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      FBI informant’s book predicts far-right violence: ‘we should be afraid’

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      America’s fraught 2024 election could be hit by far-right violence, warns a high-profile FBI informant who spent years infiltrating the Klu Klux Klan in a new book.Joe Moore spent a decade tasked with infiltrating KKK chapters in Florida to investigate enduring ties between law enforcement and the white supremacist organization, an assignment that included disrupting a murder plot by a trio of Klansmen who worked as prison guards.Now the former US army sniper is out with a book, White Robes and Broken Badges, detailing those experiences – and applying the lessons he learned to an approaching election freighted with fears of the impact of far-right and white supremacist groups.A Reuters/Ipsos poll in May reported that two out of three Americans said they were concerned that political violence could follow the 5 November election.“Unfortunately, I think it’s relevant to any time in our nation’s history, not just this election,” Moore says. Far-right ideology has two origins, he has come to learn. “One is geographical, where you are raised up in an area where that ideology is simply a part of a belief system. The second is a generational origin in which it’s handed down.”And so begins a story of how Moore, living near Gainesville in the 2010s, became involved with white supremacists in Florida, rose to the position of Grand Knighthawk, the klan’s security official, and disrupted a plot by Klansmen, all prison guards, to murder a Black former inmate, and of bringing down two major KKK figures, Grand Dragon Jamie Ward and Exalted Cyclops Charles Newcomb.“In my first tour inside the KKK – the nation’s first domestic terrorist group, founded more than 150 years ago – I foiled a plot to assassinate then candidate Barack Obama, only to witness the Klan use his election as a rallying cry and recruiting tool that ignited a firestorm within the white nationalist right,” Moore writes in the book.View image in fullscreenAfter serving in foreign authoritarian countries, he continues, “nothing I witnessed in any of them scares me as much what we’re facing at home now. Should we be afraid? With the 2024 election looming, and democracy itself on the ballot, the answer is yes, we should be very afraid.”Moore described meeting a regional Klan leader, or Grand Dragon, who lived near Rosewood, Florida, the site of a racist massacre of dozens of Black people and the destruction of the town in 1923. “After an evening at the Grand Dragon’s home I walked over to remnants of Rosewood and realized that I had the power to stop the next Rosewood,” he says.Moore’s extraordinary tale has been told previously – both as an Associated Press story in 2021 corroborated using court records and trial transcripts, and as a documentary, Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK, but Moore’s new account comes with an immediate political message.The foreword is written by the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, who last week described his experience during the January 6 riot to Democratic conventioneers in Chicago. In the book, Raskin describes the “mobilization of domestic violent extremist groups to act as the frontline shock troops in the assault”.Moore, Raskin writes, “shows how the KKK remains a central entry point and organizing force for violent white nationalism in America”.Moore says he tried to remain politically neutral, for doing otherwise would mean risking mistakes. But finding the right people to report the corruption he had uncovered was more difficult – Florida officials, he claims, didn’t want to hear his message of KKK infiltration into law enforcement.“It was far more prevalent and consequential than officials were willing to admit, so much so that state officials came out and said there was no information that the issue was any more broad than the case in front of them. But I had a list of officers that were active members and actively recruiting other people and sending active Klan members into the law enforcement hiring process as well.”The KKK may not be the force it once was, but other white nationalist organizations moved in to adopt the messaging and the membership, among them militia groups and movements like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.Moore estimates that by 2014, one-third of all Klan members were also members of another similar organization and the transition was being encouraged at the highest levels of the organization.“It just so happens that geographical and generational origins are dispersed, so if America was to have another civil war it would not be north versus south, but it would be families and geographical locations against other families and geographical locations.”White supremacists moved north in the US – joining homegrown ones already there – for reasons of economic prosperity “but they brought with them the generational origins of racism and seed different areas of the north for racism to grow generationally”, he adds.White Robes is ghost-written by Jon Land, author of the insurrectionist thriller Murder at the CDC, dozens of mystery-suspense novels and the teen comedy film Dirty Deeds, that produces a clash between style and message.No matter. Moore has an informed point when it comes to the infiltration of law enforcement – some 20% of those arrested during the January 6 Capitol attack are believed to have some relationship to US law enforcement.“Criminal organizations of all kinds want to gain access to police powers, be it prisons, local police or state police. They want information to have control of their environment,” Moore points out. “But the KKK is not about controlling their environment to make money but to fulfill an ideology to bring about a new government or system.”That in turn seeds generations below who also join law enforcement with racist ideology, he says. “It comes down to propagandizing, a self-fulfilling cycle of ideology and survivability. They fear for the loss of their ideology.” More

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      ‘Very rude’: the late Queen’s salty verdict on Donald Trump

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      Name: Rude Trump.Age: The former US president, Donald Trump, met the late Queen Elizabeth II on a couple of occasions: tea at Windsor Castle in 2018 …The Tyrant Who Came to Tea. Melania came, too. And then the following year at Buckingham Palace during a state visit.I remember. He enjoyed it, no? His former Russia adviser Fiona Hill wrote in her White House memoir that he considered a “meeting with the Queen of England was the ultimate sign that he … had made it in life.” And paying tribute to the Queen when she died, Trump himself wrote that he would never forget her “generous friendship, great wisdom and wonderful sense of humour”.Yeah, like he would know anything about that! Anyway, was it mutual, this admiration and respect? Er, not so much, according to Craig Brown’s new biography, A Voyage Around the Queen, now being serialised in the Daily Mail.Which says? That she found Trump “very rude”.No way! Trump rude? Yeah, I know, but you might have expected him to behave for the Queen of all people.She must have hosted a few controversial leaders during her reign? Putin, Assad, Mugabe, Amin. “She may not have found their company convivial; upon their departure, she may even have voiced a discreet word of disapproval,” wrote Brown.And of all the leaders it was Trump who she found rude! Was it something to do with royal protocol? Well, he did break that, by walking in front of the monarch when they inspected a guard of honour.Probably broke wind too, Trump by name … If he did that’s not covered in the book. What the Queen is said to have “particularly disliked” was the way the former president “couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder, as though in search of others more interesting”.More interesting than the actual Queen! Well, quite. Plus, she also “believed Trump ‘must have some sort of arrangement’ with his wife, Melania, or else why would she have remained married to him?”Queen Elizabeth II, she certainly spoke for her people. She certainly did.Do say: [In the voice of King Charles] “Tea, President Harris?”Don’t say: [As above] “Oh God, it’s you again.” More

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      Apprentice in Wonderland by Ramin Setoodeh review – how Donald Trump’s big break changed America

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      Every time someone complains that our new prime minister is boring, I rue the day that politics became a performing art. The degradation began, as the entertainment journalist Ramin Setoodeh relates, when Donald Trump was catapulted into power by The Apprentice, a reality/talent/gameshow over which he presided on NBC from 2004 until 2017. Before this, Trump was best known as a loud-mouthed, laughable vulgarian, a fixture in tabloid gossip columns whose business career mostly consisted of bankruptcies. The British producer Mark Burnett endowed him with a new persona as a charismatic leader, a “godlike character” worshipped by teams of ruthless young entrepreneurs who fought for the chance to serve as apprentices in his property company. It was in this phoney guise that Trump won the election in 2016; installed in Washington, he nationalised the show’s cut-throat scenario by stoking social and ideological feuds, then sat back to enjoy the mayhem that ensued.Trump’s rabid animosity energised The Apprentice. The show’s ethos was supposedly aspirational, but success proved less telegenic than the gloating spectacle of failure: at the climax of every episode Trump eliminated losers by abusively booming: “You’re fired!” This catchphrase became a clarion call. “When I said it,” he boasts to Setoodeh, “the whole building shook. The place just reverberated. People were screaming, they went crazy.” Was their reaction ecstasy or hysterical alarm? Either way, they heard a megaphonic deity trumpeting doom.As president, Trump shrank from recreating that eschatological reign of terror. Afraid of real-life confrontations, he sacked chiefs of staff and cabinet members remotely, in small-voiced tweets, not thundering public denunciations. But in interviews with Setoodeh after he was voted out of office in 2020, this hunched, dejected “shadow of a famous man” physically bulks up again as he recalls a time when he was judge, jury and executioner. Play-acting authority on television was his forte; by contrast, running the country turned out to be both a chore and a bore.On The Apprentice, as in the White House, Trump disdained preparation and refused to read briefs, “purely focused on maximising his screen time”. The only protege to whom he paid attention was the back-stabbing diva Omarosa Manigault Newman, who saw herself as a female Trump. He subsequently eased her into a job at the White House, where what Setoodeh calls her “weaponised incompetence” soon caused her to be marched off the premises in disgrace. Although she then underwent a “total Trump detox”, he still speaks of Manigault Newman admiringly. He tells Setoodeh that in her first season on the show “she was evil”, which from him is high praise, then adds that the next year “she tried to be evil – and when you try it doesn’t work”. It’s a revealingly self-reflexive remark: is Trump himself authentically malign, or just pretending to be? He probably doesn’t know. As one would-be apprentice puts it, “Trump conducts himself like an actor playing Trump”; to further complicate matters, he plays the part badly.View image in fullscreenListening as he rants and rambles, Setoodeh likens him to “a novelty talking Trump doll, its battery on the fritz”. But that battery has recently been recharged: he now resembles a dummy perched on a ventriloquist’s knee, compliantly voicing the diatribes of the homegrown fascists who are his handlers. He has also revived the demeaningly competitive format of the show that launched him, and at a rally this July he claimed to be remaking The Apprentice by goading JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Tim Scott to outdo one another in sycophancy as they vied to become his vice-presidential running mate.The framing conceit of Setoodeh’s book comes from Alice in Wonderland. Trump, he argues, “took America through the looking glass” and warped government into nonsensical farce. Other literary antecedents cast darker shadows. Burnett “envisioned a Lord of the Flies society” and devised initiatic trials as exercises in psychological torture. Auditions even included invasive STD tests. One male competitor shudders as he describes “a funnel that they stuck in there”; scraping his urethra, it extracted a sample that somehow testified to his aptitude for a business career. The ritualised firings were brutal, “carried out like public floggings”.The show’s title had an equally sinister provenance. Burnett chose it as a homage to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Goethe’s ballad about a trainee magus who runs amok with his master’s spells. In the poem, acted out by Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, the absent sorcerer returns to chasten the apprentice and immobilise all those strutting broomsticks and sloshing pails of water. Trump’s mischief-making, however, has continued unchecked, and his current wheeze is to pretend that the burgeoning crowds at Kamala Harris’s rallies are conjured up by AI, like a digital version of Mickey Mouse’s phantasmagoric broomsticks.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSetoodeh – whose parents emigrated from Iran in the 1970s to live the American dream – seems so resigned to Trump’s victory in November that he raises a white flag in the book’s dedication. Choking on the fatal name in disgust or dismay, he offers it “To my dad, who is voting for him”. Sticking to pronouns, let’s hope that more Americans vote for her.

      Apprentice in Wonderland by Ramin Setooheh is published by HarperCollins (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      All in the Family by Fred Trump review – when dollars are thicker than blood

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      Forget about the sanctity of the human family or its sticky glue of love. If you’re a Trump, the institution is a convenient mechanism for ensuring inheritance, whether of gilded financial assets or brazen moral defects. Trumps are branded merchandise, and their dynastic DNA is a double helix of greed, graft and feuding malice.Since numbers on ledgers are what matter to this mercenary dynasty, they advance arithmetically. In All in the Family, the last in a series of Fred Trumps identifies his great-grandfather – who absconded from Germany to avoid military service and founded a property empire by establishing a chain of brothels in Canada – as Fred Zero. His son Fred I, a rack-renting landlord in the New York suburbs, then begat Fred II, who defied the family by preferring a career as an airline pilot; then, after being reduced to a “second-tier Trump”, he drank himself to an early death, which made his younger brother Donald the heir apparent. Fred III, the author of this memoir, aspires to be “a different kind of Trump” but coyly trades on his tainted surname, describing himself on LinkedIn as “a third-generation member of a prominent New York real estate family”.Trumpism consists, as Fred III puts it, of “name promotion”. Fred I advertised the homes he built by anchoring a yacht emblazoned with Trump signs off Coney Island on summer weekends. The logo has since been affixed to hotels, golf clubs, a failed airline, a dodgy university and several bankrupt casinos; it currently sells Bibles, high-top sneakers that yell “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” and a Victory cologne that purports to waft out the intimate essence of Donald.What Fred III calls the “T-word” – almost as odious as the forbidden N-word, which he remembers Donald using when enraged by vandals who damaged his car – undergoes some slick mutations in the course of this chronicle. Fred Zero was born Friedrich Drumpf, which sounds like a belch or sneeze. Anglicised, the surname evokes trump cards and trumped-up accusations, a better match for the family’s ruthlessly competitive creed. Fred I’s middle name was Christ, rhyming with mist, which he derived from his German mother. But he worried that this might repel the Jewish tenants in his New York apartment blocks, so he dropped the “h” and called himself Crist instead. Fred III adopted the new spelling when he bizarrely christened his first son Cristopher; there would be no Fred IV, he decided, because “it was time to stop counting”.The other Trumps remained at their adding machines, policing the succession. Donald’s sister, Maryanne – a judge who retired from the bench after a charge of misconduct, foiling his whimsical scheme to appoint her to the supreme court – complained because Fred III jumped the queue by producing Cristopher: according to her dotty theory of primogeniture, her own son, Fred I’s oldest grandchild, had the right to marry and procreate first. Then when Donald’s creditors threatened to foreclose on his debts during the 1990s, Maryanne and the other siblings produced a will altered by the already senile Fred I that disinherited Fred II’s offspring and cruelly cut off the medical insurance for Fred III’s severely disabled son William.View image in fullscreenFred III and his sister, Mary, sued to claw back a portion of the spoils to which they felt entitled. Mary, a trained psychologist, additionally declared war on the family in her book Too Much and Never Enough, published as a spoiler during Donald’s re-election campaign in 2020; in it, incensed by his mismanagement of the pandemic, she accuses him of “mass murder”. Her brother’s charges against their uncle are milder. Anxious to maintain a semblance of peace, Fred III reminiscences fondly about his access to the Oval Office and takes pride in his complimentary membership of a Trump golf club. The family’s handed-down anecdotes about Donald’s bratty behaviour amount, as Fred III sees it, to little more than “stupid kid stuff”: hyper-aggressive and liable to tantrums, he delighted in “the pain he hoped he had caused” by stealing toys from other children or hurling an eraser at a teacher he disliked. That might sound trivial, but these infantile urges still activate the old man who itches to regain power and they will be converted into vengeful authoritarian policies if he is re-elected.Despite a settlement, the financial dispute with the aunts and uncles continues to rankle. For the Trumps, Fred III realises: “Blood only went so far – as far as the dollar signs.” Arguing about his grandfather’s will, he defends the protocols of “multigenerational wealth”, but that very terminology splices together genetic and economic heritage. As he ought to know, families pass on congenital failings as well as stocks and shares. His father once told him that he had “inherited a bad gene” and warned him to be careful about drinking; Fred III admits to having had his own foreordained struggle with alcoholism.Donald, like Hitler, trusts in eugenics. At a recent rally in Minnesota, he promoted himself as a pure-bred product of “the racehorse theory”, and he fancies that his genes make him “a very stable genius”. His apostles agree. He recovered from Covid, according to the self-styled Maga life coach Brenden Dilley, because “he’s got God-tier genetics, top fucking one percentile genetics, right?” This insane conceit explains Donald’s spasm of disgust when Fred III tells him that William’s affliction is “some kind of genetic thing”. “Not in our family,” Donald replies with a snort, “there’s nothing wrong with our genes!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe most lethal moment in the book occurs when Donald helpfully suggests that Fred III, rather than spending money on William’s care, should “just let him die and move down to Florida”. The advice comes from a remote-control executioner: after the death of the Iraqi terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Fred III listens to Donald exultantly telling the king of Jordan on the phone: “I killed him, I killed him like a dog.” What shocks me most, reading the exchange about William, is the casual logic of the follow-up. Why Florida? It’s Donald’s home, now that he is such a pariah in New York, and he commends it to his nephew as a moral Bermuda Triangle, a swamp for human alligators.Fred III makes a final attempt to redeem his tarnished lineage by citing “something that William inherited from our family”. No, this is not a trust fund; it is the young man’s “heart-melting blue eyes”, his only means of communicating with the world. It’s a nice try, but a harsher truth is proclaimed by the book’s epigraph from The Godfather, which quotes Michael, soon to be installed as mob boss, when he shrugs that the gangsterism of the Corleones is “not personal, it’s strictly business”. Donald, who customarily deflects condemnation by projecting it on to others, used to rant about “the Biden crime family”; indirectly exposing the self-disgust that skulks behind his self-love, he was of course describing the vicious, venal conduct of his own clan. More

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      Doctors told Pelosi of concern for Trump’s mental health, ex-speaker says in book

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      In early 2019, at a memorial service for a prominent psychiatrist, a succession of “doctors and other mental health professionals” told Nancy Pelosi they were “deeply concerned that there was something seriously wrong” with Donald Trump, “and that his mental and psychological health was in decline”.“I’m not a doctor,” the former speaker writes in an eagerly awaited memoir, “but I did find his behaviors difficult to understand.”Pelosi’s book, The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Pelosi was speaker between 2007 and 2011, and between 2019 and 2023, the latter spell coinciding with Trump’s chaotic presidency. Her memoir comes out amid a tumultuous 2024 presidential campaign, in which Trump is the Republican nominee for a third successive election.Questions about Trump’s fitness for office form a thread through the book. At 78, Trump is the oldest candidate ever, his campaign-trail utterances studied for frequent mistakes, his speeches are often rambling and marked by bizarre references.Trump’s volcanic behavior and disregard for societal norms also stoke such questions, not least because he left office having been impeached twice, the second time for inciting the deadly January 6 Capitol attack; has been convicted on 34 criminal charges and faces 54 more; has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil cases including one concerning a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”; and has promised if re-elected to govern as “a dictator” on “day one”.On the page, Pelosi says she did not solicit statements about Trump’s mental health from attendees at the memorial for Dr David Hamburg, “a distinguished psychiatrist who … served as the president of the Carnegie Corporation, where he had been a great voice for international peace”, and who died in April 2019.Elsewhere in The Art of Power, however, the former speaker is not shy of stating her views about Trump’s mental health, calling him “imbalanced” and “unhinged”.By 6 January 2021, Pelosi writes, “I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close. His denial and then delays when the Covid pandemic struck, his penchant for repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated, ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time.”She describes how subordinates including Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, indulged improper behavior, allowing Trump to “surreptitiously listen” to private meetings with congressional leaders, eventually prompting Pelosi to ban all cellphones from her meeting rooms on Capitol Hill.Pelosi also describes getting calls from Trump, often late at night, including one in which she says Trump insisted missile strikes on Syria he had just ordered were Barack Obama’s fault, eventually prompting Pelosi to tell him: “It’s midnight. I think you should go to sleep.”Pelosi devotes attention to the events of 6 January 2021, when she and other congressional leaders were hurried from a mob who meant them harm, then spent hours trying to get Trump to call them off.Much of Pelosi’s account is familiar, thanks to the work of the House January 6 committee, which she created, and of her own daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, a documentarian who was filming her mother that day.“People still ask me how I remained so calm,” Pelosi writes, of the hours when Congress was under attack, she and other leaders were evacuated to Fort McNair, and Vice-President Mike Pence was in hiding as the mob chanted about hanging him.“My answer is that I was already deeply aware of how dangerous Donald Trump was.“He continues to be dangerous. If his family and staff truly understood his disregard for both the fundamentals of the law and for basic rules, and if they had reckoned with his personal instability over not winning the [2020] election, they should have staged an intervention. Whether because of willful blindness, money, prestige, or greed, they didn’t – and America has paid a steep price.”Saying she had quickly realised she had “more respect for the office of president of the United States than Trump”, Pelosi says “it was clear to me from the start that he was an imposter – and that on some level, he knew it”.Still she is not done. After describing how electoral college votes were eventually counted and Joe Biden’s victory confirmed, she says she “and many others wanted a consequence for the deranged, unhinged man who was still president of the United States”.That led to an impeachment and a second failed Senate trial, after the Republican leader there, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, made a historic miscalculation: that Trump did not require conviction and barring from office, as he was politically finished.Pelosi describes another failed effort to remove Trump from office, on grounds of being unfit.“Following January 6,” she writes, “the Democratic leadership discussed asking the vice-president to invoke the 25th amendment to the constitution, which allows for the vice-president and a majority of cabinet members to certify that a president is unable to discharge the duties of the office.”She and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, “placed a call to Vice-President Pence about this possibility”.Elsewhere, Pelosi writes that she admires Pence for his actions on January 6, when he refused to be spirited from the Capitol despite having to hide from a murderous mob sent by his own president, then ultimately presided over certification of election results.But when it came to the 25th amendment, Pence let Pelosi down.“The vice-president’s office kept us on hold for 20 minutes,” Pelosi writes, adding that “thankfully” she was at home at the time, “so I could also empty the dishwasher and put in a load of laundry.“Ultimately, Vice-President Pence never got on the phone with us or returned our call.” More

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      Autocracy, Inc review – fears for liberalism and democracy

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      “There is no liberal world order any more, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real,” Anne Applebaum writes in her new book, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.In the eyes of many, US failure in Iraq coupled with the great recession discredited rules-based democracy. Parents of privilege shielded their children from war and economic downturn. The rest were not so lucky. The world’s current crop of rising strongmen are not operating on a blank slate.Russian belligerence and the rise of China play out against this roiling landscape, so too the challenges of Iran and North Korea. The emergence of a reinvigorated Brics bloc is another reminder of western unsteadiness. Indeed the west itself – from Hungary to Paris to Washington – is far from immune to the trend.“Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying upon kleptocratic financial structures,” Applebaum argues. She is a Pulitzer-winning historian, a staff writer at the Atlantic and married to Poland’s foreign minister.Looking back, Applebaum got it wrong on the Iraq war (she had advocated regime change), nailed it on Vladimir Putin (“personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people”) and came close to the mark on Ukraine (“Russia must acknowledge Ukraine as an independent country with the right to exist”).The strength of Autocracy, Inc lies in its description of how autocrats bend and distort opinion, and find allies across national boundaries.In retrospect, the west was too eager to treat China as just another trading partner, not as a rival. The Tiananmen Square massacre signaled what might come next. Xi Jinping is a product of a system.In such systems, Applebaum writes, elites operate “not like a bloc but like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power”.No single caricature-like figure calls the plays alone. Rather, ad hoc collectives are driven by cash and power.“The members of these networks are connected not only one to another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.”Such elites have lawyers in New York and London, bank accounts and holdings strewn across the world. Applebaum notes that Marc Kasowitz, who counseled Donald Trump during the Mueller investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, also represented alleged US conduits for a Ukrainian oligarch. As it happens, David Friedman, Kasowitz’s former law partner, was Trump’s ambassador to Israel.As Applebaum writes, “the globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.”Putin is estimated to be worth between $70bn and $200bn, wealth to rival that of Elon Musk. Xi and his family clock-in north of $1bn.Applebaum examines gas pipeline deals between the then Soviet Union and what was West Germany. The US was rightly concerned.Richard Nixon saw the danger that such transactions would “detach Germany from Nato”. Jimmy Carter imposed sanctions on the sale of US pipeline technology, on account of Soviet human rights violations. Decades later, the Nord Stream pipeline emerged as a battleground between Moscow, Kyiv, Berlin and Washington.Applebaum turns her gaze to Gerhard Schröder, German chancellor between 1998 and 2005. Since then, he has worked for Nord Stream, Rosneft and Gazprom – all Russian. Now 80, he has chaired the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, reportedly earning around $270,000 a year. He also led the supervisory board of Nord Stream 2, now shuttered.He is unapologetic. In February 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, he told the New York Times: “I don’t do mea culpa, it’s not my thing.”Applebaum also discusses so-called “hybrid states”, which she characterizes as countries that are a “legitimate part of the international financial system” and possess many of the trappings of democracy but that are “also willing to launder or accept criminal or stolen wealth or to assist people and companies that have been sanctioned”.She points to the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. “Russian property purchases in the Emirates rose 100% after the invasion of Ukraine,” she writes.Not surprisingly, Applebaum lauds patriotism but fears nationalism and isolationism. By such metrics, Brexit was a bust.“Did the removal of Britain from the European Union give the British more power to shape the world?” Applebaum asks.The answer is self-evident.“Did it prevent foreign money from shaping UK politics?”Want a hint? Evgeny Lebedev, son of Alexander Lebedev, a Russian oligarch and ex-KGB agent, is now Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia, neatly ensconced in parliament.“Did it stop refugees from moving from the war zones of the Middle East to Britain? It did not.”Nigel Farage’s dream has left the UK worse for wear. Farage’s admiration for Putin is a feature, not a bug.“I said I disliked him as a person,” Farage recently said of the Russian president, while campaigning for election as an MP. “But I admired him as a political operator because he’s managed to take control of running Russia.”Applebaum hopes liberalism and democracy are sustainable but is uncertain of their fate.“Nobody’s democracy is safe,” she writes. Still, “there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do.”For autocrats, liberty and autonomy are inconveniences. Conformity is king. There is little surprise that Putin portrays himself as the defender of faith and traditional values.American democrats – as well as Democrats – have reason to be concerned. During the 2016 election, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. A lot has happened since then. Come November, LePage just may get his wish.

      Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      JD Vance writes foreword for Project 2025 leader’s upcoming book

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      The Republican senator and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance has written the foreword to a forthcoming book by the head of Project 2025, the vast rightwing plan for a second Trump administration Democrats say shows the authoritarian threat posed by the GOP – and which Donald Trump has tried to disavow.In publicity material for the book, Vance says of Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation: “Never before has a figure with [his] depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism.”The same publicity material describes Roberts as “head” of Project 2025.Roberts’ book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, will be published in September.Orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation but featuring contributors from across the US right, Project 2025 is more than 900 pages long and includes proposals for radical reform to all corners of government and public life.Democrats have highlighted its threats to key freedoms including reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights. On Wednesday, Kamala Harris, the vice-president and presumptive presidential nominee, discussed Project 2025 in Indianapolis.“We must … recognise there are those who are trying to take us backward,” Harris said.“Can you believe they put that in writing? This represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future. These extremists want to take us back, but we are not going back.”Such attacks have proved effective. Concurrently, Trump and top aides have sought to distance themselves from Project 2025.Vance recently told NBC: “What the media and the Democrats are trying to do is attach its most unpopular elements to the Trump administration. It’s a 900-page document. I guarantee there are things that Trump likes and dislikes … but he is the person who will determine the agenda of the next administration.”Such protestations have been greeted with skepticism, particularly given extensive links between Trumpworld and Project 2025 authors.According to publicity material, Roberts’ book will cover similar ground to Project 2025, “outlin[ing] a peaceful ‘Second American Revolution’ for voters looking to shift the power back into the hands of the people”.But that only echoed controversial comments in which Roberts recently told the former Trump aide Steve Bannon: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”Furthermore, as reported by the New Republic, Roberts’ book was previously advertised under a more dramatic subtitle: “Burning Down Washington to Save America”.Such rhetoric is spreading. At a recent Trump-Vance rally in Ohio, a speaker warned of civil war if the Republican ticket is beaten. In promoting Roberts’ book, Vance uses violent imagery of his own.“We are now all realising that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” the senator says. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned director of JoinTheUnion.us, a “coalition of pro-democracy organisations”, told the Guardian: “Project 2025 is Maga’s endorsed blueprint for turning America into an authoritarian state.“That Trump’s running mate is introducing [Roberts’] book personally only proves that his protestations [of no links to Project 2025] are an indication of how unpopular they know the plan is.” More

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      Trump nephew reveals Uncle Donald’s racist outburst in new book

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      In a new book, Donald Trump’s nephew recalls the future US president, at the start of his New York real estate career, surveying damage to a beloved car and furiously using the N-word.The shocking scene appears in All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way by Fred C Trump III, which will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.“‘Niggers,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look what the niggers did,’” Fred Trump writes, describing his uncle’s racist outburst.In the midst of a tumultuous election, in which Trump faces Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to be vice-president, the book may prove explosive.Allegations of racism have followed Trump through his life in business and politics.Rumours persist that tape exists of Trump using the N-word during his time on The Apprentice, the hit NBC TV show that propelled him towards politics, though none have emerged. Omarosa Manigault, a Black contestant, has said she has heard such a tape. Trump denies it.Since winning the Republican nomination for president in 2016, through four years in the White House and in his third presidential campaign, Trump has repeatedly used racist language and has faced accusations of race-baiting. He has vehemently denied all such accusations.Nonetheless, Fred C Trump III describes in detail a stunning moment he says happened in the early 1970s at the house of his grandparents, Donald Trump’s parents, in Queens, New York.It was “just a normal afternoon for preteen me”, Trump III writes, but then his uncle arrived.“Donald was pissed,” Trump III writes. “Boy, was he pissed.”Trump says his uncle showed him his “cotillon white Cadillac Eldorado convertible”. In its retractable canvas top, “there was a giant gash, at least two feet long [and] another, shorter gash next to it”.“‘Niggers,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look at what the niggers did.’“‘I knew that was a bad word.’”His uncle, Trump III writes, had not seen whoever damaged his car. Instead, he “saw the damage, then went straight to the place where people’s minds sometimes go when they face a fresh affront. Across the racial divide.”Fred C Trump III is a successful New York real estate executive – outside the Trump firm – and, because of his experiences as a parent, a campaigner in support of the intellectually and developmentally disabled.He is not the first Trump to write a book about growing up in a family led by Fred Trump Sr, a New York construction and real estate magnate, and containing the future president.In 2020, Fred C Trump III’s sister, Mary Trump, published the bestseller Too Much and Never Enough. Promoting that book, she said her uncle was “clearly racist”, adding that she had heard him using racist language “and I don’t think that should surprise anybody given how virulently racist he is today”.Mary Trump will release another memoir this year, about the sad life and early death of her and Fred C Trump III’s father, Fred Trump Jr, the oldest son who nonetheless saw his younger brother take over the family business.When Fred Trump Sr died, Trump III and his sister were effectively disinherited by their uncles and aunts, before reaching a settlement.In 2020, when Mary Trump released her memoir and Donald Trump tried to block it, her brother distanced himself from the project. But this June, when Simon & Schuster announced Trump III’s own book, it promised “candid and revealing … never-before-told stories” that would shed “light into the darker corner of the Trump empire”.The publisher also said Trump III was motivated to write by the 2024 election, and suggested his book might “shape the decision of a nation”.The book spares little in its portrayal of Trump attitudes about race.Of Queens in the 1960s and 70s, Trump III says it was “one of the most diverse places on the planet” but also one of contrast, between Jamaica Estates, the affluent, white neighborhood where the Trumps lived, and areas where majority people of color lived.“If something bad happened” to residents of Jamaica Estates, Trump III writes, “they were the ones who did it. Almost certainly, it was them.”He considers a key question: “So, was Donald a racist?”Noting that “people have been asking for decades”, Trump III say his uncle used the N-word at a time when he says “people said all kinds of crude, thoughtless, prejudiced things”, adding: “Maybe everyone in Queens was a racist then.”Trump III says he did not hear his grandfather, Fred Trump Sr, use the N-word, but did hear him “sometimes say schvartze, the Yiddish slur for Black people, and his tenants were uniformly white. That had to mean something, didn’t it?”In 1973, Fred Trump Sr, Donald Trump and the Trump company were sued by the US justice department, alleging racial discrimination at New York housing developments.Trump III writes: “This was a painful period for the company and therefore for Donald … all the publicity was bad publicity. The ‘r’ word – racist – was thrown around.”The Trumps countersued and the case was settled “with no admission of guilt”, as Donald Trump has said.Trump III also addresses his grandfather’s apparent arrest at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927, which he says surprised the family when it was recently reported. Detailing an incident in his own childhood in which he says three “tough-looking Black kids” stole his bike, Trump III says his Uncle Donald demanded one of the kids be “punished” and locked up.He then cites another flashpoint in Donald Trump’s adult life: the day in 1989 when he “took out full-page ads in the New York City newspapers, demanding harsh [in fact capital] punishment for the Central Park Five”, Black teenagers wrongfully imprisoned over the rape of a white woman.“I couldn’t say I was surprised,” Trump III writes. “Suddenly, I was right back … in Queens.” More