Books

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares84 Views

      in US Politics

      Kristi Noem dogged by poor polling amid fallout from tale of killing puppy

      by

      Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful, saw polling numbers plummet after the Guardian revealed that she writes in a new book about the day she shot dead a hunting dog and an un-castrated goat, a revelation that ignited a political storm.Announcing what it called its “Noem Puppy Murder Poll Findings”, New River Strategies, a Democratic firm, said 81% of Americans disapproved of Noem’s decision to shoot Cricket, a 14-month-old wire-haired pointer who Noem says ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbour’s chickens, thereby earning a trip to a gravel pit to die.According to Noem’s account, the goat, which Noem did not name, followed Cricket to the pit because Noem deemed his odour and behaviour unacceptable on her farm. By Noem’s own detailed admission, it took two blasts from a shotgun, separated by a walk back to her truck for more shells, to finish the goat off.Noem’s book – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – will be published in May. The Guardian obtained a copy.The governor’s extraordinary admission made news because she has long been seen to be auditioning to be picked for vice-president by Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.On Friday, amid widespread disbelief that Noem chose to tell such a horrific story in such detail in a campaign book, most observers thought her chances of winning the Trump veepstakes were over.Wrote Meghan McCain, a conservative pundit whose father, John McCain, in 2008 made one of the most disastrous vice-presidential picks of all time, in the form of extremist Sarah Palin: “You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc – but not from killing a dog.“All I will distinctly think about Kristi Noem now is that she murdered a puppy who was ‘acting up’ – which is obviously cruel and insane. Good luck with that VP pick[,] lady.”According to New River Strategies: “While 37% of Republicans are still not sure if [Noem] would be a good choice, 84% of them report liking or loving dogs – not a promising sign.”Fourteen percent of respondents to the poll still thought Noem would be a good choice for vice-president to Trump. Among Republicans, 21% thought Noem would be a good pick, to 42% who did not.Among self-identified “very conservative voters”, 28% said Noem would be a good choice, against 32% who said she would not.New River noted: “A plurality of Americans who do not like dogs still disapprove of the governor’s action. While 87% of Americans who love dogs disapprove of what the governor did, so too do 48% of Americans who do not care for the animals.”Politico, which reported the New River poll, also noted Noem had fallen in a ranking of potential Trump running mates offered by PredictIt, an online betting firm.By Saturday, Noem had fallen from second, behind Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, to fourth, also behind Elise Stefanik, the New York representative, and Tulsi Gabbard, a former representative and Democratic presidential hopeful whose own campaign book, out on Tuesday, does not contain any scenes of shooting puppies.Noem responded to reports about her book by saying: “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm.” She added that her family recently put down three horses.Her communications director, Ian Fury, cited polling showing Noem as the only potential Trump vice-presidential pick with a positive favourability rating in four battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.“This is why the liberal media is so eager to attack Kristi Noem,” Fury said. “She’s the potential running mate they fear most.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe poll from Kaplan Strategies, which describes itself as bipartisan, was conducted the previous weekend but released on Friday, the day the Guardian broke the story of Noem, Cricket the dog and the unnamed goat.On Saturday, the Guardian attempted to contact public figures whose glowing recommendations of Noem’s book are printed on its jacket and introductory pages.In his blurb, Trump calls Noem “a tremendous leader, one of the best”, adding: “This book, it’s a winner … you’ve got to read it!”Asked whether Trump had read the whole book before recommending it, and whether he had comment about the controversy over Noem’s tale of killing domestic animals, the former president’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, did not immediately respond.Fox News spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Rachel Campos-Duffy, a host whose quote on Noem’s book salutes her “common sense and fearless fight for freedom”, adding: “Get ready to be inspired!”No Going Back is also blurbed by Chaya Raichik, creator of the trolling Libs of TikTok social media account; James Golden, also known as Bo Snerdley, formerly sidekick to the late rightwing shock jock Rush Limbaugh; and Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer who campaigns against transgender participation in women’s sports.By Saturday, Raichik had not commented about Noem’s dog-killing confession. Snerdley had reposted a Daily Mail version of the Guardian report.Gaines, who calls Noem’s book “the perfect blueprint for young Americans on how to move our nation forward”, did not comment on the controversy over Noem’s decision to kill a 14-month-old dog. She did, however, post a video of eight puppies sleeping in a pile on a pink rug.“The pups have arrived!” she wrote. “Be still my heart.” More

    • 150 Shares88 Views

      in US Politics

      Ruby Bridges: civil rights pioneer rejects claim book makes white children uncomfortable

      by

      Increasingly, the US civil rights icon Ruby Bridges – the first Black child to integrate a school in Louisiana – has seen some adults seek to prevent grade-school students from accessing the books and films that chronicle her story, saying the tale makes white children feel bad about themselves.But that justification is “ridiculous” because “my biggest fans are kids all around the world”, Bridges told NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker in an interview airing on Sunday morning’s episode of the show.“All of the letters, all of the mail, I have little girls from all walks of life, different nationalities that dress up like Ruby Bridges,” the now 69-year-old activist said in an excerpt of the interview that NBC shared in advance with the Guardian.“I found through … traveling that they resonate with the loneliness, probably the pain that I felt. There’s all sorts of reasons that they are drawn to my story. So I would have to disagree [that it makes certain children feel guilty].”Delivered in a recurring segment known as Meet the Moment, which aims to spotlight people who influence political issues outside Washington, Bridges’ remarks to Welker come a little more than a year after one parent’s complaint prompted a school in Florida to stop showing its students a 1988 made-for-TV movie about her.The parent in question complained that the movie – which some schools usually show to students during Black History Month in February – might teach children that “white people hate Black people”.Separately, Bridges’ autobiographical picture book I Am Ruby Bridges was included in a collection of 64 “diverse” titles from Scholastic Books – the US’s largest children’s book publisher – that librarians are allowed to opt out of for popular book fairs that Scholastic helps stage at campuses nationwide.Scholastic defended itself by saying it had been forced into that position to shield teachers and librarians in largely conservative regions which may have enacted prohibitions against children’s books addressing race, gender and sexuality.Other works by Bridges have also been targeted by book bans schemed up by groups such as Moms for Liberty.In her conversation with Welker, Bridges dismissed the idea that her experience could unduly make white children uncomfortable.“That’s just an excuse not to share the truth, to cover up history,” Bridges said. “But I believe that history is sacred – that none of us should have the right to change or alter history in any way.”Bridges was six years old in November 1960 when US deputy marshals escorted her past jeering crowds into New Orleans’ William Frantz elementary school.With her white sweater, matching hair bow, black patent leather shoes and a small satchel in her right hand that day, she became the first Black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in New Orleans – a scene immortalized in the 1963 Norman Rockwell painting named The Problem We All Live With.Bridges grew up to start an eponymous foundation dedicated to promoting tolerance and change through academic education. Meanwhile, the Akili Academy now occupying the school which Bridges integrated has a majority Black student population and is a stop on Louisiana’s Civil Rights Trail. More

    • 200 Shares65 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book

      by

      In 1952, as a Republican candidate for vice-president, Richard Nixon famously stirred criticism by admitting receiving a dog, Checkers, as a political gift.In 2012, as the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney was pilloried for tying a dog, Seamus, to the roof of the family car for a cross-country trip.But in 2024 Kristi Noem, a strong contender to be named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has managed to go one further – by admitting killing a dog of her own.“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season.Noem’s book – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – will be published in the US next month. The Guardian obtained a copy.Like other aspirants to be Trump’s second vice-president who have ventured into print, Noem offers readers a mixture of autobiography, policy prescriptions and political invective aimed at Democrats and other enemies, all of it raw material for speeches on the campaign stump.She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”.Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin”.When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”Incredibly, Noem’s tale of slaughter is not finished.Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean”, because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.At that point, Noem writes, she realised a construction crew had watched her kill both animals. The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children.“Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”In what may prove a contender for the greatest understatement of election year, Noem adds: “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.” More

    • 138 Shares106 Views

      in US Politics

      Tulsi Gabbard repeats false Hillary Clinton ‘grooming’ claim in new book

      by

      Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman, has repeated a discredited claim about Hillary Clinton that previously saw Gabbard lodge then drop a $50m defamation suit in a new book published as she seeks to be named Donald Trump’s running mate for US president.Accusing Democrats of making up “a conspiracy theory that [Trump] was ‘colluding’ with the Russians to win the election” in 2016, Gabbard claims: “Hillary Clinton used a similar tactic against me when I ran for president in 2020, accusing me of being ‘groomed by the Russians’.”Gabbard ran for the Democratic nomination. Clinton did not accuse her of being “groomed by the Russians”.What Clinton said, in October 2019 and on a podcast hosted by the former Barack Obama adviser David Plouffe, was that she thought Republicans would encourage a third-party bid in 2020, aiming to syphon votes from the Democratic candidate in key states as Jill Stein, the Green candidate, and the Libertarian, Gary Johnson, did four years before.“They are also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said, “and I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”Gabbard was then in the Democratic primary, though she never made any impact.Clinton continued: “She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. And, that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset. Totally. And so they know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee they’ll have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most need it.”Amid uproar, a spokesperson for Clinton said she had been referring to Gabbard and the Russians – saying “If the nesting doll fits”, thereby stoking media coverage in which Clinton’s remarks about “grooming” and “assets” were conflated.Clinton’s meaning was soon cleared up, but Gabbard seized on the “grooming” remark. She penned an op ed in the Wall Street Journal under a headline, I Can Defeat Trump and the Clinton Doctrine, that might now prove an awkward fit with her political ambitions.Later, after dropping out of the Democratic primary and endorsing Joe Biden, who she said had “a good heart” and would “help heal” a badly divided country, Gabbard sued Clinton for $50m over the “Russian asset” comment, rather than the remark about “grooming”. That lawsuit was dropped in May 2020.Four years on, Gabbard has completed a remarkable journey across the political aisle, from being seen as a rising Democratic star in the US House to hosting on Fox News and speaking at events including CPAC, a hard-right annual conference. Her book – For Love of Country: Why I Left the Democratic Party – will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.On the page, Gabbard presents a mix of memoir – from growing up in Hawaii to service in Iraq, from entering Congress to her failed presidential run – and pro-Trump screed. Light on detail and heavy on invective, the book includes excoriations of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. It will hit shops, however, in the aftermath of the passage in Congress of billions of dollars in new Ukraine aid.Gabbard is widely reported to be a contender for Trump’s running mate in his rematch with Biden. In her book, she defends the 88-times criminally charged former president on many legal fronts.Her complaint about Clinton’s remarks about Russia seems designed to stir up familiar Trump campaign furies over Clinton and the investigation of Russian election interference in 2016, which US intelligence agreed was carried out in his support but which prompts Gabbard to write: “None of it was true.”She also accuses Democrats of planting evidence and stories with a compliant press, aided by a “deep state” consisting of “active and retired officials from within the justice department and other national security agencies”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deep state conspiracy theory, which holds that a permanent government of operatives and bureaucrats exists to thwart populist leaders, is popular with Trump and followers notably including Liz Truss, a former UK prime minister. However, one of its chief creators and propagators, the Trump aide and ally Steve Bannon, has said it is “for nut cases”.Gabbard does not only repeat conspiracy theories in her book, but also makes elementary mistakes. In rehashing her inaccurate complaint about Clinton saying she was being “groomed” by Russia, she writes that Clinton was speaking to David Axelrod, also a former Obama advisor but the host of a separate podcast to Plouffe’s.Gabbard also claims that “the propaganda media repeated Clinton’s lies over and over, without ever asking for evidence or fact-checking her themselves”.In fact, Gabbard’s claims against Clinton were widely fact-checked or made the subject of article corrections.In October 2019 – months before Gabbard filed suit – the Washington Post, a leading exponent of the fact-checking form, said: “The initial news reports got it wrong, perhaps fueled by the ‘nesting doll’ comment, with many saying Clinton said the Russians were grooming Gabbard for a third-party bid.”Clinton, the paper added, “certainly said Gabbard was backed by Russian bots and even suggested she was a Russian asset”. But “within a 24-hour news cycle, Clinton’s staff made it clear she was talking about the GOP, not the Russians, eyeing Gabbard as a possible third-party candidate. A simple listen to the podcast confirmed that.“In other words, this was all cleared up 12 days before Gabbard published her [Wall Street Journal] article, making the inaccurate version of [the] ‘grooming’ statement the very first sentence. So there’s little excuse for getting this wrong.”The paper therefore awarded Gabbard three Pinocchios – denoting “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” – out of a possible four. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      New Cold Wars review: China, Russia and Biden’s daunting task

      by

      Russia bombards Ukraine. Israel and Hamas are locked in a danse macabre. The threat of outright war between Jerusalem and Tehran grows daily. Beijing and Washington snarl. In a moment like this, David Sanger’s latest book, subtitled China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, is a must-read. Painstakingly researched, New Cold Wars brims with on-record interviews and observations by thinly veiled sources.Officials closest to the president talk with an eye on posterity. The words of the CIA director, Bill Burns, repeatedly appear on the page. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, surface throughout the book. Sanger, White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times, fuses access, authority and curiosity to deliver an alarming message: US dominance is no longer axiomatic.In the third decade of the 21st century, China and Russia defy Washington, endeavoring to shatter the status quo while reaching for past glories. Vladimir Putin sees himself as the second coming of Peter the Great, “a dictator … consumed by restoring the old Russian empire and addressing old grievances”, in Sanger’s words.The possibility of nuclear war is no longer purely theoretical. “In 2021 Biden, [Gen Mark] Milley, and the new White House national security team discovered that America’s nuclear holiday was over,” Sanger writes. “They were plunging into a new era that was far more complicated than the cold war had ever been.”As Russia’s war on Ukraine faltered, Putin and the Kremlin raised the specter of nuclear deployment against Kyiv.“The threat that Russia might use a nuclear weapon against its non-nuclear-armed foe surfaced and resurfaced every few months,” Sanger recalls.The world was no longer “flat”. Rather, “the other side began to look more like a security threat and less like a lucrative market”. Unfettered free trade and interdependence had yielded prosperity and growth for some but birthed anger and displacement among many. Nafta – the North American Free Trade Agreement – became a figurative four-letter word. In the US, counties that lost jobs to China and Mexico went for Trump in 2016.Biden and the Democrats realized China never was and never would be America’s friend. “‘I think it’s fair to say that just about every assumption across different administrations was wrong,” one of Biden’s “closest advisers” tells Sanger.“‘The internet would bring political liberty. Trade would liberalize the regime’ while creating high-skill jobs for Americans. The list went on. A lot of it was just wishful thinking.”Sanger also captures the despondency that surrounded the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan. A suicide bombing at the Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 civilians dead. The event still haunts.“The president came into the room shortly thereafter, and at that point Gen [Kenneth] McKenzie informed him of the attack and also the fact that there had been at least several American military casualties, fatalities in the attack,” Burns recalls. “I remember the president just paused for at least 30 seconds or so and put his head down because he was absorbing the sadness of the moment and the sense of loss as well.”Almost three years later, Biden’s political standing has not recovered. “The bitter American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to underscore the dangers of imperial overreach,” Sanger writes. With Iran on the front burner and the Middle East mired in turmoil, what comes next is unclear.A coda: a recent supplemental review conducted by the Pentagon determined that a sole Isis member carried out the Kabul bombing. The review also found that the attack was tactically unpreventable.Sanger also summarizes a tense exchange between Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, over the Gaza war.“Hadn’t the US firebombed Tokyo during world war two? Netanyahu demanded. “Hadn’t it unleashed two atom bombs? What about the thousands who died in Mosul, as the US sought to wipe out Isis?”On Thursday, the US vetoed a resolution to confer full UN membership on the “State of Palestine”. Hours later, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating and Israel retaliated against Iran.New Cold Wars does contain lighter notes. For example, Sanger catches Donald Trump whining to Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T, about his (self-inflicted) problems with women. The 45th president invited Stephenson to the Oval Office, to discuss China and telecommunications. Things did not quite work out that way.“Trump burned up the first 45 minutes of the meeting by riffing on how men got into trouble,” Sanger writes. “It was all about women. Then he went into a long diatribe about Stormy Daniels.”Stephenson later recalled: “It was ‘all part of the same stand-up comedy act’ … and ‘we were left with 15 minutes to talk about Chinese infrastructure’.”Trump wasn’t interested. Stephenson “could see that the president’s mind was elsewhere. ‘This is really boring,’ Trump finally said.”On Thursday, in Trump’s hush-money case in New York, the parties picked a jury. Daniels is slated to be a prosecution witness.Sanger ends his book on a note of nostalgia – and trepidation.“For all the present risks, it is worth remembering that one of the most remarkable and little-discussed accomplishments of the old cold war was that the great powers never escalated their differences into a direct conflict. That is an eight-decade-long streak we cannot afford to break.”
      New Cold Wars is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

    • 188 Shares136 Views

      in UK Politics

      Liz Truss’s memoir is ludicrous and shows how unworthy of office our shortest-serving PM was

      by

      For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emailsSign up to our free breaking news emailsIt was Winston Churchill who remarked, according to legend, that: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” And so he did, at some length, and with his customary eloquence (six substantial volumes to be exact). His monumental achievements in power helped the process along, it’s fair to say. In the case of Liz Truss, there is little she can do to change the verdict of history on her nasty, brutish and freakishly short time in office. Her ludicrous memoir merely confirms that fact.She was, is, and will forever be a national embarrassment, her only exceptional talent being an astonishing lack of self-awareness. It’s not a useful trait in a politician, and it’s a highly unattractive one in an author. She is just as much hard work on the printed page as she is off it.Liz Truss recounts her brief time in office in her new book More

    • 163 Shares143 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause’: Tim Kaine’s journey to healing

      by

      Jack Kemp. Joe Lieberman. John Edwards. Sarah Palin. Paul Ryan. All ran for vice-president of the United States and fell short. All had to confront the question: what next? The same fate befell Tim Kaine, whose turn as running mate to Hillary Clinton in 2016 ended in a catastrophic defeat by Donald Trump and Mike Pence. The US has not recovered, as polarisation, rancour and looming criminal trials testify. But Kaine has.At 7.30am on the Monday after the 2016 election, the Virginia senator was back at work in his office. With Trump in the White House, the work of the Senate proved critical, including preserving Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law. But as time wore on, Kaine found ways to nourish his soul – not on the campaign trail but the nature trail.To mark his 60th birthday and 25th year in public office, he invented his own triathlon in Virginia. On weekends and in Senate recess weeks, Kaine hiked (mostly solo) the 559 miles (900km) of the Appalachian Trail, biked 321 miles (517km) along the crest of the Blue Ridge mountains and canoed all 348 miles (560km) of the James River. He kept a 100-word-a-day diary on his phone, raw material for his first book, Walk, Ride, Paddle.The hike was the toughest, he recalls, averaging about 14 miles (22km) a day with a 30lb (14kg) backpack, mostly in the heat of August.“I’d have two litre bottles and I’d be getting down to no water and I’ve got to get to this next stream and I’d get there and it’d be bone dry and then oh, man, talk about depressing!” the 66-year-old tells the Guardian.“The physical challenge of the hike was very difficult. It wasn’t probably till I got to mile 300 that I quit thinking about ‘I don’t need to do this whole thing. Why be so type-A about it?’ But when I passed mile 300 and I only had 260 left, it’s like, I’m going to finish this but I don’t have to rush.”A former teacher and civil rights lawyer, Kaine is one of only 30 people in US history to have been a mayor, governor and senator. In person, in a conference room on Capitol Hill, he lives up to adjectives that often tail him: affable, genial, nice. Only in politics does that count as an insult.In 2016, the New Republic ran a headline: “Tim Kaine Is Too Boring to Be Clinton’s Running Mate.” The Washington Post wondered: “What’s a nice guy like Senator Tim Kaine doing in a campaign like this?” Kaine himself quipped on NBC: “I am boring. Boring is the fastest-growing demographic in this country.”True to form, no one should look to Walk, Ride, Paddle for tales of Teddy Roosevelt-esque derring-do. Like other vice-presidential near misses, Kaine never quite became a celebrity. To those who encountered him in the great outdoors, he was just another guy in baseball cap and hiking shorts.He recalls: “I would say maybe a quarter recognised me and of that quarter, half didn’t say they recognised me. You’re out on the trail to relax and they get that. I learned there’s a beautiful Emily Dickinson poem about once being famous:
      Fame is a bee.
      It has a song—
      It has a sting—
      Ah, too, it has a wing.
      “People would see me and if you see somebody and they’re not dressed the way you normally see them, you’re like, ‘I think I kind of know you, but I’m not sure.’ Sometimes people would know me. Most often they wouldn’t. And then sometimes they were, ‘I think I know you. What do you do?’ ‘I work in Washington.’ ‘What do you do in Washington?’ ‘I do some stuff in politics’. ‘What?’ ‘I’m a United States senator.’”The journey took about 30 months, from May 2019 to October 2021, a jaw-dropping period of American history that spanned two impeachment trials, a global pandemic, racial justice protests, a presidential election and the January 6 attack on the Capitol. When the Senate was in session, Kaine had a key part to play. When in nature, he could tune out the noise and contemplate his faith in friendship, God (he grew up in an Irish Catholic household) and America.View image in fullscreenHe likens the experience to a camper who wakes up, stuffs everything into their backpack and gets going.“I realised in the course of the hike that’s how I dealt with 2016. I showed up right back to work. I started working. I said, ‘I’ll sort it all out later.’“The hike was primarily by myself. That extended time, both the solitude but also the appreciation of nature and your humility in the grand scheme of things, was helpful in taking the stuff out of the pack that needed to be washed and folded and put away the right way.”His epiphany came not around how Trump won, or relitigating what mistakes the Clinton-Kaine campaign might have made, but reckoning with a deeper question: why is America going through this dark chapter? Early one morning, Kaine was hiking alone in fog and rain and nearing Mount Rogers, the highest peak in Virginia, when he thought about the biblical Book of Job.A faithful man who has it all, Job starts to lose his family, his business, his money and his health, compelling him to ask if the universe is pointless and neighbours to assume he is suffering divine retribution.Kaine says: “There’s two explanations of why people or maybe nations suffer: because you did something wrong or maybe it’s just all pointless and random. The reader of the story knows that neither is the case: Job’s being tested. The end of the story is, as mad as he is at God, he still is true to his principles and then what was lost to him is restored.”Kaine was just days away from Trump’s first Senate impeachment trial.“I’d never been on a jury ever in my life, even on a traffic case. I’m just like, I’m 61 years old and I thought I understood this country. What’s going on here?“It’s not necessarily punishment and it’s not necessarily random, but it could be a test. So we stay true to our principles. Belief in religious equality – are we going to kick Muslims around? Our belief in free press – are we going to expose journalists to intimidation, rule of law? No person should be above the law.“I started to think about the virtues that we claim about ourselves, some of which are truer than others, none of which we can perfectly attain. But maybe this is one of these moments to see whether we’re going to stay true to principle or abandon principle, and if we stay true to principle, maybe we’ll end up sadder but wiser but we’ll turn a corner and feel like we’ve passed. I think we’re surviving the test but I don’t think we passed it yet.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNo test was more severe than January 6, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s win. Having become less addicted to his phone during his communions with nature, Kaine forgot to take it into the Senate chamber.“It was hours after the beginning of the attack, when we were finally over in a committee room and they turned on TV monitors, that I realised, ‘Oh, man, this is what my parents are seeing, this what my kids are seeing, this is what my wife was seeing.’ So, ‘[Senator] Martin Heinrich [of New Mexico], give me your phone, I got to call people quick!’“It was a day that I never would have imagined, never will forget and hope is never repeated. It was very powerful and my overwhelming emotion was anger. There was a moment when we were in the committee room that CNN called the Georgia Senate race for Jon Ossoff, which meant that the Dems now had the Senate, and it was very much like, in the middle of this attack, the American public are saying, ‘OK, we’ve seen enough here, you guys take the wheel for a while.’ They handed the keys to us.”View image in fullscreenKaine went up to the Republican senator Lindsey Graham and told him Democrats would not have taken the majority but for Trump’s lies. Graham did not disagree. Kaine said the same thing to the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, and saw a level of anger in his eyes he had never witnessed before.“The other thing that happened about three hours after we were in the room, the Virginia state police cruisers arrive to help the Capitol police. I went over to [fellow Virginia senator] Mark Warner and said the last time there was an insurrection against the United States, Virginia was leading it. Now here there’s an insurrection that’s being inspired by the president of the United States and Virginia is coming to the rescue of the union. We were both very emotional as we thought about that.”In his book, Kaine, a senator since 2013, acknowledges painful lessons about a country he thought he understood. While he has always been an optimist, he writes, Trump is “a symptom of a national sickness”. Trump is energising and galvanising for Democrats but also brings “a level of dread and tension” to everyday life.Kaine explains: “I was a missionary in Honduras when I was a young man and it was a military dictatorship and it made me be less naive: this authoritarian thing is still real, a lot of people live that way. But even then, when I came back, I still was naive because I thought that would never be something we would see in the United States, the authoritarian impulse.“But it’s Donald Trump and it’s [Nayib] Bukele [of El Salvador] and [Viktor] Orbán [of Hungary] and [Vladimir] Putin [of Russia]. You just go place to place, continent to continent, you’re going to see examples of this. The struggle between the authoritarianism and the democratic impulses is very live right now here and everywhere. That’s the global sickness that I’m talking about. Donald Trump is a symptom. He’s not the cause.”Kaine is one of a small group to have run on a US presidential ticket. His advice to Biden and Kamala Harris: continue to emphasise democracy and freedom, which connect January 6, Russia’s war on Ukraine and rightwing threats to reproductive rights. He also believes they have accomplishments to sell, including the best post-Covid recovery of any major economy.“People aren’t feeling the vibe yet,” Kaine admits, attributing this to a Covid “hangover”.“As I travel around Virginia, this is such a common phrase: ‘I’m doing pretty well but I’m not so sure about three months from now.’ They acknowledge first that economically things are OK but, just around the corner, ‘I’m sure what I’m going to see.’ The Biden-Harris ticket – and I’m on the ticket too because I’m running in 2024 – we just have to sell, sell, sell. The good news is we have a lot to sell.”The alternative, a replay of 2016, putting Trump back in the White House, is too much to bear.“I don’t want to contemplate it. We’re coming up on celebrating our 250th birthday in 2026. I want there to be a vigorous democracy for our kids and grandkids to inherit. And by vigorous, that doesn’t mean just do it the way we did it. Each generation has to decide how to renew these traditions and make them better.“But I don’t view Donald Trump as a guy who’s committed to institutions: one man one vote, free press, independent judiciary, professionalised civil service, civilian control of the military. Donald Trump is committed to himself but he’s not committed to democratic institutions and virtues. He’s done enormous harm to them.“We can wake up from that and, like Job, stick to our principles, become sadder and wiser but still pass the test that is before us. But he will do enormous damage to this nation and to others in the world with a second term.”
      Walk, Ride, Paddle: A Life Outside is published in the US by Harper Horizon More

    • 138 Shares195 Views

      in US Politics

      US historians file brief with supreme court rejecting Trump’s immunity claim

      by

      Fifteen prominent historians filed an amicus brief with the US supreme court, rejecting Donald Trump’s claim in his federal election subversion case that he is immune to criminal prosecution for acts committed as president.Authorities cited in the document include the founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Adams, in addition to the historians’ own work.Trump, the historians said, “asserts that a doctrine of permanent immunity from criminal liability for a president’s official acts, while not expressly provided by the constitution, must be inferred. To justify this radical assertion, he contends that the original meaning of the constitution demands it. But no plausible historical case supports his claim.”Trump faces four federal election subversion charges, arising from his attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, fueled by his lie about electoral fraud and culminating in the deadly attack on Congress of 6 January 2021.He also faces 10 election subversion charges in Georgia, 34 charges over hush-money payments in New York, 40 federal charges for retaining classified information, and multimillion-dollar penalties in civil cases over tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Despite such unprecedented legal jeopardy, Trump strolled to the Republican nomination to face Biden in November and is seeking to delay all cases until after that election, so that he might dismiss them if he returns to power. His first criminal trial, in the New York hush-money case, is scheduled to begin next Monday.Despite widespread legal and historical opinion that Trump’s immunity claim is groundless, the US supreme court, to which Trump appointed three justices, will consider the claim.Oral arguments are scheduled for 25 April. The court recently dismissed attempts, supported by leading historians, to remove Trump from ballots under the 14th amendment, passed after the civil war to bar insurrectionists from office.In a filing on Monday, the special counsel Jack Smith urged the justices to reject Trump’s immunity claim as “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government”.Seven of the 15 historians who filed the amicus brief are members of the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive policy institute at New York University law school.Holly Brewer, a professor of American cultural and intellectual history at the University of Maryland, said: “When designing the presidency, the founders wanted no part of the immunity from criminal prosecution claimed by English kings.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That immunity was at the heart of what they saw as a flawed system. On both the state and national level, they wrote constitutions that held all leaders, including presidents, accountable to the laws of the country. St George Tucker, one of the most prominent judges in the new nation, laid out the principle clearly: everyone is equally bound by the law, from ‘beggars in the streets’ to presidents.”Other signatories to the brief included Jill Lepore of Harvard, author of These Truths, a history of the US; Alan Taylor of the University of Virginia, author of books including American Revolutions, about the years of independence; and Joanne Freeman of Yale, author of The Field of Blood, an influential study of political violence before the civil war.Thomas Wolf, co-counsel on the brief and director of democracy initiatives at the Brennan Center, called Trump’s immunity claim “deeply un-American”, adding: “From the birth of the country through President Clinton’s acceptance of a plea bargain in 2001 [avoiding indictment over the Monica Lewinsky affair], it has been understood that presidents can be prosecuted.“The supreme court must not delay in passing down a ruling in this case.” More