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      Lessons from the Edge review: Marie Yovanovitch roasts Trump on Putin and Ukraine

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      Lessons from the Edge review: Marie Yovanovitch roasts Trump on Putin and Ukraine The former US ambassador’s memoir is timely and telling, as well as a fine story of a life in national serviceFor nearly a month, Vladimir Putin has delivered a daily masterclass in incompetence and brutality. The ex-KGB spymaster and world-class kleptocrat was the guy Donald Trump wanted to be. Just weeks ago, the former president lavished praise on his idol and derided Nato as “not so smart”.Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in bookRead moreHow’s that working out, Donald?The world cheers for Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ukraine, his besieged country. Russia’s economy is on its knees, its stock market shuttered, its shelves bare. The rouble is worth less than a penny. The west is not as decadent or as flaccid as the tyrant-in-the-Kremlin and President Bone-Spurs bet.With impeccable timing, Marie Yovanovitch delivers Lessons from the Edge, her memoir. The author is the former US ambassador to Ukraine who Trump fired during his attempt to withhold aid to Kyiv in return for political dirt, an effort that got him impeached. For the first time.Yovanovitch tells a story of an immigrant’s success. But, of course, her short but momentous stint in the last administration receives particular attention.On the page, Yovanovitch berates Trump for “his obsequiousness to Putin”, which she says was a “frequent and continuing cause for concern” among the diplomatic corps. Trump, she writes, saw “Ukraine as a ‘loser’ country, smaller and weaker than Russia”. If only thousands of dead Russian troops could talk.Trump was commander-in-chief but according to Yovanovitch, he didn’t exactly have the best handle on where his soldiers were deployed.At an Oval Office meeting in 2017 with Petro Poroshenko, then president of Ukraine, Trump asked HR McMaster, his national security adviser, if US troops were deployed in Donbas in eastern Ukraine, territory now invoked by Putin as grounds for his invasion.“An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia,” Yovanovitch writes.In the moment, she says, she also pondered if it was “better to interpret Trump’s question as suggesting that the commander-in-chief thought it possible that US troops were fighting Russia-led forces, or instead as an indicator that the president wasn’t clear which country was on the other side of the war against Ukraine”.Let that sink in. And remember this. According to Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, Trump mocked his father as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s.Yovanovitch’s parents fled the Nazis, then the Soviets. She was born in Canada and her family moved to the US when she was three. Later she received an offer from Smith, an all-women’s school in Massachusetts, but opted for Princeton. It had gone co-ed less than a decade earlier but Yovanovitch counted on it being more fun.In her memoir, she devotes particular attention to snubs and put-downs endured on account of gender. One of her professors, a European history specialist, announced that he opposed women being admitted. After that, Yovanovitch stayed silent during discussion. It was only after she received an A, she writes, that the professor noticed her and made sure to include her. She really had something to say.Lessons from the Edge also recalls a sex discrimination lawsuit brought in 1976 by Alison Palmer, a retired foreign service officer, against the US Department of State. The case was settled, but only in 1989 and with an acknowledgment of past wrongs by the department.State had “disproportionately given men the good assignments”, Palmer said. Yovanovitch writes: “I felt – and still feel – tremendous gratitude to [her] for fighting for me and so many other women.”Yovanovitch would serve in Moscow and as US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Ukraine. She worked with political appointees and careerists. She offers particular praise for Republicans of an earlier, saner era.She lauds George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, for professionalism and commitment to country. Shultz reminded new ambassadors that “my” country meant the US, not their place of posting. He also viewed diplomacy as a constant effort, as opposed to a spasmodic intervention.Yovanovitch also singles out James Baker, secretary of state to George HW Bush, for helping the president forge a coalition to win the Gulf war.“Department folks found him cold and aloof,” Yovanovitch recalls. “But it was clear immediately that he was a master of diplomacy.”Baker showed flashes of idealism. The US stood for something. As younger men, both Shultz and Baker were marines.In marked contrast, Yovanovitch gives the Trump administration a thumping. She brands Rex Tillerson’s 14-month tenure as secretary of state as “near-disastrous”. As for Tillerson’s successor, Mike Pompeo, Yovanovitch lambasts his “faux swagger” and his refusal to defend her when she came under attack from Trump and his minions.Amid Trump’s first impeachment, over Ukraine, Yovanovitch testified: “The policy process is visibly unravelling … the state department is being hollowed out.”Loyalty to subordinates was not Pompeo’s thing – or Trump’s. “Lick what’s above you, kick what’s below you” – that was more their mantra. True to form, in 2020 Pompeo screamed at a reporter: “Do you think Americans give a fuck about Ukraine?”Two years later, they do. At the same time, Pompeo nurses presidential ambitions. Good luck with that.Yovanovitch rightly places part of the blame for Putin’s invasion on Trump.“He saw Ukraine as a pawn that could be bullied into doing his bidding,” she said in a recent interview. “I think that made a huge impact on Zelenskiy and I think that Putin and other bad actors around the world saw that our president was acting in his own personal interests.”What comes next for the US, Ukraine and Russia? Pressure mounts on the Biden administration to do more for Ukraine – at the risk of nuclear conflict. Congressional Republicans vote against aid to Zelenskiy but demand a more robust US response.Recently, Trump admitted that he was “surprised” by Putin’s “special military operation”. He “thought he was negotiating”, he said. A very stable genius, indeed.
      Lessons from the Edge is published in the US by Mariner Books
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      Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media

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      Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media Elizabeth Williamson’s book on the 2012 elementary school shooting is a near-unbearable, necessary indictment of Facebook, YouTube and the conspiracy theories they spreadEven in a country now completely inured to the horrors of mass shootings, the massacre at Sandy Hook remains lodged in the minds of everyone old enough to remember it. Ten years ago, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fired 154 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle in less than five minutes. Twenty extremely young children and six adults were killed.Sandy Hook’s tragic legacy: seven years on, a loving father is the latest victimRead moreIt was the worst elementary school shooting in American history.Elizabeth Williamson’s new book is about that “American Tragedy”, but more importantly it is about “the Battle for Truth” that followed. In excruciating detail, Williamson describes the unimaginable double tragedy every Sandy Hook parent has had to endure: the murder of their child, followed by years and years of an army of online monsters accusing them of inventing this unimaginable horror.Alex Jones of Infowars is the best-known villain of this ghastly narrative. His Facebook pages and YouTube channels convinced millions of fools the massacre was either some kind of government plot to encourage a push for gun control or, even more obscenely, that it was all carried out by actors and no one was killed at all.While a single deranged shooter was responsible for the original tragedy, Williamson makes clear she believes Facebook and Google (the owner of YouTube) deserve most of the blame for the subsequent horror the relatives of victims have endured.As Congressman Ro Khanna reported in his new book, Dignity in a Digital Age, an internal Facebook document estimated that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”.Those recommendations are the result of the infernal algorithms which are at the heart of the business models of Facebook and YouTube and are probably more responsible for the breakdown in civil society in the US and the world than anything else invented.“We thought the internet would give us this accelerated society of science and information,” says Lenny Pozner, whose son Noah was one of the Sandy Hook victims. But “really, we’ve gone back to flat earth”.It horrified Pozner “to see the image of his son, smiling in his bomber jacket, passed round by an online mob attacking Noah as a fake, a body double, a boy who never lived”. Relentless algorithms pushed those “human lies to the top” on an internet which has become an “all-powerful booster of outrage and denial”.Noah’s mother, Veronique De la Rosa, was another victim of Jones’s persistent, outrageous lies.“It’s like you’ve entered the ninth circle of hell,” she tells Williamson. “Never even in your wildest, most fear-fueled fantasies would you have guessed you’d find yourself having to fight not only through your grief, which you know is at times paralyzing, but to even prove that your son existed.”Lenny Pozner regularly saw his dead son described as an “alleged victim”, but it took years before Facebook and YouTube and Twitter took substantial action to quiet the insane conspiracies their own algorithms had done so much to reinforce.Facebook allowed a Sandy Hook Hoax group and dozens of others to operate virtually uninterrupted for two years. Hundreds of videos on YouTube, owned by Google, wallowed in the hoax, drawing thousands who made threats against the families.“Facebook and Twitter are monsters,” says Pozner. “Out-of-control beasts run like mom-and-pop shops.”Facebook “focuses on growth, to the exclusion of most everything else”, Williamson writes. The algorithms are designed to keep all of us on the platform as long as possible, and they operate “with relentless, sometimes murderous neutrality, rewarding whatever horrible behavior and false or inflammatory content captures and retains users”.In 2018, an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg by Pozner and De La Rosa, published in the Guardian, accused the Facebook chief of “allowing your platform to continue to be used as an instrument to disseminate hate”.Two days later, Facebook finally suspended Jones’s personal page but “took no action against Infowars’ account, which had 1.7 million followers”. YouTube removed four videos from Infowars’ channel and banned Jones from live-streaming for all of 90 days.An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg from the parents of a Sandy Hook victimRead moreHarry Farid heads the school of Information at the University of California Berkeley. He describes the perfect storm which is threatening democracy and civility everywhere: “You have bad people and trolls and people trying to make money by taking advantage of horrible things … you have social media websites who are not only welcoming and permissive of it but are promoting it, and then you have us, the unsuspecting public.”Williamson makes the important and usually forgotten point that nothing in the first amendment gives anyone the right to use a social media platform. All it says on this subject is that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”As Farid points out, platforms have an absolute right to ban all forms of content “without running afoul of the constitution” – which is why Donald Trump had no judicial recourse when he was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol riot.But most of the time, Farid says, the platforms just look the other way: “Because they’re making so much goddamned money.”Last fall, the California Democrat Adam Schiff told the Guardian the blockbuster testimony of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen would finally be enough to spur Congress to regulate the worst excesses of the big platforms. So far, their lobbyists have prevented such action. On Saturday, the Guardian asked Schiff if he still believed Congress might act in this session. “There is still a chance,” he wrote in an e-mail, adding that “the degree of Russian propaganda on social media attempting to justify their bloody invasion of Ukraine” might finally provide the “impetus” needed for change.
      Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for the Truth is published in the US by Dutton Books
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      Lincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new war

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      InterviewLincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new warMartin Pengelly The CNN analyst says the 16th president’s example can guide America through dark times – at home as well as abroadJohn Avlon has published a book about Abraham Lincoln and peace in a time of war. He sees the irony, of course.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead more“I’d like to think that sometimes I can look around corners,” says the CNN political analyst, a former editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast. “But I didn’t anticipate that Putin would invade Ukraine opposite the book.“But there is a foreign policy dimension to the book that is probably unexpected.”In Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, Avlon offers both narrative and analytical history. He retells and examines the end of the American civil war, Lincoln’s plans for reuniting his country, his assassination and how in the former slaveholding states Reconstruction was defeated and racism enshrined in law.He also considers how Lincoln’s ideas about reconciliation and rebuilding lived on, ultimately to influence the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after the second world war, and how the 16th president’s politics of “the golden rule” – treat others as you would have them treat you – offers a model for solving division at home and abroad.More than 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln, but Avlon’s arrives in an America still subject to the attentions of Donald Trump, while from Russia Vladimir Putin pitches Ukraine into war and the world into nuclear dread.“When people pick up a book about Abraham Lincoln now,” Avlon says, “I think the flow-through is [about how] we belatedly realised the dangers of taking democracy for granted, of embracing or encouraging these tribal divides, which can wreak havoc.“So, too, there’s a real danger at taking for granted the liberal democratic order that has preserved a high degree of peace and prosperity in Europe over the past 75 years.“… There are moments where we abruptly remember that defending democracy at home and abroad is a cause that can be as heroic as winning it in the first place, and no less urgent.“It gets back to, ‘Let us have faith that that right makes might’” – a key line from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860 – “and the flip side of that is what’s being tested [by Russia]. There are people in the world who believe that might makes right.”‘Despotism taken pure’Lincoln said a famous thing about Russia in a letter in 1855, five years before his election as president.“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote to a friend, Joshua Speed. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes’. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics’.“When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”Other than that there isn’t much to go on, Russia-wise. But as Avlon points out, Lincoln was writing not just about the curse of slavery but about a domestic political threat: the Know Nothings, a nativist-populist party.The link between the Know Nothings and the Republican party of Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene has been made before, including by Avlon himself.“It’s obviously safe to say that Lincoln wouldn’t recognise today’s Republican party. His Republican party was the modern progressive party of its time, it was a big tent party, dedicated to overturning slavery.“I think, as you are trying to root Lincoln in the context of contemporary politics, you definitely need to go beneath the party label. And the fact that the Republican party now finds its base among the states of the former Confederacy is a clue … The labels may change but the song remains the same, to a distressing extent.“I was struck by what [Ulysses S] Grant said in 1875. And I checked that quote three times, because it seemed too on the nose: ‘If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.’”‘Our nation is not evenly divided’Many observers think a second American civil war is possible, along fault lines widened by a white supremacist far right which may see Putin and Putinism as a model for negating demographic change. Avlon, whose book has been well received in the political centre and on the never-Trump right, does not think civil war is imminent.“I thought Jamelle Bouie made a great point in a column a few weeks ago,” he says, “where he said, ‘Look, we don’t have structural issues like slavery.’“I do think that the current trend of polarisation, where politics becomes a matter of identity and the incentive structures move our politicians towards the extremes, rather than finding ways to work and reason together, is incredibly dangerous.“But first of all, if you look at the numbers, our nation is not evenly divided. We’re not a 50-50 nation on most issues. We’re 70-30 nation and many issues, whether it’s gay marriage, marijuana, [which] run through the country [with 70% support].“The section that believes the big lie [that Trump’s defeat was caused by voter fraud], they’re very loud. But they’re 30%, a super-majority of the Republican party. We often forget that a plurality of Americans are self-identified independents.‘What it means to be an American’: Abraham Lincoln and a nation dividedRead more“That does not diminish the danger to democracy when one party buys into a self-evident lie. Or when around a quarter of the country refuses to get vaccinated during a pandemic.“But you have to have faith in American democracy, when you look at history, because we have been through far worse before. Every generation faces great challenges. And if you’re overwhelmed by them, or pessimistic … that will not help solve them. You know, difficulty is the excuse that history never accepts.”Histories like his, Avlon says, can help readers “draw on the past to confront problems and then aim towards a better future”. His book aims “in part to give us perspective on our own problems. We’ve been through worse. We’ll get through this.“We need to be aware it’s dangerous to play with these tribal divisions for short-term political gain. And that we have an obligation to form the broadest coalition possible to defend democracy and our deepest values, which we forget sometimes.“Rooting things in the second founding and Lincoln, I think, can be clarifying and can help build that big tent again.”
      Lincoln and the Fight for Peace is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      One Damn Thing After Another review: Bill Barr’s self-serving screed

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      One Damn Thing After Another review: Bill Barr’s self-serving screed Donald Trump’s attorney general wants you to know the bad stuff wasn’t his fault and the media and Democrats were nastyTake Bill Barr literally, but not too seriously. One day before his memoir was published, the former attorney general told NBC he would vote for Donald Trump for president in 2024, if Trump were the Republican nominee. For all Barr’s protestations about how the man was unsuited to the job, he continues to resist being banished from Trump’s garden.William Barr: Trump is full of bull – but I’ll vote for himRead moreSaid differently, Barr’s memoirs are best viewed as just one more installment of Trump-alumni performance art.As a read, One Damn Thing After Another delivers the expected. Barr gives Trump a thumbs-up for galvanizing the Republican white working-class base, satisfying social conservatives and meeting the demands of donors.At the same time, Barr lets us know suburbia came to find Trump offensive and insists that in the end, Trump crashed and burned despite Barr’s best efforts. Ultimately, like everyone else the 45th president ceased to find useful, Barr was simply spat out – a reality his memoir does at least acknowledge.The book is informative – to a point. As expected, Barr omits relevant facts and engages in score-settling. It’s a first-person tell-all, after all.Barr records the suicide in federal custody of Jeffrey Epstein, predator and friend of presidents Trump and Clinton. He makes no mention of the fact that his own father, Donald Barr, gave Epstein one of his first jobs, as a high-school math teacher at the Dalton school, a tony Manhattan establishment. Even then, former students have said, Epstein creeped out young women.Barr was attorney general for the first time under George HW Bush. In his book, he attacks Democrats and the media for their pursuit and coverage of “Iraqgate” and the US government’s extension of loan guarantees to Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the invasion of Kuwait. Barr singles out William Safire, the late Nixon speechwriter and New York Times columnist, for special condemnation.A Clinton administration investigation cleared Barr of legal wrongdoing – a fact he rightly emphasizes. But he neglects to mention that in October 1989, Bush signed National Security Directive 26, which effectively boosted Iraq as a counterbalance to Iran. From there, things didn’t exactly work out as planned. The president and his team overly emboldened Saddam. His unprovoked land grab was an unintended consequence of a policy pivot.Barr lets us know he grew up in a loving home, a product of a Catholic education, a player of the bagpipes. He attended the Horace Mann school in Riverdale, an affluent part of the Bronx. As Barr notes, the school was liberal and predominately Jewish.As a Columbia undergraduate, he stood against Vietnam war protesters. His antipathy toward the radical left is longstanding. He joined the Majority Coalition, a group of students and faculty members who defended the main administration building. As recorded by the late Diana Trilling, some rioters had no qualms about trashing the school, then demanding academic honors.Unstated by Barr is the operative campus divide, “Staten Island v Scarsdale”: conservative, often Catholic students from the blue-collar outer borough versus liberal, often Jewish students from the well-heeled suburbs. Though far from working class, Barr was firmly in the first camp.Barr came by his conservatism organically. His father served in the second world war. His older brother fought in Vietnam. In 1964, Barr helped his dad distribute campaign literature for Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated presidential campaign. Amid the turmoil of the 60s, Barr yearned for the stability of yesterday. He still does: he is a culture warrior in a Brooks Brothers suit.He takes shots at James Comey and Robert Mueller, key figures in the Russia investigation. Of course he does. He also takes aim at Lawrence Walsh, special counsel in Iran-Contra. Barr accuses Walsh, now dead, of torpedoing Bush’s campaign comeback in ’92 by filing election-eve charges against Casper Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary. Barr’s ire is understandable.But he also offers up a full-throated defense of his own decision to drop government charges against Michael Flynn, despite the Trump ally’s guilty plea to lying to the FBI and, later, demand for martial law. Furthermore, Barr says nary a word in response to the volley of criticism he earned from the federal bench.In spring 2020, Judge Reggie Walton, a George W Bush appointee, “seriously” questioned the attorney general’s integrity and credibility. To drive home the point, to describe Barr’s behavior over the Russia report, Walton deployed words like “distorted” and “misleading”.Emmett Sullivan scorned Barr’s legal gymnastics over Flynn. Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the government had to turn over a memorandum it relied upon in declining to prosecute Trump. Her take was lacerating. Not only had Barr been personally “disingenuous” by announcing his decision before Mueller’s report was released, Berman Jackson said, but the Department of Justice itself had been “disingenuous to this court”.Insurgency review: how Trump took over the Republican partyRead moreSuffice to say, Walton, Sullivan and Berman Jackson do not appear in Barr’s book.As luck would have it, though, Barr does take aim at Joe Biden for his stance on Russia. “Demonizing [Vladimir] Putin is not a foreign policy,” Barr writes, nor “the way grown-ups should think”.Really? Looks like Barr didn’t have an invasion of Ukraine on his bingo card. Trump’s admiration for Putin, of course, continues.As it turned out, Barr wasn’t alone in spilling his guts to NBC. In a letter to Lester Holt, its lead anchor, Trump wrote of his former attorney general: “He is groveling to the media, hoping to gain acceptance that he doesn’t deserve.”So true.
      One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General is published in the US by HarperCollins
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      Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in book

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      Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in bookMarie Yovanovitch, who was fired by Trump in 2019, reveals details of then president’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian counterpart At an Oval Office meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in 2017, Donald Trump asked his national security adviser if US troops were in Donbas, territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists, which Vladimir Putin last month used as pretext for a full and bloody invasion.Describing the meeting in a new book, the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, writes: “An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia.”Likelihood of criminal charges against Trump rising, experts sayRead moreYovanovitch adds: “I pondered whether it was better to interpret Trump’s question as suggesting that the commander-in-chief thought it possible that US troops were fighting Russia-led forces, or instead as an indicator that the president wasn’t clear which country was on the other side of the war against Ukraine.“Either way, it was disconcerting that he did not seem to know where we had our troops – his troops – deployed. I could only imagine what the Ukrainians were thinking.”Trump fired Yovanovitch in 2019, amid attempts to withhold military aid to Ukraine in return for political dirt on Joe Biden and other rivals, an affair which fueled Trump’s first impeachment.Yovanovitch describes the Trump-Poroshenko meeting in Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir, which will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.The book comes three weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which followed years of proxy warfare in the east of the country.Yovanovitch also writes that Trump told Poroshenko Ukraine “was a corrupt country, which he knew because a Ukrainian friend at Mar-a-Lago had told him”.Trump, she says, also said: “Crimea was Russian, as the locals spoke Russian”.Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, a move never recognized by the international community. Yovanovitch writes that Trump’s words were “surprising enough to hear from one head of state to another” but Trump topped them by asking his national security adviser, HR McMaster, whether US troops were in Donbas.“Everyone kept a poker face on,” she writes.Echoing descriptions of Trump’s favored working techniques by multiple close aides, Yovanovitch says Poroshenko deployed “visual aids, which Trump really liked” as he “ably pushed back” and made his case for support.Poroshenko requested the inclusion of Javelin anti-tank missiles in a package of security aid. Trump seemed open to the idea, Yovanovitch writes. In 2019, however, news broke of his attempt to withhold military aid and secure dirt on Biden.Yovanovitch’s book comes as Poroshenko’s successor, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, leads his country’s fight against Russian invaders, his forces using US-supplied Javelins and other weapons sent by allies.The Poroshenko meeting was brief and forms a small part of a book which tells Yovanovitch’s story of machinations involving Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, which led to her firing and Trump’s impeachment.But her description of the meeting echoes others by sources including John Bolton, McMaster’s successor as national security adviser, which have shown Trump risking embarrassment and mishap when one-on-one with world leaders.Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, recently revealed that Trump risked disaster in an early meeting with his counterpart Reuven Rivlin, when he praised the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and criticized Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli prime minister, for being unwilling to seek peace.Trump’s comments “knocked everyone off their chairs”, Friedman wrote.Participants in the meeting with Poroshenko appear to have stayed seated.Yovanovitch writes that she sensed “Trump had come into the meeting viewing Ukraine as a ‘loser’ country, smaller and weaker than Russia”, only to be “a little surprised by Poroshenko”, who was “as physically imposing as Trump” and who was also “a billionaire businessman”.After the meeting, Trump said Ukraine was “a place that everybody’s been reading about”. Poroshenko told reporters he was “satisfied with the results of the negotiations”, and said the two leaders discussed military and technical cooperation.Yovanovitch “hoped that Poroshenko had created the kind of favorable impression that would make Trump rethink his views of Ukraine and its importance to our strategic interests”.However, she adds, “Trump’s obsequiousness toward Putin was a frequent and continuing cause for concern”.In 2018, Trump staged an infamous summit with Putin in Helsinki at which the two men spoke in private for close to two hours. Trump’s “toadying up” to Putin at the press conference which followed, Yovanovitch writes, made her lose her appetite.“When the Ukrainian media called,” she writes, “… we took the opportunity to reinforce the point that US policy was to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression”.Five years on from Trump’s meeting with Poroshenko, with Ukraine in a fight for its existence, Trump seems not entirely to have shed his suspicion that US troops could be in the country – a step the Biden administration has made clear will not be taken, given the potentially huge cost of confrontation with Russia.Last month, Trump appeared to misunderstand a Fox News host, to the extent of believing Americans troops had landed in Ukraine.“You shouldn’t be saying that, because you and everybody else shouldn’t know about it,” the former president said, seemingly mistaking reports of Russian troop movements for US ones. “They should do that secretly, not be doing that through the great Laura Ingraham.”“No, those are the Russians,” Ingraham corrected him.“Oh, I thought you said that we were sending people in,” Trump said. “That’ll be next.”TopicsBooksPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpUkraineCrimeaRussianewsReuse this content More

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      William Barr: Trump is full of bull – but I’ll vote for him

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      William Barr: Trump is full of bull – but I’ll vote for himBarr’s book reveals he told Trump he was ‘like a bull in a bull ring’ – in return, Trump calls his former attorney general a ‘horse’ Donald Trump’s second attorney general, William Barr, told the former US president he was “like a bull in a bull ring” and “someone’s going to come and put a sword through your head”.Trump: US should put Chinese flags on F-22 jets and ‘bomb shit out of’ RussiaRead moreIn return, Trump called Barr a “horse” who had been “broken” by the radical left.Such was the state of debate in the upper echelons of the Republican party on Monday as it digested the latest round of promotion of Barr’s memoir, One Damn Thing After Another.The book will be published on Tuesday but it has been extensively trailed – including by the Guardian. On the page and in interviews, Barr says Trump is unfit for the presidency and should not be the Republican nominee in 2024.But Barr remains a staunch conservative. On Monday, he told NBC’s Today that despite it all, if Trump was the Republican nominee in 2024, he would vote for him.“Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” Barr said.In his book, Barr repeatedly describes disagreements with Trump and tactics used by senior aides including the then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to distract or obstruct the erratic and often furious president.Speaking to NPR on Monday, Barr repeated a passage in his book when he said: “At one point, I said to [Trump]: ‘You know, Mr President, you’re like a bull in a bull ring and your adversaries have your number. They know how to get under your skin, and all they have to do is wave a red flag over here and you go charging and attack it.’“And I said, ‘At the end of the day, you’re going to be in the middle of the ring sweating and someone’s going to come and put a sword through your head.“He didn’t think much of that metaphor.”Trump evidently no longer thinks much of Barr. This weekend, the former president wrote a lengthy letter to Lester Holt, an NBC anchor who interviewed Barr on TV.“Bill Barr cares more about the corrupt Washington media and elite than serving the American people,” Trump wrote, as reported by Axios.“He was slow, lethargic, and I realised early on that he never had what it takes to make a great attorney general. When the radical left Democrats threatened to hold him in contempt and even worse, impeach him, he became virtually worthless for law and order and election integrity. They broke him just like a trainer breaks a horse.”Trump also said: “I would imagine that if the book is anything like him, it will be long, slow and very boring.”Critics might disagree. Reviewing the book for the Washington Post, Devlin Barrett said Trump’s second attorney general “was easily [his] most effective and important cabinet member” and Barr’s memoir showed he could “tell a good yarn and has a penchant for deadpan punchlines”.That said, Barrett wrote, Barr had really written “a defense of his tenure to fellow conservatives”.“Barr bided his time before taking one last swing,” Barrett said. “But as long as there are senior officials like Barr, there will be presidents like Trump.”The book has produced a flood of media attention, including charges that Barr is seeking to whitewash his role in some of Trump’s most controversial moments.Barr defends his handling of the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. In particular, he focuses on his decision to release a summary of the report by Robert Mueller. In that letter, Barr cleared Trump of seeking to obstruct justice despite the special counsel laying out 10 possible instances of such potentially criminal behavior.Speaking to NBC, Barr repeated his conclusion that Trump’s claims of voter fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden were baseless – he has used the word “bullshit” – while skating over criticism for using the Department of Justice to investigate such lies.He said Trump was “responsible in the broad sense of that word” for the deadly Capitol riot over which he was impeached a second time, for inciting an insurrection.William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignoredRead more“It appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill,” Barr said, of the storming of Congress by Trump supporters around which seven people died. “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress. And I think that that was wrong.”But he also said: “I haven’t seen anything to say he was legally responsible for it in terms of incitement.”Barr also addressed an incident he left out of his book: the firing of a US attorney, Geoffrey Berman, who was supervising investigations of Trump associates and business affairs as well as an investigation of a Turkish bank which the Turkish president asked Trump to drop.“I didn’t think there was any threat to the president,” Barr told NBC, adding that the decision “was my call”.“I hadn’t really thought much of him,” he said. “I wanted to make the change.”TopicsWilliam BarrDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2020US elections 2024US Capitol attackPolitics booksnewsReuse this content More

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      Take Up Space review: the irresistible rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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      Take Up Space review: the irresistible rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez The New York congresswoman is the subject of an admiring biographical portrait. Love her or not, her story is impressiveThis book should have been titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez But Were Afraid to Ask.William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignoredRead moreWhether you love her or loathe her, the former Sandy Ocasio has an irresistible story, told here in a brisk four-chapter narrative followed by brief sections on everything from a make-up video she made for Vogue to her evisceration of Mark Zuckerberg at a congressional hearing.The woman now known everywhere as AOC was born in the Bronx and lived there until her Puerto Rican-American parents moved her to Westchester to make sure she attended a decent public high school. A science nerd whose first ambition was to be a doctor, she dropped her pre-med major at Boston University and majored in economics and international relations. Like Pete Buttigieg, she did a brief stint as an intern for Ted Kennedy, but she didn’t enjoy it as much as he did.She spent her junior year in the African nation of Niger, where she had an unusual reaction to poverty. She decided Niger’s struggling citizens had “a level of enjoyment” that “just does not exist in American life”.In college she met Riley Roberts, a tall, smart, red-haired finance and sociology major who went from coffee house debating partner to boyfriend. Today he is a web developer and still her boyfriend, someone who tiptoes “through the public sphere, leaving little evidence of his presence”, according to the four-page section of Take Up Space which is devoted to him.AOC’s father, an architect, died of cancer while she was in college, leaving her mother struggling to hold on to their house. So after college her daughter came to New York and became a restaurant worker to make money and to be close to her mother.The striking-looking bartender who came out of nowhere to be elected to Congress three weeks after her 29th birthday was launched into politics by her brother Gabriel, who heard a group called Brand New Congress formed by Bernie Sanders supporters was looking for people to nominate anyone they thought should run in 2018.Pulled over to the side of the road in a rainstorm, Gabriel phoned his sister and asked if she wanted to run. Her reaction: “Eff it. Sure. Whatever.” So her brother, still sitting in his car, filled out the web form and hit “send”.Brand New Congress morphed into “Justice Democrats”, who had 10,000 nominations for candidates. Gradually, AOC became their favorite, not only because she was extremely smart but also because she was “really pretty”. That, Corbin Trent explained, is “like 20%, 50% of being on TV”. Trent became her communications director.The rigid leftwing ideology of Lisa Miller, who wrote the longest section of this book, sometimes leads her into statements directly contradicted by AOC’s success. Miller writes that the “facts of Ocasio-Cortez’s life” made her both an “impossible candidate” and “the kind of American whose hopes for any social mobility had been crushed by a rigged system perpetuated by officials elected to represent the people’s interests”.In real life, the facts of AOC’s Cinderella story made her the perfect candidate to take on Joseph Crowley, the Democratic boss who held the House seat she was going after – and AOC turned out to be the least “crushed” person in America.As she learned at a political boot camp organized by Justice Democrats, nothing was more important than “telling an authentic believable personal story”– and no one was better at doing that than she was.As a Black Lives Matter activist, Kim Balderas, noticed in 2017, AOC spoke like an organizer. That made Balderas realize “she’s not coming to play. She is coming to fight”. Outspent in the primary by Crowley, $4.5m to $550,000, AOC still managed to crush him with 57% of the vote.One secret to her success was Twitter. The month she won the primary she had 30,000 followers. Four weeks later she had 500,000. The number now hovers closer to 13 million. A 10-page section of the book describes her “art of the dunk”, including diagrams of her most successful exchanges, including one in which Laura Ingraham accused her of wearing $14,000 worth of clothes for a Vanity Fair photo shoot.“I don’t know if you’ve been in a photo shoot Laura,” AOC replied, “but you don’t keep the clothes.”She added: “The whole ‘she wore clothes in a magazine’, let’s pretend they’re hers’ gimmick is the classic Republican strategy of ‘let’s willfully act stupid, and if the public doesn’t take our performance stupidity seriously then we’ll claim bias’.”But her very best exchange is also the strongest evidence that the now 31-year old two term congresswoman has grown into a national treasure – and an interlocutor who almost always manages to have the last word.In “The Zuckerberg Grilling” section of the book, she interrogates the Facebook founder at a congressional hearing shortly after his company announced it would not fact-check political ads.She asked: “Would I be able to run advertisements on Facebook targeting Republicans in primaries saying they voted for the Green New Deal? … I’m just trying to understand the bounds here, what’s fair game.”“I don’t know the answer to that off the top of my head,” said the flustered Zuckerberg. “I think probably …”AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colourRead moreAOC: “So you don’t know if I’ll be able to do that.”Zuckerberg: “I think probably.”AOC followed up by asking how Facebook had chosen the Daily Caller, “a publication well documented with ties to white supremacists”, as an “official fact-checker for Facebook”.Zuckerberg said the Daily Caller had been chosen by “an independent organization called the Independent Fact-Checking Network”.AOC: “So you would say that white-supremacist-tied publications meet a rigorous standard for fact-checking? Thank you.”
      Take Up Space: the Unprecedented AOC is published in the US by Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster
      TopicsBooksAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsPolitics booksDemocratsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesreviewsReuse this content More