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      in US Politics

      Find Me the Votes review: Fani Willis of Georgia, the woman who could still take down Trump

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      If this week’s hearing about Fani Willis’s affair with her assistant Nathan Wade has piqued America’s interest in the character of the Fulton county district attorney, Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman have written the perfect book for this moment.Isikoff has been a dogged investigator for the Washington Post, NBC and Yahoo, while his longtime friend and collaborator Klaidman is a former managing editor of Newsweek now a newly minted investigative reporter for CBS. Together they have produced the most readable and authoritative account to date of all of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.At its center is a nuanced portrait of Willis, who at least until a couple of days ago appeared to be Trump’s most effective nemesis, having indicted him, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and the former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as well as 16 other co-conspirators.Whether Willis’s affair with one of her principal assistants is a valid reason to force the presiding judge to dismiss her from the case remains to be seen. But the revelation seems to have been as much of a bombshell for her biographers as it was for everyone else.Contacted by the Guardian, both authors declined to predict the outcome of the current proceeding. But Isikoff sounded optimistic that Willis would survive this latest assault.“How did the relationship between Willis and Wade prejudice any of the other defendants?” Isikoff asked. “There is simply no evidence that it did.”Willis is a daughter of the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, her father, John C Floyd III, migrated from the politics of John F Kennedy and the non-violence of Martin Luther King Jr to the much tougher ideology of the Black Panther Party of Los Angeles, which he co-founded in 1967. After that he became a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer.Isikoff and Klaidman say Floyd’s odyssey gives us “a glimpse into his daughter’s pugnacious personality and her deep-seated loathing of bullies” – both of which were on prominent display when she defended herself in the hearing room.While it was her personal passion that brought Willis into an unwelcome spotlight, it was her own focus on allegations of sexual harassment against her previous boss and mentor that made her election as the first woman district attorney of Fulton county possible. Paul Howard became the first Black person to hold the job of Fulton county DA in 1996, and made Willis a star by giving her some of his Atlanta office’s most famous cases. She became famous as the lead prosecutor in an indictment of 35 public school officials for alleged violations of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act. The Atlanta schools superintendent, six principals, two assistant principals and 14 teachers were accused of faking students’ test scores, in response to the requirements of No Child Left Behind.That law, championed by George W Bush, put schools at risk of losing federal aid if students didn’t meet minimum standards for success on standardized tests. All but one of the defendants was Black, which made the prosecution even more controversial. By the time Howard gave Willis the case she was chief of the office’s trial division. Isikoff and Klaidman say she proved a “hands-on micromanager” who “plunged into every detail of the case”. Its complexity turned out to be the perfect training for Willis to use the same Rico statute to go after Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.One of this book’s most important contributions is to remind us of the breadth and viciousness of the president’s efforts to undermine democracy – and the horrendous effects they had on the lives of decent, honest election officials in every swing state Trump lost.After multiple lawsuits alleging voter fraud were thrown out by nearly every judge who heard them, Trump famously turned his attention to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, one of several Republicans whose resistance proved heroic. When Trump got Raffensperger and his assistants on the phone, they were shocked by how many QAnon conspiracy theories Trump seemed to have accepted as fact – just because so many of his supporters had retweeted them. A particular favorite of the president’s was the notion there had been 200,000 forged signatures on absentee ballots in Fulton county – even though the total number of absentee votes had been 148,319.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the same call, Trump repeated the big lie that the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss had run between 18,000 and 56,000 bogus ballots through election scanners. Trump said Freeman was “known all over the internet”. This was the same lie promoted by Giuliani, which ultimately cost him a richly deserved verdict of $148m for libeling the two innocent women.In one of the many telling details of Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, the authors remind us that the other hero from that phone call was the Georgia deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs.“Fuchs did what was arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle,” the authors believe. To protect her boss, she decided to tape the phone call – without telling Raffensperger. After the tape leaked to the Washington Post, it quickly became the single most powerful piece of evidence against the ex-president in any of the four prosecutions he is still facing.When you see all of Trump’s alleged crimes piled together in a single narrative, it is beyond belief that he remains the favorite of a majority of Republican primary voters. But these same facts should surely be enough to guarantee his defeat if he actually gets the chance to face the larger electorate in November.
      Find Me the Votes is published in the US by Twelve More

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      in US Politics

      Biden ‘privately defiant’ over chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, book says

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      Joe Biden is “privately defiant” that he made the right calls on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in summer 2021, a new book reportedly says, even as the chaos and carnage that unfolded continues to be investigated in Congress.“No one offered to resign” over the withdrawal, writes Alexander Ward, a Politico reporter, “in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake. Ending the war was always going to be messy.”Ward’s book, The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump, will be published next week. Axios reported extracts on Friday.Ward adds: “Biden told his top aides, [national security adviser Jake] Sullivan included, that he stood by them and they had done their best during a tough situation.”Ward quotes an unnamed White House official as saying: “There wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up.”The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Taliban, which had sheltered the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, was soon ousted but fighting never ceased.Figures for the total US death toll in the country since 2001 vary. The United States Institute of Peace, an independent body established by Congress, says that 2,324 US military personnel, 3,917 US contractors and 1,144 allied troops were killed during the conflict. More than 20,000 Americans were wounded.“For Afghans,” the institute goes on, “the statistics are nearly unimaginable: 70,000 Afghan military and police deaths, 46,319 Afghan civilians (although that is likely a significant underestimation) and some 53,000 opposition fighters killed. Almost 67,000 other people were killed in Pakistan in relation to the Afghan war.”Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Furthermore, according to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, “four times as many [US] service members have died by suicide than in combat in the post-9/11 wars [including Iraq and other campaigns], signaling a widespread mental health crisis”.Biden entered office determined to withdraw, and in late summer 2021 US forces pulled out, leaving the defense of the country to US-trained Afghan national forces.The Taliban swiftly overran that opposition, and soon scenes of chaos at Kabul airport dominated world news. Tens of thousands of Afghans who sought to leave, fearing Taliban reprisals after a 20-year US occupation, were unable to get out. More than 800 US citizens were left behind, notwithstanding Biden’s promise on 18 August that troops would stay until every US citizen who wanted to leave had done so.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWard, Axios said, quotes a senior White House official as saying: “There’s no one here who thinks we can meet that promise.”On 26 August, 13 US service members were killed in a suicide attack. Three days later, a US drone strike killed 10 Afghan civilians, seven of them children. No Americans faced disciplinary action over the strike, which a US air force inspector general called “an honest mistake”.According to Axios, Ward also details extensive infighting over the withdrawal between the Departments of State and Defense.Biden, Ward says, tended to favour the state department, having been chair of the Senate foreign affairs committee, and to be wary of the Pentagon, having been vice-president to Barack Obama through eight years of inconclusive war. More

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      in US Politics

      How to steal a US election: Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig on Trump’s new threat

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      Lawrence Lessig has a message for America: Donald Trump’s assault on democracy in 2020, with his stolen-election lie and refusal to concede the White House, may have been shocking, but wait till you see what’s coming next.“We are in a profoundly dangerous moment,” the Harvard law professor says. “This is a catastrophic year, and the odds are not in our favor.”Such a blunt warning carries the gravitas of its source. Lessig is a leading thinker on how public institutions can be corrupted, and has probed deeply into vulnerabilities that leave US democracy undefended against authoritarian attack.Lessig has teamed up with Matthew Seligman of the constitutional law center at Stanford. Their new book, How to Steal a Presidential Election, asks whether a second Trump attempt to subvert democracy could succeed. Their answer makes for uncomfortable reading.“We are convinced,” they write, “that an informed and intelligent effort to undermine the results of a close, free and fair election could work in America – if the rules governing our presidential elections are not changed.”It is a sign of troubled times that prominent scholars are wargaming the next election. A country that has long prided itself as an exemplar of constitutional democracy finds itself under surgical lights.Nor is this Lessig’s first such thought experiment. Four years ago, months before Trump launched his stolen-election conspiracy, Lessig and Seligman devised a class at Harvard law school: Wargaming 2020. They looked at whether it would be possible to hack the presidential election and send the losing candidate to the White House. Their conclusion was that American democracy had dodged a bullet.“We discovered that Trump didn’t really understand what he could have done,” Lessig says. “There were obvious moves he and his team could have made, but they didn’t take them.”The insurrection on 6 January 2021 was tragic in its loss of life, but as a method of overturning the election it was the “dumbest thing they could have possibly done. No court would ever allow the election to be decided by force of bayonets.”Having repeated the wargaming exercise for the new book, Lessig is far less confident that another assault on democracy would end so positively. With the former president almost certain to secure the Republican nomination, having won in Iowa and New Hampshire, Lessig has no doubt about how far Trump is prepared to go.“We’ve seen that he’s willing to do much, more more than we expected back in 2020,” he says.Another reason for people to be “very anxious” is that Trump and his inner circle have had four years to conduct their own wargames and are likely to be far more sophisticated: “Trump didn’t understand how to undo the structures of government. Now he’s well-trained, he knows exactly what he needs to do.”For their 2024 wargame, Lessig and Seligman assume the November election will be nail-bitingly close, both nationally and in at least one battleground state. That is not an outlandish precondition – you only have to think about the 537 votes that gifted Florida and the presidency to George W Bush in 2000.Given a close election, there are factors that could help stave off disaster. With the vice-presidency in the hands of Kamala Harris, there is no chance of Trump or his supporters unleashing the kind of pressure to which they subjected Mike Pence in 2020, trying to get him to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory.In the wake of January 6, Congress also moved to close several loopholes by clarifying some of the most ambiguous wording of the 1887 Electoral Count Act. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act makes it harder for Congress to object to the counting of votes under the electoral college, and gives the courts a greater role in adjudicating the proper slate of electors to be returned from individual states should disputes arise.But in the Lessig-Seligman analysis, inevitable congressional compromises have left some loopholes in place, opening up opportunities for an unscrupulous, now battle-hardened candidate.Three scenarios stand out. The first relates to so-called “faithless electors”: delegates chosen by parties to represent the winning candidate in each state under the arcane terms of the electoral college who decide to go against their pledge and back the loser.During Trump’s first presidential run in 2016, 10 electors switched their votes. The ruse was a creative, albeit vain attempt to stave off a Trump presidency.Lessig argued on behalf of the 2016 faithless electors before the US supreme court, in a case known as Chiafolo v Washington. The court ruled against the faithless electors, ordering that states have the right to compel them to back the winners of the popular vote.The authors’ concern is that the supreme court left it up to each state to decide whether or not to take up that power. Several states have yet to spell out in law that electors must abide by their pledge to vote for the victor. That leaves the door open to electors coming under massive, even violent pressure from Trump’s army of Make America Great Again warriors.“Imagine an elector had Maga Republicans surrounding their house carrying torches and demanding they vote for Donald Trump. Who knows what the electors would do in those circumstances,” Lessig says.The second scenario involves what Lessig and Seligman call a “rogue governor”: the governor of a state who decides to flip the results of the presidential election. This route poses the greatest long-term threat of US democracy imploding, Lessig believes.Paradoxically, post-January 6 reforms in the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act heightened the danger by increasing the powers of governors to certify slates of electors sent to Congress. Both houses of Congress can vote to overrule a rogue governor, and count the correct slate representing the winner of the popular vote, but only if the House and Senate agree.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGiven a divided Congress, a rogue governor and rogue House working together could steal the state’s electoral votes, and with it potentially the presidency.The risk of this scenario in this election cycle is minimal, Lessig concedes. Many of the highly sensitive battleground states – Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – have Democratic governors.That leaves Georgia, which Biden won by just 11,779 votes. It has a Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but he resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the result in 2020 and so is arguably less likely to go rogue this year.View image in fullscreenThe third wargaming scenario is the one that really keeps Lessig up at night: what if an entire state legislature decided to go rogue?Again, the idea is not fanciful. Several legislatures in the most hotly contested states have Republican majorities firmly under Trump’s sway – Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, to name just three – and conspiracy theories about rampant electoral fraud continue to circulate within them.Lessig worries that the supreme court ruling in Chiafolo, by giving state legislatures the power to tell electors how to cast their electoral votes, heightens the risk of a Maga-dominated legislature going rogue. He envisages state lawmakers claiming massive fraud in a close race and using that to justify switching its result to Trump.“That’s a kind of opened hole that is going to be very hard to close in time,” he says.The Harvard professor has emerged from this journey into the dark arts of election subversion in a bleak mood. The book finishes with a raft of proposed changes to federal and state laws that the authors argue would close the loopholes they uncovered in their travels. Will those changes happen in time to prevent a second Trump blitzkrieg?“I’m not optimistic,” Lessig says. “I’m not optimistic that Congress will be able to do anything in time, so the most we can hope for is that the infrastructure resists as it did last time.”When he was researching the book, Lessig says he had the voice of his 13-year-old daughter ringing in his head: “Just chill,” as she would say. But in the event of an extremely close result, he feels he can’t just chill.He stresses that none of this is partisan. He began life as a Republican and had the distinction in 1980, aged 19, of being the youngest delegate from Pennsylvania to Ronald Reagan’s nominating convention.“Neither of us have anything against the conservative movement in the United States, as expressed in the traditional Republican party,” he says.But he looks at how the party has become “disengaged from the basic premise of democratic politics – if you win, you win, if you lose, you go home”. And he sees that the number of Americans who still believe the 2020 election was stolen, against all evidence, remains steady. That scares him.“Many Trump supporters have the sense that anything is justified, and that’s terrifying,” he says. “Trump is denying every single core democratic norm, and yet his support continues to grow. That too is astonishing and terrifying.”
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      in US Politics

      How to Steal a Presidential Election review: Trump and the peril to come

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      The Trump veepstakes is under way. Senator JD Vance and Representative Elise Stefanik prostrate themselves. Both signal they would do what Mike Pence refused: upend democracy for the sake of their Caesar. The senator is a Yale Law School alum and former US marine. Stefanik is the fourth-ranking House Republican. He was once critical of the former president. She was skeptical. Not anymore.“Do I think there were problems in 2020? Yes, I do,” Vance recently told ABC. “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors … I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”Last month, Stefanik said: “We will see if this is a legal and valid election. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”From the supreme court down, the judiciary has repeatedly rejected that contention.As the November election looms, Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman offer How to Steal a Presidential Election, a granular and disturbing examination of the vulnerabilities and pressure points in the way the US selects its president. Short version: plenty can go wrong.Lessig is a chaired professor at Harvard Law School. He views a second Trump term as calamitous. “He is a pathological liar, with clear authoritarian instincts,” Lessig writes. “His re-election would be worse than any political event in the history of America  –  save the decision of South Carolina to launch the civil war.”Seligman is a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford, focused on disputed presidential elections. He too views Trump uncharitably.“Former president Trump and his allies attempted a legal coup in 2020 – a brazen attempt to manipulate the legal system to reverse the results of a free and fair election,” Seligman has said. “Despite all the attention on 6 January 2021 [the attack on Congress], our legal and political systems remain dangerously unprotected against a smarter and more sophisticated attempt in 2024.”The open question is whether forewarned is forearmed. On the page, Lessig and Seligman spell out seven roads to ruin, the “inverting” of an election to force a result that thwarts voters’ expressed intentions. The authors discount the capacity of a vice-president to unilaterally overturn an election result. But they warn of the potential for havoc at state level.As they see it, the danger of pledged but not legally bound electors being coerced to vote for Trump when the electoral college convenes is “significant”. They also hypothesize a state governor “interven[ing] to certify a slate of electors contrary to the apparent popular vote”. Another path to perdition includes making state legislatures the final judges of election results. There is also the “nuclear option”, according to the authors, which is stripping the right to vote from the voters.“A state legislature cancels its election before election day and chooses the state’s electors directly,” as Lessig and Seligman put it, a potential outcome they call a “very significant” possibility under the US constitution.“State legislators are free to deny their people a meaningful role in selecting our president, directly or indirectly,” they write. “Is there any legal argument that might prevent a legislature from formally taking the vote away from its people? We are skeptical.”To say US democracy is at risk is not to indulge in hyperbole. Trump’s infamous January 2021 call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, is a vivid reminder. “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than … we have, because we won the state.” Such words continue to haunt.In an episode that casts a similar pall, Trump and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee (RNC) chair, urged election officials in Michigan’s Wayne county to block the release of final results.“Do not sign it … we will get you attorneys,” McDaniel told the officials, regarding certification.“We’ll take care of that,” Trump said.Now, as he has for so many former enablers, Trump has taken care of McDaniel. She will shortly be gone from the RNC.Among Trump’s supporters, discontent with democracy is no secret. During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. In 2019, Mike Johnson, then a Louisiana congressman, declared: “By the way, the United States is not a democracy. Do you know what a democracy is? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. You don’t want to be in a democracy. Majority rule: not always a good thing.”Johnson is now House speaker. For good measure, he claims God told him “very clearly” to prepare to become “Moses”.“The Lord said step forward,” Johnson says.On the right, many openly muse about a second civil war.“We’ve already had one, so we know it’s within the realm of possibility,” James Pinkerton, a veteran of the White Houses of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, recently wrote in the American Conservative.“In fact, by one reckoning, the English speakers have had two other civil wars in the last four centuries, spaced out every hundred or so years. Is there some sort of deep cycle at work here? With, er, implications for our own troubled times?”The election won’t be pleasant. In late December, 31% of Republicans believed Joe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate. That was eight points lower than two years before. Trump’s criminal trials loom. Through that prism, Lessig and Seligman’s work serves as dire warning and public service.
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      in Elections

      US historians sign brief to support Colorado’s removal of Trump from ballot

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      Twenty-five historians of the civil war and Reconstruction filed a US supreme court brief in support of the attempt by Colorado to remove Donald Trump from the ballot under the 14th amendment, which bars insurrectionists from running for office.“For historians,” the group wrote, “contemporary evidence from the decision-makers who sponsored, backed, and voted for the 14th amendment [ratified in 1868] is most probative. Analysis of this evidence demonstrates that decision-makers crafted section three to cover the president and to create an enduring check on insurrection, requiring no additional action from Congress.”Lawyers for Trump argue that the presidency is not an “office” as described in the 14th amendment, that only congressional action can stop someone from running, and that Trump did not incite an insurrection.Trump was impeached in Congress (for the second time) for inciting an insurrection: the Capitol attack of 6 January 2021, an attempt to overturn defeat by Joe Biden now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions.Impeached with the support of 10 House Republicans but acquitted when only seven Senate Republicans voted to convict, Trump now dominates his party and its presidential primary, 91 criminal charges (17 for election subversion), civil trials and ballot challenges notwithstanding.Maine has also sought to remove Trump from its ballot, a ruling delayed, like that in Colorado, while the supreme court considers the issue. Oral arguments are set for 8 February.Amicus briefs allow interested parties to make relevant arguments. Earlier this month, nearly 180 Republicans joined a brief in support of Trump.The 25 historians – among them James McPherson of Princeton, the pre-eminent civil war scholar – pointed to 1860s congressional debate.“Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, a Democratic opponent of the 14th amendment, challenged sponsors as to why section three omitted the president. Republican Lot Morrill of Maine … replied, ‘Let me call the senator’s attention to the words “or hold any office civil or military under the United States”.’ Johnson admitted his error; no other senator questioned whether section three covered the president.”The historians also cited Andrew Johnson, in 1868 the first president impeached, referring to himself as “chief executive officer”.Pointing out that section 3 of the 14th amendment is self-executing, and that “no former Confederate instantly disqualified from holding office under section three was disqualified by an act of Congress”, the historians also noted that Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, cited his own disqualification as reason an indictment for treason should be quashed.“Contemporary information provides direct evidence of the enduring reach of the 14th amendment,” the historians wrote. “Congress … chose to make disqualification permanent through a constitutional amendment.“Republican senator Peter Van Winkle of West Virginia said, ‘This is to go into our constitution and to stand to govern future insurrection as well as the present.’ To this end, the Amnesty Acts of 1872 and 1898 did not pardon future insurrectionists.”The historians also said “adverse consequences followed” amnesty, many ex-Confederates winning office and “participat[ing] in the imposition of racial discrimination in the south that vitiated the intent of the 14th and 15th amendments to protect the civil and political rights of the formerly enslaved people.”The historians concluded: “The court should take cognisance that section three of the 14th amendment covers the present, is forward-looking, and requires no additional acts of Congress for implementation.”Some political and legal observers have suggested Trump should be allowed to run regardless of the constitution, because to bar him would be anti-democratic.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a forthcoming article for the New York Review of Books, seen by the Guardian, Sean Wilentz of Princeton – an eminent historian not part of the supreme court brief – calls such arguments “risible”.“By their reasoning,” Wilentz writes, “Trump’s misdeeds aside, enforcement of the 14th amendment poses a greater threat to our wounded democracy than Trump’s candidacy. In the name of defending democracy, they would speciously enable the man who did the wounding and now promises to do much more.”Trump and allies including Elise Stefanik of New York, a House Republican leader, have refused to commit to certifying the result should Trump lose in November.Wilentz continues: “Whether motivated by … fear of Trump’s base, a perverted sense of democratic evenhandedness, a reflexive hostility toward liberals, or something else, [commentators who say Trump should stay on the ballot] betray a basic ignorance of the relevant history and thus a misconception of what the 14th amendment actually meant and means. That history, meanwhile, has placed the conservative members of the supreme court in a very tight spot.”Wilentz says justices who subscribe to originalism, a doctrine that “purports to divine the original intentions of the framers [of the constitution] by presenting tendentious renderings of the past as a kind of scripture”, will in the Colorado case have to contend with evidence – as presented by the historians’ brief – of what the framers of the 14th amendment meant.Recently used to remove the right to abortion and to gut voting rights, originalism now threatens, Wilentz says, to become a “petard … exploding in the majority’s face.”He also writes: “The conservative majority of the supreme court and the historical legacy of the [Chief Justice John] Roberts court have reached a point of no return. The law, no matter the diversions and claptrap of Trump’s lawyers and the pundits, is crystal clear, on incontestable historical as well as originalist grounds … the conservatives face a choice between disqualifying Trump or shredding the foundation of their judicial methodology.”If the court does not “honour the original meaning of the 14th amendment and disqualify Donald Trump”, Wilentz writes, “it will trash the constitutional defense of democracy designed following slavery’s abolition; it will guarantee, at a minimum, political chaos no matter what the voters decide in November; and it will quite possibly pave the way for a man who has vowed that he will, if necessary, rescind the constitution in order to impose a dictatorship of revenge.” More

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      in US Politics

      The Truce review: deep dive on Democrats’ dynamics and divisions

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      Joe Biden is more unpopular than Donald Trump. The Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition frays, riven by the Israel-Gaza war, crisis at the US-Mexico border and inter-generational tensions. The party convention in Chicago in August carries the potential for a repeat of 1968. Then, pandemonium in the Windy City helped cost Hubert Humphrey the White House.But for sustained Republican efforts to gut reproductive rights, a strong issue for Democrats to run on, Biden and Kamala Harris would be in even deeper trouble. Even on the economy: strong GDP numbers and an invigorated bull market have yet to yield political profit.After three years on the job, the 46th president is widely viewed as a back-slapping north-eastern pol and Hunter Biden’s dad – not the transformational figure he sees when he looks into the mirror. Worse for him, at 81, majorities say he’s just too old.With The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party, Hunter Walker and Luppe B Luppen cast a sympathetic eye toward the party of Biden, Barack Obama and the Squad, prominent progressives of color in the US House. Walker is an investigative reporter at Talking Points Memo who covered the White House for Yahoo News. Luppen is a lawyer with a social media presence. In the past, he has donated to Democrats including Obama and Hillary Clinton.Mindful of Democrats’ internal divisions, the authors warmly describe Biden’s shift left and the political cover conferred. Convincingly, Walker and Luppen argue that the tilt from the center united the party and helped Biden enact legislation – until the House was lost.“This rapprochement culminated in Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address,” Walker and Luppen write, of a speech that “leaned hard on progressive policy priorities from promoting organized labor to getting a handle on police violence”.Unfortunately, it failed to make Biden any more palatable to much of the public. On the one hand, 71% are sympathetic to unions, the highest level since 1965. On the other, Democrats remain seen as soft on crime. In 2020, protesters’ demands to “defund the police” were a boost only to Trump.“Bernie [Sanders] may have lost the election,” the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey reportedly told Ilhan Omar, a Squad member from Minnesota, after the State of the Union, referring to the Democratic primary in 2020. “But he won the speech.”Sanders, from Vermont, is the only socialist in the Senate. Biden also needed the centrists, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema but they were never his. To a point they gave him cover but they never embraced his agenda. Manchin, from West Virginia, now mulls a third-party White House run. Sinema became an independent.Walker and Luppen also describe the enthusiasm shown for Biden’s State of the Union by Jamaal Bowman, a New York congressman and Squad member.“Mr President, that was awesome – that was awesome!” Bowman is quoted as saying.“Did you write the speech?” he is shown asking Sanders.Bowman has attracted controversy of his own. In September, he pulled a fire alarm in a congressional office building, then denied doing so in an attempt to delay a crucial vote. He did plead guilty to a misdemeanor.More recently, Bowman praised Norman Finkelstein, an American academic who has accused Israel of using the Holocaust to justify its actions against Palestinians, who has said Holocaust deniers should be allowed to teach, and who on 7 October, the day Hamas fighters raped and murdered Israelis, wrote: “It warms every fiber of my soul [to see] the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.”Introducing Finkelstein at a panel session, Bowman said he was “starstruck” and had “watched him all the time on YouTube”. Under fire, Bowman said he had been “unaware of Norman Finkelstein’s completely reprehensible comments”.Encapsulating Democrats’ deepening divide over Israel, Bowman now faces a primary challenge from George Latimer, the Westchester county executive. Two months after that vote, the party will most likely face a convention fight fueled by the same issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDoubt also swirls around Biden’s vice-president. Walker and Lappen distill it. “Kamala is not ready for prime time”, a “senior White House aide” is quoted as saying, adding: “She ain’t made for this.” Fifty seven percent of registered voters concur. Walker and Luppen are not done. “This person should not be president of the United States,” a “top aide” to the former California senator’s 2020 campaign says.“The problems Harris and her team experienced on her campaign persisted during her time as vice-president,” Walker and Luppen write, adding that a source offered a damning assessment: “It was, they said, Game of Thrones.”HBO also aired Veep.The Truce also shines a light on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York and perhaps the most prominent Squad member. In the process, the book dishes on Corbin Trent, a former senior aide, and Riley Roberts, the congresswoman’s fiance.“I was hooked on fucking pain pills,” Trent acknowledges. Walker and Luppen stress that Ocasio-Cortez did not know. These days, Trent is back in the news for allegedly siphoning $140,000 in Pac money and for attempting to oust Biden as the nominee.As for Roberts, Walker and Luppen remind us of how his feelings for the police and his entrepreneurial spirit came to coincide. The authors recall a now-deleted site on which Roberts pushed the “Cop-Out Collective”, boasting, “High-end hemp t-shirts with our logo will be available for sale.”According to one poll, 47% of voters see the Democrats as too liberal, a seven-point swing since 2020. In another survey, only 57% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners expressed satisfaction with Biden as their nominee. More than seven-in-10 Republicans and allies are content with Trump.The Democrats have ceded economic policy to Sanders, their social agenda to Ivy League professors. When pivoting left on economics, it is imperative to remain in the cultural center. Democrats, including Biden, ignore this at their peril.
      The Truce is published in the US by WW Norton More

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      in US Politics

      Lindsey Graham ‘threw Trump under the bus’ in Georgia case, book says

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      The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham “threw Donald Trump under the bus” in testimony to a grand jury investigating election subversion in Georgia, a new book reportedly says, revealing that the former president would have believed “martians came and stole the election” he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.“After fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the US supreme court to block his grand jury subpoena – and losing … Graham turned on a dime ‘and threw Trump under the bus’,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman write in Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election, Politico reported.“According to secret grand jury testimony in Fulton county confirmed by the authors, Graham testified that if you told Trump ‘that martians came and stole the election, he’d probably believe you’. He also suggested to the grand jurors that Trump cheated at golf.”The book, which cites “a source familiar with [Graham’s] testimony”, will be published next week.Trump’s cheating at golf has been widely reported.Isikoff and Klaidman also reportedly describe a “strange encounter” between Graham and Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who has pursued the election subversion case, producing 13 criminal charges against Trump and charging a host of his allies.Willis reportedly decided against charging Graham over his involvement in Trump’s attempt to overturn Biden’s win in the state.“After Graham was finished testifying,” Isikoff and Klaidman write, “he bumped into Fani Willis in a hallway and thanked her for the opportunity to tell his story.“‘That was so cathartic,’ he told Willis. ‘I feel so much better.’ Then, to the astonishment of one source who witnessed the scene, South Carolina’s senior senator hugged the Fulton county DA who was aggressively pursuing Trump.“Willis’s reaction: ‘She was like, “Whatever, dude,”’ according to one witness of the strange encounter.”Trump’s criminal charges in Georgia contribute to a total of 91, as do four federal charges concerning his attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat by Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe former president also faces 40 charges over the retention of classified information; 34 regarding hush-money payments to an adult film actor who claimed an affair; civil lawsuits over his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true”; and attempts to remove him from the ballot, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.Nonetheless, he has dominated the Republican presidential primary, winning convincingly in Iowa and New Hampshire and now pressuring his last rival, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, to drop out.Graham remains, in public, a vocal Trump supporter, oblivious to charges of hypocrisy given a famous 2016 prediction that Trump would “destroy” the Republican party, and given a claim, immediately after the attack on Congress, that he was finally “out” of Trump’s camp. More

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      in US Politics

      John Lewis review: superb first biography of a civil rights hero

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      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community chronicles one man’s quest for a more perfect union. An adventure of recent times, it is made exceptional by the way the narrative intersects with current events. It is the perfect book, at the right time.Raymond Arsenault also offers the first full-length biography of the Georgia congressman and stalwart freedom-fighter. The book illuminates Lewis’s time as a planner and participant of protests, his service in Congress and his time as an American elder statesman.Exemplary of Malcom X’s observation, “of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research,” Arsenault’s life of Lewis also brings to mind William Faulkner’s take on American life: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”John Robert Lewis was born into a poor family of sharecroppers in Alabama. Sharecropping amounted to slavery in all but name. White people owned the land and equipment. At the company store, seed and other supplies, from cornmeal to calico, were available on credit. The prices set for all this, and for the cotton harvest, were calculated to keep Black people in debt.Recalling his childhood, Lewis was not referring to material wealth when he wrote: “The world I knew as a little boy was a rich, happy one … It was a small world … filled with family and friends.”His school books made him aware of the unfairness of Jim Crow: “I knew names written in the front of our raggedy secondhand textbooks were white children’s names, and that these books had been new when they belonged to them.”His parents and nine siblings’ initial indifference to learning proved frustrating. They viewed his emergent strength, which would help him withstand a career punctuated by arrests and beatings, as a means to help increase a meager income. First sent into the cotton fields at six, Lewis was frequently compelled to miss class through high school.His political mission grew out of a religious calling. His was a gospel of justice and liberation. As a child he practiced preaching to a congregation of the chickens. In time, like Martin Luther King Jr, he was ordained a Baptist minister.Inspired by Gandhi and Bayard Rustin as well as by King, Lewis also embraced non-violence in emulation of Jesus. He took to heart Christ’s call to turn the other cheek: love your enemy and love one another. He called his modeling of Christ’s confrontation with injustice “getting into good trouble”.Education offered opportunities. In college, Lewis met and befriended likeminded young people. Helping form and lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he attracted others eager to take action, as Freedom Riders or whatever else gaining equal treatment might take.Lewis’s willingness to suffer attack while defending his beliefs gave him credibility like no other. The most remembered blow produced a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama. That barbaric 1965 assault against peaceful protesters came from authorities headed by George Wallace, the governor who said: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” A move to maintain white supremacy, the atrocity became known as “Bloody Sunday”.Time after time, Lewis found unity among colleagues elusive. In 1963, at the March on Washington, four higher-ups insisted on softening his speech. Even so, his radicalized passion shone through.Collaborating with Jack and Robert Kennedy, their self-satisfied delusion masquerading as optimism, was also problematic. Time and again, political expedience tempered the president and the attorney general in their commitment to civil rights. Sixty years on, among lessons Lewis attempted teaching was the inevitability of backlash following progress. If Barack Obama represented propulsion forward, the improbable installment of Donald Trump was like a race backward. Angering some, this was why, looking past Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Lewis endorsed for president the less exciting but more electable Joe Biden.Lewis’s ability to forgive indicates something of his greatness. Of George Wallace’s plea for forgiveness, in 1986, he said: “It was almost like someone confessing to a priest.”Rather like a priest, Lewis was admired across the House chamber. His moral compass was the “conscience of Congress”. Near the end of his life, in 2020, employing all his measured and collaborative demeanor, he exerted this standing in an attempt to restore the Voting Rights Act, gutted by a rightwing supreme court. Exhibiting what seemed to be endless resolve, he nearly succeeded.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI met Lewis in 1993, in Miami, at the conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The event’s theme, “cultural diversity”, got more dubious by the day. Only Black people attended excellent Black history workshops. Only rich white people toured Palm Beach houses.There were subsidized airfares, conference fees and accommodation for people of color. But I asked the Trust’s new president, Richard Moe, if it wouldn’t be good for the Trust to acquire Villa Lewaro, a house at Irvington, New York, once the residence of Madam CJ Walker, a Black business pioneer. Moe answered: “I intend to take the Trust out of the business of acquiring the houses of the rich.”I hoped Lewis’s keynote address would deem preservation a civil right. It didn’t. Instead, Lewis lamented how high costs made preserving landmarks in poor Black neighborhoods an unaffordable luxury. Moe heartily concurred. I stood to protest.Moe cut me off: “Mr Adams, you are making a statement, not asking a question. You are out of order!”“No,” Lewis said. “The young man did ask a question! He asked: ‘Why in places like Harlem, with abatements and grants, taxpayers subsidize destruction, instead of preserving Black heritage?’ I never thought of it that way. And he’s right.”In that moment, John Lewis became my hero. As a preservationist, I share his mission to obtain that Beloved Community. It is a place where inclusion is a right and where welcome is a given.
      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press
      Michael Henry Adams is an architectural-cultural historian and historic preservation activist More