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      American Gun review: riveting and horrifying history of the AR-15

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      How long can we go between news cycles featuring assault rifles? According to the Gun Violence Archive, in 2023 the answer is barely more than 12 hours. This year there have been 565 mass shootings in the US, including the latest horror in Maine – an average of nearly two a day. Those statistics make American Gun, a brilliant new biography of the AR-15, a particularly powerful and important book.Written by two fine Wall Street Journal reporters, Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, the book is packed with characters and plot turns, from Eugene Stoner, the publicity-shy inventor who designed the first AR-15 in the 1950s, to the embrace of the gun by Robert McNamara and John F Kennedy, which led to its disastrous adoption as the chief weapon for army infantrymen in Vietnam.The design was shaped by a simple military adage: “Whoever shoots the most lead wins.” Every detail of how the weapon went from a “counter-insurgency” tool in south-east Asia in the 1960s to the most popular way to kill American schoolchildren in the 21st century is included in this harrowing narrative.Stoner worked with aluminum in one of the booming aerospace factories in California and became obsessed with how he could use new materials like plastic to make a lighter, more effective rifle. He also achieved the “holy grail that gun designers had pursued for generations: how to use the energy released from the exploding gunpowder … to reload the weapon”. Soon he had a patent for a “gas operated bolt and carrier system” with fewer parts than a conventional rifle, that would make his “smoother to operate and last longer”.The first third of American Gun is devoted to how Stoner teamed up with an entrepreneur, George Sullivan, who brought his invention to the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, which set up a new division, ArmaLite, to produce the weapon. The main challenge they faced in selling the gun to the government was a centuries-old tradition of the army designing its own weapons. In 1957, the army announced it had chosen its own M-14 to replace the M-1, the workhorse of the second world war.But the inventors used the ancient rivalry between the services to get their foot in the door. They socialized with an air force general, Curtis LeMay, and got him to fire an AR-15 at a July 4 celebration in 1960. (Famously, LeMay was a model for the psychotic character played by George C Scott in Dr Strangelove.) LeMay was so impressed by the impact the gun had on watermelons 50 and 150 yards away, he decided the air force should buy 8,500 of them for its security teams.The new rifle took off inside the government with the arrival of John Kennedy in the White House and former Ford president Robert McNamara at the defense department, with a legion of whiz kids who wanted to invent new forms of warfare. McNamara was eager to prove he was smarter than the generals he inherited, so he overrode them and convinced Kennedy the army should adopt Stoner’s rifle instead of the M-14.One thing which especially impressed the earliest AR-15 users, including South Vietnamese troops, was the way its bullets became unstable inside a human body, tearing through “like a tornado, spiraling and tipping … obliterat[ing] organs, blood vessels and bones”. This of course was the same quality that would make the weapon the ultimate scourge of American schoolchildren five decades later.To mollify the generals, McNamara allowed the Pentagon’s technical coordinating committee to modify the gun before it went into mass production. Among other things, the committee changed the kind of ammunition used – with disastrous consequences. In Vietnam, the gun jammed repeatedly in combat. Vivid descriptions of how that jeopardized the lives of American soldiers are some of the most terrifying sections of American Gun.Dick Backus, a grunt who saw half of his 10-member squad mowed down, summarized the problem: “Our government sent young men to war with a rifle that didn’t shoot.” A Washington Post editorial reached a similar conclusion: “If the New Left were to set out to compose an insider’s indictment of the ‘military-industrial complex’, it could hardly match the report which a congressional committee has submitted” about the new rifle. Eventually, the army redesigned the weapon, and by 1975 it was working well again.The second half of American Gun highlights the role of Wall Street hedge fund owners in consolidating the gun industry and making the AR-15 the weapon of choice for insecure American males. Some of the most disgusting details are about an ad campaign proposed for readers of Maxim. The first ad was a picture of a gun pointed at the reader, with the caption “MINE IS SO DEFINITELY BIGGER THAN YOURS”. A website for the Bushmaster rifle read: “The Bushmaster Man Card declares and confirms that you are a Man’s Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded.”Even more disgusting was the strategy of private equity owners who bought up large portions of the gun industry in the early 2000s. They made sure video games included their brand of rifle because it would “help create brand preference among the next generation who experiences these games, allowing [us] to win our fair share of these young customers”.There is so much more in this book, including the collapse of political will to reform gun laws. The authors also detail how fake the 10-year ban on assault rifles really was, because the bill authored by then California senator Dianne Feinstein contained so many loopholes, gun manufacturers just made tiny tweaks and kept producing weapons.And because Congress had made the AR-15 forbidden fruit, sales actually exploded. In 1995, Americans owned about 400,000 of them. “By the end of 2021,” McWhirter and Elinson write, “that number jumped to more than 20 million.”
      American Gun is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux More

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      in US Politics

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

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

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      in US Politics

      Romney: A Reckoning review: must-read on Mitt and the rise of Trump

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      McKay Coppins joined BuzzFeed in 2012, as its Mitt Romney reporter. The former Massachusetts governor won the Republican presidential nomination but lost the election to Barack Obama. Coppins wrote a postmortem, A Mormon Reporter on the Romney Bus. Its subtitle: How America Got Used to His Religion, and Mine.“I quickly found that my expertise in Romney’s religion posed a distinct advantage – not in access or sourcing, necessarily, but in understanding the elusive candidate as an actual person,” Coppins wrote.These days, Romney represents Utah in the US Senate. He has less than 14 months until he retires. His disdain for Donald Trump is legend. In February 2020, he sought to hold Trump accountable for abusing his power and strong-arming Ukraine, becoming the first senator ever to vote to convict a president of his own party in an impeachment trial. He voted to convict Trump again at his second trial, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.Coppins is now at the Atlantic. His new book is a must-read for anyone interested in how the Republican party morphed from the party of Lincoln into a Trumpian mess, picking up where Coppins left off in The Wilderness, his earlier look at the GOP.The 1960s set off a realignment in US politics. Over the past 60 years, resentment and tribalism have come to dominate, social issues come to the fore. In a Republican party once synonymous with the Union army and high-end suburbs, the south and evangelical protestantism now wield major influence.In the 1968 presidential race, the religion of George Romney – the Republican governor of Michigan and Mitt’s father – was a non-issue. His aspirations finally came undone after he said he had been “brainwashed” over the war in Vietnam.Mitt Romney first ran for the Republican nomination 40 years later, in 2008. Times and the party had changed. Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister as well as governor of Arkansas, went gunning for his rival’s religion.“Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” Huckabee asked.Coppins offers an engaging read, the product of 30 interviews with Romney, interviews with aides and friends, and the senator’s emails and diaries. Chock-full of direct quotes, Romney: A Reckoning offers a window into the world of a private man who has darted in and out of the public eye.The book is also a scorching critique, singeing many. Coppins captures Romney strafing a heap of A-list Republicans. Trump and Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, Mike Pence and Chris Christie. All take direct hits. Coppins portrays their peevishness, pettiness and gutlessness – or worse – in Technicolor. Gingrich is a “smug know-it-all, smarmy, and too pleased with himself”. Cruz is “frightening”, “scary” and a “demagogue”.As for Ron DeSantis, in Romney’s estimation, the Florida governor is “much smarter than Trump”. But Romney also asks: “Do you want an authoritarian who’s smart or one who’s not smart?” Months before the primary, the party faithful have rendered their verdict. In poll after poll, Trump clobbers DeSantis.Onwards, to Pence: “No one had been more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly.”Romney also recalls how Jared Kushner tried to convince him Trump’s erratic behavior was actually a manifestation of strategic savvy. Romney wasn’t buying. “I think he’s not smart,” he said. “I mean, really not smart.”Nonetheless, in 2012, Romney sought Trump’s endorsement. Beaten by Obama, Romney conceded on election night. Trump, though, unfurled his lie that the election was rigged. We had seen the future.To George Romney and his son, race relations mattered. The younger Romney parted with Trump after he was slow to disavow backing from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Here, Coppins quotes Romney’s journal: “It is nearly certain that he will be the nominee. I am not tempted in the slightest to retreat. I will fight him on the beaches. I will fight him in the air.” Fine words – that didn’t alter the outcome.Romney then entertained the prospect of serving Trump as secretary of state, only to be publicly humiliated. He ascribes the failed gambit to “a mix of noble motivations and self-centered ones”. Said differently, he wanted the prize but refused to pay the price. “You need to say that you’ve come to the conclusion that I’m terrific,” Trump reportedly demanded. “That I’ll be a great president … We need to clear this up.”Romney would not bend the knee. But he admits: “I like being involved and being in the middle of things, and having something important to do. It’s like, you know, I wanted to be president. If you can’t be president, being secretary of state’s not a bad spot to come thereafter.”George W Bush tells Coppins Romney dodged a bullet. Now, he has little to lose. His time in the Senate ticks down. He has a fortune to enjoy. Published estimates peg him as the third-richest member of Congress, net worth hitting $300m. Yet he is not content. Washington crumbles from within. Violence and menace are coins of the realm. January 6 cemented a new political era.Jim Jordan’s run for House speaker, from the extreme right, triggered a barrage of threats for Republicans who refused to go along. Being primaried by the right is no longer the worst that could happen. On January 6, as the Capitol lay besieged, Ann Romney, Mitt’s wife, cried: “This is our country … This is our country.”
      Romney: A Reckoning is published in the US by Scribner More

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      in US Politics

      Bayard Rustin review: fine portrait of a giant of protest and politics

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      At only about 200 pages, Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics is a pleasure to read, 23 contributors giving their take on the great civil rights advocate. Edited by the scholar Michael G Long, it is a must for those who want to better understand the complexity of a Black hero who was also an imperfect man.Rustin, the Obama-produced feature film airing on Netflix, is the most prominent example an industry of emergent Rustin scholarship. A spate of Rustin essays, Rustin books and Rustin docuseries round out the genre. They commemorate the 60th anniversary of Rustin’s foremost achievement: the March on Washington of 1963, a great protest for African American civil and economic rights.The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 was among its results. Long explains how, with this peaceful demonstration as a template, “millions of protesters … would similarly march on Washington for women’s rights, labor rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so much more. No protest in US history has been more influential and consequential.”What is it that makes the book Long has edited so special? It is its economy. Without spending a long time, from several angles you get a good picture of who Rustin was.I never met Rustin, but I did meet and was befriended by Walter Naegle. Legally adopted by Rustin so no one could contest his eventual bequest, in any real sense Naegle is Rustin’s widower. They met in 1977 and were together for the final decade of Rustin’s life.“He had a wonderful shock of white hair,” Naegle writes. “I guess he was of my parents’ generation, but we looked at each other and lightning struck.”When he moved to New York in the late 1930s, Rustin joined the 15th Street Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Any source one consults emphasizes how imperative his Quaker upbringing was. He was reared not by his unmarried teenaged mother but by his maternal grandmother. Her beliefs inspired his highly moral sense of ethics.Naegle writes: “Bayard always credited Julia [Edith Davis Rustin] with having the most profound impact on his early development. She attended West Chester, Pennsylvania’s Friends School. Her education stressed ‘human family oneness, equality, integrity, community, and peace through nonviolence’. It was this Quaker nonviolence, enhanced by Gandhi’s version, that Rustin studied in India, which he taught to Rev Martin Luther King. This was how King’s movement changed history.”I always assumed that as a boy Rustin followed a trajectory similar to that followed by his grandmother. I envisioned him interacting with white Quakers with ease. But Naegle relates something else. When she married, Rustin’s grandmother joined her husband’s African Methodist Episcopal church. Notwithstanding the strong Quaker identity they shared, neither she nor Bayard were welcome to attend the West Chester Friends Meeting. Far from the “Peaceable Kingdom” I pictured, Rustin experienced a grimmer youth. Replete with racial segregation, there was even a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.All the same, Rustin’s Quaker beliefs led him to pacifism. A conscientious objector during the second world war, he received a two-year prison term. He sought to serve fellow inmates, organizing them to protest for better conditions. Earlier, at Wilberforce University, Rustin had been expelled for organizing students – and for being gay. Jail authorities didn’t hesitate to use his sexuality against him. To be queer was to be perceived as deviant and depraved. Confessing his sexuality to his grandmother, he had only been admonished: “Never associate with anyone who has less to lose than you do.” In prison it was a different matter. Black or white, on learning about Rustin’s sexuality, most prisoners wanted nothing to do with him.Being deemed deviant and illegal haunted Rustin’s life well after his release in 1946. One friend stood by him steadfastly. A fellow socialist, Asa Philip Randolph, had established America’s first Black labor union, the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin’s capabilities as an organizer, orator and agitator impressed Randolph early. Their first big protest, a 1941 march on the capital, was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt desegregated war production contracts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy 1960, the worst sex scandal of all threatened to break into public. Envious, Harlem’s Black congressional representative demanded that King cancel a demonstration outside the Democratic National Convention. In his contribution to A Legacy of Protest and Politics, John d’Emilio tells us how the Rev Adam Clayton Powell Jr promised: “If King did not call off the protests … Powell would [claim] that King and Rustin were having a sexual affair. King immediately canceled the demonstrations.”Three years later, before the March on Washington, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina attempted to kill it by reading an old Rustin arrest into the record. It backfired. People laughed. Thanks to Randolph, Rustin was back. Some 250,000 people were safely transported to the Lincoln Memorial. The sound system worked and so did the portable toilets. Despite an overwhelming police presence, no one was shot.Rustin was multifaceted but fallible. In this insightful book, several observers contend that no one else could have done as well. Others are impressed by how Rustin combated oppression and injustice around the world. He helped normalize radical solutions to enduring problems like unemployment and inequality. His endorsement of a two-state solution in the Middle East was tact itself. However, chided by Malcolm X, Rustin’s nonviolent stance evolved. Addressing the Watts riots, he noted somberly: “If negro rioting is to be avoided in the future, it will be because negroes are enabled to get out of the vicious cycle of frustration that breeds aggression; because this country proves that it is capable of creating a new economic way of life without unemployment, without slums, without poverty.”This book makes clear that Bayard Rustin, a man for his time, is a man for our time too.
      Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics is published in the US by New York University Press More

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      in US Politics

      Sedition Hunters: how ordinary Americans helped track down the Capitol rioters

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      For one rioter at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, wearing a Caterpillar hoodie proved a bad fashion choice. Admittedly, with an American flag-patterned cap and some shades, the garment helped shield his identity as he manhandled a police officer. Yet it came back to haunt him. Investigators used an app and facial-recognition technology to zero in and eventually got their man: Logan Barnhart, a construction worker in Michigan with a passion for fitness. His résumé included bodybuilding and modeling for romance novel covers. While hitting a punching bag in a workout video, he wore some familiar attire: a Caterpillar sweatshirt. Cue the Dragnet music.There was something else remarkable about this investigation: the sleuths were ordinary Americans, part of a spontaneously formed citizen network volunteering their time to track down Capitol rioters. Now their story is shared in a book that takes its name from the movement, Sedition Hunters: How January 6 Broke the Justice System, by Ryan J Reilly, an NBC News justice reporter.“They were really just random Americans who got together and decided they wanted to do something about what happened on January 6,” Reilly says.Those random Americans did not just identify Barnhart. They sought and found other rioters who stormed the Capitol after Donald Trump refused to accept his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden and invited supporters to rally in Washington on the day Congress was to certify the results. Now, one of the Sedition Hunters, Forrest Rogers, is using his talents to siphon out misinformation of a different sort – as a journalist reporting on the conflict between Israel and Hamas for Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a newspaper based in Zurich.In the wake of January 6, the citizen sleuths proved invaluable to the FBI, which Reilly describes as reeling from the fallout of the riots and overwhelmed by the subsequent federal investigation, the largest in American history, as an initial estimate of 800 rioters entering the Capitol ballooned to more than 3,000.While the FBI approached the task with antiquated technology, the Sedition Hunters had all the latest tools, including the app that helped catch Barnhart, which was designed in a garage by one particular sleuth, known only as Alex in Reilly’s book. Many others did such critical work. Like Alex, “Joan” used an article of clothing to pin down a suspect. In her case, it was a blue-and-white sweatshirt from a school in her home town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, worn by a Capitol window-smasher. Its wearer had also been seen inside but all she had was a nickname: “Zeeker.” Joan searched the school’s Facebook page. Zeeker turned out to be Leo Brent Bozell IV, scion of a conservative dynasty.By the time of Bozell’s arrest, two other people had identified him to authorities. Both knew him. Although there are occasional mentions in the book of people who turned in rioters they knew, the Sedition Hunters focused on tracking down hard-to-find individuals who they had never met.“It was easy to get the person virtually if they posted their own crime, built their own case on a social media post,” Reilly says. “Some of them were making efforts to hide their identity in some way.”In his hoodie, baseball cap and sunglasses, one of many faces in a mob, Barnhart was tough to identify. Alex’s app proved a gamechanger. It created a virtual library of images of the attack collected by the Sedition Hunters, which they could now search to unmask the culprit. Each suspect was given a relevant nickname: Barnhart was “CatSweat”, for his Caterpillar garb. Ironically, an image from the rightwing social media platform Parler delivered the coup de grace. Facial recognition technology confirmed CatSweat as Barnhart. His social media accounts yielded further confirmation: a hat he wore in one photo matched his headgear on January 6. On Twitter, he promised Trump he would “be there” at the Capitol that day.Asked if any of the Sedition Hunters were secretly FBI agents, Reilly discounts the possibility with a quip: “They were way too skilled.” More seriously, he adds: “I think that really is what they brought to bear.”The Sedition Hunters sometimes outperformed their professional counterparts. The FBI made some wrong hits. John Richter, a Biden campaign worker, shared his name with a rioter who reached the Senate floor. Guess who was apprehended first? Although the Democratic Richter convinced them they had the wrong guy, with help from his puppy, two years would pass before the feds arrested the actual rioter.“This guy worked for Joe Biden, got him elected,” Reilly says. “He was probably not the man to look for … Stopping the election of a man he worked for did not make a lot of sense.”Reilly also notes that conservative elements within the FBI supported Trump and were lukewarm on investigating those who rioted for him.“Despite what we heard the past seven or eight years from Donald Trump, at its core, it’s a conservative organization,” Reilly says. “A lot of people generally lean conservative. It does not mean they’re all Trump supporters, but there was a lot of whataboutism in the FBI after the Capitol attacks.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionReilly does provide many examples of FBI personnel acting on tips from the Sedition Hunters. After Joan made her initial identification of Zeeker as Bozell and communicated this to the bureau, she kept scanning images from the riots for that blue-and-white sweatshirt. This uncovered further evidence of his violent actions, which she also transmitted. A special agent thanked her, promised to update prosecutors and made good on that vow, an additional charge against Bozell being brought within 24 hours.Reilly is mindful of some developments still on the horizon. There is a five-year statute of limitations for Capitol rioters – 6 January 2026 – so the window to bring remaining fugitives to justice is about two and a half years wide. There’s a wild card too: what happens if Trump wins the presidency again and decides to issue pardons?“I think it’s very real,” Reilly says of that possibility. “He said he’s going to. To me, it really depends on what the extent is going to be … You can easily see him pardoning everybody who committed misdemeanors, something like that.”Of more serious charges, he adds: “I don’t know across the board.”Who knows what will happen. For now, readers can savor the unheralded work of the Sedition Hunters, best summed up in Joan’s reflection about helping bring Bozell to justice: “He probably would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling sleuths.”
      Sedition Hunters is published in the US by PublicAffairs More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Ha, ha, ha’: Mitt Romney laughs off Trump’s ‘total loser’ attack

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      Confronted with Donald Trump’s abuse, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said: “Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.”Romney’s view of the former president and current Republican presidential frontrunner was communicated to McKay Coppins, author of a new biography, Romney: A Reckoning, written in co-operation with its subject.Romney once flirted with joining Trump’s cabinet but has since emerged as a chief antagonist, voting to convict at both Trump’s impeachment trials.Earlier this week, responding to reporting about Coppins’ work, Trump called Romney “a total loser that only a mother could love”, erroneously said the senator “just wrote a book”, and said it was, “much like him, boring, horrible, and totally predictable”.Trump also claimed to have forced “this left-leaning Rino [Republican in name only] out of politics”, a reference to Romney’s announced retirement next year.On Thursday, Coppins spoke to Brian Stelter, the former CNN anchor now host of Inside the Hive, a Vanity Fair podcast.Coppins said: “I sent [Trump’s] statement to Mitt and … I’ll just pull up the text. He wrote back, ‘Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.’ So Mitt kind of enjoyed Trump’s response.”Coppins also discussed how he came to write Romney’s biography – in part because, as he writes in his book, Romney decided not to write a traditional memoir.Coppins said: “When I first approached him, it was just a couple months after January 6. I remember our first meeting was in his Senate hideaway, which is this little cramped windowless room that the senators get near the chamber in the Capitol building. And there was still barbed wire fence around the building because the riots had just happened.”On 6 January 2021, Trump sent supporters to the Capitol to block certification of Joe Biden’s election win. They failed but nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. Thousands have been arrested and hundreds convicted, some for seditious conspiracy.Coppins said Romney’s “initial decision to cooperate with this book was just born of … extreme frustration and disappointment with the leaders of his party and fear for the country. I think he thought of this book as a warning.”Trump faces 91 criminal charges, for state and federal election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments. He also faces civil threats including a fraud trial regarding his business and a defamation trial arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Nonetheless, he leads by huge margins in national and key state polling regarding the Republican presidential nomination.Coppins told Stelter that Romney was now “looking back at the moments in his pursuit of the presidency that he sort of flirted with the more extreme elements of his party.“I think he realises now that the mistake he made, and the mistake that a lot of the Republican establishment made, was thinking that they could basically harness the energy of the far right without succumbing to it.”In 2012, Romney accepted Trump’s endorsement.“He wishes he didn’t do it,” Coppins said. “And I think that that’s emblematic of a lot of these these small ethical compromises that he and a lot of his party leaders made, not realising the kind of Pandora’s box they were opening.” More

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      in Elections

      Kevin McCarthy dismissed Liz Cheney warning before January 6, book says

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      When Liz Cheney warned fellow Republicans five days before January 6 of a “dark day” to come if they “indulged in the fantasy” that they could overturn Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, the then House GOP leader, Kevin McCarthy, swiftly slapped her down.“After Liz spoke,” the former Wyoming representative’s fellow anti-Trumper Adam Kinzinger writes in a new book, “McCarthy immediately told everyone who was listening, ‘I just want to be clear: Liz doesn’t speak for the conference. She speaks for herself.’”Five days after Cheney delivered her warning on a Republican conference call, Trump supporters attacked Congress in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s win.McCarthy’s statement, Kinzinger writes, was “unnecessary and disrespectful, and it infuriated me”.Kinzinger details McCarthy’s “notably juvenile” intervention – and even what he says were two physical blows delivered to him by McCarthy – in Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, which will be published in the US this month. The Guardian obtained a copy.Nine deaths have been linked to the January 6 riot, more than a thousand arrests made and hundreds convicted, some with seditious conspiracy. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the attack, and acquitted a second time when Senate Republicans stayed loyal. When the dust cleared from the January 6 attack, McCarthy was among 147 House and Senate Republicans who still voted to object to results in key states.Like Cheney, Kinzinger, from Illinois, sat on the House January 6 committee, then left office. Unlike Cheney, who was beaten by a Trump ally, Kinzinger chose to retire.Cheney has maintained a high profile, warning of the threat Trump poses as he leads polling regarding the Republican nomination next year, 91 criminal charges (17 concerning election subversion) and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, and refusing to rule out a presidential run of her own.Kinzinger has founded Country First, an organisation meant to combat Republican extremism, and become a political commentator. In his book, he says he responded to McCarthy on the 1 January 2021 conference call by issuing his own warning about the potential for violence on 6 January and “calling on McCarthy to say he wouldn’t join the group opposing the electoral college states.“He replied by coming on the line to say, ‘OK, Adam. Operator, who’s up next?’”Such a “rude and dismissive tone”, Kinzinger says, “was typical of [McCarthy’s] style, which was notably juvenile”.McCarthy briefly blamed Trump for January 6, swiftly reversed course, stayed close to the former president and became speaker of the House, only to lose the role after less than a year, in the face of a Trumpist rebellion.Kinzinger accuses McCarthy, from California, of behaving less like a party leader than “an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line”. And while characterising McCarthy’s dismissal of Cheney’s warning about January 6 as “a little dig”, Kinzinger also details two physical digs he says he took from McCarthy himself.“I went from being one of the boys he treated with big smiles and pats on the back to outcast as soon as I started speaking the truth about the president who would be king,” Kinzinger writes.McCarthy “responded by trying to intimidate me physically. Once, I was standing in the aisle that runs from the floor to the back of the [House] chamber. As he passed, with his security man and some of his boys, he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.“If we had been in high school, I would have dropped my books, papers would have been scattered and I would have had to endure the snickers of passersby. I was startled but took it as the kind of thing Kevin did when he liked you.“Another time, I was standing at the rail that curves around the back of the last row of seats in the chamber. As he shoulder-checked me again, I thought to myself, ‘What a child.’”Kinzinger is not above robust language of his own. Describing Trump’s Senate trial over the Capitol attack, the former congressman bemoans the decision of the Republican leader in that chamber, Mitch McConnell, to vote to acquit because Trump had left office – then deliver a speech excoriating Trump nonetheless.“It took a lot of cheek, nerve, chutzpah, gall and, dare I say it, balls for McConnell to talk this way,” Kinzinger writes, “since he personally blocked the consideration of the case until Trump departed.” More

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

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