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      The battle to keep LGBTQ+books in Louisiana libraries

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      The battle to keep LGBTQ+books in Louisiana libraries Conservatives in the state are pushing for library systems to remove books with LGBTQ+ themes and charactersMel Manuel never expected to be an activist – they even shy away from the term.“No, no way,” they said with a laugh. “No, I’ve just been a teacher my whole life.”‘We’ve moved backwards’: US librarians face unprecedented attacks amid rightwing book bansRead moreBut earlier this month, Manuel found themselves at a St Tammany library board of control meeting, packed in a small room of the local library in Covington, Louisiana, a town of just over 10,000 people directly across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. They were there to speak out against efforts to remove certain books from the library’s collection.Public library systems in Louisiana are seeing books and materials, many with LGBTQ+ themes and characters, challenged by conservative groups in the state, who are calling for them to be taken off the shelves. St Tammany parish, which includes Covington, is the latest parish – the term Louisiana uses for county – to see a showdown between pro and anti-censorship groups.Borrowing rhetoric already seen in other parts of the US, the pro-censorship groups say the books are inappropriate for children, labeling them as pornographic and pedophilic, and charging them with “grooming”, a term that refers to the process of earning the trust of a minor in order to lure them into sexual exploitation. Far-right groups are increasingly using the term as a homophobic slur against queer people.Attacks on books in public libraries come at a time when the U.S. is in a “heightened threat environment” and LGBTQ+ people are “targets of potential violence” according to a 30 November homeland security department bulletin. And young LGBTQ+ readers in St Tammany parish say they feel hurt when they see people in their community targeting books with characters like them.The anti-censorship groups that believe the books should stay on the stacks say they tell stories of marginalized and underrepresented people and their availability is important for a diverse and equitable society.“We have the highest murder and maternal death rates in the nation and the highest incarceration rates on earth,” Manuel told the library board during the meeting’s public comments, alluding to three of Louisiana’s most pressing endemic issues. “Louisiana has some serious problems, all of which directly harm our children.“We’re ignoring the very real issues our kids are facing and spreading hate in the name of protecting those very same children.”Manuel is trans and a lifelong resident of Covington. They teach high school Spanish and said it’s always been tough to meet new people like them in town. So, in January 2022, Manuel and a friend started a group called “Queer Northshore” to organize events and meet ups for LGBTQ+ people and allies in the area.The group ended up on the frontlines of the battle over local libraries after complaints from conservative groups about an LGBTQ+ Pride month display in one of the branches in July.Opposite them are conservative groups – mainly the St Tammany Library Accountability Project – which claims to be seeking the removal of books and materials they consider to be pornographic or pedophilic in order to “protect children from sexual exploitation”, according to written responses.In addition to other ordinary library business, the 13 December meeting, which drew Manuel and Accountability Project members, considered appeals for two children’s books about which the library had received complaints, or “statements of concern”.One was I Am Jazz, a picture book written by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, relating Jennings’ experience growing up as a trans child.“Transgenderism is a movement and ideology being promoted worldwide without regard to the long-term damaging effects to youngsters who fall victim to the perverting ideology and their promoters,” St Tammany resident Diane Bruni, who submitted the statement of concern, told the library board at the meeting. “The result of accepting this lie is that young children and teens are encouraged to mutilate their bodies with irreversible castrated hormones and surgery.”Bruni also submitted a statement of concern for another book being considered by the board, titled My Rainbow, an autobiographical picture book cowritten by DeShanna and Trinity Neal about a time when DeShanna made a rainbow wig for her trans daughter, Trinity, to boost her confidence.Self-love and acceptance are exactly what author DeShanna Neal said she intended with her book, along with loving family support. “We need to not only listen with our ears but with our hearts,” Neal told the Guardian. “That is what I hope people would take from My Rainbow. That every voice matters, especially when it’s from someone you love.”Ultimately, the library board found that the books did not contain any vulgar material that would warrant their removal and voted to keep them freely available on the stacks for all patrons to browse. “In these books that I’ve read,” library board member William Allin said during the board’s discussion period, “the common theme is, ‘We love you for who you are.’ That’s where the parents end up. That’s the message.”Attendees seeking the removal of the books were disappointed in the board’s decision but said the battle wasn’t over. Accountability Project attorney David Cougle reacted to the telling by telling the board his group would take its case to the parish council and seek a local law that would prevent the materials from being accessed.“We will not stop fighting this until … the children of this community are protected from a predatory library administration,” Cougle said. He predicted voters would ultimately reject a property tax set to be voted on next year that would affect the library system’s budget, essentially threatening to defund the libraries.Numbers do not back up Cougle’s claims that his group’s primary concern is child safety. To date, the St Tammany parish library system has received 82 statements of concern, but only 10% of them are for books classified as juvenile fiction or picture books. Only 1% of the books are for teens. An overwhelming 89% of the books being challenged are for young adults and adults.More than 50% of trans and non-binary youth in US considered suicide this year, survey saysRead moreEven so, the St Tammany library has adopted safeguards. Library director Kelly LaRocca, who was named the 2022 Library Director of the Year by the state’s library association in July, recently instituted new library cards that would prevent children from checking out adult books without a parent. Moreover, LaRocca said St Tammany libraries do not contain any pedophilic materials. “We do have materials that make mention of its existence,” LaRocca told the Guardian, “but we do not own materials with the expressed purpose of furthering pedophilia.”Adding fuel to the fire, Louisiana’s Republican attorney general, Jeff Landry, recently set up the “protecting minors” tip line where people can report complaints about librarians and teachers that connect children with books they say contain inappropriate content. “Rest assured that we are committed to working with our communities to protect minors from early sexualization, as well as grooming, sex trafficking and abuse,” Landry wrote in a Facebook post about the tip line.In a 19 December opinion in the local Times-Picayune newspaper’s website, Landry asserted without evidence that “graphic sexual content” in library books caused porn addiction in children as well as “violent and criminal sexual desires”.Even with the vast majority of the challenged books unavailable with children’s library cards in St Tammany, the Accountability Project and other conservative groups still don’t want them on public library shelves. One of the books that’s been a focus of attacks is Lawn Boy, a semi-autobiographical adult novel about Mike Muñoz, a 22-year-old biracial, non-binary, low-income character who educates himself by reading books at his local library.Author Jonathan Evison told the Guardian that he’s received death threats and has had people threaten to harm his children after his novel was brought before a Texas school board and charged with containing pedophilia last September, a claim that he denies. He said he believes books with LGBTQ+ characters and stories are needed now more than ever. “There’s a whole swathe of young, intelligent people looking for books that are about them, they’re looking to just belong and find their place in this larger culture,” Evison said. “Like Mike says in the book, ‘Where are the books about me?’”Some of the challenged books don’t contain any LGBTQ+ themes or characters, either. Among the list of titles the Accountability Project believes should not be on public library shelves is Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye, which explores the cruelty and pain wrought by racism, and Rupi Kaur’s first poetry collection Milk and Honey.Kaur said she started writing the Milk and Honey poems when she was a young teen as a way to help cope with bullying, mental health issues, sexual assault, depression and anxiety. The collection aims to comfort young readers.How to beat a book ban: students, parents and librarians fight backRead more“It’s meant to help,” Kaur said of such literature, “and it’s so important they’re able to access it no matter where they are.”Bailey Cook, a 12-year-old St Tammany resident who identifies as non-binary and bisexual, told the Guardian that the books targeted by the Accountability Project “make me feel supported”.Cook, who is in Manuel’s daughter’s class in school, said they think the reason books with LGBTQ+-affirming stories are under attack is because some St Tammany parents don’t want their children to be queer.But that shouldn’t be an impediment, Cook said, adding: “Books don’t make people, a person makes a person. You don’t need to get them if you don’t want to. Every book is for somebody, but there is no book for everybody.”TopicsLouisianaLGBTQ+ rightsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Trump left ‘shockingly gracious’ letter to Biden on leaving office, book says

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      Trump left ‘shockingly gracious’ letter to Biden on leaving office, book saysThe Fight of His Life, by Chris Whipple, recounts Joe Biden’s first two years in the White House Donald Trump wrote a “shockingly gracious” letter to Joe Biden on leaving office, a new book says, amid the unprecedented disgrace of a second impeachment for inciting the deadly Capitol attack as part of his attempt to overturn Biden’s election victory and hold on to power.Donald Trump: how will prosecutors pursue the House panel’s charges?Read moreAccording to excerpts published by Politico on Tuesday, The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, by Chris Whipple, captures Biden saying of Trump’s note: “That was very gracious and generous … Shockingly gracious.”Presidents traditionally leave letters for their successors. George HW Bush’s note for Bill Clinton is generally held up as an ideal of civility between presidents from different parties.After Bush died, Clinton wrote in the Washington Post that the letter revealed “the heart of who he was … an honorable, gracious and decent man who believed in the United States, our constitution, our institutions and our shared future”.Trump refuses to admit Biden beat him fairly, faces extensive legal jeopardy for his election subversion attempts, and recently called for the constitution to be “terminated” so he could return to power.Biden has said Trump’s letter was “very generous” but he has not shared its contents. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, authors of the book Peril, on discovering the note in the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Biden “put it in his pocket and did not share it with his advisers”.Whipple’s book will be published in January. He told Politico writing it was “tough, because … this is the most battened-down, disciplined, leak-proof White House in modern times”.But Whipple’s previous books include The Gatekeepers, about White House chiefs of staff, and access to the Biden White House included interviews with Ron Klain, the current holder of that post.Whipple told Politico: “I think Biden’s presidency is the most consequential of my lifetime. His legislative record is comparable to [Lyndon B Johnson’s] and he’s been underestimated every step of the way. But it’s also been a tale of two presidencies – the first year and the second year.“What makes this such a great story is that Joe Biden and his team really turned it all around, I think.”Regarding comments released as reports said Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president of Ukraine, was on his way to Washington to speak, Politico said Whipple cited Biden’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as domestic successes as proof for his contention that the president had turned things around.Whipple interviewed White House staff on “deep background”, allowing quote approval, and conducted written interviews with Biden and Kamala Harris, the vice-president. According to Politico, Harris left some questions blank, while Whipple’s book reports her dissatisfaction with her role and dissent within her team. Biden, Whipple says, initially considered Harris “a work in progress” as vice-president, the office he held for eight years under Barack Obama.Whipple also writes that Biden “felt let down by his briefers” over the US exit from Afghanistan, which was widely held to be a disaster when it took place in late summer 2021. Politico quoted William Burns, the CIA director, Mark Milley, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, and the secretary of state, Tony Blinken, debating the role of US intelligence assessments.Zelenskiy to meet congressional leaders in Washington on Wednesday – reportsRead moreA White House spokesperson said: “We respect that there will be no shortage of books written about the administration containing a wide variety of claims. We don’t plan to engage in confirmations or denials when it comes to the specifics of those claims. The author did not give us a chance to verify the materials that are attributed here.”Politico also reported a direct comment from Klain – to Whipple via text message. Many observers including reporters for Politico expected Biden to suffer a shellacking in the midterm elections last month. In the event Biden and his Democratic party did unexpectedly well, losing the House but only narrowly, holding the Senate and winning key state races.At 1.16am on Wednesday 9 November, the day after election day, Klain texted Whipple to say: “Maybe we don’t suck as much as people thought … Like maybe the nattering negatives who dumped to Politico were wrong!”TopicsBooksJoe BidenBiden administrationDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘That’s Hitler, Bannon thought’: 2022 in books about Trump and US politics

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      ‘That’s Hitler, Bannon thought’: 2022 in books about Trump and US politics The former president continues to dominate political bestseller lists, from staffers’ tell-alls to his own compulsion to tell all to Maggie Haberman and Bob WoodwardDonald Trump has been out of office almost two years, but he is still lodged in America’s consciousness. In mid-November, he declared his 2024 re-election bid. Days later, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, appointed Jack Smith as special counsel.DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead moreTrump has since demanded that the US constitution be terminated, and dined with Ye, the recording artist and antisemite formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist. This week, on a bleak Tuesday afternoon in New York, a jury found the Trump Organization guilty on all counts in a tax fraud trial.The Trump show is never dull. As expected, in 2022 the 45th president left his mark on what Americans read about politics.In February, Jeremy Peters of the New York Times delivered Insurgency, capturing how the party of Lincoln and Reagan morphed into the fiefdom of Trump. Peters caught Steve Bannon rating his former boss among the worst presidents, and likening Trump’s history-making 2015 escalator ride to a scene from Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film.“That’s Hitler, Bannon thought.” By extension, that makes Mar-a-Lago Trump’s Eagle’s Nest.As for Bannon, having burned through a Trump pardon, he awaits sentencing for contempt of Congress and will stand trial next year in Manhattan for conspiracy and fraud.In March came One Damn Thing After Another, another installment of Trump alumni performance art, this time by Bill Barr, the ex-attorney general.Barr took aim at Joe Biden for his stance on Russia, saying “demonizing [Vladimir] Putin is not a foreign policy”, nor “the way grown-ups should think”. Looks like the author didn’t have an invasion of Ukraine on his bingo card. In case anyone cares, Barr still loathes progressives, as his book makes abundantly clear. But he did spill his guts to the January 6 committee.May brought the first political blockbuster of the year, This Will Not Pass, in which Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns delivered 473 pages of essential reading. Kevin McCarthy denied having talked smack about Trump and the January 6 insurrection, so Martin appeared on MSNBC with tapes. The House Republican leader lied.Burns and Martin’s subtitle was “Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future”. They closed with an anxious meditation on the state of US democracy, quoting Malcolm Turnbull, a former prime minister of Australia: “You know that great line that you hear all the time, ‘This is not us. This is not America.’ You know what? It is, actually.”Later in May came A Sacred Oath by Mark Esper, Trump’s last defense secretary, and Here’s the Deal by the former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, Trump administration memoirs – and personas – as different as day and night.Esper pulled no punches, depicting Trump as unfit for office and a threat to democracy, a prisoner of wrath, impulse and appetite. His memoir was surgically precise in its score-settling, not just fuel for the pyre of Trump alumni revenge porn.Here’s the Deal was just that. Disdain unvarnished, Conway strafed Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. Unsurprisingly, she had few kind words for Biden, blaming him for the Ukraine invasion and for Iran threatening nuclear breakout. Trump junked the Iran deal and was Putin’s toady. Then again, Conway is the queen of “alternative facts”.In August came Breaking History, Kushner’s own attempt to spin his triumphs while playing the victim. His book was predictably self-serving and selective, even trying to spin as something understandable his ex-con dad luring his own brother-in-law into a filmed liaison with a prostitute. The Kushners and the Trumps are not your typical families.Breaking History also came with conflicting creation stories. The New York Times reported that Kushner took an online MasterClass from the thriller writer James Patterson, then “batted out” 40,000 words of his own. By contrast, the Guardian learned that Kushner received assistance from Ken Kurson, a former editor of the New York Observer, and two other Trump White House alumni. As luck had it, Trump granted Kurson a pardon for cyberstalking, though Kurson later pleaded guilty after being charged with spying on his wife.‘The first thing he told us was a lie’Labor Day signaled a pre-midterm publication rush. With The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser offered a beautifully written, utterly dispiriting history of the man who attacked democracy. In electing Trump, the New York Times and New Yorker, husband-and-wife pair wrote, the US empowered a leader who “attacked basic principles of constitutional democracy at home” and “venerated” strongmen abroad. Whether the system winds up in the “morgue” and how much time remains to make sure it doesn’t were the authors’ open questions.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreThe results of the midterms – Republicans squeaking the House, Democrats holding the Senate, election deniers defeated in key states – offered a glimmer of hope. Truth, however, remains a scarce commodity for Trump.“When we sat down with [him] a year after his defeat,” Baker and Glasser wrote, “the first thing he told us was a lie.”Specifically, Trump claimed the Biden administration had asked him to record a public service announcement promoting Covid vaccinations.Baker and Glasser also depicted Hitler as a Trump role model. To John Kelly, his second chief of staff, a retired Marine Corps general and a father bereaved in the 9/11 wars, Trump complained: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”“Which generals?”“The German generals in World War II.”“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?”According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly used The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a study by 27 mental health professionals, as an owner’s manual.Next, a month before the midterms, Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man made its debut. A political epic, the book traced Trump’s journey from the streets of Queens to the Upper East Side, from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.Haberman gave Trump and those close to him plenty of voice – and rope. She caught Kushner gleefully asking a White House visitor: “Did you see I cut Bannon’s balls off?” To quote Peter Navarro, another Trump tell-all author, like Bannon now under indictment: “Nepotism and excrement roll downhill.”Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreHaberman interviewed Trump three times. He confessed that he is drawn to her like a moth to a flame. “I love being with her,” he said. “She’s like my psychiatrist.” But she saw through him, writing: “The reality is that he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists.”Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, tried his hand with So Help Me God, a well-written and well-paced memoir that will, however, do little to shake the impression that he is the Rodney Dangerfield of vice-presidents: he gets no respect.Pence delivered a surprising indictment, cataloging Trump’s faults, errors and sins from Charlottesville to Russia and Ukraine. But Pence’s is a precarious balancing act. He upbraided Trump for his failure to condemn “the racists and antisemites in Charlottesville by name”, but also rejected the contention Trump was a bigot. As for Putin, “there was no reason for Trump not to call out Russia’s bad behaviour”, Pence wrote, while calling Trump’s infamous, impeachment-triggering phone call to Volodymyr Zelenskiy “less than perfect”. In the end, So Help Me God was a strained attempt to retain political viability.‘As long as you make the right friends’Not all the notable books of 2022 were about Trump himself. Some examined the people and movements that lie adjacent. We Are Proud Boys by Andy Campbell looked at the violence-addicted street fighters who have become best friends with many of Trump’s past and present supporters, from Ann Coulter to Roger Stone.As Campbell put it, the Proud Boys have “proven that you can make it as a fascist gang of hooligans in this country, as long as you make the right friends”.Andrew Kirtzman’s Giuliani provided a vivid reminder that Trump’s gravitational pull induces destruction. The author covered Rudy Giuliani when he was New York mayor. Rudy wasn’t always a buffoon. The book is masterly and engrossing.Broken News, by Chris Stirewalt, doubled as a critique of the media and a rebuke of Fox News, his former employer, and Trump. The Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC and Joe Scarborough fared poorly too. Substantively, Stirewalt contended that much of the news business is about the pursuit of ratings. These days, Fox is battling defamation lawsuits arising from repeatedly airing Trump’s “big lie”.Robert Draper’s Weapons of Mass Delusion dissected the Trumpian nightmare, focusing on the consequences of the world the internet created. Republicans like the far-right Arizona congressman Paul Gosar and his mentee, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are much more likely to be rewarded than penalized for “outrageous, fact-free behavior”.Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York magazine. His first book, The Long Alliance, brought depth and context to the near-two-decade relationship between the 44th and 46th presidents, emphasizing that the pair’s time in power together was no buddy movie. Barack Obama was the star. Joe Biden played a supporting role – until he too seized the brass ring.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreThe most memorable contribution to this year’s American political literature, however, was not a printed book. The Trump Tapes, subtitled “Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump” is an audio collection that offers a passport to the heart of darkness.In June 2020, Trump confided: “I get people, they come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. Want to know something? Everything is mine.” Wow.Woodward’s tapes convincingly demonstrated that Trump knew in early 2020 that Covid posed a mortal danger to the US, but balked at telling the whole truth.Trump holds the press in contempt but yearns for its approval. He flattered Woodward as “a great historian”. Maggie Haberman knows the feeling.TopicsBooksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US elections 2024Joe BidenfeaturesReuse this content More

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      We Are Not One review: assured history of Israel’s place in US politics

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      We Are Not One review: assured history of Israel’s place in US politicsTo Eric Alterman, ‘Israel is a red state’ while ‘US Jewry is blue’. Like so much else, Donald Trump has disrupted that dynamic The civil war divided America’s Christians along axes of geography and theology. These days, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, soon to be prime minister again, have wrought a similar sorting. In the words of Eric Alterman, “Israel is a red state. US Jewry is blue.”DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead moreAlterman is a distinguished professor of English and journalism at the City University of New York. We Are Not One represents four decades of effort, patience and research. Sixty pages of endnotes undergird his arguments, some dating to his student days.Alterman posits that closeness between the US and Israel has oscillated over time and that younger American Jews, particularly those outside Orthodox Judaism, are now distancing themselves from the Zionist experiment. He relies, in part, on polling by Pew Research.Practically speaking, the divide may be more nuanced, with the latest shifts also reflecting a response to a rise in crime – and messaging about it. In the midterms, the Republican Lee Zeldin won 46% of Jewish voters in New York as he came close to beating the governor, Kathy Hochul. Donald Trump never surpassed 30% nationally. In 2020, he took 37% of New York’s Jewish vote.In We Are Not One, Alterman observes how unsafe streets and racial tensions helped spawn neoconservatism. It is “impossible” to separate the movement’s “origins from the revulsions caused by constant news reports of inner-city riots … and broader societal dislocations”. Between 1968 and 1972, Richard Nixon’s share of the Jewish vote doubled from 17% to 35%.One Saturday night in 1968, a crowd thronged the streets of Borough Park in Brooklyn, a predominately Jewish enclave, to cheer the vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee. Over the next four years, “law and order” found purchase. To top it off, George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, made Israel supporters nervous.The South Dakota senator’s message, “Come home America”, left them wondering if the US would be in Israel’s corner if war came again. Vietnam was a proxy for foreign policy anxieties. As a coda, Alterman recollects how Nixon nonetheless yearned to turn Jews into political foils and whipping boys. That 2016 Trump ad with a six-pointed star over a field of dollar bills? It had deep roots.Why pro-Israel lobby group Aipac is backing election deniers and extremist RepublicansRead moreAlterman also recounts how Daniel Moynihan, a Democrat, used his position as Gerald Ford’s UN ambassador to reach the Senate in 1976. With support from neoconservatives, hawkish Jews and the New York Times, he beat Bella Abzug, a leftwing lion, in the primary. Then he beat James Buckley, the Republican incumbent.Moynihan lauded Israel’s raid at Entebbe. In Alterman’s description, he appealed to “American Jews’ feelings of vulnerability and their pride and relief at Israel’s military prowess in kicking the asses” of Palestinian and German terrorists and “humiliating” Idi Amin, Uganda’s “evil dictator”.Time passes. Things remain the same. In New York, transit crime is up more than 30%. Violence against Jews is a staple, according to the NYPD.Meanwhile, on college campuses, in Alterman’s words, Israel is a “mini-America”, a useful target for faculty and students to vent against “rapaciousness on the part of the US and other western nations vis-a-vis the downtrodden of the world”.The author quotes Benzion Netanyahu, the Israeli leader’s late father: “Jewish history is in large measure a history of holocausts.” Modern insecurities spring from ancient calamities.Kanye West spews bile. Trump entertains him with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier. Republicans quietly squirm. Trump’s Jewish supporters grapple with cognitive dissonance and emotional vertigo. Take Mort Klein, of the hard-right Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), who makes several appearances in We Are Not One.Testifying before Congress, Klein accused the press of taking Trump’s comments on Charlottesville, where neo-Nazis marched in 2017, “completely out of context”. In 2018, after 11 worshippers were murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Klein rode to the rescue again. At the ZOA dinner, he said it was “political blasphemy” to blame Trump.Last month, ZOA gave Trump its highest honor. According to Klein, the ex-president was the “best friend Israel ever had in the White House”. Then Trump met West, now known as Ye, and Fuentes, twisting Klein into a human pretzel.“Trump is not an antisemite,” he announced. “He loves Israel. He loves Jews. But he mainstreams, he legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters. And this scares me.”Trump reportedly kept Hitler’s speeches by his bed. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.At a recent confab of Agudath Israel of America, an ultra-Orthodox group, Rabbi Dovid Zwiebel, its executive vice-president, condemned Trump: “Yesterday’s friend can be tomorrow’s greatest enemy.” Two years earlier, though, its members clearly backed Trump over Joe Biden. Borough Park was as deep red as Lafayette, Louisiana.It all carries a whiff of deja vu. Alterman recounts how neoconservatives admonished America’s Jews against complaining of Israel’s alliance with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson: “The Christian Zionists’ devotion to ‘Greater Israel’ earned them a pass from the neocons for their occasional outbursts of antisemitism.”Trump had dinner with two avowed antisemites. Let’s call this what it is | Francine ProseRead moreTrump’s Mar-a-Lago dinner created a similar bind. David Friedman, his bankruptcy lawyer and ambassador to Israel, tweeted: “To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this … I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.”Trump was not amused. On Friday, he lashed out at “Jewish Leaders”. Friedman must learn patience. ZOA may wish to rescind its award.Jason Greenblatt, a Trump Organization lawyer who moved to the White House, echoed Friedman for CNN. Days later, he spoke at a synagogue in Scarsdale, north of New York City. Greenblatt repeated the need for Trump to correct the record and urged those in attendance to politely speak up.In the next breath, he lauded his one-time boss’s achievements and character. It sure is tough to quit Trump.
      We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel is published in the US by Hachette Book Group
      TopicsBooksUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpIsraelUS foreign policyreviewsReuse this content More

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      DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign books

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      DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign books The GOP flopped in the midterms but its White House hopefuls still hope to find readers – and conservative group bulk-buyersIn one of the clearest signs that the 2024 Republican presidential primary will feature rivals to Donald Trump, a host of likely candidates have released or will soon release books purporting to outline their political visions.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreSuch books often sell poorly, but that is rarely their point. They are markers of ambition. To judge from the political bookshelves, after midterm elections in which many Trump-endorsed candidates suffered humiliating losses, the former president will not be the only declared candidate for long.Among the first rank of likely challengers, Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, released a memoir last month and Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, will follow suit in February.Other possible candidates include the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo (book out next year); the Missouri senator Josh Hawley (one book done, another coming); the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley (two books out already); and the South Carolina senator Tim Scott (book published in August, including an inadvertent admission that he is going to run). Even Marco Rubio, the GOP’s great slight hope until Trump took him to the cleaners in 2016, has another book coming.Matt Dallek, a professor of political management at George Washington University, said: “These books serve as a way to generate free media and a way to put one’s name and platform, to an extent that it exists, in the eyes of voters you’re looking to reach.“It gives TV producers a hook. And so even though most of these books are, to be generous, pablum – filled with aphorisms and cliché – from the perspective of the candidate, it allows them to get their story out there, to put themselves before the public and to take a free media ride.”In short, these are not works of great literature, or even the sort of thing the great essayist Christopher Hitchens produced via “the junky energy that scotch can provide, and the intense short-term concentration that nicotine can help supply … crouched over a book or keyboard [in] mingled reverie and alertness”.It’s hard to picture evangelical hero Pence or culture warrior DeSantis like that, hunched over a desk, hammering out passages of memoir and policy to meet a publishing deadline. But perhaps their ghostwriters did.01:41The announcement this week of DeSantis’s book – The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Renewal – made the biggest splash. After all, the governor who won re-election in a landslide and declared his state “where woke goes to die” is Trump’s only serious polling rival.DeSantis has released a campaign book before, namely Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama, published in 2011 when he was aiming for Congress. According to his publisher, HarperCollins, the Ivy League-educated ex-navy lawyer will now offer “a first-hand account from the blue-collar boy who grew up to take on Disney and Dr Fauci”. True to DeSantis’s success in pursuing distinctly Trumpist policies, the announcement was replete with such culture-war themes.How to beat a book ban: students, parents and librarians fight backRead moreDaniel Uhlfelder, a former Democratic candidate for Florida attorney general, tweeted: “Ron DeSantis, who has led a statewide effort to ban books, is writing a book called The Courage to be Free. This is not a joke.”Trump books are a publishing phenomenon but books about what the agent Howard Yoon recently called the “milquetoast” Biden administration have not sold so well. Neither, it seems safe to say, will the flood of Republican books.Asked if she was eager to read DeSantis’s book, Molly Jong-Fast, host of the Fast Politics podcast, laughed and said, “Are you kidding me?” She also pointed to the common fate of such books: bulk sales to political groups rather than bookstore crowds.“The DeSantis book is something the Heritage Foundation gives people at a lunch, and then goes on a shelf. This is book that is swag. When the Kochs have their big shindig with donors, it’ll be given away. Of course, that means publishers at least know it will earn out the advance.”In sales terms, Pence has an advantage. His campaign book, So Help Me God, is also in large part a Trump book. Pence has refused to testify to the House January 6 committee but on the page he provides detailed if partial testimony, written from the rooms where it happened. The result was a New York Times bestseller.Jong-Fast said: “The reason to read his book is because he’s such a liar. I think if you went through with a fine-tooth comb, you could find a lot of inconsistencies. But … at least Pence is charismatic. The irony is he’s probably more charismatic than Ron DeSantis.”So Help Me God review: Mike Pence’s tortured bid for Republican relevanceRead moreIt is possible to write a good campaign book. Barack Obama wrote two. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance was published in 1995, as he set out for the Illinois senate. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, came two years before the presidential run of 2008.“And he probably read them,” Jong-Fast said. “And also he knows good writing. So many people don’t. The constant problem with conservatives is that you’ve alienated most of the writers. Remember, Trumpworld didn’t have any intellectuals because they couldn’t find any. The thought leader was Newt Gingrich.”Asked what Guardian readers might glean from the new campaign books, and from DeSantis in particular, Dallek said: “If you know nothing or little about him, you could probably learn about the biggest political fights he’s had, you could get a sense of the soundbites he likes to use, you know, his war against so-called woke culture. Probably some sense of a why he thinks Florida is the greatest place on Earth, some of the attacks he’s going to use against Joe Biden, if he were to run.“But it will not be the most informative place to go if you want to learn about Ron DeSantis. There are many other places, including profiles in the Guardian, that would probably be much more fruitful.”TopicsBooksUS politicsUS elections 2024RepublicansRon DeSantisMike PenceMike PompeonewsReuse this content More

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      Ron DeSantis book announcement a clear sign of presidential ambition

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      Ron DeSantis book announcement a clear sign of presidential ambitionFlorida governor expected to challenge Trump for Republican nod in 2024 will publish The Courage to Be Free in February In the clearest signal yet that Ron DeSantis is preparing a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, it was announced on Wednesday that the rightwing governor of Florida will publish a campaign-style book, mixing memoir with policy proposals.Republican Nikki Haley to decide on presidential bid over Christmas holidaysRead moreThe Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Renewal, will be published by Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins, on 28 February.The governor, his publisher said, will offer readers “a first-hand account from the blue-collar boy who grew up to take on Disney and Dr Fauci”.DeSantis has not announced a 2024 run, but he is widely reported to be considering one. His victory speech after a landslide re-election this month met with chants of “Two more years!”The cover of the governor’s book shows him smiling broadly in front of a US flag.With Donald Trump under fire over disappointing midterms results, looming indictments and a controversial dinner with a white supremacist, possible Republican opponents are rapidly coming into focus.Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, has released a campaign-focused memoir, seeking to balance appeals to Trump’s supporters with distancing himself from the violent end to Trump’s time in office.Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, will release a book in the new year. Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador who released a memoir in 2019, is also edging up to the starting line.Announcing DeSantis’s book, HarperCollins signaled a focus on the culture-war issues and theatrically cruel policy stunts that have propelled the governor to the front rank of potential candidates, alongside Trump in polls and sometimes ahead, prompting the former president to lash out.DeSantis clashed with Disney, a large employer in Florida, over legislation regarding the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues in schools, which was branded “don’t say gay” by critics.DeSantis’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, through which Anthony Fauci has advised two presidents, remains highly controversial. Florida has recorded nearly 83,000 deaths, third among US states in a national death toll approaching 1.1m.HarperCollins said DeSantis would “reveal” how he “accomplished more for his state” than any other “American leader”. Citing DeSantis’s graduation from Yale and Harvard, service in Iraq – as a navy lawyer – and election to Congress in 2012, the publisher said “in all these places, Ron DeSantis learned the same lesson: he didn’t want to be part of the leftist elite.”01:41“Since becoming governor of the sunshine state, he has fought – and won – battle after battle, defeating not just opposition from the political left, but a barrage of hostile media coverage,” it added.The announcement – which echoed numerous rightwing talking points on hot button social issues like Covid-19 and education – echoed DeSantis’s strident speech in Tallahassee earlier this month, after his easy win over the Democrat Charlie Crist, in which he proclaimed Florida the state “where woke goes to die”.HarperCollins also promised to “deliver something no other politician’s memoir has before: stories of victory”.That might seem to some a curious claim, given, for just one recent example, the publication just two years ago of A Promised Land, Barack Obama’s memoir of his rise to the presidency, significan legislative victories and preparations for his second presidential election win.TopicsBooksRon DeSantisUS elections 2024US politicsRepublicansFloridanewsReuse this content More

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      Uniting America review: how FDR and the GOP beat fascism home and away

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      Uniting America review: how FDR and the GOP beat fascism home and away Charles Lindbergh casts a shadow over Peter Shinkle’s new book, which ends with a warning about Trump and his partyThe subtitle of this remarkable popular history is “How FDR and Henry Stimson Brought Democrats and Republicans together to Win World War II”, Stimson being the Republican Franklin Roosevelt chose as secretary of war on 19 June 1940, the same day he chose another Republican, Frank Knox, for secretary of the navy.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreThose appointments came five weeks after the king asked Winston Churchill to form a unity government in Great Britain, two weeks after 338,000 French and British troops were rescued at Dunkirk, and four weeks before Roosevelt was nominated for an unprecedented third term, all events featured in this compelling volume.But Peter Shinkle’s book is a great deal more than a celebration of the bipartisanship that was a key factor in American success. It also offers brisk accounts of all US campaigns in Africa and Europe, a detailed description of how Pearl Harbor happened, and the best explanation I have read of why the government pursued its disastrous policy of interning Japanese Americans.Besides all that, there is terrific social history of the ways the war changed the status of women and African Americans. Practically the only important social impact Shinkle omits is the war’s effects on gay and lesbian Americans, a subject covered best by Allan Bérubé’s definitive book, Coming Out Under Fire.Shinkle is a veteran reporter who has written another fine book, Ike’s Mystery Man, about Robert Cutler, the closeted gay man who was Dwight Eisenhower’s right-hand man for foreign policy in the White House. That book also combined political and social history. But his new volume is broader and more important.There are probably more books written about the second world war than any other 20th-century event, but every generation needs to be reminded of its triumphs and tragedies. Shinkle does a splendid job mining for new nuggets of information and fresh perspectives.There are two big reasons for focusing on Stimson. Not only did he play a vital role in practically every important military decision from 1940 to 1945, he also kept an extremely detailed diary, which makes it possible for Shinkle to tell us exactly what he was thinking.Besides canny portraits of Roosevelt, Stimson and George Marshall, the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there are a host of subsidiary characters. The first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Black activist A Philip Randolph are two of the most important heroes while Charles Lindbergh, the celebrated solo pilot to Paris who became a fierce isolationist and a virulent antisemite, is one of its principal villains.There has been a raging debate for decades about how the surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor came about, and whether Roosevelt and his aides ignored information from Japanese diplomatic cables because they wanted to bring America into the war.It turns out almost all of the answers are in Simpson’s diary, including this key sentence: “The question was how we should maneuver [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot, without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”One of the biggest problems Roosevelt faced in 1940 and 1941 was how to counter isolationists like Lindbergh, whose affection for the Nazis and hatred for the Jews made him as popular in some quarters as he was despised in others.Before Congress, Lindbergh denounced the bill that gave Britain resources to survive the Blitz. There was much he didn’t like in the world, but “over a period of years [on both sides] there is not as much difference in philosophy as we have been led to believe”. After the House approved the extension of the draft by a single vote, Lindbergh declared “the greatest danger to this country” posed by its Jewish citizens “lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government”.While Roosevelt’s White House denounced that speech for resembling “the outpourings of Berlin”, former president Herbert Hoover “readily defended Lindbergh, a sign of the enduring political power of both the aviator and isolationism”.That power of these isolationists explains why Stimson did not record “shock, horror or anger” after Roosevelt informed him of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Instead, he wrote, “my first feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would unite our people … For I feel this country united has practically nothing to fear while the apathy and visions stirred up by unpatriotic men have been hitherto very discouraging.”Roosevelt refused to desegregate the armed forces, largely for fear of alienating southern Democrats. But Shinkle reminds us that Roosevelt’s civil rights record was much more complicated than that failure suggests.Ike’s Mystery Man review: astonishing tale of a gay White House aideRead moreRandolph, who was president of the first important Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, used the threat of a March on Washington by 100,000 citizens to pressure Roosevelt into signing a landmark executive order prohibiting discrimination and segregation by military contractors. One activist wrote that the Fair Employment Practice Committee Roosevelt impaneled led to “more progress” against “racial and religious discrimination than [in] any other period in American history”.Three million women were employed in the defense industry by the end of 1942, as well as new divisions of the army, navy and coast guard, similarly transforming their status.Jacqueline Cochran commanded the Women Airforce Service Pilots, which graduated 1,100 women training inspectors and test pilots. “Menstrual cycles didn’t upset anyone’s cycle,” Cochran wrote. Women flew “as regularly and for as many hours as the men”.Shinkle ends with all the ways history is repeating itself today, including a description of “Trump’s fascism”. The resurgence of that hateful ideology, and the budding isolationism of many Republicans eager to end support for Ukraine, are two reasons why this vivid volume is so timely and important.
      Uniting America: How FDR and Henry Stimson Brought Democrats and Republicans together to Win World War II is published in the US by St Martin’s Press
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      So Help Me God review: Mike Pence’s tortured bid for Republican relevance

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      So Help Me God review: Mike Pence’s tortured bid for Republican relevanceTrump’s VP is surprisingly critical of the boss whose followers wanted him dead. But surely the presidency won’t be his too After four years at Donald Trump’s side, Mike Pence emerged as the Rodney Dangerfield of vice-presidents: he gets no respect. So Help Me God, his memoir, is well-written and well-paced. But it will do little to shake that impression.Cheney hits back as Pence says January 6 committee has ‘no right’ to testimonyRead moreAt the Capitol on January 6, his boss was prepared to leave him for dead. And yet the Republican rank-and-file yawned. Among prospective presidential nominees, Pence is tied with Donald Trump Jr for third. The GOP gravitates to frontrunners. Pence, once a six-term congressman and governor of Indiana, is not that.As governor, he was dwarfed by his predecessor, Mitch Daniels. On Capitol Hill, he was eclipsed by the late Richard Lugar, also from Indiana and chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, and Dan Coats, another Hoosier senator. On the page, Pence lauds all three. Say what you like, he is unfailingly polite.Coats became Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence and repeatedly pushed back against the president. That cost Coats his job. Pence pushed back less.The former vice-president is a committed Christian with sharp elbows but also a sonorous voice. He has struggled with the tugs of faith and ambition. Family is an integral part of his life. He takes pride in his son’s service as a US marine. Born and raised a Catholic, the 48th vice-president is now one of America’s most prominent evangelicals. So Help Me God is replete with references to prayer. Pence begins with a verse from the Book of Jeremiah and concludes with Ecclesiastes: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”Trump picked him as a running mate at the suggestion of Paul Manafort. Unlike Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie, other possible picks, Pence could do “normal”.Time passes. On 3 November 2020, America delivered its verdict on the Trump presidency. Trump lost. By his own admission, Pence was surprised. He refused to believe the polls and mistook the enthusiasm of the base for the entire political landscape. He wrongly believed he would serve another four years, yards from the Oval Office, enjoying weekly lunches with the Man.Instead, two months later, at great personal peril, he accepted reality and abided by his conscience and the constitution. Like Richard Nixon, Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle (another hapless Hoosier) and Al Gore, Pence presided over the certification of an election he had lost.For Pence and those around him, it was a matter of duty and faith. They refused to subvert democracy. Yet along the way Pence flashed streaks of being in two minds politically – as he continues to do. He rebuffed Trump’s entreaties to join a coup but gave a thumbs-up to the turbulence. He welcomed the decision by the Missouri senator Josh Hawley to object to election results.“It meant we would have a substantive debate,” Pence writes. He got way more than that. His own brother, Greg Pence, an Indiana congressman, voted against certification – mere hours after the insurrectionists sought to hang his brother from makeshift gallows. As the mob raged, Greg Pence hid too. After it, the brass ring came first.Among House Republicans, Trump remains emperor. Rightwing members have extracted a pledge that the GOP-controlled House will investigate Nancy Pelosi and the justice department for the purported mistreatment of defendants jailed for invading the Capitol. Pence’s anger and hurt are visible.“The president’s words were reckless, and they endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol building,” he recently said. But in the next breath, he stonewalled the House January 6 committee. Pence told CBS it would set a “terrible precedent” for Congress to summon a vice-president to testify about conversations at the White House. He also attacked the committee for its “partisanship”.Bennie Thompson, the Democratic committee chair, and Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair, pushed back hard.“Our investigation has publicly presented the testimony of more than 50 Republican witnesses,” they said. “This testimony, subject to criminal penalties for lying to Congress, was not ‘partisan’. It was truthful.”From Pence, it was a strained attempt to retain political viability. Surely, that train has left the station.Pence’s memoir does deliver a perhaps surprisingly surgical indictment of Trump. The book catalogs Trump’s faults, errors and sins. From Charlottesville to Russia to Ukraine, Pence repeatedly tags him for his shortcomings and missteps.He upbraids Trump for his failure to condemn “the racists and antisemites in Charlottesville by name”, but then rejects the contention Trump is a bigot.Pence risks Trump’s wrath by piling on criticisms of ex-president in new bookRead moreAs for Putin, “there was no reason for Trump not to call out Russia’s bad behaviour”, Pence writes. “Acknowledging Russian meddling” would not have “cheapen[ed] our victory” over Hillary Clinton. On Ukraine, the subject of Trump’s first impeachment, Pence terms the infamous phone call to Volodymyr Zelenskiy “less than perfect”.But even as Putin’s malignance takes center stage, the Trumps refuse to abandon their man. Don Jr clamors to halt aid to Ukraine, the dauphin gone Charles Lindbergh. He tweets: “Since it was Ukraine’s missile that hit our NATO ally Poland, can we at least stop spending billions to arm them now?”These days, Pence leads Advancing American Freedom, a tax-exempt conservative way-station with an advisory board replete with Trump refugees. Kellyanne Conway, Betsy DeVos and Callista Gingrich are there, so too David Friedman and Larry Kudlow. If more than one of them backs Pence in 2024, count it a minor miracle.Rodney Dangerfield is gone. But his spirit definitely lives on – in Mike Pence, of all people.
      So Help Me God is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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