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      Mark Milley fears being court-martialed if Trump wins, Woodward book says

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      Mark Milley, a retired US army general who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, fears being recalled to uniform and court-martialed should Trump defeat Kamala Harris next month and return to power.“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley recently “warned former colleagues”, the veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward writes in an upcoming book. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”Woodward cites Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist now jailed for contempt of Congress, as saying of Milley: “We’re gonna hold him accountable.”Trump’s wish to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who criticized him in print has been reported before, including by Mark Esper, Trump’s second secretary of defense. In Woodward’s telling, in a 2020 Oval Office meeting with Milley and Esper, Trump “yelled” and “shouted” about William McRaven, a former admiral who led the 2011 raid in Pakistan in which US special forces killed Osama bin Laden, and Stanley McChrystal, the retired special forces general whose men killed another al-Qaida leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in Iraq in 2006.Milley was able to persuade Trump to back down, Woodward writes, but fears no such guardrails will be in place if Trump is re-elected.Woodward also describes Milley receiving “a non-stop barrage of death threats” since his retirement last year, and quotes the former general as telling him, of Trump: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.”Milley spoke to Woodward for his previous reporting. Woodward now reports the former general as saying: “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.“A fascist to the core.”Woodward, 81, made his name in the 1970s with Carl Bernstein during Watergate, the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. Woodward’s new blockbuster, War, will be published on Tuesday. His fourth book at least in part about Trump – after Fear, Rage, and Peril – stoked uproar this week with the release of revelations including that Trump sent Covid testing machines to Vladimir Putin early in the coronavirus pandemic, and that Trump has had as many as seven phone calls with the Russian president since leaving office.Milley was chair of the joint chiefs of staff from 2019 to 2023. His attempts to cope with Trump have been widely reported – particularly in relation to Trump’s demands for military action against protesters for racial justice in the summer of 2020 and, later that year, Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the election to Biden.Last year, marking his retirement, Milley appeared to take a direct swipe at Trump, then a candidate for a third successive Republican presidential nomination.“We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or tyrant or a dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” Milley told a military audience at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia. “We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”Since then, Trump has brushed aside Republican rivals to seize the nomination, campaigned against first Biden then Harris, and survived two assassination attempts. Less than a month from election day, he and Harris are locked in a tight race.In office, Trump memorably insisted senior military officers owed their loyalty to him, even reportedly telling his second chief of staff, the retired marine general John Kelly, US generals should “be like the German generals” who Trump insisted were “totally loyal” to Adolf Hitler during the second world war. Kelly mentioned military assassination plots against Hitler but Trump was not convinced.As told by Woodward, in 2020 Trump became enraged by pieces McRaven wrote for the Washington Post and the New York Times – writing in the Post that “there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil” – and comments McChrystal made on CNN, calling Trump “immoral” and “dishonest”.“As commander-in-chief” of US armed forces, Woodward writes, “Trump had extraordinary power over retired commissioned officers. It was within his authority to recall them to active duty and court-martial them. But it had only been done a few times in American history and for very serious crimes. For instance, when a retired two-star [general] was charged in 2017 with six counts of raping a minor while on active duty in the 1980s.”So Trump summoned Milley and Esper. The president demanded action but the two men told him not to seek to punish McRaven and McChrystal, because they had a right to voice their opinions and because it would backfire, drawing attention to their words.“The president didn’t want to hear it,” Woodward writes.So Milley switched tack.“‘Mr President,’ Milley said. ‘I’m the senior military officer responsible for the good order and discipline of general officers and I’ll take care of this.’“Trump’s head whipped round. ‘You really will?’ he asked skeptically.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“‘Absolutely,’ Milley assured him.“‘OK, you take care of it,’ President Trump said.”Such dramatic Oval Office scenes are familiar from previous books by Woodward and legions of competing reporters and former Trump officials. According to Woodward’s new reporting, Milley did take action after fending Trump off, calling McRaven and McChrystal and warning them to “step off the public stage”.“‘Pull it back,’ Milley said. If Trump actually used his authority to recall them to duty, there was little Milley could do.”Woodward then quotes Milley speaking this year about his fear that Trump will seek to punish his military critics if he returns to power.McRaven, now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Milley’s fear of retribution and whether he shared it.Trump has given such figures plenty of reason to worry. Among proliferating campaign-trail controversies, the former president has frequently voiced his desire for revenge on opponents and critics, including by using the FBI and Department of Justice to mount politically motivated investigations. At rallies, Trump has frequently told crowds: “I am your retribution.”The Utah senator Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, was recently asked about possible consequences of his own opposition to Trump including votes to convict in both his impeachment trials.“I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word,” a “suddenly subdued” Romney told the Atlantic. “So I would take him at his word.”Woodward also reports Milley’s harrowing experiences since stepping down as chair of the joint chiefs.“Since retiring, Milley had received a non-stop barrage of death threats that he, at least in part, attributed to Trump’s repeated attempts to discredit him.“‘He is inciting people to violence with violent rhetoric,’ Milley told his wife. ‘But he does it in such a way it’s through the power of suggestion, which is exactly what he did on 6 January” 2021, the day Trump incited supporters to attack Congress, in hope of overturning his election defeat.“As a former chairman, Milley was provided round-the-clock government security for two years. But he had taken additional precautions at significant personal expense, installing bullet-proof glass and blast-proof curtains at his home.” More

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      Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot review – a head of state lost without a script

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      As we’re reminded every four years, the US, while purporting to be a republic, is more like an elective monarchy. Presidents campaign as partisans, but once inaugurated they’re expected to transcend politics; draped in the flag, their task is to exemplify the national character. Although nowadays the country is too fractious to be personified by any individual, in less schismatic times Ronald Reagan managed the feat – as American author Max Boot argues in his generous yet sharply perceptive biography – because he was “a mainstream, generic, nonhyphenated American, Midwestern born”. “Mr Norm is my alias,” Reagan said. “Average will do it.”But was Reagan amiably bland or somehow blank? Boot finds him to be incapable of introspection, so emotionally withdrawn that he remained unknowable to everyone but his second wife Nancy, whom he called “Mommy”. While preaching “family values” Reagan neglected his offspring, and when his daughter complained he insisted: “We were happy, just look at the home movies,” relying on the camera to vouch for his parental affection. Although he was benevolent enough – as a teenage lifeguard at a lake in Illinois he saved 77 swimmers from drowning, and as governor of California he often sent personal cheques to citizens who wrote to him about their problems – Boot thinks that he had no real comprehension of other people. This limited his range as an actor; affable and superficial, in his Hollywood films he could only play versions of himself. It also explains what Boot regards as the most shaming failure of his presidency, which was his prudish refusal to confront the Aids epidemic.View image in fullscreenReagan grew up as a New Deal Democrat but acquired a horror of the welfare state during a few dreary weeks he spent filming in London in 1948. Socialism, so far as he understood it, consisted of drab, underlit shop windows and watery meals; complaining that the English “do to food what we did to the American Indian”, he exempted himself from rationed austerity by having steaks flown in from New York to be cooked at the Savoy. Otherwise, Boot suspects that he lacked ideological convictions, and his earlier careers as a radio announcer and a Hollywood contract player dictated his conduct after he graduated to politics. When he ran for re-election as president in 1984, he appointed his campaign manager as his director and compliantly recited whatever the Teleprompter told him to say.Reagan performed with aplomb as head of state; he had little interest in serving as the nation’s chief executive, and relied on aides whom he called his “fellas” to articulate policies and implement them. Boot pays more attention to Washington intrigues than Reagan ever did, but his book is best when he looks away from backroom plotting. The account of John Hinckley’s assassination attempt in 1981 is alarming and also moving. Nearer to death than was disclosed at the time, Reagan put the panicked surgeons at their ease by making jokes; during his recovery in hospital he got down on his knees to clean up a mess in the bathroom, reluctant to delegate the dirty work to a nurse.Boot gives crises an edge of wry amusement. Nuclear summits with the Russians were envenomed by Nancy Reagan’s reaction to the immaculately styled, intellectually haughty Raisa Gorbachev. “Who,” fumed the outclassed first lady, “does that dame think she is?” In an episode that threatened to topple Reagan, the gung-ho Colonel Oliver North was put in charge of illegally selling arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages, and travelled to Tehran with a chocolate cake as a token of his government’s goodwill. The bearded revolutionary guards, amused by American naivety, wolfed down the cake but released no captives.View image in fullscreenBoot, a lapsed conservative, is disgusted by the current horde of Maga Republicans. Even so, he admits that Trump’s most blustery slogan originated with Reagan, who led his own crusade to “make America great again”. A pair of Trump’s eventual fixers lurked on the fringes of Reagan’s first presidential campaign: Roy Cohn and Roger Stone arranged for an endorsement that enabled Reagan to win the usually left-leaning state of New York. But the candidate himself always denied knowledge of such deals, and when Boot catches Reagan twisting the facts – for instance by reminiscing about his military valour during a war that he actually spent in Hollywood – he treats him as a self-deceived fabulist, not a liar.For Trump, making America great means aggrandising and enriching himself. Reagan, to his credit, had no such mad, greedy conceit, and in 1994, in a handwritten note informing his “fellow Americans” that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he touchingly excluded himself from the “bright new dawn” that he predicted for the country. Later, unsure of who he was or what he had been, he wondered at the reaction of passersby when he was taken for supervised walks near his home in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. “How do they know me?” he asked his minders. The erstwhile celebrity had declined into nonentity; Mr Norm was at last truly anonymous, at least to himself.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot is published by WW Norton (£35). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      ‘Coal jobs were out, opiates were in’: how shame and pride explain Trump’s rural popularity

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      Arlie Russell Hochschild has spent decades studying the relationships between work, identity and emotion. The sociologist has a knack for coining terms that gain social currency – including “emotional labor”, in 1983, to describe the need for certain professionals, like flight attendants and bill collectors, to manage their emotions, and “the second shift”, in 1989, to describe women’s household labor.Her new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, explores what Hochschild calls the “pride paradox”: because conservative Americans value personal responsibility, they feel proud when they do well, and blame themselves when they don’t. Yet, her thinking continues, conservative regions often have worse economies and fewer opportunities than so-called blue states, so people feel ashamed of circumstances that aren’t really their fault.Stolen Pride hits shelves just weeks before a monumental presidential election that will hinge in part on competing visions of identity. The book is an attempt to understand how that pride paradox finds political expression, drawing on several years of field research in mountainous eastern Kentucky, a Donald Trump stronghold.Hochschild believes progressives need to learn to better hear “the powerful messages that are being communicated from a charismatic leader to a followership, and potentially intercept and understand them and speak to an alienated sector of the population”, she tells me on a recent evening, speaking by Zoom from a book-filled office in Berkeley, and peering at the screen through thin, red-framed eyeglasses.View image in fullscreenIn recent years, Hochschild’s work has investigated how cultural identity influences politics. Her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right studied conservative Tea Party supporters in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a region where the petrochemical industry is linked to serious environmental and health problems. Hochschild was interested in why the people she met were hostile to government regulation even when they might personally benefit from state intervention. The book, embraced by progressives anxious to understand Donald Trump’s appeal, became a bestseller.Hochschild began researching Stolen Pride in 2017. The book applies a similar ethnographic method to an equally conservative, but in other ways very different, region: Appalachia. It focuses on Kentucky’s fifth congressional district, which is the United States’ whitest and second poorest voting district, with high unemployment, poor health metrics and many people, especially men, who are subject to the so-called diseases of despair – drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide. While Hochschild’s interest in the American white working class is hardly new, her book offers some interesting new theories and angles of understanding.One of the book’s central events is a march that white supremacists held in Pikeville, Kentucky, in April 2017 – a test run for their more famous and deadly march in Charlottesville, Virginia, a few months later. These neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other extremists saw Pikeville as an ideal place to preach; in addition to being overwhelmingly white, eastern Kentucky had suffered a “perfect storm”, Hochschild says: “Coal jobs were out, opiates were in. It was a distressed area, and the white supremacists were coming to speak to that distress, to say, Hey, we’ve got answers for you,” in the form of violent fascism and white separatism.Hochschild discovered that Pikeville rejected the white supremacists’ pitch. “And I compared it to another kind of appeal, which was that of Donald Trump. One appeal didn’t work, and one did.” Her book, based on interviews with a number of local residents as well as white supremacists, wrestles with the complicated question of why.Hochschild argues that a “pride economy” coexists with the material economy and is almost as important. It also helps to explain Trump’s popularity in many rural and blue-collar areas.For more than a century, eastern Kentucky was one of the centers of the American coal industry. Though back-breaking and sometimes deadly for its workers, the sector employed thousands of people, lifted many out of poverty, and brought railways and other infrastructure into the region. Men took pride in their work, which required courage and knowhow, and the people of the region were proud that their coal fueled America.“[People could] proudly say, ‘We kept the lights on in this country; we won world war one, world war two by digging coal,’ and the coalminer was kind of like a decorated soldier – he faced danger. Many died young, of black lung. But it was like a trade passed down from generation to generation for men, and then suddenly it was cut off.”Many Appalachians blame Barack Obama’s environmental regulations for the loss of coal jobs, though that decline was decades in the making and had more to do with the rise of natural gas and automation that made the coal industry less reliant on human labor. The job losses contributed to people leaving, exacerbating a depopulation already endemic in rural America. Men who remained were humiliated, Hochschild notes, and forced to accept “‘girly jobs’ – waiting tables or scooping ice-cream, jobs that young teenagers took that couldn’t support a family”.Add to this OxyContin, which Purdue falsely marketed as a non-addictive painkiller for people recovering from work injuries. Some liberal states required three copies of every prescription, with one going to a government-controlled substances monitor; in conservative, regulation-averse states such as Kentucky, which required only two, OxyContin distribution was 50% higher.“So many people succumbed to drug addiction,” Hochschild says, “and that became [another] kind of shame, because once you did that, you lost your family, custody of your kids, you might be stealing from Grandma’s purse, or you’re on the dole, and great shame in this area was attached to accepting government services, although many people did.”Like many blue-collar, formerly Democratic areas of the US, eastern Kentucky has a history of leftwing populism. Pikeville is only 35 miles from Matewan, West Virginia, where striking miners memorably battled union-busting private detectives in 1920. The phrase “redneck” – today a term of derision, including in Kentucky, where some of Hochschild’s subjects stressed that they were “hillbillies” but not rednecks – was once a badge of honor that distinguished union miners, who wore red scarves, from scabs.The white supremacists’ belief that Pikeville would be sympathetic ground turned out to be wrong. “I spotted only three locals who marched with the white nationalists,” someone tells Hochschild in her book, “and one of them is mentally challenged.” Residents, conscious of stereotypes about Appalachia, resented the marchers’ assumption that just because their area was rural and economically deprived it would also be bigoted. The local government went to lengths to prevent violence and protect a local mosque, and residents treated the march with indifference or hostility.In contrast, Trump is more popular than ever in eastern Kentucky, which Hochschild thinks is because voters regard him as a “good bully” willing to be obnoxious on behalf of white working-class people, even if that means flouting norms of political correctness and civility.Trump shrewdly understands the power of shame and pride, Hochschild argues, and his antagonism of the liberal establishment follows a predictable pattern: Trump makes a provocative public pronouncement; the media shames Trump for what he said; Trump frames himself as a victim of censorious bullies; then he “roars back”, shifting blame back on to his persecutors and away from himself and, by extension, his supporters. Struggling Appalachians, who feel that big-city Americans look down on them, identify with Trump’s pugnacity.Shame is “almost like coal”, Hochschild says – “a resource to exploit by a charismatic leader”.Places like eastern Kentucky used to have strong labor unions that protected workers and connected blue-collar Americans to the Democratic party. The decline of unions, which now represent fewer than 7% of American private-sector workers, has been accompanied by the kind of alienation to which a strongman figure like Trump is adept at speaking.“If we look at whites without [bachelor’s degrees] who fit this pattern of loss and decline, they’re all turning Republican,” Hochschild says. “And we’re not speaking to them.” (By “we”, she seems to be referring to progressives, coastal elites, the establishment.) Despite what she calls a mutual loss of political empathy, Hochschild still believes there is “an opportunity for us to become bicultural” – and that, with an acrimonious and consequential election looming, doing so is more important than ever. More

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      Melania Trump passionately defends abortion rights in upcoming memoir

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      Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump has rarely expressed political views in public. The book, which reveals the former first lady to be so firmly out of step with most of her own party, Melania, will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.View image in fullscreenHer decision to include a full-throated expression of support for abortion rights is remarkable not just given her proximity to a Republican candidate running on an anti-abortion platform, but also given the severe deterioration of women’s reproductive rights under Donald Trump and the GOP.In 2022, in the supreme court case Dobbs v Jackson, three justices installed when Donald Trump was president voted to strike down Roe v Wade, the ruling which had protected federal abortion rights since 1973. Republican-run states have since instituted draconian abortion bans.Donald Trump has tried to both take credit for the Dobbs decision – long the central aim of evangelical and conservative Catholic donors and voters – and avoid the fury it has stoked, saying abortion rights should be decided by the states.But Democrats have scored a succession of election wins by campaigning on the issue, even in conservative states, and threats to reproductive rights, among them threats to fertility treatments including IVF, are proving problematic for Republicans up and down this year’s ticket.Amid a blizzard of statements opponents deem misogynistic and regressive, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, has indicated he would support a national abortion ban – a move it seems his boss’s wife would be against.Donald Trump himself recently got into a tangle over whether he would vote in November to protect abortion rights in Florida, a ballot his wife will also cast given their residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He eventually said he would vote no. Judging by her own words, Melania Trump appears likely to vote yes.Her memoir is slim, long on descriptions of her youth in Slovenia, life as a model in New York and love for the man whose third wife she became, correspondingly short on policy discussion. But Donald Trump provides a blurb, praising his wife’s “commitment to excellence … insightful perspective … [and] entrepreneurial achievements”.Before discussing abortion, Melania Trump says she disagreed with her husband on some aspects of immigration policy, not least as an immigrant herself.“Occasional political disagreements between me and my husband,” she says, are “part of our relationship, but I believed in addressing them privately rather than publicly challenging him.”And yet, later in her book, she states views on abortion and reproductive rights diametrically opposed to those of her husband and his party.“I have always believed it is critical for people to take care of themselves first,” Melania Trump writes of her support for abortion rights. “It’s a very straightforward concept; in fact, we are all born with a set of fundamental rights, including the right to enjoy our lives. We are all entitled to maintain a gratifying and dignified existence.“This common-sense approach applies to a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health.”Melania Trump says her beliefs about abortion rights spring from “a core set of principles”, at the heart of which sits “individual liberty” and “personal freedom”, on which there is “no room for negotiation”.After outlining her support on such grounds for abortion rights, she details “legitimate reasons for a woman to choose to have an abortion”, including danger to the life of the mother, rape or incest, often exceptions under state bans, and also “a congenital birth defect, plus severe medical conditions”.Saying “timing matters”, Melania Trump also defends the right to abortion later in pregnancy.She writes: “It is important to note that historically, most abortions conducted during the later stages of pregnancy were the result of severe fetal abnormalities that probably would have led to the death or stillbirth of the child. Perhaps even the death of the mother. These cases were extremely rare and typically occurred after several consultations between the woman and her doctor. As a community, we should embrace these common-sense standards. Again, timing matters.”More than 90% of US abortions occur at or before 13 weeks of gestation, according to data from the CDC. Less than 1% of abortions take place at or after 21 weeks.On the campaign trail, Republicans have blatantly mischaracterized Democrats’ positions on abortion. Last month, debating Kamala Harris, Donald Trump falsely said his Democratic opponent’s “vice-presidential pick … says that abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. [Tim Walz] also says: ‘Execution after birth’ – execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born – is OK.”He was factchecked: it is not legal in any state to kill a baby after birth.On the page, Melania Trump issues a distinctly un-Trumpian appeal for empathy.“Many women opt for abortions due to personal medical concerns,” she writes. “These situations with significant moral implications weigh heavily on the woman and her family and deserve our empathy. Consider, for example, the complexity inherent in the decision of whether the mother should risk her own life to give birth.”Recent reporting has highlighted cases of women who have died in states where abortion has been banned.She goes on to appeal for compassion.“When confronted with an unexpected pregnancy, young women frequently experience feelings of isolation and significant stress. I, like most Americans, am in favor of the requirement that juveniles obtain parental consent before undergoing an abortion. I realize this may not always be possible. Our next generation must be provided with knowledge, security, safety, and solace, and the cultural stigma associated with abortion must be lifted,” writes the former first lady.Finally, Melania Trump offers an expression of solidarity with protesters for reproductive rights.“The slogan ‘My Body, My Choice’ is typically associated with women activists and those who align with the pro-choice side of the debate,” she writes. “But if you really think about it, ‘My Body, My Choice’ applies to both sides – a woman’s right to make an independent decision involving her own body, including the right to choose life. Personal freedom.” More

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      Memoir contradicts Republican Senate candidate’s ‘below the poverty line’ tale

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      At a recent campaign event in Whitehall, Montana, the Republican US Senate candidate Tim Sheehy told voters that a decade ago, when he set up the aerial firefighting company through which he made his fortune, he and his wife were living “below the poverty line”.“My wife and I homeschool our kids,” Sheehy said. “We made that decision several years ago. She’s a Marine, naval academy graduate, she could have a great job and even when our company was tiny, and we … were below the poverty line and making no money, we said: ‘No … the most important job in the world is being a mother.’ And she’s doing that every day.”A little more than a month from election day, in a race that could decide control of the Senate, such hardscrabble tales are helping Sheehy lead the Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, a longtime Montana farmer. The two men are due to debate in Missoula on Monday night.But Sheehy’s claim about living in poverty while building his company, Bridger Aerospace, is contradicted by his own memoir.In that book, Mudslingers, published last year, the former navy Seal writes that when he and his wife contemplated leaving the military, in 2013, they “weren’t wealthy, but … did have resources”.This, he writes, was in part thanks to having “lived quite frugally during our time in the military, spending a lot of time deployed, accumulating savings, taking advantage of base housing and meals, and of course spending almost nothing while on deployment.“So, we had amassed a nest egg of close to $300,000. I also had some money that my parents had been putting away for me since I was a kid. All told, we had roughly $400,000 to allocate toward building a business and establishing a new life.”In 2014, as Sheehy got his company going, the US health department defined the poverty guideline for a family of three in Montana as $19,790. The poverty threshold, as defined by the US Census Bureau, was $19,055.By his own account, Sheehy set out to build Bridger Aerospace with 20 times that – a sum he calls “not exactly chump change”.Sheehy has also regularly claimed to have “bootstrapped” his company, a term the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance”.Yet in his book, Sheehy describes both receiving the $100,000 his parents had saved for him and asking his father and brother to help him pay $500,000 to buy necessary planes. His father, he writes, “backed me, financially and emotionally, without expecting anything in return”, while his brother was given an “equity stake in the business”.Sheehy also describes how in 2017 his brother helped secure investment from Blackstone Group, the New York private equity behemoth led by Stephen Schwartzman, a top Republican donor, in order to pull off a $200m aircraft order.Sheehy grew up in Minnesota and attended the US Naval Academy in Maryland. Describing his early days in Montana, he has often told of how he, his wife and their first child started out living in a tent. That might boost his claim of living below the poverty line, but Sheehy has also described how living under canvas was a choice.Having purchased “60 undeveloped acres”, Sheehy writes in his book, “the simple and probably sane thing to do would have been to rent an apartment in town while we got the business off the ground”. But they chose to build a house, and to camp while the structure went up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSheehy’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. News of Sheehy’s book contradicting his own claim about living in poverty, however, follows similar reporting regarding his claims about his background.The Montana Free Press was among outlets to report that though Sheehy has said he grew up in “rural Minnesota … surrounded by farmland”, he in fact “grew up in a multimillion-dollar lake house, learned to fly under the tutelage of a neighbour, [and] attended a private high school”.In May, the Daily Beast reported that Sheehy’s campaign trail claims about how he left the US military do not match those in his book. Sheehy’s campaign responded angrily, claiming an attack on his patriotism and service. Then, this month, the Guardian reported documents seemingly showing Sheehy did not follow Department of Defense protocol for clearing sections of Mudslingers that deal with military subjects, including deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The campaign did not respond.Regardless, Sheehy seems well-placed to secure a Senate seat, holding seven- and eight-point leads over Tester, a three-term moderate Democrat.Federal figures regarding poverty in Montana in 2014 do back up one claim in Sheehy’s book. Describing how he hired his first employees, he says he paid just $1,500 a month, amounting to $18,000 a year, to his first chief pilot, Tim Cherwin.Cherwin brought with him “the chain-smoking desert rat Steve Taylor, who would become our director of maintenance”. Sheehy, who says he started the business with $400,000, says both men were “earning wages below the poverty line”. More

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      Lucky Loser review – how Donald Trump squandered his wealth

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      Donald Trump started his career at the end of the 1970s, financed by his father Fred Trump. Over the years this transfer of wealth added up to around $500m in today’s money in gifts. My rough calculations say that, had he simply taken the money, leveraged it not imprudently, and passively invested it in Manhattan real estate – gone to parties, womanised, played golf, collected his rent cheques and reinvested them – his fortune could have amounted to more than $80bn by the time he ascended to the presidency in 2017.And yet Trump was not worth $80bn in 2017. Instead, Forbes pegged him at $2.5bn – which, given the difficulties of valuing and accounting for real estate, is really anything between $5bn (£4bn) and zero (or less). It is in this sense that Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig call Trump a “loser”. He is indeed one of the world’s biggest losers. By trying to run a business, rather than just kicking back and letting the rising tide of his chosen sector lift his wealth beyond the moon, he managed to destroy the vast majority of his potential net worth.How he did that is what Buettner and Craig chronicle in a book dense with facts and figures, but punctuated with moments of irony and dark humour – particularly when contrasting Trump’s public bravado with the often pathetic reality of his money management. The combination turns what might have been a rather boring tome, of interest only to trained financial professionals like me, into something of a page turner. Buettner and Craig paint a picture of Trump’s businesses as “mirage[s], built on inherited wealth, shady deals, and a relentless pursuit of appearances over substance”. And yet, Road Runner-like, he runs off the edge of the cliff, looks down, shrugs – and keeps going until his feet touch the ground again on the other side.Buettner and Craig delve more deeply into this story than anyone I have encountered. They have done their interview and newspaper-morgue homework, checked it against tax information and business records spanning three decades, and so gained an unprecedented look into the real workings of Trump’s financial empire. They uncover, I think as much as we can get at it, the truth behind the narrative of his wealth and its indispensable support: the myth of a genius businessman that he has spun and that, deplorably, much of the press and his supporters have bought, hook, line and sinker. Their conclusion? He was always exaggerating how rich he was, and always skating remarkably close to the edge of financial disaster.But though he squandered a great deal, it’s also true that he was extremely lucky. First, and most importantly, he was a beneficiary of the absolutely spectacular Manhattan real-estate boom. Second, he had things break his way at many crucial junctures that ought to have sunk him into total and irrevocable bankruptcy. Third, he was able to use his celebrity developer-mogul image to attract new business partners after his old ones had washed their hands of him. He was also lucky in the complacency of many of them with respect to his shenanigans: their willingness to play along and not find a judge to pull the plug.What sort of psychology produces this kind of behaviour? Buettner and Craig psychoanalyse Trump as unable to take the hit of recognising his relative incompetence. A deep need for public validation as the master of the Art of the Deal led him, over and over again, to make increasingly risky decisions. The illusion of success had to be maintained at all costs, which meant that a loss had to be followed by an even bigger bet.And so there Trump was at the start of 2017, in spite of everything, stunningly successful. Buettner and Craig call this an “illusion”. I profoundly disagree. To repeatedly save yourself from bankruptcy – to somehow manage to hand responsibility off to the people you do business with while you hotfoot it out of the picture – demonstrates considerable skill and ingenuity of some sort. Trump has exhibited great (if low) cunning and resilience when faced with what often appeared to be near-certain financial, entrepreneurial and business doom. It is, Buettner and Craig say, a combination of “bravado [and] branding” that allowed him to always “walk away with something – usually at the expense of others”.Many of us hope that Trump’s story will end with a proper comeuppance, restoring the appropriate and just moral order of the universe, in which his galaxy-scale hubris does indeed ultimately call forth a satisfying nemesis. Until then, we must regard him as a remarkable success – although few philosophers would judge Trump’s brand of success as the kind worth having.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion More

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      Did Reagan pave the way for Trump? ‘You can trace the linkages,’ says biographer

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      “Understand this about immigration,” Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives and a staunch Democrat, said in an interview on HBO earlier this month. “The best speech on immigration was by President Ronald Reagan.”Pelosi is not alone among Democrats heaping praise on the 40th president for his pro-immigration views, defiance of tyranny and politics of optimism – “It’s morning in America.” For many he has come to symbolise nostalgia for a more innocent, less partisan time. Visitors to America’s capital often land at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport. A newly released biopic starring Dennis Quaid is the latest burnishing of the myth.But a critically praised biography of Reagan challenges these assumptions, balancing recognition of Reagan’s strengths with a close examination of his glaring weaknesses on inequality, race and the Aids pandemic. Its introduction poses a provocative question: “Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?”And the book comes not from a progressive Democrat but a former foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. Max Boot is himself an immigrant: he was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, gained US citizenship and is now a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank.“I guess my relationship with the Republican party is like the love affair that ended badly,” Boot, 55, says in a Zoom interview from his white-walled home in New York. “I was an ardent admirer of Reagan as a young man in the 1980s.“He made conservatism cool for a lot of people including me growing up in that decade and all the more so in my case because I was born in the Soviet Union and my family came here and so tended to gravitate towards the right side of the political spectrum. I loved it when he called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’ and stood up for human rights behind the iron curtain. He made me a Republican.”View image in fullscreenBut a day after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Boot reregistered as an independent. He believes this has given him an objectivity and distance from his biographical subject. “That’s allowed me to write a much better book than I would have written in the past if I were writing from a pro-Reagan or pro-Republican standpoint. What I tried to do was to do a very balanced job that was neither hagiography nor hit job but trying to show Reagan both good and bad.”In Reagan: His Life and Legend, Boot acknowledges the personal and political differences between Reagan, born in 1911, and Trump, born in 1946. Reagan, he argues, was both more ideological and more pragmatic than most people realise. He was pro-free trade, pro-immigration, pro-Nato and anti-Russian expansionism. Boot has no doubt that he would have supported Ukraine in its battle against Vladimir Putin. Reagan also had a sunny, optimistic vision of America, a sharp contrast from Trump’s “American carnage”.But there are through lines, all the same. “Clearly the Republican party has evolved in ways that Reagan could have never anticipated and yet I don’t think you can just say, wow, Trump arrived from Mars and there was no relationship between what he’s saying and doing and previous decades in the Republican party,” Boot argues.“Just as a historian, that seems to me very ahistorical because we know things don’t come out of nowhere. You can trace the linkages and see that despite the huge differences between Trump and Reagan, there are also various resemblances and similarities.”The first and most obvious is that both men were television hosts – Reagan on General Electric Theater, one of the most popular shows of the late 1950s and early 1960, and Trump on The Apprentice, one of the most popular shows of the 2000s and 2010s.Boot comments: “Both Reagan and Trump beamed into people’s homes so that people assumed that they knew them, that they were like a friend but, in many ways, they were falling for the image rather than the reality. In Trump’s case, the image was that he was this super-successful wheeler-dealer whereas we now know that so many of his companies went bankrupt and he had a very chequered business record.View image in fullscreen“In Reagan’s case, it was this image as the man nextdoor, somebody who was like this friendly neighbour and warm friend, which was certainly the image that he projected. And yet it was striking to me, talking to people who knew him well, that actually Ronald Reagan had this glacial reserve. He would have made a pretty good hermit. That’s an indication of how TV can distort reality.”Reagan also became a Hollywood film actor, which caused later critics to question his political and intellectual heft. In the 1985 time travel caper Back to the Future, Doc Brown says, “Tell me, Future Boy, who’s President of the United States in 1985?” When Marty McFly says Ronald Reagan, an incredulous Doc retorts: “Ronald Reagan! The actor? Then who’s vice-president, Jerry Lewis?”But Reagan was in a different league from Trump, who once used a black Sharpie marker to alter an official hurricane map and suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19. Boot says: “It’s all relative because Reagan was certainly criticised for knowing so little about the government and paying so little attention to details, which was true compared to other presidents. But he was practically like a political science PhD compared to Trump because he was actually interested in ideas.“It wasn’t all just about himself. It wasn’t all about boosting his own ego. You could argue about his ideas and you could say maybe that they were bad ideas, but he had ideas and he was devoted to them and he read and he wrote. I read all of his letters that are extant and he was a beautiful writer. There was a lot more intellectual substance with Reagan than with Trump, even though Reagan was also accused of being a lightweight.”Reagan was hailed as “the great communicator”. When asked how relevant his acting career had been for the presidency, he replied: “There have been times, in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do this job if you hadn’t been an actor.”Both Reagan and Trump were populists who reviled Washington, though the former did not refer to it as “the deep state”, and both used the campaign slogan “Make America great again”. Boot also points to more troubling resemblances, including Reagan’s poor record on civil rights and racial justice.Reagan himself insisted that he was incapable of prejudice, pointing to the example of his father, Jack, who was of Irish Catholic ancestry and therefore the victim of discrimination, as giving Reagan some sensitivity about the experience of minorities. “But he was pretty oblivious to the African American experience,” Boot contends.“He talked about his home town of Dixon, Illinois, as being a wonderful place where people loved each other and neighbours supported each other and – he wouldn’t have said it this way – it was like a kumbaya spirit prevailed. When I actually researched Dixon in the 1920s, what I discovered was it was a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan.“The Klan was having massive rallies right outside of town. They were marching through the downtown and in their white sheets. This is what Reagan’s neighbours were actually up to and the town actually even had segregation, even though it wasn’t in the south. The movie theatre was segregated; Black people had to sit in a separate area. It wasn’t all peace and love but he was kind of oblivious to it.”View image in fullscreenTime and again in his early political career, Reagan was on the wrong side of history. He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. In his race for governor of California in 1966, he opposed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.In a 1971 phone call with President Richard Nixon, Reagan made racist remarks about African delegates to the United Nations, calling them “monkeys” and saying they were still “uncomfortable wearing shoes”. He did not attend Martin Luther King’s funeral, even though many Republicans did, and opposed the Martin Luther King Jr public holiday right up until the day he signed it into law.Boot comments: “He certainly did not engage in the openly racist appeals of a George Wallace or Trump for that matter but he certainly used race-neutral, coded language that people understood, talking about law and order, talking about we can’t allow our streets to turn into a jungle, talking about welfare queens, that infamous episode in the 1980 election where he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair [in Mississippi] and talked about states’ rights a few miles from where three civil rights workers have been slain by the Klan.“He had a double standard on human rights abroad, where he was very tough, and rightly so, on human rights violations in the Soviet Union but he was very weak on human rights violations in South Africa and in fact vetoed a tough sanctions bill on South Africa. I can’t judge what was in Reagan’s heart but I know his political record and it was one of catering to white backlash voters but doing it in seemingly neutral language which didn’t alarm moderates, didn’t turn off centrists.”A generation later, Trump dispensed with Reagan’s dog whistle and replaced it with a bullhorn, deploying blatantly racist stereotypes in pursuit of the same goal. Boot adds: “He’s not nearly as deft. He does it with these crazy stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs or whatever. Reagan loved an apocryphal story himself but nothing quite that crude or crazy.”The parallels do not stop there. Each was a Democrat before they were a Republican. Each was the oldest US president in history when he took office (a record since surpassed by Joe Biden). Each survived an attempted assassination by a loner with no apparent political motive. Just as Trump mishandled the coronavirus pandemic, Reagan had a devastating blind spot when it came to Aids, despite the efforts of scientists such as Anthony Fauci.View image in fullscreenBoot comments: “When you look back at his presidency, the fact that he completely ignored Aids and it was killing tens of thousands of people, that’s a major blot on his record. He even speculated that Aids could be God’s punishment for gay people and so forth – things that were commonly said, I guess, in straight society in the 1980s.“At the time reporters would joke with Reagan aides about Aids; the reporters thought it was a big joke, too. It wasn’t like they were holding him to account. But standards have greatly changed and now, from our vantage point, it seems shocking that Reagan and a lot of his senior aides were so callous about Aids.”Ultimately, Boot argues, Reagan paved the way for Trump. “He was addicted to faux facts. He would often cite apocryphal quotes and anecdotes and statistics that weren’t really true but would keep citing them anyway, even when it was pointed out that he didn’t have any basis for doing so. You can argue that acclimated the Republican party to the fire hose of falsehoods that you see from Trump.“Even more fundamentally, Reagan’s policies truly favoured the wealthy and increased income disparity in the United States. You can argue that those policies, whether it was the tax cuts, lack of anti-trust, anti-union activity, all the rest, by widening those income disparities opened the way for populism in America, both from the left and the rightwing populism that Trump exploits today.”Reagan remains a convenient political prop for Republicans in 2024. Several candidates in this year’s party primary sought to position themselves as Reagan’s true heir, with former vice-president Mike Pence often recalling that he “joined the Reagan revolution and never looked back”. Even Trump regularly calls the former president as a defence witness on abortion, stating that “like President Ronald Reagan before me, I support the three exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother”.View image in fullscreenReagan died in 2004, aged 93, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. If he were still alive today, it is impossible to imagine him delivering a Maga speech on Trump’s behalf at a campaign rally or convention. Boot reflects: “Every generation of Republicans has been more rightwing than the previous generation. Reagan was well to the right of Nixon and Ford. Trump is now well to the right of Reagan.“I’m sure that if Reagan were still alive, he would be being denounced as a Rino [Republican in name only], just as George Bush and Dick Cheney and so many others are today. After all, in 1986 Reagan signed this immigration bill that legalised millions of undocumented immigrants – what Republicans today would denounce as an amnesty bill and so very different from what Maga Republicans would do.“The ultimate irony here is that, in 1980, when Reagan was elected, Reaganism was pushing the Republican party in the country to the right. Today, if Reaganism were to prevail on the Republican party, it would be pushing the Republican party to the left, to the centre.”Both Reagan and Trump demonstrated the power of personality to shape the Republican party in their own image. Where celebrity led, ideology followed. Boot wonders if the same thing could happen when the party finally enters the post-Trump era.“It’s possible to imagine maybe there will be some charismatic, transcendent individual in the future who might have much more moderate views than Trump does and, if so, that person could easily gain ascendancy over the Republican party. It’s also possible that a rightwing demagogue who’s as crazy as Trump but even more effective could be the future of the Republican party.“It’s up for grabs – too soon to know. But based on the Reagan and Trump precedent, maybe we should be looking for the next leader of the Republican party among people who host national TV shows.” More

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      Hillary Clinton: ‘It would be exhilarating to see Kamala Harris achieve the breakthrough I didn’t’

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      On 21 July, when Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris, the dream of seeing a woman in the Oval Office was suddenly back within reach. It wouldn’t be me; but it could be Kamala. History beckoned. But a whole lot of bigotry, fear and disinformation, not to mention the electoral college, stood in the way. Could we do it? Could we finally shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling and prove that in America there is no limit to what is possible?When Bill and I heard the news that Biden was withdrawing and endorsing Kamala, we drafted a joint statement saluting him and endorsing her. She is talented, experienced and ready to be president, so it was an easy decision.After our statement went public, Kamala called us. She was remarkably calm for someone who had just been thrown into the deep end of a bottomless pool. She told us she wanted to earn the nomination. “I’m going to need your help,” she said. “We’ll do whatever you need,” I told her. Bill and I were both ready to do everything we could to help get her elected.History is full of cautionary tales, but 2024 is not 2016. Trump’s victory then, and the ugliness of his presidency, woke up a lot of people. There’s less complacency now about the strength of our democracy, and more consciousness of the threats posed by disinformation, demagoguery and implicit bias.Some people have asked how I feel about the prospect of another woman being poised to achieve the breakthrough I didn’t. If I’m being honest, in the years after 2016, I also wondered how I would feel if another woman ever took the torch, that I had carried so far, and ran on with it. Would some little voice deep down inside whisper: “That should have been me”?Now I know the answer. After I got off the phone with the vice-president, I looked at Bill with a huge smile and said: “This is exciting.” I felt promise. I felt possibility. It was exhilarating.When I imagine Kamala standing before the Capitol next January, taking the oath of office as our first woman president, my heart leaps. After hard years of division, it will prove that our best days are still ahead and that we are making progress on our long journey toward a more perfect union. And it will make such a difference in the lives of hard-working people everywhere.As Joni Mitchell sang all those years ago, something’s lost but something’s gained. Democrats have lost our standard-bearer, and we will miss Joe Biden’s steady leadership, deep empathy and fighting spirit. He is a wise and decent man who served our country well. Yet we have gained much, too: a new champion, an invigorated campaign and a renewed sense of purpose.

      This is an edited extract from the epilogue to the audiobook Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty by Hillary Rodham Clinton, published by Simon & Schuster. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. More