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      It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders review – straight talking from the socialist senator

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      ReviewIt’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders review – straight talking from the socialist senatorSanders tackles the grim facts about the economic order that the political establishment wilfully ignores“When we talk about uber-capitalism in its rawest form – about greed that knows no limit, about corporations that viciously oppose the right of workers to organize, about the abuses of wealth and power that tear apart our society – we’re talking about Amazon,” writes Bernie Sanders in his new book. “And when we’re talking about Amazon, we’re talking about Jeff Bezos.”These are typical lines in what comprises an attack on the status quo from every conceivable direction. Sanders addresses his own two ultimately thwarted campaigns to lead the Democratic party; the crisis in American healthcare and the chasms of health inequality shown up by Covid; the declining union movement and stagnation of wages; the burgeoning billionaire class and its impact on democracy; and the looming environmental crisis. Nothing he says will come as any surprise to his supporters, who are legion. Everything he says is quite unfashionable, from the macro – greed is bad, actually – to the micro, still using “uber” to mean “ultra”, as if Uber itself didn’t exist. He has no compunction about his reference points, which go from the obvious (F Scott Fitzgerald observing that thing about the rich) to the niche (a union organiser and folk singer named Florence Reece, who wrote a song in the 1930s called Which Side Are You On?). If his ideas were a band, they’d be the Ink Spots, with songs written a long, long time ago, and all the intros the same.These aren’t complex propositions. Of course it’s wrong to profit from other people’s illness; of course when access to healthcare is tied to work, that puts citizens in a state of semi-bonded servitude. Of course corporations are actively anti-social, of course they have driven down wages over 50 years and immiserated the workforce. Of course when three firms – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – control assets equivalent to the GDP of the entire United States, we’re into the rotting phase of late-stage capitalism.Sanders’ popularity and his immense value to the political ecosystem stems from his willingness to say all this out loud, defying the credo which has defined mainstream discourse since at least the Clinton era: that the class war is over, that capitalism is as inevitable as the weather, and that markets don’t need morals, because they have their own separate schematics, drawn by an invisible hand.In other words, his book is easily as frustrating and depressing as it is galvanising and uplifting; reading one story or statistic after another, about growing inequality, child poverty, financial insecurity – 77% of Americans are now anxious about their financial situation – one’s very lack of surprise reinforces a sense of hopelessness.Yet, particularly in the early chapters, which cover the intricacies of both Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and his (also often thwarted) work as the chairman of Congress’s Budget Committee since the election of Joe Biden, you cannot ignore the fact that the wind has changed. Precisely because Sanders is such a straightforward thinker and writer, he insists on some facts that the political establishment – on both sides – wilfully ignores. It is objectively better, more democratic, more plural, when a campaign is funded by grassroots donations than when a candidate has to go cap in hand to Peter Thiel. The Democrats do better in the polls when they allow in their left flank, rather than try to erase it in the name of electability. And at the level of the principle, to let the man himself take over, “wars and excessive military budgets are not good”; “carbon emissions are not good”; “racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia are not good”; “exploiting workers is not good”. This isn’t the book to come to for new ideas, in other words. But it’s a capitalist fallacy that everything has to be new, in any case.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTopicsBooksUS politicsBernie SandersDemocratsreviewsReuse this content More

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      The Lincoln Miracle review: how Republicans chose their great redeemer

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      ReviewThe Lincoln Miracle review: how Republicans chose their great redeemer As the Republican Party marches right, Edward Achorn’s second book on the 16th president makes instructive readingThe party of Lincoln is dead. A half century after the civil rights backlash begat Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, Donald Trump announced on Fox News that his accomplishments may have surpassed those of the 16th president.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead more“So, I think I’ve done more for the black community than any other president, and let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, ’cause he did good, although it’s always questionable.”Descendants of those freed from slavery under Lincoln? They would probably differ.Trump grew up in Queens, a New York borough, but his heart belongs to Dixie. He called the Confederate Robert E Lee one of the greatest US generals and said there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white supremacists marched in August 2017 and a counter-protester was murdered. Truly, Trump has cast the Republican party in his own image.Against this bleak backdrop, Edward Achorn delivers The Lincoln Miracle, an in-depth examination of Abraham Lincoln’s successful quest for the Republican presidential nomination at the convention of 1860.Achorn is Pulitzer finalist, particularly interested in the 19th century and baseball. The Lincoln Miracle is Achorn’s fourth book but second on Lincoln, after Every Drop of Blood, about the second inaugural address of 1864. The Lincoln Miracle is beautifully written, filled with vivid and easily digested prose.The reader knows Lincoln will prevail, the US will shortly be at war with itself and the Union will triumph at great cost. Foreknowledge does not detract. The Lincoln Miracle’s themes are timeless, its subtitle apt: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History.Achorn deftly lays out the personas, demographics and rivalries that shaped the nominating contest and the 1860 election. The Whig party was spent, riven by slavery and nativism. Anti-Catholicism was a force. Anti-German sentiment too. The nation was buffeted by the competing pulls of abolitionism and preservation of the Union. Republicans were divided, Democrats fractured. The Democratic convention was an abject failure. Compromise was not in the air.Three years earlier, the supreme court had issued its infamous Dred Scott decision, reading slavery into the constitution. Short of constitutional amendment or war, there was little to be done. Slavery had morphed into a right.At the Illinois Republican convention in 1858, Lincoln delivered what would come to be known as the House Divided speech. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he quoted from the Book of Matthew, his Baptist upbringing manifest. Lincoln may have been a deist but he appreciated Scripture. According to Achorn, he believed “pain and failure were endemic to human life”. People could only do so much. The rest was in the hands of an “inscrutable” God.“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half-slave and half-free,” Lincoln said. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”Lincoln had served one term in Congress, back in the 1840s. His antipathy to slavery was well known. So was his opposition to popular sovereignty, the notion that new states could decide for themselves if slavery would be legal within their borders. In 1858, Lincoln was running for a US Senate seat. He battled the Democrat Stephen Douglas on that very point. Lincoln won the debates but lost the election. In 1859, John Brown seized the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to arm the enslaved. He was put to death for treason. The glue that held the country together was quickly coming undone.Lincoln had a rematch with Douglas. In the fall of 1860, in a four-way election, both men vied for the White House. Lincoln had been an underdog for the Republican nomination, never mind the presidency. How he won the first prize before he won the second is a tale worth telling. His political march signaled how he would govern, how he would impose his vision and will on the country.Lincoln respected the foundational documents, wedding his opposition to slavery to the founders’ stated ideals.“He was acceptable,” writes Achorn, “because he celebrated the founding fathers and Declaration of Independence. Lincoln believed intensely that the founders had opposed slavery as an obvious contradiction of the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and had set it on the road to extinction.”Nowadays, the 1619 Project takes a different view. The issue is live once more.Lincoln knew patience could be a virtue, that he could bend time to his side. At the Republican convention, in a huge wooden “wigwam” in Chicago, he was the darkest of dark horses. With each round of balloting, his odds improved. After the first round, Lincoln was more than 70 votes behind William Seward, the New York senator and favorite to be the nominee. After the second ballot, Seward’s margin collapsed. Lincoln’s victory, in the third round, was inevitable. Seward became Lincoln’s secretary of state.Every Drop of Blood review: how Lincoln’s Second Inaugural bound America’s woundsRead moreThe Lincoln Miracle describes political battles on a stage long vanished. The book lands in an America transformed. The last president from Lincoln’s party demands the constitution be terminated. He considers a return to the White House – and dines with an anti-Semite and a white supremacist.But 19th-century dynamics have not completely vanished. On the right, John C Calhoun, father of the filibuster, proponent of white supremacy and secession, is praised. Into the Republican presidential race strides Nikki Haley, a Trump appointee turned rival who once told the Sons of Confederate Veterans states had the right to secede. There’s more. The civil war the Confederacy fought to maintain slavery? A matter, in Haley’s weasel words, of “tradition versus change”.More than 150 years after Lincoln’s assassination, the embers of civil war still glow. The Lincoln Miracle is relevant reading indeed.
      The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History is published in the US by Grove Atlantic
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      Untouchable review: Trump as ‘lawless Houdini’ above US justice

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      ReviewUntouchable review: Trump as ‘lawless Houdini’ above US justice Elie Honig offers a powerful indictment of the former president and those who have failed to bring him downThis book by a former federal prosecutor is subtitled “How Powerful People Get Away With It” but its overwhelming focus is Donald Trump and Merrick Garland, the most famous unindicted miscreant of modern times and the attorney general most responsible for the failure, so far, to prosecute any of his offences.People vs Donald Trump review: Mark Pomerantz pummels Manhattan DARead moreElie Honig writes that a “staggering parade” of Trump’s henchmen have been indicted, convicted, imprisoned or all three: Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, Thomas Barrack, Elliott Broidy, Sam Patten, George Nader, Allen Weisselberg and – last but not least – the Trump Organization itself.And yet, somehow, “a lawless Houdini … stands at the epicenter of the carnage, untouched, undeterred, and, if anything, emboldened”.Honig thinks the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, is still “the most likely to indict Trump” for his efforts to tamper with election results. But Honig makes a powerful case that “the prime opportunities to hold Trump criminally accountable for his actions have passed”, as federal and state prosecutors, especially Garland, “have fumbled away their best chances and inexcusably allowed years to lapse without meaningful action”.In the last four years, justice department leaders have zigzagged between extremes. First there was the wildly political and persistently dishonest William Barr, whose efforts to keep Trump safe ranged from keeping his name out of the indictment of Cohen for illegal hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, to Barr’s flatly false assertion that evidence developed by the special counsel Robert Mueller was “not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense”.Then came Garland, who is the opposite of Barr but who so far has managed to be nearly as helpful to Trump as his predecessor.“The problem,” Honig writes, “is in seeking to … restore political independence [for the justice department], Garland has gone too far …“It’s one thing to do the job without regard to politics. But it’s another to contort ordinary prosecutorial judgement to avoid doing anything that might even be perceived as political or controversial.”Honig prosecuted more than a hundred members of the mafia. He recounts several such cases, highlighting the similarities between the chiefs of famous families like the Luccheses and Gambinos and the man at the top of the Trump Organization.One way in which they operate the same way is to make sure subordinates lie to protect their boss, without being directly ordered to do so. For example, Cohen perjured himself when he said Trump’s efforts to build a tower in Moscow ended before the Iowa caucuses in 2016. They actually continued for months, into the “heart of the presidential campaign”.Honig writes: “Trump never said to Cohen, ‘I need you to lie for me.’ Instead, Trump openly lied in public about the timing of the Russia deal ‘for all to see’ – including Cohen.“Therein lies the beauty of being a boss. Trump never said the magic words that would have obviously given rise to criminal liability.”Honig also focuses on the dubious ethics of the former Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr, who bungled a chance to indict two of Trump’s children over the Trump Soho project, then did the same with an investigation of Trump himself.The lawyer for Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump was Marc Kasowitz. As the New Yorker, ProPublica and WNYC reported, Kasowitz gave Vance a $25,000 campaign contribution in January 2012 – just five months before meeting with Vance about the Trump kids’ case.Vance returned Kasowitz’s contribution just before his meeting with Kasowitz. Three months after the meeting, Vance dropped the case against the Trumps. Incredibly, just a few weeks after that, “Vance accepted a brand new, even larger campaign contribution from Kasowitz, who personally donated almost $32,000 and raised at least $18,000 more.” Five years later – only after the New Yorker had reported those additional contributions – Vance returned Kasowitz’s contribution again!“This much is beyond dispute,” Honig writes. “The sequence here looked terrible.”But no one comes out looking worse than Garland. Trump was protected while he was in the White House by a decades-old justice department memoranda which concluded it was impossible to indict a sitting president. After 21 January 2021, Trump lost that protection. But for many months, Garland did nothing concrete to take advantage.Honig offers the seven-count indictment he says he would have brought against Trump if he were the prosecutor in charge. It would include:
      Count 1: obstruction of justice. The Mueller report’s description of Trump’s firing of the FBI director James Comey and his attempts to fire special counsel Mueller provides overwhelming evident that “Trump obstructed justice”.
      Count 2: campaign finance violations connected to hush money paid to two of Trump’s alleged former girlfriends.
      Count 3: bribery, extortion, foreign election aid and witness retaliating and tampering, all of which were the subject of Trump’s first impeachment.
      Count 4: conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding and election interference – the subject of the second impeachment.
      Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nationRead moreHonig’s final conclusion: while “Garland plays by Marquess of Queensbury rules”, Trump is “a remorseless street brawler”. Garland could have brought criminal charges “but he didn’t, at least not in a timely manor … As many advantages as the system gave to Trump, and as aggressive and effective as he has been in explaining them, Garland still could have achieved some measure of justice, if he had just done his job.”This week brought the news that Jack Smith, the special counsel belatedly appointed by Garland to investigate Trump, had subpoenaed Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, as part of his investigation of the former president’s post-election activities.Perhaps the justice department will manage to defy expectations and return an indictment against Donald Trump. This powerful book, however, offers very little hope for that most desirable outcome.
      Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away With It is published in the US by Harper
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      People vs Donald Trump review: Mark Pomerantz pummels Manhattan DA

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      ReviewPeople vs Donald Trump review: Mark Pomerantz pummels Manhattan DAProsecutor who helped convict John Gotti thinks Alvin Bragg let Trump slip from the hook. His memoir proves controversial Mark Pomerantz is a well-credentialed former federal prosecutor. As a younger man he clerked for a supreme court justice and helped send the mob boss John Gotti to prison. He did stints in corporate law. In 2021, he left retirement to join the investigation of Donald Trump by the Manhattan district attorney. Pomerantz’s time with the DA was substantive but controversial.Trump porn star payment a ‘zombie case’ that wouldn’t die, ex-prosecutor says in bookRead moreIn summer 2021, he helped deliver an indictment for tax fraud against the Trump Organization and Alan Weisselberg, its chief financial officer. At the time, Cy Vance Jr, the son of Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, was Manhattan DA. Pomerantz also interviewed Michael Cohen, Trump fanboy turned convicted nemesis, pored over documents and clamored for the indictment of the former president on racketeering charges.For Pomerantz, nailing Trump for his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who claims an affair Trump denies, didn’t pass muster. But that avenue of prosecution was a “zombie case” that wouldn’t die. It still hasn’t: a Manhattan grand jury again hears evidence.Pomerantz saw Trump as a criminal mastermind aided by flunkies and enforcers. He believed charges ought to align with the gravity of the crimes. But as Pomerantz now repeatedly writes in his memoir, Alvin Bragg, elected district attorney in November 2021, did not want to move against Trump. In early 2022, Bragg balked. In March, Pomerantz quit – and leaked his resignation letter.“I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the penal law,” Pomerantz fumed. “I fear that your decision means that Mr Trump will not be held fully accountable for his crimes.”Now comes the memoir, People vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account. It is a 300-page exercise in score-settling and scorn. Pomerantz loathes Trump and holds Bragg in less than high regard. He equates the former president with Gotti and all but dismisses the DA as a progressive politician, not an actual crime-fighter.In a city forever plagued by crime and political fights about it, Bragg’s time as DA has proved controversial: over guns, trespassing, turnstile jumping, marijuana and, yes, the squeegee men.Bragg is African American. This week, a group of high-ranking Black officials protested against Pomerantz’s attacks. In response, Pomerantz called Bragg “respected, courageous, ethical and thoughtful” but said: “I disagreed with him about the decision he made in the Trump case.”In his resignation letter, Pomerantz wrote: “I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice.”Trump, he now writes, “seemed always to stay one step ahead of the law”. That may conjure up images of Road Runner and Wile E Coyote but Pomerantz is serious. “In my career as a lawyer, I had encountered only one other person who touched all of these bases: John Gotti, the head of the Gambino organised crime family.”The Goodfellas vibe is integral to Trumpworld. In The Devil’s Bargain, way back in 2017, Joshua Green narrated how Trump tore into Paul Manafort, his then campaign manager, shouting: “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?” It was if Trump was channeling Joe Pesci.With the benefit of hindsight, Pomerantz concludes that the US justice department is better suited to handle a wholesale financial investigation of Trump than the Manhattan DA. Then again, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, has a lot on his plate. An insurrection is plenty.Pomerantz’s book has evoked strong reactions. Trump is enraged, of course. On Truth Social, he wrote: “Crooked Hillary Clinton’s lawyer [Pomerantz says he has never met her], radically deranged Mark Pomerantz, led the fake investigation into me and my business at the Manhattan DA’s Office and quit because DA Bragg, rightfully, wanted to drop the ‘weak’ and ‘fatally flawed’ case. This is disgraceful conduct by Pomerantz, especially since, as always, I’ve done nothing wrong!”Really?In December, a Manhattan jury convicted the Trump Organization on 17 counts of tax fraud and the judge imposed a $1.6m fine. Alan Weisselberg pleaded guilty and testified against his employer. Trump and three of his children – Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric – are defendants in a $250m civil lawsuit brought by Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on fraud-related charges. That case comes to trial in October 2023, months before the presidential primary. Sooner than that will be the E Jean Carroll trial, over alleged defamation and a rape claim Trump denies.Significantly, state prosecutors say Pomerantz may have crossed an ethical line.“By writing and releasing a book in the midst of an ongoing case, the author is upending the norms and ethics of prosecutorial conduct and is potentially in violation of New York criminal law,” J Anthony Jordan, president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, announced.Never Give an Inch review: Mike Pompeo as ‘heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass’Read moreBragg accused Pomerantz of violating a confidentiality agreement. Pomerantz is unbowed. “I am comfortable that this book will not prejudice any investigation or prosecution of Donald Trump,” he states on the page. No formal ethics complaint has appeared.Pomerantz also offers a window on personalities that crossed his path. Cohen receives ample attention. Pomerantz lauds Trump’s former fixer for his cooperation but reiterates that Cohen pleaded guilty to perjury.His conduct left Pomerantz shaking his head. Cohen’s liking for publicity could be unsettling. So was his Oval Office tête-a-tête with Trump over the payment to Daniels. Pomerantz was disgusted. Trump and Cohen, he writes, defiled America’s Holy of Holies, its “sanctum sanctorum”.No harm, no foul. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, announced: “Mr Cohen will continue to cooperate with DA Bragg and his team, speaking truth to power – as he has always done.” On Wednesday, Cohen met the Manhattan DA for the 15th time. Pomerantz is gone. The show goes on.
      People vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      Ron DeSantis’ academic restrictions show he hopes to change history by censoring it | Francine Prose

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      Ron DeSantis’ academic restrictions show he hopes to change history by censoring itFrancine ProseFlorida’s Stop Woke Act and ban on African American studies will only deprive students of the right to think and learn For some time now, conservative groups have pressured libraries and classrooms to remove certain “controversial” books from their shelves and their syllabi. These are texts that tell uncomfortable or unpopular truths about our nation’s origins, including inequality, race, history, gender, sexuality, power and class – a range of subjects that a small but vocal group of Americans would prefer to ignore or deny.Ron DeSantis bans African American studies class from Florida high schoolsRead moreThese efforts achieved one of their most notable successes last April when the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the Stop Woke Act, which prohibits in-school discussions about racism, oppression, LBGTQ+ issues and economic inequity. Books that have not been officially vetted and approved must be hidden or covered, lest teachers unknowingly break an ill-defined law against distributing pornography – a felony.On 1 February, these pernicious restrictions on academic freedom spread beyond Florida, when the College Board announced its decision to severely restrict what can and cannot be taught in the newly created advanced placement class in African American studies. Cut from the curriculum (or in some cases made optional) was any discussion of Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, police brutality, queer Black life and the Black Power movements of the 1960s and 70s. Writers who have been removed from the reading list include bell hooks, Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates.These decisions are alarming and disturbing on so many levels that it’s hard to decide which aspect is the most damaging and insidious. At risk are our foundational principles of free speech, our conviction that educators – and not politicians – should be writing up our lesson plans and deciding what transpires in our classrooms, our belief that students can (and need to) consider complicated issues.As someone who has taught for decades, I can hardly imagine abruptly cutting off class discussions that have veered (as they inevitably will) into these now forbidden areas. Must we fear that our students will report us as insurrectionists and felons for having mentioned the grotesque racial disparities in our prison populations? I believe that education not only involves the transmission of hard information but also helps students to think for themselves, to weigh opposing arguments and to make informed decisions. How can these goals be accomplished when we are being told to (quite literally) whitewash our nation’s history, to deny that we are walking on appropriated land in a country built by kidnapped and enslaved people, when we are being encouraged to lie about the very ground beneath our feet?Students aren’t as stupid as the Florida legislature seems to think, and by adopting these new regulations, we are only encouraging them to distrust their teachers and the system that so blatantly misrepresents the realities they so clearly observe around them.In the past, authoritarianism – and the indoctrination that sustains it – has used educational systems to further its agenda. We can recall images of first-graders wearing little red kerchiefs and saluting the eastern bloc dictators, of students let out of class to welcome the Führer to town. We know that democracy depends on the free and open exchange of ideas, on conversations that begin early in the life of its citizens – and that fascism thrives when only one point of view is permitted. DeSantis’s rulings, and the campaigns that have engendered them, are inherently anti-democratic.We cannot change history by censoring it. We cannot pretend that we were never a slave-holding society, that racism ceased to exist when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. We cannot erase the past, or influence a young person’s gender and sexuality by removing a book from the library. Students are not political pawns or ideologues-in-training. They are our future and it’s frightening to imagine a future populated by citizens who were forbidden to argue and debate, to hear about a historical event from multiple perspectives and to learn to make the critical judgments and necessary distinctions that will help them navigate our increasingly complex and challenging world.It’s been noted that Ron DeSantis graduated with a degree in history from Yale, where he was presumably encouraged to engage in – and to learn from – the open debates that he is now attempting to stifle. Presumably, too, he learned what a good education is, what it means to be taught to think – and that is precisely what he is denying students who are less privileged than he and his Yale classmates.It’s a political decision designed to win over the Trump supporters that the governor will need in his bid for the presidency – that is, white working-class Americans who don’t understand that their own children are also being denied the education that will help them overcome the class divisions that perpetuate our economic inequality. Private school students will still be able to study history in depth, to learn to reason, to process and assess the accuracy of what they are being told. It’s the public school kids who will be funneled into the low-paying jobs, the dim futures for which their schooling has (not accidentally) prepared them.‘We’ve moved backwards’: US librarians face unprecedented attacks amid rightwing book bansRead moreUltimately, what’s most troubling about the new restrictions and proscriptions is that historical facts are being recast as snowflake propaganda. The truth is being distorted or omitted at a moment when we, as a nation, have never so desperately needed to maintain our grip on reality.Without being taught to distinguish truth from fiction, without being asked to think, without learning how this country evolved – a history not just of heroism and noble principles but of theft, brutality and crime – our students will be easy prey to every conspiracy theory that comes along. They will find it far more difficult to imagine and implement the important ways in which we hope to become a more equitable, less racist – and better educated – society.
      Francine Prose is a former president of Pen American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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      Trump porn star payment a ‘zombie case’ that wouldn’t die, ex-prosecutor says in book

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      Trump porn star payment a ‘zombie case’ that wouldn’t die, ex-prosecutor says in bookMark Pomerantz writes of frustration of attempt to make hush money to Stormy Daniels a money-laundering case Donald Trump’s hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels is a “zombie case” that keeps coming back from the dead, a former New York prosecutor writes in a new book published as his former office once again considers filing criminal charges against the former president over the matter.Prosecutors likened Trump to mob boss and had to prove he wasn’t insane – bookRead morePeople vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account, will be published in the US on Tuesday. It has been extensively reported. The Guardian received a copy.Mark Pomerantz’s book has proved controversial, not least because it arrives as the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, continues to investigate Trump, empaneling a grand jury hearing evidence about the Daniels payment. Bragg and Pomerantz, who fell out over the investigation of Trump, have exchanged broadsides in the media.On the page, Pomerantz lists numerous matters on which he says New York prosecutors considered charging Trump, including his tax affairs, his relationships with financial institutions including Deutsche Bank and Ladder Capital, property deals in Washington and Chicago, and leases at Trump Tower in Manhattan.But he says the Daniels payment came to seem a viable way to take Trump on.Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claims to have had an affair with Trump in 2006. He denies it, but in 2016, as he ran for president, his then lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet.News of the payment broke in early 2018, when Trump was president. Trump was revealed to have reimbursed Cohen for the payment but only Cohen paid a legal price, his breach of election finance law contributing to a three-year prison sentence. Trump has never been charged.In his book, Pomerantz writes that he came to view the payment as a potential money-laundering offence.“If Clifford had gotten money by threatening to tell the world that she had slept with Donald Trump,” he writes, “that sounded like extortion to me. And if it was extortion, then maybe the hush money she received could be regarded as criminal proceeds, so action taken to conceal Trump’s identity as the source of the money was chargeable as money laundering.”This, Pomerantz writes, was “a new idea, and I got enthusiastic about it”. He shared his ideas with other investigators, he says, and “the return to life of the hush money facts as a potential basis for prosecution sparked a nickname for this part of the investigation … the ‘zombie’ case, because it was alive, and then it was dead, and now it had sprung back to life”.Pomerantz writes that he thought the “zombie case” was “very strong”, as the basic facts were “readily provable”. He describes Cohen’s willing cooperation and evidence that Trump directed Cohen to lie about the payment in the Oval Office itself.In late February 2021, Pomerantz says, he sent a memo to the New York district attorney, then Cy Vance Jr, outlining the “zombie case” and its vital contention that the $130,000 Cohen paid Daniels was “‘dirty money’, or the proceeds of a crime”.He admits he was presenting “a somewhat awkward construct”, in part as he would have to prove Trump was a victim of blackmail.Cohen’s description of Trump’s reaction to Daniels’s claims helped. Pomerantz writes: “I asked what words did they use, and his answer was that Trump referred to it as ‘fucking blackmail’. That was more than sufficient for my purposes.”But Pomerantz says his “creative theorising smacked into [the New York district attorney’s] cautious and conservative culture”. Other investigators “balked” at his extortion theory, he writes, partially because it would be hard to prove Daniels had physically threatened Trump, as necessary under New York law.Pomerantz then focused on Daniels’s lawyer and extracting information from federal prosecutors in New York. But he said he came upon “a new legal problem” which returned the “zombie case” to its grave.Under New York law, he writes, the money Daniels received “had to qualify as ‘criminal proceeds’ when Cohen sent it; otherwise sending was not money laundering. If the money became criminal proceeds only when received, the crime of money laundering had not taken place.”And so the “zombie case” was dead again.Pomerantz describes a brief flutter back to life, when he and colleagues were “contemplating an indictment that featured false business records … which would bring the ‘zombie’ theory back from the dead once again”.But Bragg, who succeeded Vance as Manhattan district attorney, became a lightning rod for liberals when he was reported to have backed away from indicting Trump on any charge. Pomerantz resigned in February 2022, accusing Bragg of acting “contrary to the public interest”.On Sunday, discussing Trump’s tax affairs, Pomerantz told CBS: “If you take the exact same conduct, and make it not about Donald Trump and not about a former president of the United States, would the case have been indicted? It would have been indicted in a flat second.”Pomerantz also called Bragg’s decision not to indict Trump a “grave failure of justice”.Bragg told the New York Times Pomerantz “decided to quit a year ago and sign a book deal”.“I haven’t read the book and won’t comment on any ongoing investigation because of the harm it could cause to the case,” Bragg said.Bragg did secure a conviction against the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, on tax charges. Not long after that, the investigation of the Daniels payment was reported to be ongoing.Trump complained about “a continuation of the Greatest Witch Hunt of all time”.But Pomerantz’s “zombie” case has bounced back from the grave once again.In his book, Pomerantz says that if the hush money case is the only one the New York DA pursues against Trump, it will be “a very peculiar and unsatisfying end to this whole saga”, given that “persistent fraud … permeated [Trump’s] financial statements”.“That case involves serious criminal misconduct, [but] it pales in comparison to the financial statement fraud.”TopicsBooksDonald TrumpPolitics booksUS politicsUS crimeMichael CohenStormy DanielsnewsReuse this content More

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      The Aftermath review: a younger, more liberal America? OK, Boomer

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      ReviewThe Aftermath review: a younger, more liberal America? OK, BoomerPhilip Bump of the Washington Post has produced a fascinating account of demographic change and future possibilities Younger Americans are decidedly more liberal than their parents. On election day 2022 they thwarted a ballyhooed “red wave”, saved the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock from defeat and deflated Kari Lake’s bid for Arizona governor. Nationally, voters under 30 went Democratic 63-35.Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nationRead moreMillennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, and members of Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are also less than proud of living in the US, according to survey data. Suffice to say, “Maga” sloganeering leaves them less than reassured.Those generations grew up in the shadows of 9/11, the Iraq war, the great recession and Covid. Their school lunch menus featured shooter lockdown drills. They are ethnically diverse. Millennials have defied political expectations. They did not shift right with age. Instead, they make Republicans sweat.Along with race, gender and culture, inter-generational rivalry can be tossed into that long-simmering pile of resentments known as America’s cold civil war. Enter Philip Bump and his first book, aptly subtitled The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America. Bump is a national columnist for the Washington Post. Demographics, culture and economics are part of his remit. Through that prism, The Aftermath delivers.Bump attempts to explain how the US reached its present inflection point and offers a glimpse of what may come next. His tone is methodical, not alarmist.Gently, he introduces the reader to the term “pig in the python”, coined by Landon Jones, once managing editor of People magazine, to describe the demographic bulge created by GIs who returned from the second world war. Bump pays respect to Jones’s book, Great Expectations, which stands among the “first serious examinations of the baby boom”. Hence the label Baby Boomers, for people born in those fertile post-war years.Boomer politicians include Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich. They may not have made the world a better place but they definitely left their mark. Their appetites frequently eclipsed their judgment. Clinton and Trump were impeached. Both faced lawsuits alleging sexual assault. Gingrich was forced out as House speaker.“They are a generational tyranny,” Bump quotes Jones.“OK Boomer” is a catchphrase and retort, not a compliment.More than three decades ago, Lee Atwater, the manager of George HW Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, believed the boomer experience provided a more cohesive political glue than income, political tradition or religion.“This group has dominated American culture in one form or another since it came into being,” he observed.Stratocaster in hand, Atwater played with Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones at Bush’s inauguration. The new president jammed along on air guitar. Atwater recorded an album with BB King and others. Now, Atwater, Bush, King and Charlie Watts are gone. Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards play on. There’s always time for one more tour, until there isn’t.Bump also addresses tensions within the Democrats’ diverse, upstairs-downstairs coalition, observing that race and ethnicity are not necessarily destiny. Among minority voters without college degrees, the party of FDR and JFK has ceded ground to the GOP. The much-vaunted “coalition of the ascendant” has not lived up to its hype.Bump notes divides between Black and Latino voters. In the 2020 primaries, Black Democrats sided with Joe Biden, Latinos with Bernie Sanders. Among Latinos, Trump ran three points better against Biden than against Hillary Clinton. Among Black voters, he was five points better.As with working-class whites, cultural issues retained their salience for those without a degree. Before the supreme court gutted a woman’s right to choose, Republicans possessed the luxury of watching the Democrats trip over themselves as they grappled with the latest leftwing orthodoxy, turning off wide swaths of the electorate, including Boomers, as they did so.Now it’s the Republicans’ turn to squirm. Voters in red Kansas and Kentucky rejected abortion bans. In the midterms, inflation and abortion were the two most important issues. Inflation may be receding but abortion is not going away.As Bump observes, women older than 60 frequently emerged as both faces of the resistance to Trump and a moderating force. More than three in five Americans are angry or dissatisfied with the supreme court decision on abortion, yet the GOP faithful demands self-immolation.Affirmative action provides another example of ethnic fluidity. In 1996, California adopted Proposition 196 and scrapped race-based preferences, despite overwhelming Latino opposition. As Bump describes it, the Latino share of the electorate was smaller than its proportion of the population. If results were weighted to reflect that larger figure, Proposition 196 would been defeated.Priorities of ethnic blocs can change. By 2020, support for affirmative action among Californian Latinos appeared lukewarm at best. At the same time Californians were sending Biden to the White House they resoundingly rejected Proposition 16, an attempt to undo Proposition 196.By the numbers, backers of Proposition 16 spent more than $31m for around 44% support. Opponents of the measure raised a meager $1.6m yet took 56%.Bump posits that in the future, the US will look more like Florida: older and less white. Florida has moved right in recent years – whether ageing millennials and Gen Z-ers push it back towards the center remains, of course, to be seen. Bump also poses a series of “what ifs”, unanswered: “What happens if changes in the state reduce the motivation for Americans or immigrants to move there? What if the federal government further constrains international migration?”“Florida’s future is dependent on decisions made in the present,” he writes. “The long term depends on the short term.”
      The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America is published in the US by Penguin Random House
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      Prosecutors likened Trump to mob boss and had to prove he wasn’t insane – book

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      Prosecutors likened Trump to mob boss and had to prove he wasn’t insane – bookMark Pomerantz, who was on New York team investigating tax affairs, reportedly compares ex-president to John Gotti New York prosecutors building a case against Donald Trump for allegedly lying about his wealth for tax purposes had to show the former president was “not legally insane”, one of those prosecutors reportedly writes in an eagerly awaited new book.Why prosecutors might get Trump – and not Biden – for classified documentsRead moreThe lawyer, Mark Pomerantz, also reportedly compares Trump, the only confirmed candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, to famous figures in the world of organised crime including John Gotti, the “Teflon Don” who died in prison in 2002.In messages seen by the Guardian on Friday, one former Trump administration official called the comparison “unfair to the late Mr Gotti”.Pomerantz was part of attempts by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to build a case against Trump, but quit in February 2022 as the DA, Alvin Bragg, decided not to indict.Pomerantz is now the author of The People vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account, due to be published in the US on Tuesday. The book has angered Bragg, who is still investigating Trump, and the former president, who has threatened to sue.News outlets obtained the book on Friday. The Daily Beast reported Pomerantz’s words about Trump and insanity.“To rebut the claim that Trump believed his own ‘hype’,” Pomerantz writes, the Beast says, “we would have to show, and stress, that Donald Trump was not legally insane.“Was Donald Trump suffering from some sort of mental condition that made it impossible for him to distinguish between fact and fiction?”According to the Beast, Pomerantz writes that lawyers “discussed whether Trump had been spewing bullshit for so many years about so many things that he could no longer process the difference between bullshit and reality”.The New York Times also obtained the book. It reported that Pomerantz says Trump rose to fame and power “through a pattern of criminal activity”.“He demanded absolute loyalty and would go after anyone who crossed him,” Pomerantz reportedly writes. “He seemed always to stay one step ahead of the law. In my career as a lawyer, I had encountered only one other person who touched all of these bases: John Gotti, the head of the Gambino organised crime family.”A lawyer for Trump, Joe Tacopina, told the Times: “Injecting the name John Gotti into this seems like just another desperate attempt by Pomerantz to sell books.”Pomerantz reportedly writes that he considered a racketeering case under New York laws used against mobsters, an idea eventually dropped as too ambitious.Bragg has recently revived the investigation of Trump’s role in a 2016 hush money payment to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, who claims an affair with Trump that the ex-president denies.The Manhattan DA is reportedly seeking cooperation from Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization chief financial officer recently given a five-month jail sentence for tax offences.Trump faces legal jeopardy on numerous other fronts, from his attempts to overturn the 2020 election to his retention of classified documents and a rape allegation by the writer E Jean Carroll, a claim Trump denies. The former president also faces an ongoing civil suit over his financial practices brought by the New York state attorney general, Letitia James.On Friday, Bragg told the Times: “Our skilled and professional legal team continues to follow the facts of this case wherever they may lead, without fear or favor.“Mr Pomerantz decided to quit a year ago and sign a book deal. I haven’t read the book and won’t comment on any ongoing investigation because of the harm it could cause to the case.”Pomerantz denies prejudicing investigations of Trump. According to the Beast, he writes that when he was on the team, prosecutors “had a case, but it was not without issues, and certainly could not be described as a slam dunk”.He also reportedly describes disagreements within Bragg’s team about how to proceed.“It was frustrating to feel like we were about to march into battle and were strapping on our guns and equipment, but when we looked around at the rest of the platoon we saw a lot of conscientious objectors,” Pomerantz reportedly writes.The Times said: “The book’s description of conversations between Mr Pomerantz and Mr Bragg’s team could arguably complicate the investigation. In particular, Mr Pomerantz detailed Mr Bragg’s opposition to using Michael D Cohen, a longtime fixer for Mr Trump who turned on the former president, as a witness, an awkward disclosure now that Mr Cohen may become one of Mr Bragg’s star witnesses.”Cohen was jailed for offences including the payment to Daniels. He said this week he had once again given his phones to investigators.In his book, the Times said, Pomerantz calls Bragg’s investigation “the legal equivalent of a plane crash”, caused by “pilot error”.On Friday, Bragg told the Times: “Mr Pomerantz’s plane wasn’t ready for takeoff.”TopicsBooksDonald TrumpUS politicsUS taxationUS crimeOrganised crimePolitics booksnewsReuse this content More