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      Republican school bill mocked for claim Frederick Douglass debated Lincoln

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      Republican school bill mocked for claim Frederick Douglass debated LincolnVirginia bill banning teaching of ‘divisive concepts’ confused black civil rights campaigner with white senator Stephen Douglas A Republican bill to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” in schools in Virginia ran into ridicule when among historical events deemed suitable for study, it described a nonexistent debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.David Blight on Frederick Douglass: ‘I call him beautifully human’Read moreLincoln did engage in a series of historic debates hinged on the issue of slavery, in the Illinois Senate campaign of 1858. But he did so against Stephen Douglas, a senator who had ties to slavery – not against Frederick Douglass, the great campaigner for the abolition of slavery who was once enslaved himself.The Virginia bill was sponsored by Wren Williams, a freshman Republican sent to the state capital, Richmond, in a tumultuous November election.Identifying “divisive concepts” including racism and sexism, the bill demanded the teaching of “the fundamental moral, political and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government”.In part, this was to be achieved with a focus on “founding documents” including “the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Federalist Papers, including Essays 10 and 51, excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States”.The teaching of history has become a divisive concept in states across the US, as rightwing activists have spread alarm about the teaching of race issues. In November, the winning candidate for governor in Virginia, the Republican Glenn Youngkin, made it a wedge issue in his win over the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe.Youngkin successfully seized upon critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society – but which is not taught in Virginia schools.Why Frederick Douglass’s struggle for justice is relevant in the Trump era | Ibram X KendiRead moreNor, it turned out, will Williams’s bill be enforced in Virginia courts. As the Washington Post reported, “by Friday morning, Frederick Douglass was trending on Twitter, and the bill had been withdrawn”.Online, ridicule was swift. “New rule,” wrote Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor. “If you don’t know the difference between Frederick Douglass and Stephen Douglas, you don’t get to tell anyone else what to teach.”Many were also happy to point out that Douglass has caused embarrassment for Republicans before. In 2017, Donald Trump at least gave the impression he thought the great campaigner was alive.“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognised more and more, I notice,” the former president said.On Friday, Sidney Blumenthal, a Guardian contributor and Lincoln biographer, said: “Lincoln did not debate Frederick Douglass. Historians may search for the video, but they will not find it.”Blumenthal also pointed out that Lincoln and Douglass did meet three times when Lincoln was president, from 1861 to 1865 and through a civil war that ended with slavery abolished.How did Republicans turn critical race theory into a winning electoral issue?Read moreTheir conversations included a discussion about inequality in pay between Black and white soldiers, upon which Lincoln ultimately acted, and Confederate abuse of Black prisoners. There was also a famous meeting after Lincoln’s second inauguration, in 1865, when Lincoln greeted Douglas at the White House as a friend.Blumenthal also offered a way in which students in Virginia and elsewhere might use Douglass’s life and work to examine divisions today.Speaking a day after two centrist Democratic senators sank Joe Biden’s push for voting rights reform, Blumenthal said: “Frederick Douglass’s great cause became that of voting rights.“If there is any debate that is going on now, it is not between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is between Frederick Douglass and all the Republican senators who refuse to support voting rights – and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema too.”TopicsBooksFrederick DouglassAbraham LincolnAmerican civil warHistory booksVirginiaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Five great reads: smart supermarkets, Biden’s first year and a gaming empire built by children

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      Five great reads: smart supermarkets, Biden’s first year and a gaming empire built by childrenGuardian Australia’s daily round-up of compelling reads as selected by lifestyle editor Alyx Gorman Grab a piece of fruit and a beverage of your preference and settle in for Five Great Reads: your morning tea wrap of great writing, curiosity and usefulness, lovingly selected by me – Alyx Gorman, Guardian Australia’s lifestyle editor (cold brew and blueberries, in case you’re wondering).If you’d rather be reading the news as it unfolds, hop over to our live blog; and if you just want a quick hit of something other than Covid, read about this badger that discovered a trove of 209 Roman coins in Spain.If you’re reading this on our website and fancy getting it in your inbox instead, you can sign up to receive Five Great Reads as an email by popping your address in the box above. Go on, do it!Now, on to the rest of the reads.1. Big-name writers on Biden’s first yearFour leading American authors – SA Cosby, Richard Ford, Margo Jefferson and Joyce Carol Oates – share their thoughts on Biden’s leadership through 12 months of political polarisation and the pandemic.Notable quote: “The other day, someone was talking about the DW Winnicott idea of the good enough mother,” writes Pulitzer-prize winning critic and author Margo Jefferson. “She’s not a saint, she has her own problems, but she’s good enough for the child to grow up reasonably well. With Joe Biden, it’s a case of the good enough president.”How long will it take me to read? About 10 minutes.2. The rise of the sentient supermarketWell, OK they’re not really sentient, but they’re smart. AI-powered shops in the UK, Scandinavia and the US could spell the end of the grocery store as we know it.The bit that’s good for you: You never have to queue again.The bit that’s good for the supermarket: These stores have no shoplifting (and very few staff).The bit that’s a Black Mirror episode: All this is achieved by thousands of cameras tracking shoppers’ every move, and sending the bill to their phone as they walk out.How long will it take me to read? About five minutes.3. A video game empire built on child labourRoblox – a platform which allows people to not only play games, but build and make money from them – is the most valuable video game company in the world. “It is an empire built on the sale of virtual boots and hats,” Simon Parkins writes. “And considering that almost half of its users are aged 13 or under, the creativity and labour of children.”Notable quote: “It began to have a negative effect on my mental health,” says Regan Green, who spent two years working as a developer on a Sonic the Hedgehog Roblox game. “I was constantly trying to find ways to improve the project, but [the game’s creator] always wanted more out of me and I became incredibly burned out.”Yeah, but everyone is burning out at the moment. Did I mention that he was working on the game between the ages of 12 and 14?Oh. Then: “The pressure caused me to break.”4. Hanya Yanagihara on her new novel and America’s brattinessThe A Little Life author’s new book To Paradise – a work of alternative history that spans three centuries – has already been called “as good as War and Peace” (by fellow author Edmund White). Here Yanagihara talks about the book and the American ideals it explores and critiques.Yanagihara on writing very big books, while holding down a very fancy job (as editor of T Magazine): “I’m not the smartest or hardest-working or most educated person, but I am the best at time management.”I guess I need to get better at time management then. Same.So how long will it take me to read this? Five well-managed minutes.5. Exercising with a heart conditionThe latest in our How to Move series tackles fitness with a difficult ticker.Notable quote: “The importance of exercise is to increase the efficiency of the muscles to de-load the heart,” says exercise physiologist Bridget Nash. “A strong muscle is an efficient muscle.”TopicsAustralia newsFive Great ReadsUS politicsGamesfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Unthinkable review: Jamie Raskin, his lost son and defending democracy from Trump

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      Unthinkable review: Jamie Raskin, his lost son and defending democracy from Trump The Maryland Democrat has written an extraordinary memoir of grief, the Capitol attack and the second impeachment

      David Blight: Trump has birthed a new Lost Cause myth
      Unthinkable is the perfect title for this extraordinary book, because it describes a superhuman feat.The Steal review: stethoscope for a democracy close to cardiac arrestRead moreJamie Raskin is a fine writer, a Democratic congressman, a constitutional scholar and a deeply loving father. When 2020 began, he had no inkling that just 12 months later his country and his family would face “two impossible traumas”.On 31 December, his beautiful, brilliant, charismatic 25-year-old son, Tommy, took his own life. Six days later, a vicious mob invaded Raskin’s workplace, the cradle of democracy, leaving several dead and injuring 140 police officers.Raskin suffered “a violent and comprehensive shock to the foundations”. Never had he felt “so equidistant … between the increasingly unrecognizable place called life and the suddenly intimate and expanding jurisdiction called death”.This is where the superhuman part came in. Instead of succumbing to unfathomable grief over the death of his son, Raskin seized a lifeline thrown by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and agreed to lead the effort to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the riot which might have derailed the peaceful transition of power.He found “salvation and sustenance … a pathway back to the land of the living”.“I’m not going to lose my son at the end of 2020 and lose my country and my republic in 2021,” he told CNN, less than three weeks after Tommy’s death.Raskin’s astonishing story of tragedy and redemption, of “despair and survival”, depended entirely on all the “good and compassionate people” like Tommy, “the non-narcissists, the feisty, life-size human beings who hate bullying and fascism naturally – people just the right size for a democracy … where we are all created equal”.Tommy Raskin was the fourth generation in a great liberal family. His maternal great grandfather was the first Jew elected to the Minnesota legislature. His father, Marcus Raskin, was one of the earliest opponents of the Vietnam war when he worked in the Kennedy White House. In 1968, Marcus Raskin was indicted with William Sloane Coffin, Dr Benjamin Spock and others for conspiracy to aid resistance to the draft. When Raskin was the only one acquitted, he famously demanded a retrial.Jamie Raskin taught constitutional law then ran for the Maryland Senate, with Tommy, then 10, his first campaign aide. In the state legislature, Raskin helped outlaw the death penalty and legalize same-sex marriage.Tommy was a second-year student at Harvard Law School when Covid began. Like so many others with clinical depression, the catastrophe deepened his symptoms. His father described his illness as “a kind of relentless torture in the brain … Despite very fine doctors and a loving family … the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last.”Congressman Jamie Raskin: ‘I’ll never forget the terrible sound of them trying to barrel into the chamber’Read moreThis is also a political memoir, of the Capitol attack and the second impeachment. Driving to the Capitol, Raskin spotted MAGA supporters heckling a young Black driver and a car with a bumper sticker reading: “If Guns Are Outlawed, How Am I Going To Shoot Liberals?”He realizes these “fascist bread crumbs throughout the city” should have activated “some kind of cultural alarm”. More chillingly, he reports the decision of some Democrats to cross their chamber after Congress was invaded, “because they thought a mass shooter who entered would be less likely to aim at the Republican side of the House”.But Raskin was never afraid: “The very worst thing that could ever have happened to us has already happened … and Tommy is with me somehow every step of the way. He is occupying my heart … He is showing me the way to some kind of safety … My wound has now become my shield of defense and my path to escape, and all I can think of is my son propelling me forward to fight.”The most powerful part of Raskin’s book, the heart-shattering part, is his love letter to Tommy, a “dazzling, precious, brilliant … moral visionary, a slam poet, an intellectual giant slayer, the king of Boggle, a natural-born comedian, a friend to all human beings but tyrants and bullies, a freedom fighter, a political essayist, a playwright, a jazz pianist, and a handsome, radical visitor from a distant future where war, mass hunger and the eating of animals are considered barbaric intolerable and absurd”.Raskin realized that for the last week of his life, his son had made an effort to impersonate someone in perfect mental health, so no one would intervene. These were his parting words: “Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”Raskin takes some solace remembering the story of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie, who died of typhoid fever at the age of 12 in 1862, plunging his parents into depression.It had been a point of pride that Raskin responded to every constituent, but a deluge of condolences made that impossible. There was also a call from Joe Biden, three days after Tommy died. The president-elect promised “the day would come when Tommy’s name would bring a smile to my lip before tears to my eyes”.Congressman Jamie Raskin on the day democracy almost crumbled in the US: Politics Weekly podcastRead moreEventually Raskin was convinced to write one letter for everyone sending condolences, one for everyone who wrote about impeachment and a third for everyone who offered condolences and political solidarity. One actually wrote: “I was looking for a condolence card for the loss of your son which also said ‘and thanks for saving our country too’, but Hallmark apparently doesn’t make those.”Naturally, one of Raskin’s son’s heroes was Wittgenstein, who believed the truth of ethical propositions is determined by the courage with which you act to make them real.“On this standard,” Raskin writes, “there have never been truer ethical claims than the ones made by Tommy Raskin, because he was all courage and engagement with his moral convictions.”May this book and Tommy’s example inspire us all to rescue our gravely beleaguered democracy.
      Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy is published in the US by Harper
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      The Steal review: stethoscope for a democracy close to cardiac arrest

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      The Steal review: stethoscope for a democracy close to cardiac arrest Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague have produced an indispensable and alarming ground-level record of how Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election played out in precincts and ballot-counting centers in key statesIn their terrific new book, the veteran reporters Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague argue that the mob that invaded the Capitol in Washington almost exactly a year ago “had no more chance of overthrowing the US government than hippies in 1967 had trying to levitate the Pentagon”.From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animalsRead moreThe “real insurrection” was the one “led by Trump and his coterie of sycophants” in Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. It “was only slightly better organized than the mob but considerably more calculated and dangerous”.That real insurrection is the subject of this timely and important volume. The authors have used a stethoscope to examine the minutia of the American election process. The result is a thrilling and suspenseful celebration of the survival of democracy.The attempted coup was led by Donald Trump. Its intended denouement, in which the vice-president, Mike Pence, would ignore the votes of the six states above plus Washington DC in order to swing the election to Trump, was outlined in an insane memo written by the lawyer John Eastman, described here as “surely the most seditious document to emerge from the White House in American history”.That final act, of course, never happened. Not even Pence, the most sycophantic vice-president of modern times, could bring himself to violate the constitution so blatantly to keep his boss in the White House.But the genuine heroes, brought to life here, were the “hundreds of obscure Americans from every walk of life, state and local officials, judges and election workers. Many of them were Republicans, some were Trump supporters. They refused to accept his slander of themselves, their communities and their workers, and they refused to betray their sworn duty to their office and their country. They were the real patriots.”Bowden and Teague – the latter a Guardian contributor – take us through six battles that lasted from the night of the election, 3 November 2020, until Joe Biden’s election was finally certified by Congress early on 7 January last year.Their book performs a vital service, demonstrating just how well our tattered democracy managed to function despite vicious partisanship and all the new challenges created by the pandemic. For the first time, I understood how brilliantly new machines used to count the votes performed, the intricacies of opening outer and inner envelopes, capturing the images of both then preserving the vital paper ballots inside, making it possible to confirm electronic results with a hand count in case of any failure in technology.In Arizona, the elections department conducted “the mandatory hand count of election day ballots from 2% of the vote centers and 1% of the early ballots as required by Arizona law and it yielded a 100% match to the results produced by the tabulation equipment”.Scott Jarrett was co-director of elections in the populous Maricopa county, and he is one of the crucial bureaucrats celebrated here: “A pale slender young man … dressed in a plain gray suit, the very picture of an earnest functionary, a man happily engaged in the actual machinery of government and quietly proud of his own unheralded importance and competence.”In a public hearing crowded with crazed conspiracy theorists, Jarrett carefully explained how only one of the two “encrypted memory cards (both with tamper-proof evidence seals)” was transported from various polling centers to the main counting location, “so that the results on one card could be double-checked against the other as well as the precinct ballot report they had generated. Backing up that memory were, of course, the actual ballots that had been run through the machines. The memory cards and the ballots were sealed and delivered by “two members of different parties”, escorted by county sheriffs.Clint Hickman, chairman of the Maricopa county board of supervisors, noted that if the eyes of some in the audience were glazing over, he just wanted “people that are watching this” to understand “we don’t glaze over”.The authors point out that Hickman was touching on a fundamental feature of The Steal, the factitious narrative concocted by Trump and his cronies: conspiracy theorists depend on ignorance.“They begin with distrust: only a sucker believes the official story. They then replace the often tedious, mundane details of an intricate process … with a simpler narrative”: theft.They invent colorful stories about a “deal struck with a late Venezuelan dictator to deliver tainted election machines, or a plot to preprint fake ballots in the dead of night”. This creates what cognitive scientists call “a community of knowledge”.The big problem that didn’t exist even 30 years ago is the speed with which such idiotic stories are spread through the internet and by the Twitter feed of a malevolent president like Trump, exploding the reach of such stories and their power to undermine democratic norms.March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican readsRead moreThe book reminds us that democracy itself depends on a modicum of trust. That is why Trump’s ability to persuade so many Americans of the truth of so many lies has had such a disastrous effect on our body politic.Bowden and Teague have performed a singular service by revealing the details that disprove Republicans’ unceasing inventions about voter fraud.The problem is that so many Republicans will continue to ignore the lessons of this book. American democracy could still be destroyed by the torrent of voter suppression laws already passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures, spurred by lies invented by Trump and amplified by insidious “journalists” like Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson, whose perfidy is brilliantly dissected in these pages.If democracy does prevail, it will survive because of the ability of authors like Teague and Bowden to make the truth even more compelling than Fox News fictions.
      The Steal is published in the US by Atlantic Monthly Press
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      Democracy Lives In Darkness review: how to take politics off the holiday dinner table

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      Democracy Lives In Darkness review: how to take politics off the holiday dinner tableEmily Van Duyn’s study of a group of liberal women in rural Texas is thought-provoking reading for the holiday period

      From Peril to Betrayal: the year in US politics books
      In 2015, Saturday Night Live spoofed the rancorous political arguments besieging American social life.‘It’s who they are’: gun-fetish photo a symbol of Republican abasement under TrumpRead moreCast members seated around a dining table to celebrate Thanksgiving passed the side dishes and threw invective. The verbal heat rose and rose until a young girl pressed play on a cassette player and the Adele song Hello washed over the room. The combatants instantly ceased fire and began lip-synching the lyrics. Their rapture escalated until they physically entered a re-creation of the music video.A Thanksgiving Miracle aired before the Trump presidency and its violent subversive conclusion. This holiday season, it’s hard to think of a song capable of transporting Americans into a state of blissful unity. Masks and vaccines have become an issue and assault weapons have cropped up as accessories on congressional Christmas cards. But there is an alternative to mutually assured bad-mouthing. Americans can meet clandestinely among the like-minded, not just to commiserate but also to plan and participate in election campaigns.Emily Van Duyn, a political communications scholar, embedded with one such group in Texas in 2017. Her book chronicles the journey of 136 liberal women living in a rural and thus predominantly conservative Texas town who, determined to resist Trump, organized themselves into what Van Duyn anonymizes as the Community Women’s Group (CWG).They were middle-aged and senior white women (save one who was Black), afraid to speak their minds and put up yard signs. The author interviewed 24 of them multiple times, attended their monthly meetings on a dozen occasions, and examined meeting minutes from November 2016, when they were in tears and shock, until December 2020, at which point their politicking had yielded higher vote totals for Democrats in the previous month’s election, though not enough to prevail anywhere on the ballot.Van Duyn also conducted a national and statewide survey in 2018, from which she concluded that more than one in five American adults felt the need to hide their politics, and just under one in 10 operated in similarly self-obscured conversational settings.The study explains how social, geographic and political causes shaped the communication practices of the CWG.“[T]he growing animosity between and within parties, the uncertainty about truth, the growing intersectional animosity around ideology, race, class, and gender, made for a political context that was not only unpleasant but risky.”Trump palpably threatened their sense of security as women. Locally, they feared ostracization, loss of business (especially the real estate agents), defacement of property and being run off the road by men in trucks with guns who noticed liberal bumper-stickers, as happened at least once and was talked about often.Van Duyn excels at detailing the evolution of CWG’s communications practices, a mix of private and public facing activities conducted through physical as well as digital channels. Many members had grown up deferring to men about matters political. But a week after Trump’s victory one of them sent an email to eight neighbors: “I would like to suggest that we get together for support and see where that takes us.”That got forwarded, and 50 showed up at the first meeting. In a remote location, with the blinds closed, they wrote a mission statement and formed committees by issue to educate themselves. That super-structure soon fell by the wayside. Their formalized confidentiality agreement held, however. Between meetings they relied on a listserv to communicate among themselves with a brief detour into a secret Facebook group.In their darkened space (the book title inverts the slogan of the Washington Post) they opened each meeting with talk about their fears. A few started sending letters to the editor of the local newspaper using their individual identity, often to register dissent with and fact-check other letter writers. Over the two years of the study, about half emerged as open Democrats. They worked on mobilizing other Democrats (even though not all were registered or comfortable with the party), leaving the heavy labor of persuasion to formal campaigns. Their work shored up the party in their county: they ran phone banks, filled district chairs, updated voter files and raised money. The group had served as a safe harbor to develop political skills and confidence.CWG falls into several political traditions, including the voluntary associations that De Tocqueville valorized, the hidden minorities who have suffered the weights of oppression and, for that matter, the collectives of oppressors and cultists.Women are a demographic majority in America, and the political positions of CWG would fit in the national mainstream. But these women were neither in the contexts of their lives. Even so, by the end of the period Van Duyn examines, their politicking mirrored that of more open demographic counterparts such as the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County, a group that helped first-time candidate Abigail Spanberger turn a central Virginia seat Democratic in 2018 – one that she now has to decamp for a newly re-drawn district.Some Republicans at holiday gatherings this year will continue to relish the opportunity to bait liberals (a practice that goes both ways). They may emulate Trump’s style of discourse, centered on a barrage of lies, exaggerations, accusations and taunts. Or they may not do any of these things; as Trump said about southern border-crossers in 2015 “some, I assume, are good people”. Indeed, some Republicans may feel intimidated by progressive majorities in workplaces and on campuses.All told, the risks of escalated, energy draining crossfire between America’s political tribes have risen and intensified. So this holiday season is no time for engaging others in political matters, for disputing the veracity of their claims and integrity of their motives. Far better to smile wanly, deflect provocations, change the subject, and then join or form a political support group. As Van Duyn’s book shows, good things can follow from going underground.
      Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret is published in the US by Oxford University Press
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      Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policy

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      Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policyBarak Ravid has written a fascinating account of four chaotic years in which some progress was nonetheless made Trump’s Peace is a blockbuster of a book. Barak Ravid captures the 45th president saying “Fuck him” to Benjamin Netanyahu and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures. Imagine the Republican reaction if Barack Obama had done that. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham would plotz. But Trump? Crickets.The State of Israel vs The Jews review: fierce indictment of a rightward lurch Read moreRavid also delivers a mesmerizing tick-tock of the making of the Abraham Accords, the normalization of Israel’s relations with four non-neighboring Arab states.Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Yousef al-Otaiba – the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the US – and members of Israel’s government took the time to talk. Ravid footnotes the receipts.The result is a well-paced and engrossing read, if in Hebrew only for now. Israel-born and based, Ravid writes for Axios and Walla, an Israeli website. He knows his subject. Netanyahu is caught telling Avi Berkowitz, Kushner’s deputy and a US negotiator, not to leak to the author. Instead, Berkowitz talked on the record.Technically, the Abraham Accords are a joint declaration signed by the US, Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. Practically, the agreements represent the first major breakthrough in Middle East peace since the October 1994 treaty between Israel and Jordan. Unlike the Hashemite kingdom, the UAE and Bahrain do not border Israel, are graced with petroleum reserves, and stare at Iran across the Persian Gulf.According to Ravid, the nuclear threat posed by Tehran and the unrest that followed the Arab Spring reshaped policies and thinking towards normalizing relations with Israel. The Palestinians no longer occupied center stage.Ravid reports that Netanyahu backtracked on a commitment to annex part of the West Bank after being subjected to US pressure. Apparently, the Trump administration made clear it would continue to shield Israel in the United Nations security council but would not at the International Criminal Court. Netanyahu got the message. It came down to a UAE ultimatum: settlements or peace. Netanyahu blinked.Ravid regards Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, also known as MBZ, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, as an unsung hero. He compares MBZ to Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who made peace with Israel then paid with his life.By the numbers, the Abraham Accords are yielding dividends. The UAE has announced a $10bn investment fund in key Israeli economic sectors and envisions more than $1tn in trade over a decade. Saudi Arabia looks to Bahrain as a conduit for investment in Israel and the Biden administration is “leaning” into the accords, after first hesitating.Ravid portrays Trump and Netanyahu as divisive leaders who threatened their countries’ democratic moorings. He recounts the 6 January insurrection in the US and Netanyahu’s resort to incitement. And yet, Ravid argues, fairness demands that both receive credit for this particular accomplishment.Understandably, Ravid is more ambivalent toward the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, a legacy of the Obama administration hated by Netanyahu and Trump. In Trump’s telling, his decision to pull out was not the result of Israeli urging. Rather, the deal was flawed and deserved to be scrapped.That verdict is not unanimous. Ravid quotes Udi Lavie, former deputy chief of the Mossad, who says the US withdrawal did not benefit Israel but hurt it. At the same time, Ravid observes that Netanyahu and Yossi Cohen, a former head of the Mossad, harbor no such regrets.Negotiations with the Iranian regime continue, with no tangible signs of progress. As Israel girds for possible conflict, its message is conflicted.A recent New York Times headline blared: Israeli Defense Officials Cast Doubt on Threat to Attack Iran. On the other hand, Amos Yadlin, a former air force general, told the paper his country has the capability for a successful strike.“Can the American air force can do it better? Definitely. But they don’t have the will.”Or necessarily the same strategic interests. Trump’s ascendance in 2016 was directly related to the Iraq war and its casualty count.Ravid also offers his take on Trumpworld. He stresses that Kushner was neither ideologue nor idealist. At heart he was a businessman, sympathetic to Israel but not seeing annexation as a personal cause. Nor, Ravid says, was Kushner driven by religious sentiment – as was Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state. The Messiah could wait.Nor, unlike Condi Rice, George W Bush’s secretary of state, did Kushner regard Palestinians stuck at Israeli check-points as – in Ravid’s words – “the reincarnation of Rosa Parks on a bus in Alabama”.In contrast to Kushner, David Friedman, Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and ambassador to Israel, viewed the two-state solution as an “illusion”. Before he took office, he derided Jews on the left as “worse than Kapos”. His nomination narrowly cleared the Senate.‘We are family’: the Israelis sharing life and hope with PalestiniansRead moreAs ambassador, Friedman was close to Netanyahu, sitting in on Israeli government meetings until he was tossed out by cabinet members. Ravid describes Friedman as “flesh of the settlers’ flesh”. Friedman has taken issue with portions of Ravid’s reporting – and has a book due in February.Earlier this year, Friedman told the Times he would not rule out becoming a US-Israeli dual national, but not until Trump’s plans for 2024 were known.“I’m going to stay American-only for at least four years,” he said. “I want to give myself every opportunity to return to government.”Maybe, maybe not. Trump remains on the stage, ready to kneecap any competitor for the Republican nomination. Netanyahu is standing trial on bribery and corruption charges while leading the opposition bloc in Israel’s Knesset.Paradoxically, his efforts to cling to power may be the best insurance policy for the current coalition government. One thing is certain: the two men created facts on the ground that will outlast them both.
      Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East is published in Israel by Yedioth Ahronoth Books
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      From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animals

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      From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animals 2021 provided a glut of memoirs, deep dives and tell-alls about American politics in an age of Covid and attacks on democracy itself. Which were the best – and most alarming?If in recent years American politics books have been noted mainly for ephemera, in 2021 the winds of history began to blow open the doors – occasionally to devastating effect. The advent of a new administration loosened tongues and made documents more readily available as some sought redemption, justification or simply fame.March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican readsRead moreSuch books illustrate the truth that one cannot keep a thing hidden and generally share certain characteristics that convey the ring of truth. They report bitterly angry outbursts by Donald Trump, staff reeling from dysfunction, chaos and the pressures of a campaign in a pandemic. They frequently recount interviews with Trump himself. They contain sufficient profanity to make sailors blush.And, happily, this paper celebrated its bicentennial in part by scooping many of them, with real consequences in the case of Mark Meadows, who published The Chief’s Chief this month. Some – the former White House chief of staff in particular – may wish they had not written books. But some books are essential to understand the danger in which the country finds itself.The former FBI director James Comey opened the year with Saving Justice, a second book defending the rule of law. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes followed with Lucky, a quick but full postmortem of the 2020 campaign, noting: “Luck, it has been said, is the residue of design. It was for Joe Biden, and for the republic.”The heart of the year was a series of blockbusters from prominent reporters, each containing significant new information on aspects of the chaos that was 2020. Michael Bender led off with Frankly, We Did Win This Election, in which Trump’s words, on the record, are unsurprising but nonetheless shocking.In Landslide, Michael Wolff completed his Trump trilogy with a focus on the campaign – including Chris Christie, in debate preparation (as a result of which he tested positive for Covid), earning Trump’s ire for asking hard but predictable questions on Covid response and family scandals – and on a post-election dominated by Trump’s anger as the levers of power, including the supreme court of which he chose three members, failed to overturn his defeat.Wolff is keenly analytic: as he writes, Trump “knew nothing of government, [his supporters] knew nothing about government, so the context of government itself became beside the point”. Instead, Trump was “the star – never forget that – and the base was his audience”. This self-referential and adulatory mode of governing failed in a divided country facing a pandemic and rising international challenges. Landslide is a fine book, though as new evidence from the 6 January committee emerges, Wolff’s conclusion limiting Trump’s own knowledge of and responsibility for the events of that day may come to seem premature.Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker followed with I Alone Can Fix It, in which Gen Mark Milley said the US was in a “Reichstag moment” on 2 January, four days before the insurrection, and referred to “the gospel of the Führer” poisoning American democracy. Trump’s anger at his pollster, Tony Fabrizio, for being the bearer of bad news on Covid and the electorate is telling too: “They’re tired? They’re fatigued?” Politics as empathy was not the campaign’s theme.Bob Woodward, writing with Robert Costa, likewise completed his Trump series with Peril, whose title sums up its conclusion. The book, notable for revealing Gen Milley’s attempts to reassure the Chinese military in the waning days of the presidency, quotes Trump’s apparent view that “real power [is] fear” and asks, “Were there any limits to what he and his supporters might do to put him back in power?”Adam Schiff’s Midnight in Washington brings a former prosecutor’s eye and perspective of a House intelligence committee chairman to issues surrounding Trump and Russia. His book is both history and warning.Among Trump loyalists, former trade czar Peter Navarro released In Trump Time, in which he criticized Meadows and anyone else he deemed insufficiently loyal. The book’s most memorable line calls Vice-President Mike Pence “Brutus” to Trump’s “American Caesar” – all without irony or, one hopes, knowledge of Roman history.Not all notable books were tell-alls. Some contained real policy insights. Josh Rogin’s Chaos Under Heaven looks at US-China relations from a strategic as well as pandemic perspective, noting US conflicts of both interest and policy as well as Trump’s inability to develop a workable strategy. Rival books on antitrust policy by two very different senators, Amy Klobuchar and Josh Hawley, illustrate Congress’ increased focus on large technology companies. Evan Osnos’ Wildland chronicles the lives and fortunes of billionaires and the growth of the Washington machine – and the effects, including rightward political shifts, on those at the bottom. On a related theme, in Misfire Tim Mak delivers a shocking history of the National Rifle Association and its former leaders.Several books will serve as first drafts of history. Madam Speaker, Susan Page’s biography of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, describes how she “took on the boys club and won” through mastery of legislation and her caucus. Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue compiles the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinions, speeches and other documents, with Amanda Tyler as co-author.Uncontrolled Spread review: Trump’s first FDA chief on the Covid disasterRead moreUnsurprisingly in the second year of a pandemic, healthcare featured prominently. In The Ten-Year War, Jonathan Cohn recounts the 10-year history of Obamacare. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain tells the sad and painful story of the promotion of opioids in America. On the pandemic, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta in Nightmare Scenario focus on the Trump administration’s response. Leaving responsibility mostly to the states had deleterious consequences, as did chaos, turf wars and giving priority to “the demands of Trump and his base” as he sought reelection rather than an effective response.Scott Gottlieb, a well-regarded former FDA commissioner, takes a broader, more philosophical view in Uncontrolled Spread. Absence of leadership and a “sizeable enterprise devoted to manufacturing skepticism” about the virus and public health solutions meant the US failed the bar of “delay[ing] its onset and reduc[ing] its scope and severity”. But the Operation Warp Speed vaccine effort “proved what government could accomplish when it functions well” and makes one keenly regret the absence of leadership elsewhere as confirmed US deaths, so many among the unvaccinated, surpass 800,000.The pandemic’s broader impact is equally profound. In Gottlieb’s words, “Covid normalized the breakdowns in a global order that it was presumed, perhaps naively, would protect us, just as Covid pierced our own perception of domestic resiliency, cooperation, and fortitude.” Vaccine hesitancy in the face of clear science is only one pandemic effect.‘Pence was disloyal at exactly the right time’: author Jonathan Karl on the Capitol attackRead moreWith honorable mentions for Wolff, Leonnig and Rucker, Woodward and Costa, and Gottlieb, ABC’s Jonathan Karl produced arguably the year’s most significant book in Betrayal, in which Trump cabinet members “paint a portrait of a wrath-filled president, untethered from reality, bent on revenge”. The attorney general, Bill Barr, decries election-related conspiracies; the acting defense secretary, Chris Miller, seeks to dissuade Trump from attacking Iran by taking (and faking) an extreme position in favour:
      Oftentimes, with provocative people, if you get more provocative than them, they then have to dial it down.
      Such was government in the Trump era.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Nobel Lecture that “one word of truth shall outweigh the whole world”. The amount of newly uncovered truth is already outweighing a fair number of the more than 4,000 exoplanets Nasa has recorded.Yet the vital question remains: what will Americans, in particular Republican officials and independent voters, do with this information? As Karl wrote, “The continued survival of our republic may depend, in part, on the willingness of those who promoted Trump’s lies and those who remained silent to acknowledge they were wrong.”Is it to be Solzhenitsyn’s hope – or his fear that “when we are told again the old truth, we shall not even remember that we once possessed it”?TopicsBooksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationBiden administrationJoe BidenRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican reads

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      March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican reads The former chief of staff has written the most consequential Trump book – if not, thanks to the revelation of the great Covid cover-up, in quite the way he planned. In contrast, McEnany, Navarro and Atlas just play fast and loose with the truthThe Chief’s Chief is the most consequential book on the Trump presidency. In his memoir, Mark Meadows confesses to possibly putting Joe Biden’s life in jeopardy and then covering it up – all in easily digested prose and an unadorned voice. If nothing else, the book has provided plenty of ammunition for Donald Trump to have concluded that Meadows “betrayed” him.Trump tested positive for Covid few days before Biden debate, chief of staff says in new bookRead moreTrump has trashed The Chief’s Chief as “fake news”, derided Meadows as “fucking stupid”, and falsely claimed that the book “confirmed” that he “did not have Covid before or during the debate”.Actually, when it comes to events in Cleveland on 29 September 2020, Meadows writes: “We’ll probably never know whether President Trump was positive that evening.” But we know he very well might have been.And to think Trump gave Meadows a blurb for his cover: “We will have a big future together”. Hopefully, Meadows received at least 30 pieces of silver as an advance.By the numbers, Trump came in contact with approximately 500 people between the time he received his first positive test, which was followed by a negative one, and his announcement that he did indeed have Covid. Not surprisingly, Trump blamed others for giving him the virus, even intimating that gold star military families did it.Last week, after the Guardian broke news of Meadows’ book, Michael Shear of the New York Times recalled: “Hours after he received the call from Meadows informing him of a positive test, Trump came to the back of AF1 without a mask and talked with reporters for about 10 minutes.”“Several days later”, Shear himself tested positive.The 45th president looks like “patient zero”, a one-man super-spreader.Switching topics, Meadows tags Biden for getting overly handsy and says Andrew Cuomo ogled Hope Hicks. Unsurprisingly, Meadows omits mention of allegations against his own boss. Just one example? E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against Trump, arising from an alleged rape in a department store dressing room.Turning to Republican politics, Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, accuses John Boehner, once House Speaker, of acting like a “Mafia Don”. Again, Meadows does not mention the boss’s behavior.As reported by Joshua Green in Devil’s Bargain, Trump once laced into Paul Manafort, his sometime campaign manager, thus: “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?”Manafort was convicted on bank and tax charges in 2018. But he stayed a loyal foot soldier and received a pardon from Trump.With Christmas just weeks away, Meadows throws in the following Trump quote as a holiday bonus: “I’m the only one who can save us.”Meadows isn’t the sole Trump administration alum doing his darnedest to portray their guy as America’s saviour. But he is the only one who lets us know Trump tested positive before he tested negative. And that makes his book one for the ages.Other would-be stocking stuffers by Trump insiders convey that they were either in the dark about that fateful Covid test or took care not to share. Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s final press secretary; Peter Navarro, an economics adviser; and Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser, are out with books of their own.Kayleigh McEnany’s book claims don’t stand up to assurances that she didn’t lieRead moreIn her non-tell-all, McEnany makes sure we know of her academic credentials and reiterates her claim that she never lied to reporters. After all, she writes, her education at “Oxford, Harvard and Georgetown” meant she always relied on “truthful, well-sourced, well-researched information”.She doesn’t mention her time at the University of Miami much. But no matter. Elite degrees say more about future earnings and marriage prospects than a penchant for truth. Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania. Boris Johnson, Oxford. Richard Nixon went to Duke and Bill Clinton is a graduate of Yale.Nixon was disbarred, Clinton’s law license suspended. Boris is Boris.McEnany thanks the deity repeatedly. Her title, For Such a Time as This, riffs off the Book of Esther. She stays on message for more than 200 pages, lauding Trump for standing for “faith, conservatism and freedom”. But that first positive Covid test, on 26 September, described by Meadows and since confirmed by Maggie Haberman and other pillars of the Washington press? Nada.McEnany writes that on 1 October 2020, two days after the Trump-Biden debate, she learned for the first time that Trump and Melania had “tested positive for Covid-19”. On 2 October, Trump was helicoptered to hospital. On 5 October, McEnany was told she had the virus too. She does not draw a line to Trump’s recklessness.“Thankfully,” she writes, “everyone in the White House made a full and complete recovery, including me.”Not true. McEnany does not mention Crede Bailey, head of the White House security office. When she was Trump’s press secretary, she did.Asked about Bailey at a briefing, McEnany said: “Our heart goes out to his family. They have asked for privacy. And he is recovering, from what I understand. We are very pleased to see that. But he and his family will be in our prayers.”On a GoFundMe page set up to help pay for Bailey’s treatment, a friend wrote: “Crede beat Covid-19 but it came at a significant cost: his big toe on his left foot as well as his right foot and lower leg had to be amputated.” Bailey also suffered long-term lung, heart, liver and kidney damage. According to his family, Trump has never publicly acknowledged Bailey’s “illness”.McEnany delivers a bouquet to Meadows.“You were a constant reminder of faith,” she gushes. “Thank you for being an inspiring leader for the entire West Wing.”Navarro would probably disagree. In fact, it’s a good bet he would concur with Trump’s new assessment of Meadows’ intelligence.In his book, In Trump Time, Navarro repeatedly takes Meadows to task for insufficient loyalty and accessibility. According to Navarro, after Trump lost to Biden, the White House chief of staff’s heart and body were too often not at the White House.“Wherever the heck” Meadows was, Navarro says, he sounded “like Napoleon after Waterloo, getting ready to be shipped out to Elba”.Navarro also blames Meadows for failing to heed a purported warning in 2019 from Cleta Mitchell, a Republican activist and lawyer, that the Democrats “were getting ready to steal the election”. When Meadows was pressed in September 2020 about his failure to act on this tip, Navarro says, all he could muster was, “It just didn’t happen.”The fact that both the House and Senate have documented Meadows’ efforts to put the squeeze on Republican election officials fails to impress Navarro.The Chief’s Chief may have also waived Meadows’ claim of executive privilege. Either way, Meadows’s latest about-face on cooperating with the House select committee investigating the events of 6 January is unlikely to alter Navarro’s impression of him.As for Mitchell, she resigned from her law firm over her role in an infamous call between Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state.On top of pushing the line that the Democrats stole the election, Navarro lambasts numerous officials for failing to confront China, Mike Pence among them. Significantly, as he goes after Trump’s star-crossed vice-president, Navarro sounds a now-familiar trope of the anti-democratic right.He brands Pence a treacherous “Brutus” who betrayed Trump, an “American Caesar”. Did Navarro forget those gallows bearing Pence’s name? Regardless, the shoutout to a murdered Roman emperor is meant as a full-throated compliment.During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. Last May, Michael Anton of the rightwing Claremont Institute pondered whether the US needed a caesar. Anton was joined on air by Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug, a self-described monarchist and pillar of the Dark Enlightenment, a take embraced by the alt-right.Navarro demands “full forensic audits” of the 2020 election and posits that the 6 January insurrection may have been “perpetrated by those who sought to provoke an attack on our Capitol as a means of derailing” a Trump electoral college win.In A Plague Upon Our House, Scott Atlas goes after Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci for grabbing headlines but ignores both Trump’s prediction that Covid, “one day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear” and his admission to Bob Woodward that Covid would be worse than he told the public.Former Trump adviser claims to ‘expose unvarnished truth’ of Covid in new bookRead moreCovid has killed nearly 800,000 Americans – and counting. The US faces another Covid winter, with more than 100,000 new cases daily and the Omicron variant looming. Vaccine resistance and Covid deaths have become red-state hallmarks.Atlas is a radiologist and a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He joined the Trump White House in August 2020 and resigned after the election.As a Covid adviser he opposed expanded testing and isolation, calling such measures “grossly misguided”. Rather, he argued that the virus could be stymied and herd immunity attained once 20% to 25% of the population contracted it. In his book, he appears to discount the impact of long Covid.Confronted by an open letter from Stanford faculty, challenging his credentials, Atlas threatened legal retaliation. Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s lawyer, demanded immediate retraction. None followed.Atlas, however, did get one big thing right: opposing school closures, which he characterized as an “egregious and inexplicable” policy failure. Closures helped cost the Democrats Virginia. Glenn Youngkin’s win in that race for governor was about more than critical race theory.Trump and Trumpism will remain a force in the Republican party in the years to come. Meadows, McEnaney, Navarro and Atlas are counting on it.Earlier this month, however, Chris Christie spoke at a dinner of DC poohbahs.“I gave Donald Trump my undying loyalty,” he said. “And as we learned this week, he definitely gave me Covid.”Just a reminder, folks.TopicsBooksRepublicansDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsPolitics booksCoronavirusfeaturesReuse this content More