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      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
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      ‘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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      ‘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
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS elections 2020RepublicansUS domestic policyreviewsReuse this content More

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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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