,” Homes puts her finger on the fault line, giving voice to the nebulous fears and fantasies of the old Republican plutocracy. At the root of it all, the novel suggests, is race. With characteristic aplomb, the Big Guy sums up his current existential crisis: “My wife is a drunk, my kid is running off into the woods and the people elected an African as president.”His racism is presented as fact but never explored — a missed opportunity and ultimately, the novel’s greatest failing. From the outset, Homes walks a fine line between realism and caricature. By choosing not to examine her protagonist’s racism, she denies us full access to his psyche. This lack of particularity has a flattening effect: the Big Guy is racist not because of his own specific background and experience and psychological idiosyncrasies, but because he’s the kind of person who would be racist. Instead of a deeply imagined, fully human character, rife with complexities and contradictions, The Big Guy is reduced to a type.Novel-writing is a slow business. Producing a good one — or even a bad one — takes such an ungodly long time that any relevance to the current moment is largely a matter of luck. And indeed, “The Unfolding” — Homes’s first novel in 10 years — reads like a story conceived in another era. After all the nation has lived through in the Trump years, the 2008 election seems very far away.The publisher’s marketing copy attempts to address this, calling the book “prescient.” It’s a puzzling claim — “The Unfolding” was written long after its characters’ predictions had already come to pass — that ultimately does the book a disservice. Homes isn’t trying to predict the future. Her intentions are forensic. Obama vs. McCain may seem like a lifetime ago, but this witty, perceptive novel underscores its continuing relevance. Like an insurance investigator reconstructing an accident, Homes is interrogating the recent past. In “The Unfolding,” she connects the dots for us, tracing the tortuous path that got us where we are.Jennifer Haigh’s most recent novel, “Mercy Street,” was published in February.THE UNFOLDING, by A.M. Homes | 416 pp. | Viking | $28 More

  • in

    Did Biden Just School the Republicans or His Own Party?

    Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Depending on whom you ask, Joe Biden’s decision to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans is either the Democrats’ political masterstroke or a major political gift to Republicans. What’s your take?Gail Collins: Well, Bret, allow me to take the middle road. Gee, I really do enjoy saying that. Makes me feel so … judicious.Politically, I think it’s more a winner than not. Tens of millions of people who have college debt in their family are going to be grateful; almost everybody else has other things to focus on. I doubt anybody who started last week liking Joe Biden’s agenda is suddenly going to turn on the Democrats.Bret: I wonder. This just seems to me like yet another case of Democrats getting on the wrong side of working-class America. Most Americans don’t have a bachelor’s degree, sometimes because they couldn’t afford it. Most Americans who did go to college either have paid their loans off or are paying them off. Now they have been turned into chumps for living within their means — while paying, through their taxes, for those who didn’t.Expect Republicans to run on this in the fall the way Democrats are running on abortion rights. What do you think of the decision on the merits?Gail: Policywise, I just wish it had been tied to some serious reforms of the current system that helped create all that debt in the first place.Bret: Agree. One-time student loan forgiveness isn’t going to get educational costs under control. If anything, it will create a moral hazard in which people take out student loans they may not be able to afford in the expectation of future loan forgiveness. What’s your reform proposal?Gail: First and foremost, a deep dive into for-profit schools. Many of them are total scams, and even the ones that aren’t often charge more for programs people can get elsewhere.Bret: I’d add that there are plenty of nonprofit schools also charging way too much for dubious degrees.Gail: After that, a serious look at overall price tags. The fact that loans are so easy to get has encouraged even very fine schools to charge too-high tuition in order to get money for programs that feed the ego of the administration more than the quality of the education.And then … well, hey. Your turn.Bret: It wouldn’t hurt, either, if colleges and universities started cutting down sharply on the army of administrators they’ve hired in recent years, who contribute a lot to fiscal and bureaucratic bloat and therefore to overall costs.Gail: Watch out, administrators — if Bret and I are in accord, you’ve probably got a problem.Bret: Longer term, we should help steer teenagers away from the idea that four-year college is their one and only ticket to prosperity, status and success. We should shift our funding toward community colleges, vocational schools and a wide range of adult-education programs. I’m also sympathetic to the idea of expanding opportunities for shorter enlistment times for young people who want to join any branch of the armed forces. It could help fund their future education, and it would make them more disciplined students when they do.Gail: While we’re being hard-nosed about what we want students to get out of college, I feel obliged to point out that some of the less practical aspects of higher education can be terrific experiences. I went to graduate school and got a master’s degree in government, which I don’t think has ever once convinced a potential employer I was a superior candidate. But I had a great time, met some fascinating people, including my future husband, and learned a lot.I paid for it through on-campus jobs, some of which you could argue amounted to a kind of public financing. Not saying this should be a universal goal. But when I’m cheerleading for the most practical possible approach to higher education, I feel obliged to toss it in.Bret: True and fair. Liberal-arts education is great when students are engaged and teaching quality is high. Wish that were more often the case.On another subject, Gail, any takeaways from the release of the redacted affidavit on the Mar-a-Lago search?Gail: Have to admit I was disappointed by all those redactions — I was hoping for something that looked a little larger. More dramatic. More specific. More … something. How about you?Bret: Here’s my hunch: Donald Trump has only a vague idea of what’s in all of these documents. The notion that he read through boxes and boxes containing hundreds of documents with classification markings and chose to take these particular items strikes me as … unlikely.Gail: Yeah, I hear he’s currently way too engrossed in rereading the collected works of Tolstoy.Bret: Right. He’s so upset by Anna Karenina’s suicide that he hasn’t been able to focus on anything.What is very much like Trump is that, as soon as the administration sought to recover the boxes, he saw an opportunity to set up a test of strength against Biden — one that would stoke the paranoia of his supporters, rally wavering Republicans to his side and set up the Justice Department to fall on its face barring some spectacular disclosure.So my bottom line is that the Justice Department had better come up with something very damning, not just a charge relating to mishandling classified documents. If it doesn’t, it will be the fourth or fifth time in six years that the F.B.I. has meddled in politics, only to cause irreparable damage to its own reputation.Gail: Congratulations, you’ve flung me into depression. I do agree with you that the story on Trump’s end is less likely a sinister plot than messy grabbiness, perhaps along with a reasonable paranoia that, given the number of things he’s done wrong, there’d be evidence of something bad somewhere.Bret: I’ve always maintained that with Trump, there are no deep, dark secrets: His absolute awfulness always stares you squarely in the face, like a baboon’s backside.Gail: Short term, this saga is just giving ammunition to the right. But I can’t envision a whole lot of people switching their allegiance to Trump because of it.Bret: Not among people who never voted for him. What worries me for now is that he’ll recapture wavering Republicans who were nearly done with him.Gail: Republicans who race to the polls because they’re outraged by the F.B.I.’s Mar-a-Lago adventure are going to be a fraction of the number of folks who’ll want to register their very strong feelings on behalf of abortion rights.Bret: We’ll see.Gail: But let me poke you on another federal agency that conservatives tend to find … problematic. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act includes about $80 billion to update the I.R.S. I think it’s a great idea, given its current pathetic state. Overworked agents sitting around stapling papers together aren’t going to be able to win a lot of battles with high-end accountants and lawyers protecting their rich clients from an audit.But as I’m sure you know, a lot of Republicans are howling about what the dreaded Ted Cruz calls a “shadow army” of I.R.S. agents. What’s your take?Bret: I recently read that the I.R.S. answers just 10 percent of calls. So if the money goes to making the agency more responsive to distressed taxpayers, I’m fine with it. My worry is that the agency will initiate lots of audits against people who don’t have the benefit of fancy accountants and lawyers and who are at the mercy of an agency that has almost limitless power and not much accountability.Gail, we’re getting to the end of summer, and some of our readers may be looking for a final book recommendation before Labor Day. I know you’re working on a memoir, but are there any books you’d suggest?Gail: The last time we talked books I said I was enjoying the novel “A Gentleman in Moscow.”Now you’re giving me a chance to share a letter I got from a reader, John Burgess, saying he’d put in a request for it at his local library, He continued: “The day I picked it up, my son tested positive for Covid. Now I am sequestered in my house (my son lives with me), reading about a Russian noble who was imprisoned in the Metropol hotel in Moscow in 1922. The setting could hardly be more perfect.”See, you never can tell when a novel you read is going to parachute into your real life.On the nonfiction front, I just happily finished “Thank You for Your Servitude” by our former colleague Mark Leibovich, one of the latest in what looks like a banner year for retrospectives on the Trump presidency.How about you?Bret: I spent part of the summer reading books by friends. I devoured Jamie Kirchick’s riveting “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” a landmark that deserves companion histories for London, Paris and other capitals. I was deeply moved by “When Magic Failed,” the posthumous memoir of Fouad Ajami, with its heartbreaking depictions of village and city life in his native Lebanon.I read an advance copy of Lionel Shriver’s forthcoming nonfiction collection, “Abominations,” appropriately subtitled “Selected Essays From a Career of Courting Self-Destruction,” which should be mandatory reading for college freshmen. And I finally got around, albeit 20 years late, to my old friend Mindy Lewis’s stunning memoir, “Life Inside,” centered on her institutionalization as a teenager in the late 1960s in a psychiatric hospital in New York. It deserves to be reissued in this new era of mental health crisis among younger people.Gail: I knew your summer list would be high quality and longer than mine. I like the idea that my excuse is that I’m writing a book, so there’s not much time for reading. But maybe if I stopped watching “Sopranos” reruns before bed …Bret: Can’t wait for your book. We’ve been revisiting some favorite French farces. Highly recommend “Le Dîner de Cons” and “Le Placard.”Gail: Next week we’ll be off, celebrating Labor Day with our readers, Bret. Then it’s on to September and the midterm election homestretch. Lord knows what’s going to happen, but it’s nice to know that whatever it is, I’ll get to talk about it with you.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

  • in

    Promoting His Memoir, Kushner Offers Tortured Defenses of Trump

    Jared Kushner, who spent his years in the White House evading responsibility for his father-in-law’s most extreme moves, has had to answer for some of them on his book tour.WASHINGTON — Making the rounds promoting his new memoir, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald J. Trump, this week ran into the question he has managed for months to avoid commenting on publicly: Did he agree with Mr. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen?“I think that there’s different words,” Mr. Kushner told the talk show host Megyn Kelly during a friendly interview on SiriusXM. He added, “I think there’s a whole bunch of different approaches that different people have taken, and different theories.”Pressed to say whether Mr. Trump lost, Mr. Kushner demurred. “I believe it was a very sloppy election,” he said. “I think that there’s a lot of issues that I think if litigated differently may have had different insights into them.”In reality, the words that election officials have used to describe the 2020 contest are “the most secure in American history,” and judges across the country rejected nearly all of the several dozen lawsuits that allies of Mr. Trump filed alleging fraud.Mr. Kushner’s reluctance to concede as much reflected the contortions he is now attempting as he tries to sell a book whose success hinges on his close ties to Mr. Trump. At the same time, he is seeking to keep his distance from the lies and misdeeds that paved the way for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Like the memoir itself, titled “Breaking History,” the task involves a highly selective narrative that casts Mr. Kushner as a young star getting things done in the White House without getting his hands dirty.“Before I came into office,” the unelected Mr. Kushner said on Tuesday, settling into the “Fox & Friends” couch, the “conventional thinking” had been that there could never be peace between Israel and Arab nations “until you have peace with the Palestinians.”In that interview, Mr. Kushner, who was a senior adviser in the Trump White House, credited himself with helping to bring an “outsider’s point of view” to the world’s intractable problems.“Before I came into office,” Mr. Kushner said, the “conventional thinking” had been that there could never be peace between Israel and Arab nations “until you have peace with the Palestinians.”Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesIn another interview, he noted that his father-in-law had “asked me to take lead on building the wall.”During a virtual book event, Mr. Kushner even suggested he might be immortal, saying that he had prioritized exercising since leaving the White House because his generation could be “the first generation to live forever.”When it comes to Jan. 6 and the election lies that spurred the riot, Mr. Kushner is less sure-footed. In the interview with Ms. Kelly, he labored to defend Mr. Trump’s feverish obsession with the 2020 election.“What’s happened over the last year is that there has been a debate that’s been badly needed in this country about election integrity,” he said. More

  • in

    Giuliani Associate Sought Pardon for Him After Jan. 6, Book Says

    The letter, which also requested that Rudolph W. Giuliani be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was intercepted before reaching President Donald J. Trump.An associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, tried to pass a message to Mr. Trump asking him to grant Mr. Giuliani a “general pardon” and the Presidential Medal of Freedom just after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to a new book.The associate, Maria Ryan, also pleaded for Mr. Giuliani to be paid for his services and sent a different note seeking tens of thousands of dollars for herself, according to the book, “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor,” by Andrew Kirtzman, who had covered Mr. Giuliani as a journalist. The New York Times obtained an advance copy of the book, which is set to be released next month.Bernard B. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani’s close adviser and the New York City police commissioner for part of his time as mayor, stopped the letter from getting to Mr. Trump. And it is unclear if Mr. Giuliani, who helped lead the efforts to overturn the 2020 election but has repeatedly insisted he did not seek a pardon shielding him from potential charges, was involved in the request.But the letter adds another layer to the complex picture now swirling around Mr. Giuliani as he faces legal fallout from his efforts to try to help Mr. Trump cling to power, including being notified that he is a target in at least one investigation.“Dear Mr. President,” Ms. Ryan wrote in the letter, dated Jan. 10, 2021, according to the book, “I tried to call you yesterday to talk about business. The honorable Rudy Giuliani has worked 24/7 on the voter fraud issues. He has led a team of lawyers, data analysts and investigators.”Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsMaking a case against Trump. More

  • in

    ‘Why We Did It’ Is a Dark Ride on the ‘Republican Road to Hell’

    The former political operative Tim Miller writes about why most of the Republican establishment learned to stop worrying and line up behind President Trump.WHY WE DID ITA Travelogue From the Republican Road to HellBy Tim Miller259 pages. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.Too often, when straining to put some daylight between themselves and the Trump administration, regretful Republicans have reached for elaborate excuses and high-toned rhetoric. The former political operative Tim Miller knows better than to try.The most honorable parts of “Why We Did It,” Miller’s darkly funny (if also profoundly dispiriting) post-mortem/mea culpa, are the ones that dispense with pious pretense. Miller, a millennial who started working in Republican politics when he was 16, depicts himself as someone who was so preoccupied with “the Game” that for years he gave little thought to the degraded culture that his bare-knuckle tactics helped perpetuate. He liked the excitement, the money, the mischief. There was a “bizarre type of fame” that came with “D.C. celebrification,” he writes. He got addicted to the “horse race.” He was in it to win.His fixation on victory was so consuming that it could often override his personal interests. “Why We Did It” recalls a moment when Miller panicked after John McCain made a stray comment in 2006 that was barely, just barely, pro-gay marriage. (McCain later clarified that he was only talking about private ceremonies; he did “not believe that gay marriages should be legal.”) Miller was planning to work on McCain’s presidential campaign. Miller is also gay. He was upset that McCain might hurt his chances with Republican voters, rather than excited at the prospect of working for someone who didn’t “want to deny me the ability to have a totally chill, off-the-books, man-man ceremony.” Miller says it’s precisely this warped response — his own “championship-level compartmentalization” — that makes him especially suited to understanding why most of the Republican establishment learned to stop worrying and line up behind Trump. The episode with McCain was just the beginning. Miller later went on to do P.R. work for social conservatives who virulently opposed same-sex marriage. “As a gay man who contorted himself into defending homophobes,” he writes, “I am more than capable of inhabiting the mind of the enabler.”The first half of the book describes Miller’s political coming-of-age — from closeted young Republican who grew up in a devout Catholic family to a spokesman for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign to one of the loudest Never Trumpers during the 2016 election. The second half of “Why We Did It” is a taxonomy of the kind of Republicans who went MAGA, based on Miller’s conversations with them and his firsthand knowledge of what makes the most opportunistic D.C. creatures tick.In between the two halves is an awkward chapter titled “Inertia,” in which Miller owns up to going from denouncing Trump before he was elected to working for Scott Pruitt, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator. (“It was a trying time and I was desperate.”) Miller later got a contract for media-monitoring services from the E.P.A. (“icky,” he concedes). Oh, and Miller also conducted opposition research for Facebook that happened to dovetail with conspiracy theories, casting the liberal financier and philanthropist George Soros as the shadowy force behind an anti-Facebook movement. (Miller insists that this newspaper’s reporting on what happened was “overheated.”)Tim Miller, the author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.”Sophie Berard Photography“I was favor-trading with people who were causing real-world harm so I could get a pat on the head from some client who wanted self-serving scuttlebutt fed to the rubes,” he writes of his career. But as a self-described P.R. flack, Miller knows how to spin such ugly straw into shiny gold. Who better to identify why his fellow Republicans got sucked under than someone who kept getting pulled back in?The hardcore Trumpists who loved their candidate from the beginning don’t interest Miller. His subjects include colleagues who worked with him nearly a decade ago on the Growth and Opportunity Project, known as the Republican “autopsy,” organized after Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012. The report called for moderation, for outreach, for immigration reform. But one by one, the people working on the project went from abhorring Trump to embracing him.There was “the Striver,” Elise Stefanik, the Harvard-educated representative from upstate New York who “was doing what was required to get the next buzz,” Miller writes. There was “the Little Mix,” Reince Priebus, who liked “feeling important” and tried “to stay in everyone’s good graces while the world around him unraveled.” Miller calls Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer “the Nerd-Revenging Team Player” who gamely thought that obtaining some status in the White House might make up for some “negative charisma.” There was a coterie of “Cartel-Cashing, Team-Playing, Tribalist Trolls,” always on the lookout for the next gravy train.Some of these former colleagues will talk to Miller; others won’t. “Why We Did It” begins and ends with the story of his friendship with the Republican fund-raiser Caroline Wren, a fellow “socially liberal millennial,” who worked with Miller on McCain’s 2008 campaign but more recently made a star turn as a Trump adviser subpoenaed by the panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Wren’s motivations don’t turn out to be particularly complex; she herself admits that her politics have always had less to do with the finer details of governing than the more cultish aspects of personality. “She had come to worship John McCain,” Miller writes, and she was soon “obsessed with Sarah Palin.” When pushed to explain what drew her to Trump, whose policies she says repulsed her, Wren rails against smug progressives driving around in their Priuses and forcing everyone to drink out of paper straws. She felt intensely annoyed by their self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. She liked Trump because of what she calls his “scorch-the-earth mode.”This “animus,” Miller says, seems to have been the necessary condition for converting his “reluctant peers” into Trump supporters. I recommend reading “Why We Did It” alongside “It Was All a Lie” (2020), by Stuart Stevens, another “what happened” book by a former Republican operative. Stevens comes across as thoughtful, deliberative, reflective; Miller comes across as clever, a little bit mean, extremely profane. Stevens captures how the Republican Party spent decades cultivating grievances that it didn’t plan to do anything about, while Miller captures the consequent emotional valence, with its “unseriousness and cruelty.” Both books are absorbing; neither is particularly hopeful.“AHHHHHHH,” an exasperated Miller writes, remembering how he stayed in politics because of his own thirst for fame and fortune. For all the reluctant Trump supporters’ torturous rationales, maybe the reasons for why they did it don’t get much more complicated than that. More

  • in

    ‘Patriotic and Honest Republicans’ Telling the Truth

    More from our inbox:But Your 2020 Election Was Not Fraudulent?The Supreme Court’s Ruling on Religion and SchoolsDon’t Erase Tolstoy’s NameBook Browsing, in a BookstoreThe Jan. 6 committee heard from a group of witnesses who were pressured by former President Donald J. Trump to overturn the election.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Pressured States to Comply on Fake Electors” (front page, June 22):There is a silver lining that I did not expect in the Jan. 6 hearings. I am a lifelong Democrat. The Republicans in the news over the last several years have been frightening in their cruel and vicious remarks and extreme agendas on race relations, gay marriage and abortion and, most important, in their devotion to the ex-president.But the hearings have brought some very reasonable, patriotic and honest Republicans to the front. There are people who voted for Donald Trump and supported his platform, but when faced with his drive to overturn a fair election, they are coming through. They are telling the truth about the lies and corruption and putting their careers and maybe their lives on the line.It gives me hope that there is a way out of the nightmare of the last administration’s corruption and a way forward with sane debate and compromise.Joan BancroftDenverTo the Editor:Of all the crimes Donald Trump may have committed, or inspired his deluded faithful to commit, the malicious attack on two election workers, Wandrea Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, is the single most shameless act of deceit and cowardice of his entire pathetic career.Two humble women worked selflessly during a pandemic to uphold our democracy. Donald Trump misused the power of the presidency to maliciously destroy the good reputation of these women in his quest to undermine our democracy.If no other details or testimony from these hearings are remembered, future generations will ask how someone who had no sense of decency could actually be president of the United States.Asher FriedCroton-on-Hudson, N.Y.To the Editor:As the victims of threats and verbal assaults, Wandrea Moss, her mother and other members of the family should be as eligible to receive 24/7 security and peace of mind as Brett Kavanaugh and other Supreme Court justices and their families. We owe them their lives back.Lois BerkowitzOro Valley, Ariz.But Your 2020 Election Was Not Fraudulent?A resolution adopting the false claim that former President Donald J. Trump was the victim of a stolen election in 2020 was passed by Republican state-party delegates in Texas.Leah Millis/ReutersTo the Editor:Re “Texas G.O.P. Adopts Stolen Election Claims” (news article, June 20):Many Republicans who reject President Biden’s 2020 victory are occupying seats in statehouses or in Congress to which they themselves were elected in that very same “illegitimate” election. If that election was so fraudulent, how could these same Republican election deniers (so conveniently) accept their own 2020 elections?David E. CohenNorth Haledon, N.J.The Supreme Court’s Ruling on Religion and Schools Pete Marovich for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Justices Deliver Win to Schools Based in Faith” (front page, June 22):Whatever you may think of government offers to pay the tuition for the private education of children, the paying of that tuition to religious institutions is clearly a violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition against the government establishment of religion, despite the current Supreme Court’s majority holding to the contrary.There is no more clear government support of religious institutions than sending public money their way, exactly the kind of government action that the First Amendment prohibits. It is not the court’s duty to support religion, only to guarantee that government stays out of the business of religion and does not prohibit its free exercise.What we have instead is a court bent on strengthening religion in this country. Never mind that the Constitution provides otherwise.Bruce NeumanWater Mill, N.Y.To the Editor:Once a state provides funding for private schools, it cannot then refuse to fund religious schools. People who believe that this exclusion is justified based on the “separation of church and state” are getting it wrong.Andrea EconomosHartsdale, N.Y.Don’t Erase Tolstoy’s NameTo the Editor:Re “So Long, Tolstoy Station? Cities ‘Decolonize’ by Erasing Russian Names” (news article, June 8):Having visited Ukraine, including Kyiv, in more peaceful times, I can certainly understand that eliminating the names of prominent Russians from public places in an effort to “decolonize” this wonderful nation is very much in order. However, the name of the author Leo Tolstoy, a true person of peace and good will, should remain.Tolstoy was one of the greatest, most positive influences on both Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Among many other actions, Gandhi named a farm he established, as a refuge for passive resisters and their indigent families, the Tolstoy Farm.James K. RileyPearl River, N.Y.Book Browsing, in a BookstoreApps have struggled to reproduce the kind of real-world serendipity that puts a book in a reader’s hand.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesTo the Editor:The headline on your June 9 article about browsing in bookstores read, “Can Any App Capture This Experience?” The answer is obvious — of course not.Book browsing is a physical experience, involving visual, tactile and sometimes even olfactory sensations. In a physical bookshop, people are moved to pull a book off a shelf and take a closer look for many reasons, some obvious, some subtle and some downright mysterious.Every book browser has experienced those magical instances in which they have found books they weren’t looking for or even knew existed, but which to some degree affected their life.The possibility of making another such serendipitous discovery is why people love to browse in bookstores. It can’t be engineered or made subject to an algorithm.M.C. LangChevy Chase, Md. More

  • in

    Side by Side With (Bernie) Sanders

    THE FIGHTING SOULOn the Road With Bernie SandersBy Ari Rabin-HavtSo much has happened to shape American politics since Bernie Sanders ended his second presidential campaign — the pandemic, Donald Trump’s election denial, the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, the war in Ukraine — it’s easy to overlook the Vermont senator’s place in political history.To a remarkable degree for a failed presidential candidate, Sanders has had an enduring impact on the Democratic Party. In the wake of his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Democrats have tacked sharply to the left on issues like college debt, health care and social welfare. Even in defeat, Sanders remains a progressive hero, with a new perch for influencing policy as the Senate Budget Committee chairman.For all that, Sanders is not well known on the granular level — his management style, tastes and quirks — in a way that is common for national politicians. Into that vacuum comes Ari Rabin-Havt’s engaging memoir of the 2020 Sanders campaign, “The Fighting Soul: On the Road With Bernie Sanders.”Rabin-Havt, a former deputy campaign manager, offers an insider’s view of the gruff, no-frills, democratic socialist — a politician who “hated the political part of political campaigns” like fund-raising and hobnobbing. He was so clueless about party pooh-bahs that he did not recognize the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, a major Democratic donor.Rabin-Havt was with the senator when he had a campaign-trail heart attack in October 2019. Feisty even in an ambulance, Sanders quizzed E.M.T.s about their jobs and benefits. Asked to rate his pain on a 1-to-10 scale, he snapped with an expletive: “That is a (nonsense) question. I have no idea.”The heart attack was a watershed that looked like the end of the campaign. Then 78, Sanders already faced questions about whether he was too old to be president, and was losing ground to Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.Surprisingly, the health scare helped revive Sanders’s fortunes. While he was still in the hospital, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called to offer her coveted endorsement, which brought fresh momentum and was central to a “Bernie Is Back” campaign.He dominated early voting rounds as Biden floundered. After Biden’s South Carolina primary triumph, other Democratic contenders dropped out, leaving Sanders the last rival standing. Then, after quitting, Sanders became a reliable team player, working hard to elect the Democratic nominee.Rabin-Havt says his book’s principal goal is not to dwell on why the senator lost. Still, that question lingers over the narrative. Rabin-Havt’s explanation, common among Sanders loyalists, is that the party establishment, aided by the mainstream media, rallied behind Biden to keep Sanders from winning the nomination. “The Democratic Party is a disorganized institution,” he writes, “but it would organize against Bernie Sanders in a way they had not against any other candidate — Democratic or Republican.”He rejects suggestions from some Democrats — including former President Obama, in a 2018 meeting with Sanders here recounted in fresh detail — that he would have had a better shot if he’d reached beyond his base or moderated his message. But if he had followed that advice, Rabin-Havt writes, Sanders would have become a different politician and lost core backers. There’s the rub: The uncompromising consistency that thrilled supporters and put Sanders within reach of the nomination was an obstacle to building a broader coalition to win it.The book ends with a glimpse of how the iconoclastic outsider now appreciates the satisfactions of being a Senate insider. Sanders had a big hand in shaping President Biden’s first major accomplishment — a pandemic-relief bill brimming with progressive policies.“We got something done here, didn’t we?” he told Rabin-Havt after the bill passed. “This is fun.” More

  • in

    In France, a Victory and a Warning

    More from our inbox:Church Support of the ‘Big Lie’When Tragedy Strikes, Grandma and Grandpa Are ThereReturning to AustraliaRussian Disinformation, Then and NowHandwritten Archives, to Capture HistoryCampaign posters featuring Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, in the French town of Roye, where two out of three voters backed Ms. Le Pen.James Hill for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “In France, Macron Defeats Le Pen for Presidency” (front page, April 25):That the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen came as close as she did to defeating Emmanuel Macron in France is further confirmation that extremists are successfully normalizing autocrat-friendly nationalist messaging.Ms. Le Pen, a longtime sympathizer of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, said in her concession speech, “The ideas we stand for are reaching new heights,” Le Monde reported.As chilling as that sounds, she’s correct, and the world should pay closer attention. But for now, those in the West who embrace free thinking, democracy and even just a scintilla of globalism can breathe a very brief sigh of relief.Cody LyonBrooklynTo the Editor:My dear French friends, you may have won a battle by re-electing Emmanuel Macron, but you are losing the war. So long as the reach of the bigoted right wing grows, France is losing.When in the midst of a gunfight, and with the other side getting stronger, dodging one bullet is no reason to celebrate.Peter MailleLa Grande, Ore.To the Editor:Has anyone noticed that Marine Le Pen, the loser, has actually accepted the results of the election and conceded? What a novel idea!And Vive la France!Irene Bernstein-PechmèzeQueensTo the Editor:I recall an earlier election when another Le Pen made it to the second round. In 2002, Marine’s father, Jean-Marie, was crushed 82 percent to 18 percent by the conservative Jacques Chirac. Leftist voters did their republican duty, voting against those who would put an end to democracy itself.The French do not like Emmanuel Macron. But they remember fascism. Perhaps if Americans had such memories, they would better defend the democracy that they are losing, bit by bit, every day.Bob NelsonYuma, Ariz.Church Support of the ‘Big Lie’ Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Stolen-Election Falsehood Goes to Church” (front page, April 25):You report that some evangelical pastors are hosting events dedicated to Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen and promoting the cause to their congregations.To the extent that such a charge is true, do these churches still retain any semblance of a religious exemption from federal and state taxes, which prohibits political campaign activity? Just wondering.Michael PeskoeMiami BeachTo the Editor:How do church leaders who preach from the new King James Version of the Bible — “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” John 8:32 — perpetuate a lie?Talk about cognitive dissonance.Harriet VinesChapel Hill, N.C.To the Editor:Of all the scary articles in The Times about Ukraine, Russia, wildfires, climate change, Marine Le Pen, Ron DeSantis and more, I found the one about evangelical pastors by far the scariest.Ellen SchafferPalm Coast, Fla.When Tragedy Strikes, Grandma and Grandpa Are ThereMia Scala, 6, hugs her grandfather Angelo Conti, 74, while waiting for a Girl Scouts meeting to start.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesTo the Editor:“When Parents Are Lost to Covid, Grandparents Step In,” by Paula Span (news article, April 14), not only recognizes the role that grandparents are playing in the wake of Covid, it also acknowledges that “extended family has always been the first line of defense in the wake of such tragedies.”For my book on the history of American grandmothers, many of the 75 women I interviewed told about a 1950s grandmother who stepped up — took the grandchildren into her home or went to live in the grandchild’s home — when things fell apart because of parents’ death, divorce or illness.None of the grandmothers had anticipated this refilling of their empty nests, all of them struggled with the responsibility, and all of their granddaughters-turned-grandmothers now look back with awe at what their grandmothers did for them.One notable change from then to now: Grandfathers in the 1950s were not active in their care the way older men are today, another example of how feminism has improved family life.Engagement with grandchildren is not just a delightful extra in family life, it is also a serious form of insurance. Should a tragedy mean that grandchildren must live with grandparents, that painful transition is eased if the elders and the kids have experience with one another aside from holidays and have built trust over time.No grandparent wants the custodial job, but every grandparent should consider time with grandchildren as an investment in their security.Victoria Bissell BrownHavertown, Pa.The writer, a retired professor of American history at Grinnell College, is working on a book titled “The Nana Project.”Returning to AustraliaFamilies reuniting at the Sydney International Airport.To the Editor:Re “A Post-Lockout Reunion of Yearning and Dread,” by Isabella Kwai (Sydney Dispatch, April 10):The last time I had been home to Australia to see my entire family was in May 2019. At one point, over Zoom, my sister told me that it was as if I had flown to the moon and never returned.The plane home in January was completely full of anxious expats and earnest American grandparents eager to see newly minted Aussie grandbabies. All the arrival hugs were tighter and longer than they had ever been. The smiles were wider and the welcomes longer — even from the custom officials! And maybe the accents were even broader!And … yes … if I could have bottled the dawn laughter from the troop of cheeky kookaburras camped outside my Brisbane window just days before I returned to the U.S., I would have.Patricia RyanWest Lafayette, Ind.Russian Disinformation, Then and NowTo the Editor:The state-sponsored disinformation spread to the Russian people is an old game. In the 1930s my father traveled to Russia. As was required, he had an Intourist guide with him at all times. As they became more friendly, she started to ask him about life in the U.S.“You live in New York,” she said. “Tell me about the skyscrapers that fall down.” He could not convince her that such things were not happening. She told him that all Russians knew about the frequently falling skyscrapers and was disappointed that he couldn’t be more candid with her about it.The acceptance of such nonsense appears to be embedded by a long history, though the current pernicious version is surprising in an era of greater access to outside information.Ty DillardSanta Fe, N.M.Handwritten Archives, to Capture HistoryTo the Editor:Re “Preserving a Couple’s ’60s Insights,” by Douglas Brinkley (Arts pages, April 19):Doris Kearns Goodwin sums up the special role of archives in the last lines of this excellent and informative article:“Oh, how I love old handwritten letters and diaries. I feel as if I’m looking over the shoulder of the writer. History comes alive!”How sad that in today’s world of computers and “no paper,” the progression from draft to final speech or report will no longer exist in many cases. The “delete” key has replaced crossing out, rewriting by hand and literally cutting and pasting.Some of us fear that using only the computer means that there will be no file of marked-up notes or previous drafts for historians to see and then give us that looking-over-the-shoulder feeling. That will keep history from coming alive.Sally DorstNew YorkThe writer is a retired magazine editor. More