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      in US Politics

      Michael Lewis and John Lanchester: ‘Trump is a trust-destroying machine’

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      In late 2023, as the US presidential election was heaving into view, the author Michael Lewis called up six writers he admired – five Americans and one Briton – and asked if they’d like to contribute to an urgent new series he was putting together for the Washington Post. At the time, Lewis was hearing talk that if Donald Trump got back into power, his administration would unleash a programme of cuts that would rip the federal government to shreds. Lewis decided to launch a pre-emptive strike. The series, entitled Who Is Government?, would appear in the weeks running up to the election. Its purpose, Lewis explains over a Zoom call from his book-lined study in Berkeley, California, “was to inoculate the federal workforce against really mindless attacks”. It would do this by valorising public service and, as he puts it, “jarring the stereotype people had in their heads about civil servants”.Other writers might shrink away from the notion that they could restrain a US president with a handful of essays, but Lewis has an outsized sway. Author of such mega-bestsellers as Liar’s Poker and Flash Boys, he has a knack for writing about arcane concepts in business, finance and economics in ways that don’t just enlighten the uninitiated but whip along with the pace of an airport thriller. Hollywood loves him: Moneyball, The Blind Side and The Big Short all got turned into hit movies crammed with A-listers. So when Lewis speaks out about the forces shaping our world, even if it concerns something as seemingly unsexy as the federal government, people tend to listen.View image in fullscreenThe British writer John Lanchester, who contributed a standout piece to the series, got a glimpse of Lewis’s appeal when they first met in 2014. It was behind the stage at the London School of Economics. Lanchester had agreed to interview Lewis about Flash Boys, which plumbs the murky world of high-frequency trading. “Not only was the venue sold out,” Lanchester recalls, “but they’d had to add on another room at the theatre for people to watch, and that was sold out too. I remember thinking: ‘There’s a tube strike on, it’s absolutely pissing down, nobody’s going to come.’ But not a bit of it. The place was packed.”Lanchester is no slouch himself when it comes to turning knotty financial matters into page-turners. An acclaimed novelist (The Debt to Pleasure, Capital) who used to review restaurants for the Guardian, in 2010 he published a book about the financial crash – Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay – that gave a sweeping overview of the global economy while mercilessly skewering its absurdities. Now he regularly takes his filleting knife to topics ranging from Brexit to cryptocurrencies for the London Review of Books.View image in fullscreenSince their 2014 meeting, the pair have become good friends, with an odd-couple dynamic that’s entertaining to witness. Lewis is hyper-engaged and talks in a confident New Orleans drawl about the iniquities of Trump and Elon Musk; Lanchester, joining us from his kitchen in London, seems more mild-mannered at first but his easy-going demeanour hides a biting wit. They clearly enjoy each other’s work and company. “I make a point of inviting him for dinner whenever I’m in London,” says Lewis, “and I try to get him over here whenever I can. And of course I looped him into this series …”Who Is Government? isn’t Lewis’s first foray into the workings of the US civil service. In 2017, soon after Trump got in for the first time, Lewis had an insight into just how unprepared the new president was to take over the US government’s various branches. “The Obama administration had spent six months preparing a series of briefings for the transition,” he recalls, “but then Trump won and he just didn’t show up. So I decided to fly to Washington and find out what went on inside the government.” He wrote up his findings in three articles for Vanity Fair, later gathering them into the 2018 bestselling book The Fifth Risk. Among the people he spoke to who’d been neglected by the Trump team were officials tending the US nuclear arsenal.View image in fullscreenAs the 2024 election approached, amid warnings that Trump might do much worse than neglect the civil service if he got back into power, Lewis decided to revisit the government’s inner workings. Joining him for the ride this time was Dave Eggers, who reported on a team of scientists probing for extraterrestrial life from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. In turn, Geraldine Brooks profiled online sleuths at the Internal Revenue Service who uncover evidence of cybercrime and child sexual abuse in the darker regions of the net, and W Kamau Bell wrote touchingly about his Black goddaughter’s work as a paralegal at the justice department.For his part, Lewis tracked down a mining engineer at the labour department named Christopher Mark, whose research had helped prevent fatal roof falls in underground mines. He also wrote about Heather Stone, a rare-diseases expert at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who had saved lives by fast-tracking authorisation for an experimental drug to treat potentially lethal balamuthia infections.Lanchester, meanwhile, opted to write not about a person but a number – the consumer price index, a fiendishly complex statistic that acts as the main official measure of inflation. The lack of a human protagonist doesn’t make the piece any less absorbing, and Lanchester has fun uncovering the staggering amount of data on seemingly insignificant matters (such as the average length of the adult bedbug or the average annual income for a nuclear medicine technologist in Albany, New York) that the federal government hoovers up every year.View image in fullscreenThe overall effect of the series, just published as a book –Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service – is to transform civil servants from faceless bureaucrats into selfless superheroes. It’s a cracking read but sadly, contrary to Lewis’s hopes, it did nothing to prevent the flurry of devastating cuts that Trump and Musk, via his “department of government efficiency” (Doge), have inflicted on the government over the past couple of months. Of the 3 million-plus federal workers, it’s estimated that more than 20,000 have already been fired. Many of the subjects of the book are at risk of losing their jobs.“Maybe we’re in early stages in the war, but it’s amazing how little effect the series has had,” Lewis says ruefully. “Not only have I not heard a peep from Doge, but I haven’t had any sense that they were worried about what I might write. Though I did send Elon Musk an email asking if I can move in and watch what he was doing. He didn’t respond.”Musk isn’t the only tech billionaire behaving erratically. From conception to publication, the Washington Post series had the full support of the newspaper’s owner. “Jeff Bezos was very excited to be covering the government in any way you could,” says Lewis. “Every piece, he’d call [then opinion editor] David Shipley, and Shipley would call me, saying: ‘Bezos loves this thing.’ But things have changed.” The day before our conversation, in a move widely interpreted as a knee-bend to Trump, Bezos announced that the newspaper’s opinion section would now be dedicated to supporting “personal liberties and free markets”. Shipley resigned before the announcement.Now Lewis and Lanchester are looking back at a collection of essays conceived in a more hopeful time and wondering what will become of the departments they wrote about – and the country that relies on them. They are not optimistic. Over the course of our 90-minute conversation towards the end of last month, they talked about the motivation behind Trump and Musk’s war on the civil service, its probable effects on the US and the lessons the UK should be taking.You say in the intro to Who Is Government? that “the sort of people who become civil servants tend not to want or seek attention”. Was it hard to find interesting people to write about?ML: It took about a nanosecond. And I think there’s a reason for that: there are just a lot of great subjects [in the federal government], and the minute they face existential risk, they become really interesting. They’re weird and different. They’re not interested in money, for a start. They’ve got some purpose in their lives.Was the entire series written before Trump’s re-election?ML: All except for the last piece [about rare diseases expert Heather Stone], which was conceived before, but I didn’t write it until after. What I’m doing now is getting all the writers to go back to their characters to ask what’s happening to them. Both my characters look like they’re about to be fired. Heather has been told that the whole enterprise of dealing with infectious disease is going to be axed from the FDA. And [mining engineer] Chris Mark texted me the other day to say: “They’ve cut our purchasing authority and they want us to hand in our credit cards.” So if they’re not gone, most of our characters are disabled. It’s like watching a toddler loose inside of a nuclear reactor pushing buttons.You two are watching from afar. Are you watching the end of our democracy? Or are you watching some kind of false jeopardy situation?
      JL: Well, we had an exchange over email about this, and I’ve been thinking about what you said, Michael, that we’ll probably muddle through but we are playing Russian roulette with democracy. That image lodged in my head. And the thing that is deeply shocking and surprising is that nobody seems to give a shit about [the government cuts].The cuts are being made in the name of efficiency but it looks more like an ideological purge. Is that how you see it?ML: I don’t think it’s one person’s will being exerted; it’s a combination of Trump, Musk and Russell Vought, who’s now the director of the office of management and budget. He was the architect of that Project 2025 book and he’s a Christian nationalist-slash-libertarian, whatever that is. Trump is the easiest to grok. He’s a trust-destroying machine. He needs chaos where nobody trusts anybody and then there’s a weird level playing field, and he excels in that environment.My simple view of Musk is that he’s like an addict. He’s addicted to the attention, the drama – he’s stuck his finger in the social media socket and his brain is fried. He’s probably got cheerleaders, his little Silicon Valley crowd, telling him he’s doing a great thing, but most of them don’t know anything about it or the consequences. Vought’s the only one, I think, with a clear vision, but it’s a weird vision – really drastically minimum government. Those are the threads I see of what’s going on, and the backdrop is that they can do anything and the polls don’t move – people here don’t seem to care.But isn’t it only a matter of time before people do start to care… once the effects of the cuts kick in?ML: The pessimistic response is that, when things go wrong, there’ll be a war of narratives. The Trump narrative will inevitably say something like: “These bureaucrats screwed it up,” and it creates even more mistrust in the thing that you actually need to repair. I do think we’re going to muddle through. But I don’t think Trump’s ever going to get blamed in the ways he ought to. And whoever comes and fixes it is never going to get the credit they should.JL: When you look at the historical analogies to this kind of collective delusion, it’s quite hard to think of a way of recovering from losing a sense of an agreed consensus reality. The only historical examples I can think of is, basically, you lose a catastrophic war. You know, the Germans lose and they wake up and they have a reckoning with their past. But that’s historically quite rare and hard to imagine … But maybe that’s too dark. Maybe what happens is specific impacts arise from specific programmes being cut that make people think: “Oh, actually, that’s not such a great idea.”A clip just circulated of Musk talking about the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and he said something like: “Oh yeah, we made a couple little mistakes, like we briefly cut Ebola prevention there for just a second, then we brought it back again.”And then I saw someone who ran the USAid Ebola response during one of the outbreaks saying: “That’s flatly not true [that Musk restored the Ebola response].” Musk talks loudly about fraud and theft in government, but these things aren’t fraud and theft – they’re just programmes they don’t like. In fact I haven’t actually seen anything that you could with a straight face categorise as fraud – have you, Michael?ML: There’s almost no worse place to be trying to engage in fraud or theft than the US government, because there are so many eyes on you. When you take a federal employee out to lunch, they won’t let you pay for their sandwich – they’re so terrified. In fact it’s far easier to engage in fraud and theft in a Wall Street bank or a Silicon Valley startup, and there’s probably much more waste too.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHas either of you met Musk?ML: I have not. I have lots of one degree of separations. Walter Isaacson, who wrote Musk’s biography, is an old friend. I basically watched him do that project – I followed it blow by blow.JL: Isaacson basically lived with Musk for, what, nine months, and there’s not a single commentary on politics at any point in the whole book. In 2022, Musk was still a Democrat. It’s just utterly bizarre. And I think part of the frenzy and vehemence comes from an extraordinary naivety about [government]. He actually doesn’t know anything about it, and he didn’t care about it until about 10 minutes ago.One thing that strikes me about Doge is how adversarial it is without it having to be. You could run a project like this, unleashing a roomful of 20-year-olds on the systems of government, without saying that everyone who works in federal government is a criminal. You could just ask: “How could the systems be made to work better?” Because $7tn [the approximate annual budget of the federal government] is quite a lot of money to spend and it’d be astonishing if there wasn’t some waste in there. But you could do it without making people frightened.And it worries me, because lots of things that happen in the US come back over the Atlantic. It happened with Reagan and Thatcher. It happened with Clinton providing the template for New Labour. So I suspect a version of this is going to come back over here.What lessons should the UK be taking from this? JL: Well, that’s one of them. If we were going to do what they call a zero-based review of government spending, let’s do it without framing them as the enemy, because it’s deeply unhelpful. Also, I wouldn’t be astonished if this attack on DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion in companies and organisations] came over. I think we should brace for impact on that one.For your essay, John, why did you decide to write about a number instead of a human being?JL: It’s partly intellectual vanity, but I really like the challenge in writing about structures and systems. We’re hardwired to like stories about people, but a lot of the most important stories in the world don’t have individual people as their central character. We’re very resistant to the idea that we don’t have agency as individuals.Your writing on economics arose from the research you did for your novel Capital, didn’t it?JL: Yeah, that’s right. I’d been following the financial crisis and ended up knowing a lot about it, so I wrote a nonfiction book [Whoops!] in order to quarantine that information, because one of the problems with research from the fiction point of view is that you end up having to use it. It’s very difficult to research a topic and then say: “You know what, that doesn’t really belong in the book.” But finance is difficult to dramatise because of the level of detail involved. It’s kind of anti-erotic in fiction to just explain things.Michael, in the other direction, have you ever come upon a story that didn’t quite work as reportage and you wished you had a novelist’s toolkit to turn it into fiction?ML: No, but I have had moments where I thought: “This story is not mine because I’m just not equipped to write it.” And I wrote one of them – a book about Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the two Israeli psychologists [2016’s The Undoing Project]. I had that story land in my lap, with privileged access, and I spent eight years arguing with myself [about whether] I was the person to do it. I was sure that someone else better equipped – a subject-matter specialist – would come along and write the book. Then the people I had interviewed started dying off and I realised that no one was.JL: With quite a lot of these stories, the subject-matter expert is precisely the person who can’t tell the story.ML: That’s right. They don’t have the childlike wonder about it all. They don’t ask the simple questions. because they’re too deep in it … But no, I’ve never been frustrated by my lack of novelistic flair, and I never had a strong desire to write a novel. My literary frustration is all in screenwriting. I’ve had a very successful career as a failed screenwriter. I’ve been paid over and over to do these things, and they never got made.The world of screenwriting is a profound mystery, because you see all the shit they make. What’s the process? You’re turning down these things and making that? I worked on an adaptation of my last novel, The Wall, but then Apple said: “Really sorry, we have a competing project.” The competing project was called Extrapolations and I’ll give you a cash prize if you can get through a single episode. They spent tens and tens of millions on it. And it’s off-the-scale, unbelievably, face-meltingly bad.One problem for writers now is that there’s just such a blizzard of extraordinary news. How do you get a foothold and decide what to write about?JL: Perhaps this is more a matter of temperament than anything else, but I’m feeling that I have to step back a bit until it’s clear what the shape of it is, because my hunch would be some form of horrific implosion and the wheels falling off and chaos ensuing. But I thought that last time that Trump was president.ML: I’m going to Washington for much of April, and I have a character in mind, but I want to test it. It’s kind of a dark, funny book that I want to write, and I’ve got to see if this character can sustain that. Generally, I’m with John in that I like to wait and see. I feel like my role in the war is sniper. Don’t give away your position. You’re going to get one shot at this. Wait until you get the clean shot and take it. But I don’t think we’re far away from having the clean shot.JL: Given that you were on to [the possibility of Trump getting re-elected and gutting the federal government] when we spoke 18 months ago, Michael, are you surprised by how this has played out? Is it basically what you imagined, or is it weirder, more extreme?ML: I’d never have predicted this. I know Trump said that he could go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and the supporters would still be with him …JL: I believe that.ML: But I didn’t think he’d do what he’s doing materially to his own base. I mean, two days ago he partially gutted the veterans’ healthcare system. This is the healthcare system in a lot of the rural US. That’s his base. And who would have predicted the alliance with Musk? Not me. I would have thought they’d have a falling out after three days, that there just isn’t enough oxygen in the room for both of them. If you’re looking for the simplest explanation for what’s going on, if Trump was a Russian asset, I don’t know if he’d behave any differently from how he’s behaving. I’m not saying he is, but it isn’t the behaviour of someone who is maximising his political future – it’s someone who’s maximising the damage to society. And why would you do that? He was supposed to get rid of illegal immigrants, stop inflation, cut taxes, whatever. But [gutting the civil service] has become the central feature of his administration. I just didn’t think he cared that much about it.View image in fullscreenWhich is the real Bezos; the one who was supportive of this series celebrating public service or the one who’s now dedicating the Washington Post’s opinion pages to championing free markets?ML: I feel some sympathy towards Bezos. I really like him, personally. He’s fun to talk to. He seems to be basically sane. He’s not obviously megalomaniacal or even that self-absorbed. He’s really interested in the world around him. He makes sense on a lot of subjects. So I think the real Bezos is not a bad guy.But he’s done a bad thing. And it’s curious why. You would think, if you had $200bn, that you’d have some fuck-you money. I mean, how much do you have to have to be able to live by your principles? There’s some curve that bends, and at some point, when you have so much money, you’re back to being as vulnerable as someone who has almost nothing. He’s behaving like someone who has nothing, like he’s just scared of Trump. I think if you were with him and watching every step, you’d be watching an interesting psychological process where he’s persuaded himself that what he’s doing is good. He’s rationalised his behaviour, but his behaviour is really appalling.JL: How fucking craven do you have to be, if you can lose 99% of your net worth and still be worth $2bn and you can’t say “fuck you” to proto-fascists? The thing that is frightening is that people like him, men like him, are looking into the future and basically assuming that the US is going to become a kind of fascist state. Because, I mean, $2bn is enough to say “fuck you”. But if the US is now going to become a Maga [Make America Great Again] theocracy, and we just had the last election we’re ever going to have, then maybe he’s positioning for that. I don’t know that to be true, but that’s my darkest version.Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by Michael Lewis, is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Will Trump give up the store?’ Edward Fishman on how US economic warfare works – and doesn’t

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      Edward Fishman’s first book, Chokepoints, is a study of American economic warfare. Densely reported but fast-moving, the book examines recent US sanctions policy regarding Iran, Russia and China, and how the dollar’s dominance of international financial systems has allowed administrations to pursue political aims.Fishman’s own service under Barack Obama, at Treasury, Pentagon and State, stands him in good stead. So does teaching at Columbia and being a Washington thinktank fellow.As Chokepoints comes out, Donald Trump is beginning talks with Russia aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. Russia is seeking relief from US sanctions, which Trump seems inclined to give, and Ukraine and Europe are increasingly isolated from the US.“The record of the first Trump administration on Russia is not particularly strong,” Fishman said, diplomatically, when asked what the US might expect from a president widely held to be in thrall to Vladimir Putin – and speaking before Trump’s spectacular Oval Office argument with Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and subsequent suspension of US military aid.Fittingly, as the author of a history of modern sanctions, Fishman looked back to look forward – and did not find encouraging signs.View image in fullscreenIn 2018, “under pressure from Congress, Trump imposed sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate in Russia … Deripaska owned Rusal, which is the largest aluminum company in Russia, and produced almost 10% of the world’s aluminum. And overnight, basically, aluminum prices skyrocket, Rusal stock collapses, and there’s significant chaos in metal markets.“And Trump gets all these calls from the Russians, from CEOs, saying, ‘What are you doing? Stop.’ And he just pulls back the sanctions.”Years later, that episode is “concerning” to Fishman, “for a few reasons. One is, I think it signals to Russia that as soon as [Trump’s US faces] even the slightest amount of blowback, he will cave, even absent any concessions. It wasn’t like Putin gave any political concessions [in 2018]. It wasn’t like, ‘OK, we’re gonna free these prisoners overnight, we’re gonna stop this bombardment in Ukraine,’ because there was a low, simmering conflict being fought at the time. Trump just pulled back the sanctions.“And after that is when Russia shifts basically all of its foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar and into the euro and the yuan, the Chinese currency, and gold. So that was the key moment. Putin realizes [about Trump], ‘This guy, he doesn’t have the stomach to do anything, but also he’s so erratic.’ I think that was when the US lost leverage it needs with Russia, though I think it contributed to Putin underestimating the sanctions he would face in 2022”, from Biden, when he ordered a full invasion.US sanctions have hurt Russia deeply – and therefore should be among Trump’s strongest cards to play. Typically, he has been inconsistent. Usually friendly to Moscow, on Friday, Trump used his social media platform to say that because Russia was “absolutely ‘pounding’ Ukraine on the battlefield” he was “strongly considering large scale” sanctions and tariffs on Russia until a ceasefire could be reached.Fishman pondered the issue: “Do I think that Trump will give up the store? I don’t know … I would say I’m not confident that he’s going to get a just peace in Ukraine. But I’m not yet saying, ‘This guy is failing, we’re about to give up everything to Russia in exchange for nothing,’ though I think it’s possible and it’s certainly what the Russians want. It’s very clear they want to cut a deal with Trump that basically couches sanctions relief as a favor to the US, to say, ‘We should have open trade and investment with you. It’s good for America. It was Biden who put on all these restraints. He was just restraining US-Russia relations for no good reason.’“They want to basically get the US to give up their biggest bargaining chip before full negotiations over Ukraine even start.”Fishman studied at Yale, Cambridge and Stanford after 9/11. He noticed that “Iran’s nuclear program shot to the top of the foreign policy agenda”, even though “it was very obvious that the US was not willing to fight another war in the Middle East. And as a result, a number of people were thinking, ‘OK, what do we do about it?’”Joining the US government, Fishman found himself looking for a good book on sanctions.“I had an interesting mix of roles. Some were in the action, doing sanctions, diplomacy, and in others I was more of an adviser to really senior people. I worked for Secretary of State John Kerry and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey … And what I noticed was in the Situation Room, when the top leaders were discussing US foreign policy, whenever it turned to economic warfare, sanctions, etc, the level of conversation was so low, and I think it was because most people in the room had no idea what sanctions were.“It felt arcane. It felt mysterious. And so a big goal [with Chokepoints] was to demystify this and to create a way for average people just to read a book and say, ‘OK, I get it enough that I can develop my own opinions.’”The book is written to keep the reader moving, short chapters introduced with journalistic flourishes. Character traits are sharply noted, short anecdotes from lives away from work help present diplomats and bureaucrats in sharp relief.The importance of the sanctions policy such characters have shaped over the last 20 years is hard to overstate. The first part of Fishman’s book concerns the Iran nuclear deal, reached under Obama through diplomacy and economic pressure, meant to stop the Islamic Republic getting the bomb, dumped by Trump in 2018. Fishman also considers Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the US-led response – one subject of angry debate in the Oval Office when Zelenskyy visited last week – then switches to how Obama and Trump approached China.Fishman is a proud Obama alum but he is not afraid to apportion criticism.“Trump was significantly less risk-averse than Obama was when it came to sanctions. And I think that hopefully the Obama-Russia section [of Chokepoints] shows that in some ways, that risk aversion did not serve American interests.“The Obama administration also toward the end started to become quite concerned about China building islands in the South China Sea, all kinds of other aggressive acts. I think some Obama people would say this was too late in the administration to do anything about it but I would have been surprised, honestly, if you had seen a kind of frontal assault on Chinese economic aggression, even if Obama had more time.“So I think the benefit of Trump, with respect to China, was that he showed us that we have more leverage than we think we do, that we have more flexibility to actually push back against things that China was doing to hurt American interests, because I think it was well documented that Chinese IP theft was one of the ways that they were damaging American business interests, damaging the US economy, and we really hadn’t done anything about it.“So I do think that what Trump got right on China was that you can punch back without necessarily destroying the relationship … the US-China relationship didn’t really collapse during the Trump administration until the very end, until Covid, because they had signed the phase one trade deal in January 2020.“The thing that strikes me about the first Trump administration, and I think is going to be true about this one, is that Trump … on most issues, he vacillates. And China’s one of them. He goes back and forth from being extremely tough to being like, ‘Xi Jinping is my best friend.’”Trump is inconsistent toward other countries too, particularly those he threatens with tariffs, adversaries and friends alike, as demonstrated this week by 25% tariffs slapped on Mexico and Canada, then partially delayed.“Tariffs are taxes on imports,” Fishman said. “Let’s say we were to impose a tariff on Russian oil of 20%. That would mean that US companies could buy Russian oil, but if they were to do so, they’d have to pay a 20% tax. So a US refinery, down the street from me in New Jersey, could pay a tax to the US government to buy that Russian oil.“A sanction would be basically saying you can’t buy any oil at all. So a tariff is a significantly weaker form of a sanction. Historically, as a result, tariffs have not been used for national security reasons. They’re an economic bargaining chip. Sometimes you use tariffs to protect important domestic industries.“What Trump has done is basically just made tariffs yet another weapon in the US economic arsenal, alongside sanctions and export controls. And I think that’s OK. But it’s important for people to realize that tariffs are a significantly weaker tool than sanctions or export controls, so the idea of using them to address key national security problems is somewhat ludicrous.“Trump recently threatened tariffs on Russia. We import $2bn or $3bn worth of goods from Russia. So what good is that going to do? The tariff threat against the Brics countries – a lot of these things don’t make a lot of sense. I think he has a fixation with tariffs. Let’s see if one of his red lines is crossed, if he actually just relies on tariffs, or if there’s sanctions too.”A “chokepoint” is a point at which trade can be squeezed: physically, in corridors such as the Bosphorus or the Panama canal, electronically, through financial networks from which the US can freeze enemies out.“Geographic chokepoints have never fully lost their relevance,” Fishman said. “With the invention of the airplane, there are ways to ship commodities without access to chokepoints. But a lot of things, like oil, still travel by sea or by pipeline. And so that’s why the Bosphorus today is still a really important chokepoint. The Suez canal is very important, and the Strait of Hormuz.“What’s different about economic warfare today is that throughout almost all of human history, up until 20 years ago, cutting off any of these chokepoints would have required taking a navy vessel and parking it there, and saying, ‘OK, thou shall not pass.’ The difference now is you can have an official in the treasury department sign a document and block a chokepoint from thousands of miles away. That’s why you’ve seen this sort of unchained economic warfare, because it’s not like military force, it’s not like you’re actually putting US troops and US ships in harm’s way.”Trump has implied willingness to use US troops, to seize the Panama canal or Greenland. Fishman sees actual deployments as a possible consequence of Trump fueling a breakdown of economic order.“The thing I worry about, about some of Trump’s rhetoric, not just about Panama but Greenland … is that I think that we are certainly headed toward a breakdown in globalization. I think that in order to regain a sense of economic security, we’re going to see an erosion of economic interdependence.”Economic nationalism is on the rise. Fishman worries that “Trump may be driving us towards deploying these weapons of economic warfare not just against the Chinas and Russias of the world, but against Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Colombia, Brazil – all these different countries he’s threatened tariffs and sanctions against.”His book ends on a pessimistic note. In conversation, he warns: “History shows us that when states can’t acquire markets and resources through open trade and finance, that’s when wars break out. They try to conquer them. If you have that mindset, if you say, ‘We don’t feel like we can access these resources unless we physically plant our flag there,’ then that’s not a world that any of us is going to be happy living in.”

      Chokepoints is out now More

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      in US Politics

      Will Trump put a Fox News host on the US supreme court? Mark Tushnet can’t rule it out

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      Should Donald Trump get the chance to nominate a new justice to the supreme court, to join the three rightwingers he installed in his first term, he might pick “the equivalent of Pete Hegseth”, Mark Tushnet said, referring to the Fox News host who is now US secretary of defense.“Trump as a person has his idiosyncrasies, I’ll put it that way,” Tushnet said, from Harvard, where he is William Nelson Cromwell professor of law, emeritus. “And … I have thought about potential Trump nominees, and actually, what comes to mind is the equivalent of Pete Hegseth: a Fox News legal commentator.”Justice Jeanine Pirro? It’s a thought. Perhaps future historians will debate “The Box of Wine that Saved Nine”. Perhaps not.“I wouldn’t rule it out,” Tushnet said, of his Fox News theory, if not of Pirro, per se. “I don’t think it’s highly likely, but given the way those things work, and given the idea that you want people who aren’t simply judges, it’s not a lunatic thought, I guess.”The reference to “people who aren’t simply judges” is to arguments laid out in Tushnet’s new book, Who Am I to Judge?, in which he makes his case against the prevalence of judicial theories, particularly originalism, to which conservatives adhere, and calls for a rethink of how justices are selected.Tushnet is a liberal voice. Provocatively, he writes that Amy Coney Barrett, the third Trump justice who in 2022 helped remove the federal right to abortion, at least has a hinterland different from most court picks, as a member of People of Praise, a hardline Catholic sect.“I think her involvement in that group has exposed her to a much wider range of human experience than John Roberts’s background, for example,” Tushnet said, referring to the chief justice who was a Reagan White House aide and a federal judge. “And so if you’re looking for people who have been exposed to human experience across the board, I think she’s a reasonable candidate for that.”View image in fullscreenConey Barrett cemented the 6-3 rightwing majority that has given Trump wins including rejecting attempts to exclude him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection and ruling that presidents have some legal immunity. Now, as Trump appears to imagine himself a king and oversees an authoritarian assault on the federal government, reading Tushnet and talking to him generates a sort of grim humor.Looking ahead, to when Trump’s executive orders might land before the justices, Tushnet suggests “the court will put … speed bumps in the way of the administration. They won’t say: ‘Absolutely you can’t do it,’ except the birthright citizenship order.”That order, signed on Trump’s first day back in power, seeks to end the right to citizenship for all children born on American soil and subject to US jurisdiction, as guaranteed under the 14th amendment since 1868.On 23 January, a federal judge said Trump’s order was so “blatantly unconstitutional” that it “boggled” his mind. Should it reach the supreme court, Tushnet can see the rightwing justices “saying: ‘Look, yeah, if you want to do this, we’re not saying you can, but if you want to do it, you got to get Congress to go along. You can’t just do it on your own.’ So that would be a speed bump.”That said, Tushnet sometimes thinks “about how in the US, there are these traffic-calming measures that are literally speed bumps but sometimes, if you go over too fast, you fly”. Trump, he said, has licensed rightwing justices to take decisions that “may not count as speed bumps if you fly off them”.Tushnet was happy to answer a question he thinks all supreme court nominees should be asked: what’s your favorite book and favorite movie?Tushnet’s favorites are Middlemarch by George Eliot and Heaven, a 2002 film directed by Tom Tykwer from a script co-written by Krzysztof Kieślowski. He wrote his book containing such questions, he said, “because I had this longstanding sense that the [supreme court] nomination process has gotten off the rails, mostly by focusing exclusively on judges as potential nominees, and secondarily by focusing on constitutional theory.“For the past 20 years, the court … has been dominated by people whose background was as judges or appellate advocates, and historically that was quite unusual. There are always some judges but there always had been people with much broader kinds of experience, including a former president, William H Taft [chief justice between 1921 and 1930], and several candidates for the presidency, including Charles Evans Hughes [1916], Earl Warren [a vice-presidential pick in 1948], senators like Hugo Black. And those people had disappeared from consideration for the court, and that seemed to be a bad idea.”Tushnet describes a “political reconstitution of the nomination process provoked in large measure by the Republican reaction to the Warren court”, which sat from 1953 to 1969, the era of great civil rights reforms.“I think their view was the Warren court was not composed of judges, they were politicians, some called them ‘politicians in robes’, and Republicans sort of thought the way to get away from the substantive jurisprudence of the Warren court was to put judges on the court, rather than people with what I call broad experience,” Tushnet said.One justice on the current court was not previously a judge: Elena Kagan, one of the three besieged liberals, was dean of Harvard Law School, then solicitor general under Barack Obama.Tushnet “went into the project thinking that I would find more great justices who had been a politician than I actually did. When I was teaching, I would do this thing about who the justices were who decided Brown v Board of Education”, the 1954 ruling that ended segregation in public schools, “and I think it’s fair to say that not one of them’s primary prior experience was as a judge, and like seven or eight of their prior primary experiences were as a politician. And if Brown v Board is the premier achievement of the supreme court, the fact that it was decided by a court primarily made up of politicians counts in favor of thinking about politicians when appointing to the court.”“Why not do it? For me, the main feature of having been a politician is not that you’ve taken stances aligned with one or another political party at the time, but that you’ve provided reasons in many different ways, you’ve grown up amongst people with a wide range of life experiences that you’ve had to think about, as a politician, in order to get their votes, in order to get your way,” he said.Tushnet’s ideal might be Charles Evans Hughes, an associate justice from 1910 to 1916 and chief justice between 1930 and 1941, but also governor of New York, Republican candidate for president and US secretary of state.On the page, Tushnet imagines asking Hughes a question – “What constitutional theories do you use?” – and getting an appealing answer: “I try to interpret the constitution to make it a suitable instrument for governance in today’s United States.”Tushnet says modern judges and justices should say the same, rather than reach for judicial theories. His new book is in part an answer to a demolition of originalism by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley law school: “I distinguish, I think, more clearly than other people have, including Erwin, between what I call academic originalism and judicial originalism.”Either form of originalism concerns working out what the founders meant when they wrote the constitution, then advocating its application to modern-day questions. Tushnet “think[s] a good chunk of academic originalism is not subject to many of the criticisms that Erwin levels. It’s not perfect but it’s an academic enterprise, and people work out difficulties, and there’s controversy within the camp and so on.View image in fullscreen“Judicial originalism is different because it has a couple of components. One is, we now know it’s quite selective. To get originalism into the TikTok decision, for example, you have to do an enormous amount of work. It’s not impossible, but it’s not an originalist opinion, fundamentally. So [justices are] selectively originalist, or, as my phrase is, opportunistically originalist. They use it when the sources that they’re presented with support conclusions they would want to reach anyway, and the adversary process at the supreme court isn’t a very good way of finding out what they say they’re trying to find out. And so as a judicial enterprise, originalism just doesn’t do what it purports to do.”To Tushnet, the late Antonin Scalia, an arch-conservative and originalist, is “the leading candidate to be placed on a list of great justices” of the past 50 years, “because of his influence and his contributions to the court.“But one bad contribution was his widely admired writing style. Now, writing styles change over time. And having read an enormous number of opinions of the 1930s, I know there’s an improvement in readability since the 1930s. But the idea that [opinions] become more readable, accessible and memorable by including Scalia-like zingers, short phrases that are quotable and memorable, seems to be just a mistake. But he’s very influential, and so people try to emulate him … Justice Kagan does it in a gentler way. I guess my inclination would be to say: ‘If you’re going to do it, do it the way Justice Kagan does, rather than the way Justice Scalia did.’”Tushnet agrees that some of Scalia’s pugilistic spirit seems to have passed into Samuel Alito, the arch-conservative author of the Dobbs v Jackson ruling, which removed abortion rights, if while shedding all vestiges of humor.In his book, Tushnet shows how Alito’s Dobbs ruling contained a clear mistake, the sort of thing that is largely down to the role clerks play in drafting opinions, as Tushnet once did for Thurgood Marshall, the first Black American justice.“Times were quite different then,” Tushnet said. “The year I was there, the court decided 150 cases. Now they’re deciding under 50 a year … the year I was there was the year Roe v Wade was decided [1973, establishing the right to abortion, now lost]. It had been resolved fundamentally the year before, so they were just cleaning things up, but we knew these were consequential decisions.”The court will soon have more consequential decisions to make. In the meantime, talk of a constitutional crisis, of a president defying the courts, grows increasingly heated.“My sense is that we’re not at the crisis point yet,” Tushnet said. “Like many administrations before it, the Trump administration is taking aggressive legal positions, which may or may not be vindicated. If they’re not vindicated, they’re muttering about what they’ll do. That’s happened before.“My favorite example is that in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt, while a major decision was pending, had his staff prepare two press releases, one saying: ‘Actually the court has upheld our position,’ the other saying: ‘The court mistakenly rejected our position, and we’re going to go ahead with it anyway.’ Now, they didn’t have to issue that press release, because the court went with the administration. But, you know, muttering about resistance is not historically unusual. Resisting would be quite, quite dramatic, but we’re not there yet.”

      Who Am I to Judge? is published by Yale University Press More

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      Tom Cotton gingerly steps on Trump’s toes as he eviscerates TikTok in book

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      Tom Cotton stands a better chance of becoming Senate majority leader than a Republican presidential nominee. After all, with Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Arkansas senator worked to undermine Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election – an unforgivable sin in Trumpworld.Cotton branded those who stormed the Capitol “insurrectionists” – a label he previously affixed to those who rioted amid protests over the police murder of George Floyd.In 2022, Cotton mulled a presidential run, taking multiple trips to Iowa and New Hampshire. He never announced and Trump again claimed the prize. Cotton’s dream may never die but for now he is chair of the Senate intelligence committee and the third-ranking Republican in the upper chamber – not a bad perch from which to publish his latest book.With Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, Cotton seeks to shine a light on a major threat to US interests. In the process, he gingerly steps on Trump’s toes; trashes Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk; and repeatedly dings TikTok, which is owned by China but also by Jeff Yass, a professional investor and a convert of convenience to Trump’s cause. Cotton may come to regret all three moves as missteps.He obliquely criticizes Trump regarding Chinese investment in US educational institutions. “A senior Chinese Communist purchased New York Military Academy, Donald Trump’s alma mater, and then appointed several of his Chinese associates to its board of trustees,” Cotton writes. That sale was finalized in 2015. “The Department of Defense has granted the academy hundreds of thousands of dollars since its Chinese takeover,” Cotton adds. Federal records show such grants made during Trump’s first term, between 2017 and 2021.Elsewhere, the senator slams Musk for “chasing Chinese dollars”. For 2024, Tesla reported revenues from China of $20.94bn.On top of being the driving force of Trump’s evisceration of the federal government, via the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Musk is chief executive of companies including Tesla and SpaceX, which in turn owns Starlink internet. In such roles, Cotton writes, “Musk told China’s state television, ‘I’m very confident that the future of China is going to be great and that China is headed towards being the biggest economy in the world and a lot of prosperity in the future.’” This hardly sounds like “America first” or “Make America great again”.Cotton groups Musk with American “tech titans” he views as putting profit ahead of the national interest, including the Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta. Collectively, writes Cotton, they have “shamefully supplicated China’s Communist rulers”.But the senator reserves a special place in hell for TikTok.“No social-media app has harmed our kids more than TikTok,” he declares. “If your kid uses TikTok, I urge you to stop reading now and immediately delete the account.”Here, Trump and Cotton are no longer on the same page. In 2020, Trump branded TikTok a threat to national security and sought to force its divestment. But now money, votes and vengeance appear to have supplanted national interest.For starters, there is Yass, co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, a trading company that holds a 15% stake in ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. Yass is also a key funder of the Club for Growth, a deep-pocketed and libertarian-minded tax-exempt organization. Trump met with him late last winter. His thinking on TikTok changed. As it happens, Yass hasn’t donated to Cotton since 2013.Now Trump looks to rescue TikTok and ByteDance, a move Cotton openly criticized. On taking office, Trump imposed a 75-day moratorium on the deadline, under US law, for ByteDance to find a US buyer. At the inauguration, Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, sat alongside Tulsi Gabbard, now director of national intelligence.Cotton has bitten his lip. “Our point in passing that law,” he told Fox News, was not to ban TikTok in the US. Rather, it was to compel ByteDance to divest, and ostensibly have a “TikTok that is not influenced by Chinese communists”. For the moment, TikTok remains in such control.In his book, Cotton urges Americans to shun “avoid other Chinese apps like Temu, Alibaba, Shein, WeChat, and Alipay. A few dollars savings or a little extra convenience isn’t worth the threat to your family’s privacy and data security or the indirect help these apps provide to the Chinese communists.” Talk about timing.Kash Patel, the new FBI director, is an investor in Elite Depot, Shein’s corporate parent. The Wall Street Journal blared: “Trump’s FBI Pick Stands to Make Millions From Fashion Brand Shein … Critics question potential conflicts of interest in owning shares of [a] foreign company with China ties.” Patel values his Elite Depot stock between $1m and $5m.Cotton voted to confirm. “Congratulations, FBI Director Patel!” he posted. “America will be safer and more secure with Kash leading the FBI.”Trump has helped Shein and Temu, mail-order retailers, stay great. Initially, Trump imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese imports and closed the “de minimis” loophole, which had enabled packages from China valued at less than $800 to be processed duty-free. Then Trump reversed himself. The loophole stood.As for data security and privacy, so close to Cotton’s heart? Musk and the boys of Doge are hoovering that stuff up as you read.Cotton remains a China hawk and an economic nationalist, but is no longer a darling of Trumpworld. In the run-up to the vote to confirm Gabbard as DNI, Cotton and John Thune, the Senate’s majority leader, received a stern warning from Matt Boyle of Breitbart, a Trump-adjacent media organ.“They will be heroes assuming they usher Tulsi to confirmation but if Tulsi is not confirmed then Cotton and Thune are in deep personal trouble with the base. I’m optimistic on this one at this point. The consequences of failure are too dire.”Love is conditional. Cotton lives to fight another day.

      Seven Things You Can’t Say About China is published in the US by HarperCollins More

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      Julianne Moore’s freckles? How Republican bans on ‘woke’ books have reached new level

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      When the actor Julianne Moore learned her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, a tale of a girl who learns to stop hating her freckles, had been targeted for a potential ban at all schools serving US military families, she took to Instagram, posting that it was a “great shock” to discover the story had been “banned by the Trump Administration”.Moore had seen a memo that circulated last week revealing that tens of thousands of American children studying in about 160 Pentagon schools both in the US and around the world had had all access to library books suspended for a week, while officials conducted a “compliance review” to hunt out any books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”.Although whether Moore’s book would be selected for “further review” or banned entirely remains unclear, the episode brought into stark relief that the movement to ban books in the US – which has been bubbling up for several years, mostly in individual states – had reached a whole new level: the federal one.Donald Trump’s re-election, and his subsequent crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, has many campaigners fearing that the Pentagon move to scrub its libraries of anything it opposes ideologically could be the first of a series of broad attempts to eliminate any discussions of race, LGBTQ+ issues, diversity and historical education from public schools.The Trump administration has scoffed at the idea that it is banning books, and last month it instructed the Department of Education to end its investigations into the matter, referring to bans as a “hoax”. Indeed, many deny that banning books is censorship at all – a disconnect that stems not just from the historical context of book banning, but from a semantic dispute over what it means to “ban” something.In the early 20th century, books such as Ulysses by James Joyce and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck were banned due to “moral concerns”.Likewise, the red scare of the 1950s saw increased censorship of materials perceived as sympathetic to communism, while the 1980s saw attacks against books dealing with race and sexuality, such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker, which was nearly banned two years after its release in 1984 after a parent petitioned against its use in an Oakland, California, classroom.The difference today, however, is that instead of coming primarily from conservative community organizers, the book banning movement is now coming from government – school boards, local governments and now, with the Pentagon move, even the federal government, increasingly working in lockstep.The modern wave of book bans could be said to have started with a backlash against The 1619 Project, a journalistic anthology by Nikole Hannah-Jones published by the New York Times. The project aimed to reframe US history by centering the contributions of Black Americans, but conservative politicians – including Trump – claimed it taught students to “hate their own country”.View image in fullscreenIn response, Republican lawmakers moved to ban the work in schools, marking the beginning of an intensified campaign against so-called “anti-American” literature.According to PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to defending free expression in literature, more than 10,000 book bans occurred in public schools during the 2023-2024 school year. Books that address racism, gender and history were disproportionately targeted.“The whole principle of public education is that it is not supposed to be dictated by particular ideologies that aim to censor what other people can learn and access in schools,” Jonathan Friedman, the managing director for US free expression programs at PEN America, said.Rightwing politicians, however, have increasingly used book banning as a rallying cry, portraying certain books as tools of “indoctrination” – failing to note the irony that indoctrination is the process of carefully limiting ideas, like banning books.One key figure has been the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. He has echoed Trump’s dismissal of book bans as a “hoax”, and spearheaded multiple attempts to reshape education to reflect only conservative values, including the Stop Woke Act, which restricts discussions on systemic racism, and the Parental Rights in Education Act, widely known as the “don’t say gay” law, which limits discussions of gender identity and sexuality in classrooms.Banned titles in Florida schools now include Beloved and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.What DeSantis and other rightwingers often say is that these efforts don’t truly constitute “bans” because they only remove books from schools, rather than totally outlawing them from being bought in the US, and therefore don’t encroach on free speech. John Chrastka, the executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, argued that this is faulty reasoning.“The private marketplace is protected by the first amendment in ways that the government is not beholden to,” he said. “The idea that because a book is still available for sale means that it’s not being banned outright is only the difference between a framework that was in place prior to the 1950s” and today.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe noted that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was first published in 1928 in Europe, was banned in the US for several years before finally getting its American publication in 1959 in what was a watershed affirmation of the right to free speech. Realizing that the first amendment prevented them from blocking the book from US bookstores, critics turned their attention to libraries instead, a grayer area in terms of constitutional protections.DeSantis and other rightwing politicians have taken the lesson: if the constitution prevents you from banning a book from being bought or sold in Florida, the next best thing is to ban it from the places most people would have the easiest access to it – schools and libraries.“It doesn’t add up,” Chrastka added, “the idea that a teenager in a state where it’s impossible for them to get to an independent bookstore because they don’t exist any more somehow has enough liberty to buy the book when the school library is blocked from having it available for them.”Another key distinction is between banning books from classroom curriculum versus removing them from school libraries – which, unlike classrooms, are historically protected spaces for free access to ideas.“What you read for a class supports the curriculum,” says Chrastka, whereas “the school library is supposed to support independent reading. One of them is required reading and the other one isn’t, but [the reading material] is meant to be available.”The landmark supreme court case Island Trees School District v Pico in 1982, when a school board in New York removed books from its libraries it deemed “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy”, established that school boards cannot restrict the availability of books in their libraries simply because they don’t like or agree with the content.Critics contend the new wave of book bans, although not yet about preventing sales at bookshops, fails to meet the intended purpose of libraries: to preserve and provide a variety of ideas and information that may not be readily or equally accessible to everyone.Now, many fear that once certain books are established as unacceptable in schools, the censorship could spread to colleges, bookstores and eventually nationwide bans. Even if that does not happen, experts say one of the most reliable ways to ensure ideas are suppressed is to dismantle the education system, making Trump’s repeatedly stated goal of eliminating the Department of Education a particular concern.“The vast majority of the budget for the Department of Education and the laws and regulations that make sure that the department is functional go to help students succeed and protect students who are otherwise vulnerable,” said Chrastka.With the education system having been chipped away at for decades with budgets cuts, low literacy rates and high dropout rates, book bans only make it weaker.“What we need in this country is for students to feel supported and to find their own identities, and reading is a core component of that,” Chrastka said. “Let’s let the kids discover themselves and discover their own path forward in the process.” More

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      ‘X-rays into the president’s soul’: Jeffrey Toobin on Trump, Biden and the pardon power

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      To Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy, pardons are “X-rays into the soul” of the American president who gives them, revealing true character. Pardons can show compassion and mercy in the occupant of the Oval Office. More often, they expose venality and self-preservation.Toobin said: “One thing you can say about Donald Trump is that his moral compass always points in the same direction, and his motives are always the same, which are transactional and narcissistic. This is a good example, I think, of my thesis that pardons are X-rays into the president’s soul.”In his first term, Trump “wanted to settle a score with Robert Mueller, so he pardoned everyone Mueller prosecuted” in the special counsel’s investigation of Russian election interference in 2016 and links between Trump and Moscow, Toobin said.“Trump wanted to take care of his family, so he pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner,” who is now nominated as US ambassador to France, the author added. “He wanted to reward his House Republican allies, so he pardoned several who were engaged in egregious corruption, and he pardoned people who were [his son-in-law and adviser] Jared Kushner’s friends.”Asked why he wrote his 10th book to come out now, so soon after such a momentous election, Toobin, a former CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer, said: “I saw that from a very early stage in the campaign Trump was talking about January 6 pardons. But I also recognized that if Kamala Harris won, there would be pressure on her to pardon Trump” on 44 federal criminal charges now dismissed.“I think the proper way to understand the January 6 pardons [issued on day one of Trump’s second term] is to remember that Trump himself was a January 6 defendant, Toobin said. “He wasn’t charged with the riot the way the others were, but he was charged with trying to overthrow the election with the fake electors scheme. And if you look at the way in the beginning part of his second term he is settling scores and rewarding his friends, the January 6 pardons told you exactly how he was going to go about conducting his administration.”Reportedly saying: “Fuck it, release ’em all”, Trump gave pardons, commutations or other acts of clemency to the absurd, such as the J6 Praying Grandma and the QAnon Shaman, and to the outright sinister: hundreds who attacked police, militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy, Toobin wrote.He said: “If Trump had tried to carve out the non-violent January 6 rioters [for clemency], that that would have been somewhat more defensible than what he wound up doing, which was, in my view, completely indefensible.”His point about pardons being an X-ray for the soul applies to Joe Biden too.On the page, Toobin decries the 46th president’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, on gun and tax charges and any other grounds, having said he would not do so.Toobin said: “When you think about Hunter, this is a guy who was convicted of a crime, who pleaded guilty to other crimes. So it’s not like these were made-up accusations against him. Yes, the criminal justice system came down hard on him, but the criminal justice system comes down hard on a lot of people, and their father wasn’t president of the United States, so they don’t get this kind of break. And I just think that’s not how the system is supposed to work.”Publishing schedules being what they are, The Pardon does not cover the last-minute pre-emptive pardons Biden gave his brothers, his sister and their spouses, as well as public figures held to be in danger of persecution by Trump, Liz Cheney and Gen Mark Milley among them.But Toobin told the Guardian: “The family pardons were just bizarre, because these people, as far as I’m aware, are not even under investigation. But [Biden] was so worried and fixated on his family that he took this extraordinary step, which is just egregious to me.”The pardon is older than America. British kings could pardon people. When the states broke away, they kept the pardon for presidents. George Washington used it after the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, for men convicted of treason. Abraham Lincoln used it during the civil war to reprieve Union soldiers sentenced to die and to forgive Confederates in the name of peace.Such acts of mercy continue, memorably including Jimmy Carter’s clemency for those who dodged the draft for Vietnam and Barack Obama’s record-setting issue of commutations for people mostly jailed for minor crimes. Even Trump handed down mercy in his first term, amid the push which produced the First Step Act, criminal justice reform he swiftly seemed to forget.Asked which modern president has best used the pardon power for the public good, Toobin picks Obama. Inevitably, though, most public attention falls on use of the power for controversial ends, including George HW Bush’s mop-up of the Iran-Contra scandal and Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon for Marc Rich, a financier turned fugitive.The most famous pardon of all, the one Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal, hangs over every president. As Toobin sees it, had Harris taken office in January, pressure to pardon Trump of his alleged federal crimes would have been great, and it would have sprung from “an interesting shift in the conventional wisdom” about Ford and Nixon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It was widely considered a disaster in 1974” – Carl Bernstein told Bob Woodward, his Washington Post partner in reporting Watergate, “The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch” – “but now you’ve had Ted Kennedy giving Gerald Ford an award, saying he was right about the pardon. You have Bob Woodward changing his mind [to say the pardon was ‘an act of courage’]’, and at the oral argument of the Trump v United States supreme court case [about presidential immunity, last April], Justice Brett Kavanaugh said, ‘Well, everyone now agrees Ford did the right thing.’”Toobin thinks Ford did the wrong thing, given Nixon’s clearly criminal behavior. He was also “struck by the absence of a book heavily focused on that issue of the Ford pardon. So all those combinations led me to try to not only write a book, but have it come out in early 2025.”He duly devotes most of that book to the Nixon pardon: how Ford agonized about it, decided to do it, then employed an obscure young lawyer to make sure Nixon took it.“I had certainly never heard of Benton Becker when I went into this,” Toobin said. “And I think his central role illustrates how ill-prepared Ford was for the whole issue of dealing with Nixon, because if you want to address an issue that will be the central event of your presidency, maybe you want to entrust it to someone who is not a young volunteer lawyer, who is himself under criminal investigation.“Now, if you say that, you should say that Becker [who died in 2015] was completely cleared. But it struck me as ludicrous that a president with the entire resources of the White House counsel’s office, the justice department and the entire American government, chose to invest so much authority in this young man. I think that just illustrates how Ford’s anxiousness to get the whole Nixon subject behind him led him to fail to consider the consequences of what he was doing.”The rights and wrongs of the Nixon pardon echo to this day. Looking again to last year’s supreme court arguments over presidential immunity, which the justices decided did apply in relation to official acts, Toobin said: “I thought the best question at that oral argument was Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson saying, ‘If presidents are immune, why did Ford need to pardon Nixon?’ Which is a great question, and doesn’t really have an answer. The only real answer is that [Chief Justice] John Roberts just completely changed the rules” in Trump’s favor.The Pardon is Toobin’s guide to how presidential pardons work, for good or often ill. He is not optimistic that the power can be reined in or usefully reformed:“The both good and bad news is that our constitution is almost impossible to amend, and no one cares enough about pardons one way or the other to undertake the massive task of of trying to amend the constitution. It’s not even clear how you would amend it. My solution to pardon problems is not changing the constitution, it’s getting better presidents.”That will have to wait – at least for four more years.

      The Pardon is out now More

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      Presidents at War: how battle has shaped American leaders

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      In his new book, Presidents at War, Steven M Gillon considers how the second world war shaped a generation of presidents, a span that takes in eight men – but not all of them served in uniform between 1941 and 1945.Gillon likes to “ask people, ‘There are seven men who served in uniform in world war two and who went on to be president: who are they?’ And most people think Jimmy Carter did, and they forget Ronald Reagan.”Carter was born in 1924 and came of age in wartime. But the submariner turned peanut farmer turned politician, who died aged 100 in December, graduated the US Naval Academy in 1946, the year after the war. Reagan, meanwhile, joined the Army Reserve in the 1930s and spent the war years enlisted – but stayed at home in Hollywood, where he made his name as an actor, narrating films and joining fundraising drives.“Reagan was the most fascinating for me,” says Gillon, emeritus professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and scholar-in-residence at the History Channel. “I once bought the story about: ‘Oh, he wanted to go and fight but his eyes were too bad.’ In fact, there’s all these machinations going on behind the scenes that keep him from going overseas, to make sure he stays in California so he can make movies, while at the same time creating this public image of a guy who has been off to war, and he comes home to his wife [Jane Wyman], and there’s a picture of him in his uniform, kissing his wife – who in fact he slept with every night during the war.”Gillon focuses on how the war affected men who led their country through the cold war with Russia, into the quagmire of Vietnam, and eventually into the first Iraq war. To Gillon, “those presidents who came closest to combat were the ones who were most restrained in their use of force afterwards,” meaning Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded Allied forces in Europe, and John F Kennedy and George HW Bush, who flirted with death in the Pacific, JFK as a torpedo boat captain, Bush as a navy flier.“Reagan is the exception of so many of these things,” Gillon says. “Reagan never sees war. He thinks he saw the Holocaust camps, but he didn’t. He just makes stuff up, and he thinks it’s true. But what I did not know was how he came out of the war with the real fear of nuclear weapons, and he belonged to an organization for international control of atomic weapons, largely a liberal organization, as he was involved in other liberal organizations like Americans for Democratic Action.“While he shed all the other liberal ties, he never shed that fear of nuclear weapons. And despite all his bombastic language, he was very restrained in the use of force. I mean, the only thing he did was create a phony war in Grenada [in which 19 Americans died] and see 241 Americans killed in Lebanon [both in 1983], and that was a peacekeeping mission.”View image in fullscreenIn response to the Beirut embassy bombing, Reagan launched limited strikes. He also bombed Libya, in 1986, and funded and fueled conflicts elsewhere, his efforts in Nicaragua creating the Iran-Contra scandal. But on the global scene, Gillon “was surprised at how restrained Reagan was. And then his fear of nuclear weapons made him open to [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s overtures” for detente and arms control “during his second term … this was where Reagan followed his own instincts and in this case his instincts were right, and he was the right person to do it because he had such strong anti-communist credentials. So that was a twist I had not appreciated before.”Gillon’s book contains more twists. Many involve Lyndon Baines Johnson, like Reagan no stranger to distorting facts for political gain. A congressman when the US entered the war, LBJ got himself into uniform for a Pacific fact-finding tour. Hitching a ride on a bomber, he survived an attack by Japanese fighters.“There’s controversy over whether that took place the way he described it,” Gillon says. “There was an article written by some aviation historians who said it never could have happened. And then, years later, the Japanese pilot who had actually led the attack against the American planes said he remembered Johnson’s plane. He remembered crippling it, and he said the plane was so wounded that he knew it wasn’t going to do any damage, so he broke off and went back into the main attack.”Johnson’s plane made it back to base, leaving him alive to tell tales of his own bravery on the campaign trail. Gillon shows how those tales grew more shameless but thinks the basic story “is definitely true”, including how a bathroom break meant Johnson lost a spot on a plane which was shot down, killing all onboard.“Yeah, Johnson was just cool as a cucumber. And I’m sure he was thrilled when he landed.”Gillon was born in working class Philadelphia in 1956, in the shadow of the war. Too young for the Vietnam draft, fascinated by the presidency, he graduated from Widener and Brown and then taught at Yale and Oxford. Recent books include America’s Reluctant Prince, about his late friend John F Kennedy Jr, and The Pact, about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, a Democratic president and a Republican House speaker whose relationship resonates loudly today.With his latest book, Gillon focuses on the major lessons of the second world war, particularly the cost of appeasement, Hitler’s triumph at Munich in 1938 a constant ghost at the feast. Such lessons, he says, “some forgot, like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, while others, like Kennedy and Bush, those who really saw battle and the horrors of war, you see them thinking about world war two all the time when they’re making big decisions, whether it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis for Kennedy or it’s the invasion of Iraq with George Bush”.View image in fullscreenLooking to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Gillon describes how both served but did not see battle. Both were in the navy. Ford’s closest brush with action involved a fire aboard his ship during a Pacific typhoon. Nixon was posted to tropical islands, working logistics and supply, failing to reach the front line.Vietnam dominates Gillon’s book. US involvement began under Eisenhower, accelerated under Kennedy, swirled into nightmare under Johnson and finally ended under Nixon – though he had lengthened the horror by thwarting peace talks for his own political gain. Gillon retells the extraordinary Anna Chennault affair, in which a Washington socialite acted as a go-between with the government of South Vietnam, relaying Nixon’s urge to boycott talks till the 1968 election was done. When Johnson learned of it, he told a senior Republican: “This is treason.” The senator agreed. Johnson called Nixon, who denied it. Gillon writes: “According to some reports, after hanging up, Nixon collapsed with laughter.”In 1968, Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. The war did not end until 1973. Reading Presidents at War, it is striking to realize that no future president who was of an age to serve in Vietnam did so.Bill Clinton opposed the war, studied abroad and denied accusations of dodging the draft. Joe Biden secured student deferments then was exempted on account of teenage asthma. George W Bush, the son of a war hero, went into the Texas Air national guard, which, Gillon notes, “is a place notoriously where rich, powerful people put their kids during war”. Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain did go to Vietnam – but lost presidential elections.As so often, Donald Trump is a whole other matter. He obtained student draft deferments but also found a doctor to say “bone spurs” in his heels rendered him unfit for service. He has also said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating in New York was his “personal Vietnam”, making him feel like “a great and very brave soldier”. It’s not a line to endear him to Gillon, who says he cast his first vote for a Republican president, Ford, but whose epilogue to Presidents at War makes clear his distaste for Trump, his view of military matters and his reported negative comments about those who serve.“I have my political point of view but when I write history, I try to be really fair-minded,” Gillon says. “And I can’t be fair-minded toward Trump. I just dislike him so much that I don’t think I could write a book about him. I wrote a book about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, and what made me happy was that both Clinton and Gingrich liked it. I take great pride in being fair of mind towards someone like Newt Gingrich, who I have no political affinity for, but I just can’t get to that point mentally with Trump. I can’t write a book that I feel I can’t be fair.”

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      JD Vance and those threats from within | Letters

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      Among the justified furore around America’s new position in the world, one part at least triggers a bit of nostalgia (JD Vance stuns Munich conference with blistering attack on Europe’s leaders, 14 February). JD Vance’s description of the “threat from within” brings back memories of Margaret Thatcher’s designation of those who disagreed with her as “the enemy within”. I still have a badge with that somewhere. Maybe it’s time I dusted it off.Steve TownsleyCowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan As JD Vance lectures European leaders about freedom of speech, Louisiana is banning health officials from promoting vaccinations and libraries across the US are having to purge their shelves of any books that make mention of subjects that Republicans dislike. No hypocrisy there, then?Tony GreenIpswich, Suffolk Britain thought it had a special relationship with the US. Seems we got dumped on Valentine’s Day.Emma TaitLondon Your report (‘Guess who’s back?’: the inside story of Nigel Farage’s quest for power, 15 February) confirmed what I already suspected: Reform is basically a party run by millionaires, for the benefit of millionaires, with a good dollop of nativism added to the mix.Alan PavelinChislehurst, Kent Re remarks in school reports (Letters, 14 February), my favourite is from around 1971, courtesy of a great history teacher: “Intelligent answers, a mastery of the facts would help.” I’m sure CP Scott would have agreed with him.Kevin McGillPrestwood, Buckinghamshire More