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      McConnell was ‘exhilarated’ by Trump’s apparent January 6 downfall, book says

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      McConnell was ‘exhilarated’ by Trump’s apparent January 6 downfall, book saysNew York Times reporters show how Senate leader’s opposition to Trump dwindled in face of hard political reality Hours after the deadly Capitol attack on 6 January 2021, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, told a reporter he was “exhilarated” because he thought Donald Trump had finally lost his grip on the party.Biden finds Murdoch ‘most dangerous man in the world’, new book saysRead moreClose to a year and a half later, however, with midterm elections looming, Trump retains control over the GOP and is set to be its presidential candidate in 2024.What’s more, McConnell has said he will support Trump if so.McConnell’s short-lived glee over Trump’s apparent downfall is described in This Will Not Pass, an explosive new book by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns of the New York Times which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.The two authors describe a meeting between one of them and McConnell at the Capitol early on 7 January 2021. The day before, a mob Trump told to “fight like hell” in service of his lie about electoral fraud attempted to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election victory by forcing its way into the Capitol.A bipartisan Senate committee connected seven deaths to the attack. In the aftermath, 147 Republicans in the House and Senate nonetheless lodged objections to electoral results.According to Martin and Burns, McConnell told staffers Trump was a “despicable human being” he would now fight politically. Then, on his way out of the Capitol, the authors say, McConnell met one of them and “made clear he wanted a word”.“What do you hear about the 25th amendment?” they say McConnell asked, “eager for intelligence about whether his fellow Republicans were discussing removing Trump from office” via the constitutional process for removing a president incapable of the office.Burns and Martin say McConnell “seemed almost buoyant”, telling them Trump was now “pretty thoroughly discredited”.“He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger,” McConnell is quoted as saying. “Couldn’t have happened at a better time.”The authors say McConnell indicated he believed he would regain control of his party, alluding to a previous confrontation with the far right and saying: “We crushed the sons of bitches and that’s what we’re going to do in the primary in ’22.”McConnell also said: “I feel exhilarated by the fact that [Trump] finally, totally discredited himself.”McConnell’s words ring hollow, in fact, as the 2022 midterms approach. Trump endorsements are highly prized and Republicans who voted for impeachment are either retiring or facing Trump-backed challengers.Trump was impeached for a second time over the Capitol attack but as Burns and Martin describe, McConnell swiftly realised that most Republican voters still supported the former president – many believing his lie about electoral fraud – and that most Republicans in Congress were going to stay in line.Burns and Martin describe how in Trump’s Senate trial, Democratic House managers sought to convince McConnell of their case, knowing his loathing for Trump and hoping he would bring enough Republicans with him to convict.But McConnell, grasping a legal argument that said Congress could not impeach a former president, did not join the seven Republicans who did find Trump guilty of inciting an insurrection.After voting to acquit, McConnell excoriated Trump, saying he was “practically and morally responsible” for the Capitol attack.That did not change the fact that thanks in large part to McConnell, Trump remains free to run for office again.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS SenateUS CongressRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      ‘A PhD in my brother’: Valerie Biden Owens on the Joe she knows

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      Interview‘A PhD in my brother’: Valerie Biden Owens on the Joe she knowsDavid Smith in Washington In her newly published memoir, Growing Up Biden, the president’s sister pays tribute in a moving portrait of sibling loveWho wouldn’t want Valerie Biden Owens in their corner? The first sister of the United States gives no inch in defending her big brother. Asked about Joe Biden’s notorious gaffes, for example, she simply rejects the premise.Overcoming Trumpery review: recipes for reform Republicans will never allow Read more“He doesn’t have gaffes,” she insists. “He speaks the truth. Like, hello, surprise, I just said what was true!”At the end of a carefully crafted speech last month in Warsaw, Poland, the president ad libbed that Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, “cannot remain in power”. To the world’s media it was a howler implying regime change that upended weeks of diplomacy and sent aides scrambling.To Biden Owens, however, it was truth-telling after meeting refugee mothers and children.“This is a man, you see what you get,” she says, with recognisable flintiness. “His wife died. Two of his children died, one by a long death and one by a sudden death. And one almost from addiction. He was speaking from his heart. What kind of man [Putin] does this? That’s the real Joe Biden. That was not a gaffe.”Biden Owens, 76, is talking about her newly published memoir. Growing Up Biden is a lucid account of a middle-class childhood remarkable only for its ordinariness, becoming the first woman in US history to run a presidential campaign, and helping “Joey” emerge from personal and political disasters to reach his own mountaintop.It is also a moving portrait of sibling love. Joe is the oldest of four Biden children. Valerie was born three years later, followed by Jimmy and Frank.“At an age when a lot of other older brothers pretended they didn’t even know their sister, Joey took me everywhere with him,” she writes. “When his friends would ask, ‘Why did you bring a girl?’ he answered, ‘She’s not a girl. She’s my sister. If you want me around, she’s going to be around, too.’”Family life began in Scranton, Pennsylvania but work dried up for Joe Biden Sr, who found opportunities in Delaware, cleaning boilers and selling cars. The Bidens moved to a two-bedroom apartment there when Joe was 10.Valerie’s book does not dwell long on her brother’s childhood stutter but, via Zoom from her home in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, she elaborates.“I don’t remember as a little girl that he stuttered; he was just my big brother. But as I got older then I saw that he was a stutterer. I could hear it and I was aware that he was made fun of and that he was made to feel less and put in a corner.“When you’ve been bullied, you have two ways to go: you can become a bully yourself or you can realise that we’re all in this together and there’s more to life than kicking somebody who’s down. So my brother, layer by thin layer, developed a backbone of steel and determined that he was not going to be defined by a bully.”How did their parents react to it?“Contrary to what he had incoming – because he stuttered, he was stupid – my mother said, ‘Oh no, Joey, it’s because you are so smart, you can’t get the words out fast enough’. So my mother gave him confidence. When a person stutters the natural inclination is to jump in and say the word for them but we didn’t do that.”Joe spent hours alone in front of a mirror, reciting Irish poetry. “He spit the stutter out. He worked at it. In the end, adversity builds character. My brother turned out to be the man that he is with such great empathy because he was a stutterer, so that turned out to be one of his best gifts in hindsight.”Joe worked as a lawyer, joined the county council and became known in Democratic politics in Delaware. Fifty years ago last month, he announced that he would challenge a popular incumbent for a US Senate seat. Valerie, a 26-year-old high school teacher, ran his long-shot election bid.It must have been hard going, in a year that would produce campaign accounts with titles such as The Boys on the Bus?She reflects: “Politics was a boys’ club. Women in in the 1970s and through that period only opened and closed headquarters and got coffee and ordered the paper.“There were few women candidates. There were no women consultants or women campaign managers or even women journalists with rare exceptions. It was a brand new world for a woman but I had it a lot easier than a lot of women because my brother pulled up a chair for me at the table of all men and said, ‘This is my sister. She speaks for me. She’s the boss. What she says goes, nothing passes through or gets out of here unless she approves.’“It wasn’t because I was such a brilliant campaign strategist because I had never met a campaign manager before – nor had Joe and I really ever met a United States senator before. It was because I had a PhD in my brother. I knew Delaware, I knew my brother, I knew what the issues were and I knew how we wanted to present what we stood for and I knew how to listen to the people in Delaware who told us what they needed.“I had it easier until Joe left the room and then there were always doubters who looked at me as either the token relative or the token sister. But I was raised with a wonderful, decent man who was my father and three brothers, so I was not intimidated by men. I enjoyed them and I realised we’ve got to work together.”Biden won that first election by 3,163 votes, or less than 1.5%. Six weeks later, his wife Neilia and baby daughter, Naomi, were killed when their car collided with a tractor trailer. His sons, Beau and Hunter, were seriously injured but survived.His sister’s most vivid memory of that day is the clack, clack, clack sound of hers and Joe’s heels as they hurried through the marble hallway of the US Capitol minutes after getting the call from their brother Jimmy. She writes: “Joe turned to me, eyes stricken, voice choked. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I remember his eyes. I wish I didn’t. Staring into them at that moment was like staring straight into hell.”She adds now: “My mom always said the eyes are the windows of the soul and I was looking into two dark, dark spaces, because he knew. It was horrible.“On 7 November, my brother was the too-young-to-serve newly elected senator from Delaware, 29 years old, the hope of the future of the Democratic party, had a beautiful wife, three magnificent children, and six weeks later the whole world turned on its axis. He was a young man whose heart had been ripped out. A young widower.“Life has a way of interrupting. You think you’re in control and then, bam. My dad said that’s when you’ve got to get up and keep moving. Joe had to get up because he had Beau and Hunter, his two sons, who were just ready to turn three and four years old, so he had a purpose.”Valerie moved in and helped raise the boys. She also guided Joe – who married Jill Jacobs in 1977 – to six more Senate terms, although they fared less well running for the White House. In the 1987 presidential campaign, he was accused of plagiarism after quoting the British politician Neil Kinnock but forgetting to credit him.Biden Owens recalls: “The whole incident of Neil Kinnock hurt me a lot personally because it went after my brother’s character and it was a slip of the tongue of omission. Joe should have said it and he didn’t and so he took the hit for it.”Joe ran a short campaign for the 2008 nomination but after eight years as Barack Obama’s vice-president he opted not to run in 2016. His sister suggests this had more to do with another tragedy, the death of his 46-year-old son, Beau, from brain cancer than discouragement from Obama.“We wanted to run for president but my brother hadn’t had time to heal and the way that we heal is as a family. What choice is there: to be with your son who you know has been given a death sentence or be out talking to the primary voters in New Hampshire? Just no choice. You have to go through a period of grief and mourning. Every person does it differently but the presidency was not on the cards for us.”‘Swings and misses’Joe wears Beau’s rosary on his left wrist every day. His sister insists that loss upon loss has not shaken their faith in God’s existence.“For me, being a Catholic is a package and, if you believe in the afterlife, it still is pretty hard. Particularly when Beau died, I remember yelling, ‘Why God, what possible good could come from this?’ It was a heart wrenching cry.“A friend of mine said to me maybe it’s because where he is now, he’ll be able to do even more good than were he with you on Earth. It gave me pause because it’s part of the story of the resurrection and life after death. I didn’t lose my faith because I, Valerie Biden Owens, need something bigger to hold on to than herself.”It looked like the end of the road for Joe’s political ambitions. But then, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump and the sight of white nationalists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, galvanised Biden for one more bid. Yet again, there was a rocky start.At a Democratic debate in Miami in June 2019, the California senator Kamala Harris challenged Biden’s opposition to mandatory desegregation busing in the 1970s, telling the story of a girl who was part of schools’ racial integration and ending with dramatic effect: “That little girl was me.”Biden Owens was not impressed. “Being a campaign manager, I know sometimes your candidate swings and misses. That was a swing and a miss and certainly it was not an accurate representation but it was a campaign. Immediately in the fallout, it was clear that was not a smack to Joe.”Biden went on to win the primary with significant support from Black voters. Bearing no grudge, he picked Harris as his running mate. His sister adds: “Look, my brother’s a smart man. He had been vice-president and he knew what it took and what he needed as his partner, and he chose her. So it all was OK.”This time the campaign was managed by Greg Schultz and then Jen O’Malley Dillon, with Valerie as adviser. She admits she had been hesitant about her brother running because Trump was sure to launch vulgar and dishonest attacks on the family.Sure enough, Republicans obsessed over Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine, which included high-paid consultancies and gifts, alleging without evidence that Joe abused the vice-presidency to enrich his son. There is still a frenzy over emails and photos found on a laptop abandoned by Hunter at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. Hunter did confirm that he was under federal investigation over a tax matter. He also wrote a memoir of his struggles with addiction.His aunt does not watch the rightwing media onslaught. “It’s been the same story for four years,” she says. “There’s nothing new. It’s the same one, same one, same one, same one. And by the way, the president has never been accused of any indication that he’s done anything wrong.“It’s the same accusations they’re dishing out. If that’s how they hope to win as opposed to anything that’s positive, what the hell difference does that make to the ordinary American who’s worried about food or medicine and education for their child? Who cares? Talk about something that matters, Republican party. Step up to the plate. Help middle-class America.”Perhaps voters agree. The attacks on Hunter never quite stuck like the “Lock her up!” attacks on Clinton. Biden won the White House, promising to heal “the soul of America” after four years of American carnage.There have been accomplishments for sure – a coronavirus relief package, a record 7.9m jobs created, a $1tn infrastructure law and a reassertion of America on the global stage – but disappointments persist on the climate crisis, police reform and voting rights in a Congress where Democrats’ majority is wafer-thin.Biden Owens reflects: “What I think was mom’s most profound statement was ‘beware the righteous’ and we’ve got them on the right and we have them on the left equally now. I don’t know how these men and women in Congress are married, how they stay married. Compromise is not a dirty word. It doesn’t mean giving up your principles; it means rubbing off those rough edges.“It’s been a very difficult time and we’re all just trying to keep our head above water. But when you look at what Joe’s done – more jobs, more judges, more diversity, first woman vice-president, first African American woman on the [supreme court] bench – Joe remembers his roots. He’s a middle-class, ordinary American who had opportunities to do an extraordinary thing, becoming president. He’s got his eye on the ball, which is middle class America.”‘All Republicans aren’t bad guys’The president has been criticised, however, for relying on an old operating system in which compromise was possible and failing to recognise that today’s Republican party has embraced Trump’s authoritarianism and lies.“What puzzles me is this: what happened to Lindsey Graham?” Biden Owens writes, referring to the Republican senator for South Carolina. “After John McCain died, perhaps a part of Senator Graham’s soul died as well. The man is unrecognisable to me.”She elaborates via Zoom: “I don’t know Lindsey Graham well but, to me, the good guy, the decent person, a large portion of that left him. The Republican party has become a party of a personality cult.‘All these men’: Jill Biden resented Joe’s advisers who pushed White House runRead more“All Republicans aren’t bad guys and there are good men and women who are Republicans and God bless them because that’s what we got to do to keep our democracy working. But the kissing the ring of the former president, I don’t understand it. It’s there and it’s something to be dealt with. But I have hope that the good men and women will stop this slide.”Valerie, who is married to Jack Owens, a lawyer and businessman, and has three children, says her brother will run again in 2024 and the question of his age – he turns 80 this year – is for the voters to decide. Early in her book, she reflects matter-of-factly that she lived the first 40 years of her public adult life in his shadow.Does she have any regrets – and wonder, perhaps, if she could have been President Biden? She quotes the novelist Edith Wharton: “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”She explains: “That’s me and Joe. Sometimes he was the candle, sometimes I was the mirror, but it also flipped. My light was never snuffed out. My life was doing what I wanted to do and what I could do best. I could talk about Joe Biden much better than Joe Biden could talk about Joe Biden.“People could take the measure of the man or not and he got to do what he did best, which was go out, listen to the voters, tell what he was about and be the best Joe Biden that he could be. So no, it was a wonderful partnership and I wouldn’t have changed it.”
      Growing Up Biden is published in the US by Celadon
      TopicsBooksJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsDemocratsPolitics booksinterviewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Overcoming Trumpery review: recipes for reform Republicans will never allow

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      Overcoming Trumpery review: recipes for reform Republicans will never allow The depth of Trump’s corruption is familiar but still astonishing when presented in the whole. Alas, his party shares itThe great abuses of power by Richard Nixon’s administration which are remembered collectively as Watergate had one tremendous benefit: they inspired a raft of legislation which significantly strengthened American democracy.The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of historyRead moreThis new book from the Brookings Institution, subtitled How to Restore Ethics, The Rule of Law and Democracy, recalls those far-away days of a functioning legislative process.The response to Watergate gave us real limits on individual contributions to candidates and political action committees (Federal Election Campaign Act); a truly independent Office of Special Counsel (Ethics in Government Act); inspector generals in every major agency (Inspector General Act); a vastly more effective freedom of information process; and a Sunshine Law which enshrined the novel notion that the government should be “the servant of the people” and “fully accountable to them”.Since then, a steadily more conservative supreme court has eviscerated all the most important campaign finance reforms, most disastrously in 2010 with Citizens United, and in 2013 destroyed the most effective parts of the Voting Rights Act. Congress let the special counsel law lapse, partly because of how Ken Starr abused it when he investigated Bill Clinton.The unraveling of Watergate reforms was one of many factors that set the stage for the most corrupt US government of modern times, that of Donald Trump.Even someone as inured as I am to Trump’s crimes can still be astonished when all the known abuses are catalogued in one volume. What the authors of this book identify as “The Seven Deadly Sins of Trumpery” include “Disdain for Ethics, Assault on the rule of law, Incessant lying and disinformation, Shamelessness” and, of course, “Pursuit of personal and political interest”.The book identifies Trump’s original sin as his refusal to put his businesses in a blind trust, which led to no less than 3,400 conflicts of interest. It didn’t help that the federal conflict of interests statute specifically exempts the president. Under the first president of modern times with no interest in “the legitimacy” or “the appearance of legitimacy of the presidency”, this left practically nothing off limits.The emoluments clause of the constitution forbids every government official accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” but lacks any enforcement mechanism. So a shameless president could be paid off through his hotels by everyone from the Philippines to Kuwait while the Bank of China paid one Trump company an estimated $5.4m. (As a fig leaf, Trump gave the treasury $448,000 from profits made from foreign governments during two years of his presidency, but without any accounting.)Trump even got the federal government to pay him directly, by charging the secret service $32,400 for guest rooms for a visit to Mar-a-Lago plus $17,000 a month for a cottage at his New Jersey golf club.The US Office of Special Counsel catalogued dozens of violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits political activity by federal officials. Miscreants included Peter Navarro, Dan Scavino, Nikki Haley and most persistently Kellyanne Conway. The OSC referred its findings to Trump, who of course did nothing. Conway was gleeful.“Let me know when the jail sentence starts,” she said.There was also the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, addressing the Republican convention from a bluff overlooking Jerusalem during a mission to Israel. In a different category of corruption were the $43,000 soundproof phone booth the EPA administrator Scott Pruitt installed and the $1m the health secretary Tom Price spent on luxury travel. Those two actually resigned.The book is mostly focused on the four-year Trump crimewave. But it is bipartisan enough to spread the blame to Democrats for creating a climate in which no crime seemed too big to go un-prosecuted.Barack Obama’s strict ethics rules enforced by executive orders produced a nearly scandal-free administration. But Claire O Finkelstein and Richard W Painter argue that there was one scandal that established a terrible precedent: the decision not to prosecute anyone at the CIA for illegal torture carried out under George W Bush.This “failure of accountability” was “profoundly corrosive. The decision to ‘look forward, not back’ on torture … damaged the country’s ability to hold government officials to the constraints of the law”.However, the authors are probably a little too optimistic when they argue that a more vigorous stance might have made the Trump administration more eager to prosecute its own law breakers.The authors point out there are two things in the federal government which are even worse than the wholesale violation of ethical codes within the executive branch: the almost total absence of ethical codes within the congressional and judicial branches.The ethics manual for the House says it is “fundamental that a member … may not use his or her official position for personal gain”. But that is “virtually meaningless” became members can take actions on “industries in which they hold company stock”.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreThe Senate exempts itself from ethical concerns with two brilliant words: no member can promote a piece of legislation whose “principal purpose” is “to further only his pecuniary interest”. So as long as legislation also has other purposes, personal profit is no impediment to passage.The authors argue that since the crimes of Watergate pale in comparison to the corruption of Trump, this should be the greatest opportunity for profound reform since the 1970s. But of course there is no chance of any such reform getting through this Congress, because Republicans have no interest in making government honest.Nothing tells us more about the collapse of our democracy than the primary concern of the House and Senate minority leaders, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell. Their only goal is to avoid any action that would offend the perpetrator or instigator of all these crimes. Instead of forcing him to resign the way Nixon did, these quivering men still pretend Donald Trump is the only man qualified to lead them.
      Overcoming Trumpery is published in the US by Brookings Institution Press
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS political financingUS voting rightsUS constitution and civil libertiesreviewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      ‘All these men’: Jill Biden resented Joe’s advisers who pushed White House run

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      ‘All these men’: Jill Biden resented Joe’s advisers who pushed White House runFirst lady tells authors of new biography she cut off push to recruit her husband to challenge George W Bush in 2004 Feeling “burned” by her husband’s first run for the presidency, Jill Biden resisted advisers including Ron Klain, now White House chief of staff, who pushed him to mount another campaign in 2004.Trump ‘very intent on bringing my brother down’, Joe Biden’s sister saysRead more“All these men – and they were mostly men – coming to our home,” she said. “You know, ‘You’ve got to run, you’ve got to run.’ I wanted no part of it.”The first lady was speaking to Julie Pace and Darlene Superville, co-authors of Jill: A Biography of the First Lady, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.“I didn’t even know whether I wanted Joe to ever do it again,” Jill Biden said. “I mean, I had been so burned.”Joe Biden first ran for president in 1987, withdrawing amid allegations that he plagiarised the leader of the British Labour party, Neil Kinnock, in campaign remarks.Jill Biden was describing a meeting at the Bidens’ house in Delaware more than 15 years later, when Joe Biden met Mark Gitenstein, a long-term adviser, and Klain joined on speakerphone.John Kerry, then a Massachusetts senator, was favourite for the Democratic nomination to challenge George W Bush. But, the authors write, “some party leaders thought Joe could go head-to-head with [the] president … in the general election”.“There were always so many people trying to get Joe to run,” Jill Biden said. “You’ve got to run again. You’ve got to try again. Always. It was constant.“He knew that I wasn’t in favour of his running.”The authors cite Jill Biden’s autobiography, Where the Light Enters, published in 2019, in which she describes “‘fuming’ out by the pool” while the meeting with Klain and Gitenstein went on.Jill Biden writes that she eventually cut the meeting off by drawing “NO” on her stomach with a Sharpie pen and “march[ing] through the room in my bikini.“Needless to say, they got the message.”“Joe and Gitenstein did, at any rate,” Pace and Superville write. “Klain, still eagerly engaged on speakerphone and unaware of what had just transpired in the room, kept brainstorming away.“‘I don’t understand it,’ a bewildered Klain said later when Gitenstein called to explain. ‘The conversation was going so great and all of a sudden, it just stopped.’”Joe Biden did mount a second run for the White House in 2008, with Jill’s support, but dropped out early, unable to compete with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.Neil Kinnock on Biden’s plagiarism ‘scandal’ and why he deserves to win: ‘Joe’s an honest guy’Read moreHe was Obama’s vice-president for eight years, spent four years in apparent retirement, then beat Donald Trump in 2020 to become, at 78, the oldest president inaugurated for the first time. Pace and Superville describe how Jill Biden supported her husband’s second and third White House runs.Klain was appointed to oversee the effort against Ebola in 2014 and remains one of Joe Biden’s closest and most powerful advisers. Last year, the New York Times reported that “Republicans have taken to calling him Prime Minister Klain”, a characterisation Klain has disputed.Gitenstein, a lawyer who worked for the Senate judiciary committee when Biden chaired it, was ambassador to Romania under Obama. He advised Biden in 2020 and is now US ambassador to the European Union.Jill Biden’s most senior male aide is Anthony Bernal. He has been described, by Politico, as both “an influential figure” and “one of the most polarising people” in the Biden White House.TopicsBooksPolitics booksJoe BidenUS politicsDemocratsUS elections 2004US elections 2020newsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      ‘I didn’t win the election’: Trump admits defeat in session with historians

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      ‘I didn’t win the election’: Trump admits defeat in session with historiansThe ex-president also said that Iran, China and South Korea were happy Biden won, adding that ‘the election was rigged and lost’

      Review: The Presidency of Donald Trump
      Donald Trump has admitted he did not win the 2020 election.Capitol attack panel scores two big wins as it inches closer to Trump’s inner circleRead more“I didn’t win the election,” he said.The admission came in a video interview with a panel of historians convened by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor and editor of The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment. The interview was published on Monday by the Atlantic.Describing his attempts to make South Korea pay more for US military assistance, Trump said Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, was among the “happiest” world leaders after the 2020 US election put Joe Biden in the White House.“By not winning the election,” Trump said, “he was the happiest man – I would say, in order, China was – no, Iran was the happiest.“[Moon] was going to pay $5bn, $5bn a year. But when I didn’t win the election, he had to be the happiest – I would rate, probably, South Korea third- or fourth-happiest.”Trump also said “the election was rigged and lost”.Trump’s refusal to accept defeat by Biden provoked attempts to overturn results in key states in court – the vast majority of such cases ending in defeat – and the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Trump was impeached a second time, for inciting an insurrection, and acquitted a second time after enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal.Trump thus remains free to run for the White House again in 2024, which he has repeatedly hinted he will do.Writing for the Atlantic, Zelizer said Trump “was the one who had decided to reach out to a group of professional historians so that we produced ‘an accurate book’”.The former president called the historians assembled by Zelizer “a tremendous group of people, and I think rather than being critical I’d like to have you hear me out, which is what we’re doing now, and I appreciate it”.Trump, Zelizer wrote, “seemed to want the approval of historians, without any understanding of how historians gather evidence or render judgments”.Zelizer also pointed out that shortly after the session with the historians, Trump announced he would give no more interviews for books about his time in office.“It seems to me that meeting with authors of the ridiculous number of books being written about my very successful administration, or me, is a total waste of time,” Trump said in a statement, in July 2021.“These writers are often bad people who write whatever comes to their mind or fits their agenda. It has nothing to do with facts or reality.”TopicsBooksHistory booksPolitics booksDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of history

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      The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of history Julian Zelizer of Princeton has assembled a cast of historians to consider every aspect of four years that shook AmericaAfter thousands of articles and scores of books about Donald Trump’s mostly catastrophic presidency, it’s difficult for anyone to break dramatic new ground. But this new volume, with contributions from 18 American academics, is broader and deeper than all its predecessors, with essays covering everything from Militant Whiteness to the legacy of Trump’s Middle East policies, under the title Arms, Autocrats and Annexations.The result is a great deal of information that is familiar to those who have already plowed through dozens of volumes, enlivened by a few new facts and a number of original insights.One of the best essays, about the Republican party Trump inherited, is written by the book’s editor, Julian Zelizer. The Princeton historian reminds us that the “smashmouth partisanship” perfected by Trump actually began when Newt Gingrich snared the House speakership nearly 30 years ago. In 1992, Pat Buchanan’s speech to the Republic convention featured all of the gay-bashing Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, (and may other Republicans) have revived with so much gusto in 2022.Trump swooped in to profit from White House photographer’s book deal – reportRead moreWith major contributions from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the rightwing media machine, most of the GOP moved so far right it didn’t become Trump’s party because he “seized control” but rather because “he fit so perfectly” with it. Most Republicans were “all in” for Trump, from Mitt Romney, the ex-never Trumper who voted with his former nemesis more than 80% of the time, to “moderate” Chris Christie, who gave Trump an “A” four months after his four years of scorched-earth governance were over.Nicole Hemmer, from Columbia, offers an excellent primer on the irresistible rise of rightwing media, reminding us that in the last year of the first George Bush presidency, Limbaugh was spending the night at the White House. By 2009, the shock jock “topped polls asking who led the Republican party”.By the time Trump started his run for the presidency, in 2015, he had “grown far more powerful than the political media ecosystem that had boosted his rightwing bona fides”. This became clear after his dust-up with Megyn Kelly. Moderating a primary debate, the Fox anchor challenged his long history of sexist statements. Trump declared afterwards: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”The Fox News chief, Roger Ailes, “stayed silent”, Hemmer writes. Another executive, Bill Shine, “told on-air anchors not to come to Kelly’s defense”.By the spring of 2016, Fox was becoming less important than Breitbart, an extreme-right website which researchers at Harvard and MIT declared the new anchor of a “rightwing media network”. It was Steve Bannon of Breitbart who “armed Trump with something like a cohesive political platform … built on anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-liberal politics – the same agenda Breitbart.com was promoting”.“Sure enough”, Trump’s Twitter feed “during the campaign linked to Breitbart more than any other news site”.Eventually, just about everyone on the right became a Trump disciple. Glenn Beck compared him to Hitler in 2016. By 2018, Beck was wearing a red Make America Great Again hat, though he blamed the media’s “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for “forcing him to become a Trump supporter”. As a former rightwing radio host, Charlie Sykes, explained: “There’s really not a business model for conservative media to be anti-Trump.”A Brown historian, Bathsheba Demuth, demonstrates that Trump was also a perfect fit for a party that endorsed a propaganda initiative of the American Petroleum Institute that portrayed environmental protection as “a dangerous slide toward communist authoritarianism”. Among loyal constituents were evangelicals, who either saw human dominion over nature as “a doctrinal requirement” or just thought the whole debate was irrelevant because of “Christ’s imminent resurrection”.The most surprising fact in this chapter is that the fossil fuel industry was so sure Trump was a loser in 2016, it gave the bulk of its contributions to Hillary Clinton.Margaret O’Mara, of the University of Washington, describes big tech’s key role in our national meltdown. She reminds us of a key, mostly forgotten moment 10 years ago, when “Google and Facebook successfully petitioned the Federal Election Commission for exemptions from disclaimer requirements” that required political ads to say who paid for them and who was responsible for their messages.The companies argued the requirements would “undermine other, much larger parts of their businesses”. Disastrously, the FEC went along with that pathetic argument. After that, no one ever knew exactly where online attack ads were coming from.O’Mara also recalls that Facebook provided the 2016 Trump campaign with “dedicated staff and resources” to help it purchase more ads on the platform. O’Mara mistakenly reports that the Clinton campaign received the same kind of largesse. Actually, in what may have been the campaign’s single worst decision, it refused Facebook’s offer to install staffers in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreAnother chapter, by Daniel C Kurtzer of Princeton, analyses what Trump supporters consider their president’s greatest foreign policy achievement: the initiation of diplomatic relations between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Morocco.A conservative journal summarized the accomplishment this way: “Washington is strengthening repression in Bahrain, underwriting aggression by UAE, sacrificing the Sahrawi people [of Western Sahara, to Morocco], undermining reform in Sudan and even abandoning justice for Americans harmed by Sudan. The administration calls this an ‘American first’ policy.”The last chapter focuses on the two failed attempts to convict Trump in impeachment trials. Those outcomes may be Trump’s worst legacy of all. Gregory Downs, from the University of California, Davis, writes that the failures to convict “in the face of incontrovertible proof” may convince all Trump’s successors “that they have almost complete impunity as long as they retain the support of their base, no matter what the constitution says”.
      The Presidency of Donald Trump is published in the US by Princeton University Press
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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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