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      Historian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’

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      InterviewHistorian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’Tim Adams The author of On Tyranny on the lack of historical literacy, how local news has been replaced by Facebook, and why novels matter to himTimothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of books about the 20th-century history of central Europe, including Bloodlands, which examined the devastating consequence of Hitler and Stalin’s simultaneous reign of terror over civilian populations, and won the 2013 Hannah Arendt prize for political thought. In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, Snyder wrote a short book, On Tyranny, which provided 20 brief lessons – “Defend Institutions”, “Remember Professional Ethics”, “Read Books” – from the 20th century that might help readers protect democracy against dictatorship. It topped the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction in 2017. A new edition of the book, with illustrations by the German-American Nora Krug, whose graphic memoir Belonging confronted Germany’s Nazi past, has just been published.What prompted you to want to make this graphic version of On Tyranny?It came out originally in this extremely simple, accessible form. I always had the idea that it could take a different form, but that only became concrete once I read Nora Krug’s Belonging. I cold-called her and said: “Could you please do this?” Part of it was also to renew it. I changed the text a little bit, removed some of the stuff that was specific to 2016 and added some lines that recall what happened in 2020.You wrote the original in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Was it intended as a call to arms for yourself as well as to others?Yes, it was like something snapped in me where I thought we should all do the things that we can. In writing the book I was putting myself out there, so it was something I had to live by. I’m glad I did that. As a writer, you have to make yourself vulnerable sometimes.Looking back, it seemed important to say that being outraged on social media about Trump probably wasn’t going to be enough?Exactly. I think the lesson that maybe people reacted to the most is number 12: “make eye contact and talk to people” in the corporeal world. And then number 13, which was to actively get involved in politics, to get our physical bodies into unfamiliar situations. The book is a frontal attack on that idea that it is never enough to accept the world as it is and just comment on it.One of the things that the book is alarmed by is a lack of historical literacy. The fact that terms such as “America first” or, in the UK, “enemies of the people” could be employed with so few alarm bells ringing among people about their history in fascism. Do you still see that kind of illiteracy even in some of your students?History has been seriously devalued in the US, I would say, since 1989 and that very unfortunate idea [“the end of history”] that history was now over. “America first” and “enemies of the people” are words that are consciously applied by people who wish to destroy democracy. If people don’t know how those words have been applied in the past, then that is dangerous. Part of the backwash of the Trump coup attempt is all of these laws in various states are designed to make history uncontroversial – which, let’s be clear, means: uncontroversial for white people.At the time you wrote the book, people were being criticised for making comparisons with what was happening in 2016 and the 1930s. Did you feel any trepidation about doing that?I don’t remember having that feeling. When people refuse to make comparisons with events that have happened before, what they are really saying is: “I don’t want to look at either the past or the present.”You grew up in Dayton, Ohio. How much did that firsthand knowledge of the midwest and those declining industrial heartlands inform your understanding of the forces that produced Trump?It certainly affected it. In 2016, I spent some time going door to door there and talking to people about the forthcoming presidential election. That helped me to see how important social media was. I asked one guy a question and he went back and checked Facebook before answering. Where my parents are from and still live had become entirely Trumpland.The demise of local news is not mentioned often enough in these kind of conversations…I think a lack of local news may be the single greatest source of the problem. Most American counties are now news deserts; they have no reporters covering local politicians at all. People have no way of being active citizens; they go on reading but the stuff they read drives them upwards to national politics, into obsession and conspiracy. They bring the trust they had for local news to Facebook.One of your antidotes to that is “read books”; who have been the writers that you’ve turned to most in the past five years?I always go back to Roger Penrose, the physicist. He is important to me because he has a view about unpredictability in quantum mechanics, which has implications for politics. And then some of the people who confronted these questions in the last century in different ways: Hannah Arendt, Václav Havel, Victor Klemperer. In addition to that, it’s really important to me to read novels, because they prepare you for scenes in the real world you haven’t yet confronted. I’ve just started rereading Les Liaisons Dangerouses. But I also get excited when I hear Julian Barnes has a new novel out.It seems to me that the opposite of tyranny is not freedom, but something more active: creativity, engagement. Do you think artists and writers have lately stepped up to that challenge?I think it’s true that freedom cannot be the opposite of anything. But I’m not going to criticise artists and writers – the main problem is often the way that their work has trouble getting viewed. One of our big problems at the moment is that we find it hard to imagine a viable future. Art and literature enable us to flex those imaginative muscles.Where do you place your optimism?I prefer hope to optimism. One thing is, it turns out that people really like democracy. It has been heartening to see that so many people care enough about democracy to take personal risks to defend it.TopicsHistory booksBooks interviewUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis on the culture wars: ‘How has this happened? Where is the escape hatch?’

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      As Ronson’s BBC podcast Things Fell Apart begins, the documentary-makers and old friends discuss conspiracy theories, the problem of ‘activist journalists’ and what happened to Ceaușescu’s socksby Fiona SturgesJon Ronson and Adam Curtis became friends in the late 1990s, having bonded over their shared interests in power, society and the stories we tell about ourselves. Curtis, 66, is a Bafta-winning documentary film-maker whose credits include The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear and HyperNormalisation. His most recent six-part series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, draws on the history of psychology and politics to show how we got to where we are today. Ronson, 54, is a US-based Welsh writer and journalist whose books include 2015’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, about social media brutality and the history of public shaming. In recent years, Ronson has turned to podcasting, investigating the porn industry in The Butterfly Effect and its follow-up The Last Days of August.Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights.His forthcoming BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, is about the roots of the culture wars and the ways the present is echoed in the past. Over eight episodes, he talks to individuals caught up in ideological conflicts, conspiracy theories and moral panics. These include Alice Moore, the wife of a fundamentalist minister and unexpected culture war instigator who campaigned to remove textbooks containing liberal material from schools, and Kelly Michaels, a daycare worker and victim of the “satanic panic” who was wrongfully imprisoned in 1988 by a New Jersey court for child abuse (the verdict was overturned in 1993).We are on: Curtis is talking from his office in London while Ronson is at home in New York. By way of preparation before their chat, Curtis has binged on Ronson’s new series. No sooner are cameras switched on than the reminiscences begin.Jon Ronson Do you remember that time we went to an auction of [the late Romanian dictator Nicolae] Ceaușescu’s belongings?Adam Curtis Yes, now that was exciting.JR It was. We went on a minibreak to Romania together.AC I bought Ceaușescu’s cap, and a pair of socks.JR I also got a pair of socks. There was some very heavy bidding from a mysterious gentleman who got all the ornaments. The prices were getting pretty high so I stuck with the socks. I don’t even know where they are now. I bet you know where your stuff is.AC I do, actually.JR We have had many conversations over the years and generally I find I’m asking you questions because I’m trying to get ideas. I always think of you as a fantastic source of insights into the future. In the early days of social media, you were the very first person to say to me: “Don’t think of this as a utopia. There are some problems here.” There are two or three people in my life where, when they talk, I really want to listen to what they have to say, and you are one of those.AC That is completely not true. What actually happens is that I bollock on about theories which you completely ignore and then you go off on your stories. Anyway, I’m trying to remember when we actually met.JR I think the first time I met you was when I made the [1997] documentary Tottenham Ayatollah and you came to the screening.AC And your wife Elaine invited me to meet you in a cafe off Tottenham Court Road. She said: “Can you come and talk to him? Then you could take some of the pressure off me by talking about his film.”JR She probably said: “I can’t take it any more. He won’t stop agonising.”AC But when we met you didn’t agonise at all. I think what we recognised in each other – and it’s been the professional bond between us – is that we’re both interested in what happens outside those normal areas that most political journalists examine that involve politics and power. We want to look at things like psychology and how a conspiracy theory plays out and how feelings work through society.JR I’m really surprised at how frequently the things that we tell stories about overlap. But the way we go about it is so different. I think your brain works better thinking about theories and my brain works better thinking about stories.AC I think you and I are creatures of our time. I got interested in this idea that power now works not through traditional forms but through the idea of individualism; it says you should be allowed to do what you want to do, but we will serve you to get that. You and I both know what it’s like to be an obsessive individualist, but we’ve become intrigued by how that plays out in a society in which you’ve got lots of people wanting to be individuals. I’ve always had this theory that self-expression is the conformity of our age. The most radical thing you can do is something extraordinary like walking naked around the world, and not tell anyone that you’ve done it. You can’t post anything online. When you say that to people, they can’t conceive of it.JR I really like that idea.AC The other thing that we both do when we’re interviewing people is not follow a list of questions. You go into a situation where you have questions in your head but suddenly they’ll say something which is either funny or unexpected and you just learn to go with it. It’s like suddenly a little piglet swerves off from the herd, and you go with it up and over the hill.JR One positive thing that has been said about what I do is that there’s a sincerity to it. I never go into something with an idea of how it will turn out.AC We’re talking about sincerity? Don’t go there, Jon! You’ll be writing poems next.JR [Laughs] Well it’s really to do with trying to figure out what I think from my research without being told what to think by other people. I think people appreciate the fact that I’ve worked hard to come to the thoughts I’ve come to.AC Yes, I agree with that.JR I guess what we have in common is we’re not ideologues. We don’t go into a situation with a set of agendas. We’re more willing to be a twig in the river of the story and just go where it takes us. By doing that we’re forced to keep an open mind. I don’t even have a list of questions in my head when I’m interviewing somebody. I’m literally a tightrope walker with no safety net, and I have, on many occasions, plummeted to my death like in Squid Game.AC I think that open-mindedness is clear in your podcast. And it’s absolutely the right time to examine the roots of what we’re calling the culture wars, which is such a difficult and sensitive area. So much journalism, when it goes back into the past to see why something happened, always interviews the people who are defined as the actors, the people who consciously set out to [create conflict]. What I’m increasingly intrigued by is the people who were acted upon by that thing or idea. Because the way ideas or concepts play out in society are never the way that the people who started them think. What you’ve done in these programmes is follow individuals who are acted upon by these forces, because it shows you the real dimensions of what these things called culture wars are.JR Well, I realised that I would watch people become overconsumed by these cultural conflicts, to the extent that it was impacting their mental health and tearing families apart. But every show that’s about the culture ends up a part of the culture wars, and I didn’t want to do that. So I thought the way to do it was by focusing on a moment and a human story and tell that story in as unexpected a way as possible. In the end we found eight stories about the complexity of human life and they all happen to be origin stories. These are the pebbles being thrown in the pond and creating these ripples.AC Yes, these people have got caught up in the great tides of history that have come sweeping over them. It feels real. If you follow people who are acted upon, you start to understand, in a much more sympathetic way, why people do things that you might not like or approve of. You see how someone is led to something, with no idea of the consequences. In the first two episodes, you talk about how the evangelical movement up until the early 1970s had been completely detached from any involvement in the moral, political or social questions of American society. And what you trace is how two people got sucked into a particular issue, which then acted like a fuse to reawaken the evangelical movement.JR For decades the Christian right were silent: they consumed their own media, they went to their own churches and they listened to their own radio shows, and they were totally unengaged with what was happening. But then a few things happened that finally galvanised them into becoming soldiers in a culture war, and one was a new diversity of thought in school textbooks. In the series I talk to Alice Moore, who is in her 80s now and was one of the earliest cultural warriors for the evangelical right. She was a church minister’s wife in West Virginia who discovered there was going to be a new sex education lesson taught in schools, and she wasn’t having that. So she got on to the school board, and then the new curriculum arrived in 1974 that was full of all these multicultural voices, and things got so heated over just one semester that school buses were shot at – in fact, shots were fired from both sides – and a school was bombed. And I discovered while talking to Alice that one of the reasons for the intensity of the anger was a misinterpretation of a poem [that appeared in one of the new school textbooks].AC By Roger McGough!JR Yes. It was a poem [1967’s At Lunchtime: A Story of Love] that featured a spontaneous orgy that takes place on a bus, because the passengers thought the world was about to end at lunchtime in a nuclear war. So Alice was reading out this poem to me and I was thinking: “I don’t think this is in favour of spontaneous orgies on buses. I think this poet is agreeing with you, to an extent.” So then I went off to talk to Roger about it.AC And then you went back to Alice, and she was quite grumpy about it, which was funny. But I think this is a beautiful example of what we were talking about. As I was listening to that episode I was thinking: “Hang on, this isn’t quite as bad as she thinks it is.” And then, Jon’s brain is thinking the same thing, but without judgment.JR I like to steer clear of conflict as much as I can.AC Which is good and also rare. Most people would pursue her with their agenda. Right now, everyone is judged as either being good or bad. It’s good versus evil – that’s where journalism has got to now. But yours doesn’t do that.JR I’m interested in everybody as a human being and I’m quite startled by the myriad examples of the media being a part of the culture wars. It seems to happen everywhere, this mistelling of a story so it fits into a particular ideology a little more clearly. It happens on all sides. I get very disheartened when CNN lies to me or is biased or omits certain aspects of the truth to tell a certain version of the story. During the Trump years I really felt that with CNN. I felt like I was in QAnon and my Q was Anderson Cooper.AC I would read the New York Times all about the close friendship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. And I know enough Russian journalists who I trust to know that it’s just complete rubbish. So hysteria happened on both sides. I mean if you go back over reports even from my own organisation, the BBC, about how Trump was actually an agent of Putin, it’s extraordinary. It’s a conspiracy theory. That’s as much of a panic as anything else you get on the right.JR I also think a lot of journalists are, like: “Oh my God. All this time I’ve just been a liberal but look at these things that are happening: Trump’s election, George Floyd.” So they think it’s not enough to be a liberal journalist, they have to be an activist journalist. And I think it’s completely understandable and, in some cases, it’s a great thing. But then in other cases, it’s really troublesome because journalism now has pre-existing ideologies.AC And then journalism lifts off from Planet Real and goes off into the realms of histrionic personality disorder. I actually think histrionic personality disorder describes most of the progressive classes in western societies, in that they’ve given up on their progressivism and retreated into a histrionic attitude to the world.JR I do think these stories tell us an awful lot about the way we live our lives today. In the satanic panic episode, which is about moral panics in the 1980s, you think it’s going to be about the parallels today with QAnon. But it becomes clear that there are also parallels with the panics on the left today, and that we all have these cognitive biases. I tell this story in which daycare workers are being accused of satanic activity, which clearly never happened, and where people actually went to jail. Suddenly it wasn’t just the Christian right worried about satanic cults at the end of your street, but mainstream America. When the flame is burning hot, we can all act in irrational, brutal or inhuman ways, and you see it across the spectrum.AC The series did make me think: how has this happened? Not just the culture wars but their ferocity. And where is the escape hatch? Because I think all sides now feel that there’s something not quite right. If you examine the years since Trump and Brexit, there has been this enormous hysteria in newspapers and on television about it. But actually the politicians have done nothing to change society. It’s almost been like a frozen world. So, I think the real answer to why this is happening is because politics has failed. It’s become this dead area, this desert surrounded by thinktanks, and someone’s got to get in there and regenerate it. The new politics is waiting to come. And I think it will happen.Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart continues Tuesday, 9am Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. It will be available in the US and Canada exclusively on BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head is on BBC iPlayer.TopicsJon RonsonAdam CurtisPodcastsPodcastingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguished

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      Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguished ABC’s man in Washington delivers a second riveting and horrifying read about how close America came to disasterTrumpworld is in legal jeopardy. The 45th president’s phone call to Brad Raffensperger, urging the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes”, may have birthed a grand jury.‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyRead moreIn Manhattan, the outgoing district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, has empaneled one of those, to look at Trump’s business. As a Vanity Fair headline blared, “The Trump Organization should be soiling itself right now.”In Washington, the Department of Justice ponders the prosecution of Steve Bannon, chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign and a pivotal figure in the “Stop the Steal” movement second time round.For Trump, out-of-office has not translated into out-of-mind. He thrives on all the attention.Amid it all, Jonathan Karl dives once again into the Stygian mosh pit, this time with Betrayal, a sequel to Front Row at the Trump Show, a New York Times bestseller.In that book, in the spring of 2020, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent prophesied that “Trump’s war on truth may do lasting damage to American democracy”. Sadly, he wasn’t wrong. Front Row preceded by months a coup attempt egged on by a defeated president. Looking back, Trump’s embrace of birtherism, “alternative facts” and crowd violence were mere prelude to the chaos that filled his time in power, his final days in office and all that has come and gone since then.In his second book, under the subtitle The Final Act of the Trump Show, Karl gets members of Trump’s cabinet to speak on the record. They paint a portrait of a wrath-filled president, untethered from reality, bent on revenge.Karl captures Bill Barr denouncing Trump’s election-related conspiracy theories and criticizing his election strategy. Appearing determined to salvage his own battered reputation, Trump’s second attorney general tells Karl his president “was making it too much of a base election. I felt that he had to repair the bridges he had burned [with moderate voters] in the suburbs.”By that metric, Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s governor-elect, has a bright future, a politician who puts suburban dads and rural moms at ease. No wonder Republicans think they have found a star, and with him a winning formula.As for Trump’s claims about rigged voting machines, Barr “realized from the beginning it was just bullshit” and says “the number of actual improper voters were de minimus”. No matter, to Trump: he continues to demand Republican legislatures carry out post-election audits.Karl delivers further confirmation of Mitch McConnell’s fractious personal relationship with Trump, a man the Kentucky senator reportedly repeatedly mocked. According to Karl, McConnell, then Senate majority leader, sought to formally disinvite Trump from Joe Biden’s inauguration. Kevin McCarthy, the chief House Republican, leaked the plan to the White House. In turn, Trump tweeted that he would not attend.McConnell attempted to thread the needle, placating Trump while keeping the GOP’s Koch brothers wing onside. But once he acknowledged Biden’s victory, the damage was permanently done. McConnell was an object of Trumpian scorn.That the senator jammed Amy Coney Barrett on to the supreme court days before the 2020 election and before that played blocking back for Brett Kavanaugh is now rendered irrelevant. Trump wants McConnell out of Senate leadership. Adding insult to injury, Trump recently told the Washington Post McConnell wasn’t a “real leader” because “he didn’t fight for the presidency”, and said he was “only a leader because he raises a lot of money”.“You know,” Trump said, “with the senators, that’s how it is, frankly. That’s his primary power.”He’s not wrong all the time.Betrayal also documents a commander-in-chief who scared his own cabinet witless. After Trump junked the Iran nuclear deal, for example, Tehran thumbed its nose back. Drama ensued, because Trump wanted to know his options.Chris Miller, then acting defense secretary, tells Karl that to dissuade Trump from ordering the destruction of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, he chose to play the role of “fucking madman” – his words, not Karl’s – which meant advocating that very course of action. According to Karl, not even Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state and an Iran hawk, played along.“Oftentimes with provocative people, if you get more provocative than them, they then have to dial it down,” Miller explains to Karl. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, I was fucking crazy, but that guy’s batshit.’”Here, the reader might pause to imagine a campaign slogan for Trump in 2024: “Fucking crazy, but not batshit”.On a similar note, Karl depicts Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s crony and attorney, as a walking timebomb. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser, avoided the former New York mayor. Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, saw him as a corrosive force.“I’m not going to let Rudy in the building for any more of these,” Meadows reportedly told Chris Christie, New Jersey’s former governor, and Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, as they prepared for debates with Biden.These days, Giuliani is suspended from the bar, reportedly under investigation and unable to persuade Trump to pay his bills. Christie and Trump are at loggerheads too, over sins real and imagined, past and present.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read moreAs for Meadows and Stepien, they are in the crosshairs of the House select committee focused on the US Capitol attack. From the looks of things only Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have so far remained intact, ensconced in Florida, sufficiently distanced from Big Daddy.Despite such fallout, Betrayal concludes with words of warning. Karl rightly contends that Trump’s “betrayal” of American democracy highlighted “just how vulnerable” the system is.“The continued survival of our republic,” he writes, “may depend, in part, on the willingness of those who promoted Trump’s lies and those who remained silent to acknowledge they were wrong.”In a hypothetical rematch, Trump leads Biden 45-43. Among independent voters, he holds a double-digit lead. Don’t hold your breath.
      Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show is published in the US by Dutton
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansreviewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Chris Christie: Trump knows better about election lies – or is just ‘plain nuts’

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      Chris Christie: Trump knows better about election lies – or is just ‘plain nuts’Former New Jersey governor’s new book bound to put him at odds with former president as 2024 approaches Chris Christie’s comeback tour will continue next week with publication of a book, Republican Rescue, in which the former New Jersey governor seeks to present himself as the face of the party after Donald Trump, and a plausible contender for the presidential nomination in 2024.Trump defended rioters who threatened to ‘hang Mike Pence’, audio revealsRead moreSuch efforts have already seen the one-time presidential candidate clash with Trump, who did not take kindly to Christie warning in a speech in Nevada last weekend: “We can no longer talk about the past and the past elections – no matter where you stand on that issue, no matter where you stand, it is over.”In a statement, Trump, who is likely to run again in 2024, claimed Christie was “absolutely massacred by his statements that Republicans have to move on from the past, meaning the 2020 election fraud”.Christie then told Axios, in an interview due to run on Sunday, he was “not going to get into a back-and-forth” with the longtime friend he helped prepare for debates with Joe Biden and who nearly made him White House chief of staff.But Christie’s book seems guaranteed to anger Trump further. In a copy obtained by the Guardian, Christie writes that Republicans “need to renounce the conspiracy theories and truth deniers, the ones who know better and the ones who are just plain nuts”.The former governor does not say if he thinks Trump knows better about his claims of electoral fraud, or is one of those who is “nuts”.But he adds: “We need to give our supporters facts that will help put all these fantasies to rest, so everyone can focus with clear minds on the issues that really matter. We need to quit wasting our time, our energy and our credibility on claims that won’t ever convince anyone or bring fresh converts onboard.”Condemning the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a hard-right Georgia congresswoman who has expressed support for conspiracy theories, Christie says Trump indulges such figures because he likes “anyone who says nice things about him”.Discussing the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that high-profile Democrats are involved in satanic child abuse, Christie writes that such beliefs “would be ridiculous” if they were not “so sad”.The FBI considers QAnon a potential terrorist threat. Trump, however, has said its followers share his concern about crime, “love our country” and “like me very much”.Told last year that QAnon supporters believe he is “secretly saving the world” from a “satanic cult of paedophiles and cannibals”, Trump said: “I haven’t heard that but is that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing?”“Many in our society,” Christie writes in Republican Rescue, “use these wild, untrue conspiracy theories to advance their political agendas.”Christie left office in New Jersey under the cloud of the Bridgegate payback scandal and with historically low approval. Regardless, he continues to tout his pugnacious Jersey persona – a political proposition roundly rejected by Republican voters in the presidential primary in 2016 – writing that “everyone knows I never pull my punches” and “I call things as I see them”.Some observers, however, question Christie’s sincerity in his stand against Trumpism, given his longstanding closeness to Trump.Eric Boehlert, author of the Press Run newsletter, wrote critically on Friday about a CNN special, Being Chris Christie, due for broadcast on Monday.“Today,” Boehlert wrote, “Christie is promoting himself, with the help of CNN, as a brave truth-teller who’s standing up to Trump and his Big Lie about the 2020 election … but Christie may have had the longest delayed conversion to the anti-Trump crowd of any Republican in America.“Just last year Christie helped Trump prep for a presidential debate. After watching Trump get impeached, Christie still jumped at the chance to be near the center of power to help the maniac get re-elected … Days after helping with Trump’s prep, where everyone was unvaccinated and unmasked, Christie was hospitalised with Covid.”In his book, Christie describes both his role in Trump’s debate prep and the bout with Covid which sent him to intensive care.On the debate stage, in Cleveland, Trump notoriously refused to condemn the far-right Proud Boys, instead telling them to “stand back and stand by”.The New Jersey columnist Charles Stile said then Christie’s defence of Trump’s words “served to remind us of his own trajectory” as a “one-time truth-telling, center-right darling of the GOP [who] embraced his role as a trusted adviser in Trump’s orbit”.Another Jersey columnist, Alan Steinberg, called Christie “a person of irrepressible ambition, without limits or guard rails … and an essential component of that ambition is an obsessive quest to be relevant”.Republican Revival will be published on Tuesday.TopicsBooksChris ChristieDonald TrumpUS elections 2024RepublicansUS politicsPolitics booksnewsReuse this content More

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      Both/And review: Huma Abedin on Clinton, Weiner and a political life

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      BooksBoth/And review: Huma Abedin on Clinton, Weiner and a political lifeThe close aide to Hillary Clinton has written a tale spliced with pain but blind to her boss’s weak spots

      Abedin: Kiss from unnamed senator was not sexual assault
      Lloyd GreenSun 7 Nov 2021 02.00 ESTLast modified on Sun 7 Nov 2021 02.02 ESTIn 2015, Hillary Clinton’s brains trust deliberately elevated the stature of the “extreme” Republican contenders, the “pied pipers”, Donald Trump included. On election night in 2016, Clintonworld stared into the abyss.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read more“It was sheer disbelief,” Huma Abedin writes in her new memoir. “More like shock.”Clinton, Abedin as campaign vice-chair and other aides failed to grasp that Trump was spearheading a movement, his mien his message. Clinton branded half of his supporters “deplorables”.Not surprisingly, in her memoir Abedin shows a blind spot to Clinton family shortcomings. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, for example, “it seemed very likely” to her that it “was untrue”. Somehow, an intern who rose to become one of Hillary’s closest confidantes forgot that even before Lewinsky, Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct had almost throttled his White House ambitions. Bill and Hillary even appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes to salvage his viability.“I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” Hillary said.Not surprisingly, as Hillary’s so-called “second daughter”, Abedin has a problem coming to grips with an immovable likability deficit that cost her boss both times she ran for president.“Why was HRC not likeable?” Abedin asks. “This was particularly difficult to understand for those who knew her, since as far as we were concerned that was a quality she had in abundance.”Others have plumbed such waters – and found Clinton wanting. Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, for example, a Pulitzer Prize winner, portrayed Hillary sporting a “foul mouth” and being loathed by the agents who protected her. After members of her Secret Service detail overheard Chelsea Clinton calling them “pigs”, Leonnig wrote, the first daughter was reminded that their job was to “stand between you, your family and a bullet”.Chelsea reportedly responded: “Well, that’s what my mother and father call you.”Abedin does not discuss how, out of office, Hillary scooped up windfalls in the commodities market and easy millions in Wall Street speaking fees, all while doing her best impersonation of Mother Teresa.Clinton’s second run for president tarnished her image. In December 2017, a Gallup poll pegged her favorability at 37%. But unlike Mandy Grunwald, an adviser to both Clintons, Abedin refuses to admit that Hillary has foibles.According to Grunwald, Clinton could sound like she “DOESN’T think the game is rigged” against normal Americans, mustering only recognition that the “public thinks so”. Said differently, Clinton conveyed obliviousness to the Great Recession of 2008-09, its casualties and anxieties.In April 2015, nearly half of the US self-identified as working- or lower-class. Between November 2007 and late 2016, white Americans in that bracket lost more than 700,000 jobs.Abedin describes sitting with Clinton in Iowa, watching Trump “ramble incoherently about himself”. She captures Clinton saying: “I just don’t get it.” Similarly, Abedin mocks Bernie Sanders’ call for a “revolution” and glosses over the fact that Clinton only beat the Vermont senator to clinch the nomination in early June 2016, more than a week after Trump wrapped up the Republican nod.“With each contest, she methodically racked up the number of delegates she needed to secure the nomination,” Abedin writes. That’s pure spin. It was supposed to be a coronation. They didn’t plan on winning the Iowa caucuses by a razor-thin margin or getting walloped in New Hampshire, where Clinton won on her first go-round.A youth-driven movement helped propel Sanders’ rise. Aspiration and grievance counted. The bankers had gotten their bailouts. Sanders supporters were staring at a future bleaker than their parents had known. Clinton had gone from the “beer track” candidate of 2008 to the pick of the wine drinkers, the coastal establishment. And yet, according to Abedin, defeat by Trump still came as a bolt from the blue.Both/And lets the reader play voyeur and counselor too. Abedin delivers the skinny on her courtship by, marriage to and traumatic estrangement from the former congressman Anthony Weiner. She shares that they attended couples’ therapy, and that he possessed darker secrets than she first thought.She also describes how an unnamed senator shoved his tongue down her throat and pinned her against a couch while the pair were in his apartment for late-night coffee. Abedin writes that she repressed memories of the event until they came rushing back amid Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, when the supreme court nominee was accused of, and denied, sexual assault.Asked by CBS if the senator had committed a sexual assault, Abedin paused.“Did I feel like he was assaulting me in that moment?” she told Nora O’Donnell. “I didn’t, it didn’t feel that way. I was in an uncomfortable situation with a senator and I didn’t know how to deal with it.”‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyRead moreThis does not appear to be the final word. Members of the Senate worry about who else the unnamed senator may have abused. Philippe Reines, a former Clinton aide, says it is up to Abedin “alone to decide what to share, with whom, how and when”.Abedin’s eye for style asserts itself throughout her memoir – even as she deals with how her husband made damaging headlines. In May 2011, she woke up in Buckingham Palace and surveyed the room. Her “long, fitted gown for the evening’s white-tie dinner hung on the bathroom door”. An “elegant chestnut-brown writing desk” stood at the “foot of the bed”. The same weekend, Weiner alerted his pregnant wife to his sexting habits. Weiner went to prison but he and Abedin are not completely estranged.Both/And is also a story of Abedin’s life before and outside politics. She tells of being born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of spending most of her youth in Saudi Arabia, a father and mother who held doctorates, of family ties in the Middle East, the subcontinent and the US. It is the strongest part of the book, a tale of an immigrant, of an upward arc.
      Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds is published in the US by Scribner
      TopicsBooksHuma AbedinHillary ClintonUS politicsAnthony WeinerPolitics booksDemocratsreviewsReuse this content More

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      ‘If Hillary Clinton loses this election, it will be because of you and me’ – an exclusive extract from Huma Abedin’s memoir

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      Huma Abedin‘If Hillary Clinton loses this election, it will be because of you and me’ – an exclusive extract from Huma Abedin’s memoirThe presidential candidate’s right-hand woman was looking forward to the last push in the 2016 campaign, and her son starting school. Then her husband, Anthony Weiner, broke the news …
      Read an interview with Huma Abedin here Huma AbedinSat 6 Nov 2021 04.00 EDTIf there was a single night I truly believed Hillary Clinton would become president, it was 28 July 2016, when she took to the floor in her white Ralph Lauren suit to formally accept the nomination. As a blizzard of confetti and a hundred thousand red, white and blue balloons descended from the cavernous ceiling, the song Stronger Together, written and recorded for that evening, echoed through the hall, competing with the deafening sounds of fifty thousand supporters clapping and cheering for the woman in white on stage. Once HRC accepted the nomination, she began tossing giant blue balloons emblazoned with white stars out to the audience; to Tim Kaine, her running mate; to Chelsea, who had spoken so eloquently to introduce her mother; to her husband, who had given his own moving tribute to her on the second night of the convention and now looked exuberant as he waded through the waist-high drift of balloons that rained down.Afterwards, our delegation of about 20 Clinton/Kaine family members, campaign staff and officials made its way through the balloons to the small backstage hold area, and Tim Kaine surprised me by leading the rest of our group in an impromptu singing of Happy Birthday. It was my 41st birthday. This new decade was turning out to be pretty extraordinary. Or so it seemed.A month later, after a long day in the midst of a week of fundraising events on Long Island, I joined Anthony and our son Jordan in a home that had been lent to us so that I could stay close to the Clintons. The house was a pristine construction of glass and wood, with a tennis court and rectangular granite pool in the back. It was this scene of unblemished perfection that would soon be the setting for the collapse of my entire house of cards.When I walked through the front door that evening, Anthony was in the middle of his end-of-day routines with Jordan, and I joined my nightly conference calls. He played games with Jordan while bathing him, then dressed him in pyjamas and handed him to me so I could read him a bedtime story. Anthony had been checking his phone regularly, but no more than I.Jordan fell asleep beside me, and I continued to sit with him, my dress crumpled around me, the lamp still on, his picture book open in my lap, my iPhone in my hand as I began responding to the messages that had come in over the past 30 minutes.“Can you talk?”Anthony had quietly walked into the room. From the tone, I knew it was bad.“The New York Post called.” Really bad.It was late. There was simply too much going on in my world for Anthony’s problems to surface at this moment. The Democratic National Committee server being hacked; Trump publicly calling on Russia to find Hillary’s emails; warnings about Russian election interference; death threats from Islamic State. I was also planning the final two months of the campaign. On the home front, Jordan’s first day of school was the following week and I was worried I wouldn’t even be in town for it. I didn’t have the bandwidth to contend with any more problems.Distracted and overwhelmed, I half-heartedly asked, “What is this about?”He opened with an apology, the admission that he didn’t entirely know what was in the story. He simply said the Post had a picture of him and that Jordan might be in it. I envisioned a photo of Anthony and Jordan out somewhere. On the ferry. On the subway. On a park bench. I inferred that he had sent some such picture to another woman. I had given up on expecting him to respect the vows of our marriage, but our child’s image being shared felt more violent than any humiliation I had faced in the past.The stakes were already so high, almost unbearably so, and I needed help navigating how to handle the story. Around midnight, I emailed Clinton’s adviser Philippe Reines all I knew, which was essentially nothing. “Philippe, I think I have a problem,” I typed before falling into a night of fitful sleep. I knew only one thing: it wouldn’t be as bad as Anthony said. It would be worse. And it was.A response from Philippe appeared in my inbox in the early hours: “You need to look at this picture yourself.” And so I clicked on the link Philippe sent. I wish I could take back the image that appeared but I can never erase it. There was Jordan, sleeping peacefully next to an indecent Anthony, an image shared with a stranger, or a “friend” in Anthony’s view, and now for the entire world to see. This crossed into another level of degradation, a violation of the innocence of our child. There were no more “What were you thinking?” questions left in me. It was over.If there was anything unforgivable in a marriage, a partnership in raising a child, this was it. It was not rage that motivated me that morning, because the word rage would not do justice to what I was feeling. I think God had put me in this perfect glass and wood-framed house for a reason, because I would have destroyed everything around me if I had been in my own home. I simmered until I thought I would explode. After checking to make sure Jordan was still asleep and closing the door to his room, I marched out to the living room, where Anthony was lying on the sofa, still fully dressed from the previous night, his eyes bloodshot, phone in his hand, no doubt having seen the article as soon as it posted. I informed him I was putting out a statement announcing our separation, to which he responded quietly: “OK.” I then told him that he needed to find another place to live when we returned to Manhattan. He would not be welcome to sleep in the apartment or spend any nights alone with our son ever again. He nodded, looking down while I screamed at him. The yelling didn’t make anyone feel better, but I did it anyway.I went outside and got on the phone with Philippe a little after 7am, and asked him to help me with a statement. Then I steeled myself, took a few deep breaths, and dialled Hillary Clinton. She did not need this. Our campaign did not need this. She counted on me, had faith in me, and I was bringing more scandal, more shame to what should have been a laser-focused effort to close out the campaign. She said that she was glad I was finally moving on with my life. I then dialled Bari Luri, now Chelsea’s chief of staff, and emailed Bill Clinton’s team, too, apologising to them all. I knew they would face questions about this on the campaign trail.I thought the image might kill my mother, so I sent her an email, told her I was leaving Anthony and assured her I was fine and that Jordan would be OK. I was glad she was close by, visiting family in New Jersey, because I knew she would come to help me; but I couldn’t have her hear my voice in that moment because then she would know just how bad it was. Everyone has a limit and I had finally reached mine, ages after everyone else had gotten there. The next day, my mom, my sister, my nephews would all descend on us.I received all sorts of messages that began with “I don’t know what to say”, because “I’m sorry” didn’t seem quite enough this time. Most people congratulated me for finally freeing myself from Anthony.Twenty-four hours later, my family were on their way to join us, and the fundraisers were in full swing. But I had something else on my plate. New York state Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) was making their first visit to interview Anthony and me, to ensure that Jordan was “safe”. Children’s Services investigations can be triggered by calls to the agency from members of the public concerned about the wellbeing of a child. Enough people had called in to report us that Children’s Services said they had no choice but to open a case. It was a tense and uncomfortable visit. A young woman and two or three men in suits filled the chairs at the dining table and asked questions. Anthony couldn’t remember enough details to answer. When was the photo taken? Who was it sent to? Were there others? What was happening in the image? Was the child awake? I felt like I was in a bad movie where the acting was subpar and the plot made no sense.After a few minutes, they shifted their attention to me. Did I have any prior knowledge of Anthony taking suggestive pictures in which Jordan was present? I tried not to let the anger within me distort my voice when I said of course I did not. Never, for one second, did I think Anthony would do anything to harm or expose our child. Ever. Until now. The barrage of questions continued, and in the brief silences during their note-taking, my mind could escape back to the old world I had lived in, the world of reason. I wondered why Anthony would do this now, just when we both had so much at stake in our lives. I was on the campaign of a lifetime which, if successful, would be historic. His life was finally back on track. He was in talks to anchor a television news show, write a book, launch a podcast. None of these opportunities could possibly survive the scandal. And they didn’t.When the investigators said they needed to interview Jordan, I became protective of him and tried to resist. The young woman, who had identified herself as the primary investigator, assured me that she would only ask him a few general questions about how he was doing, and there would be nothing that would make him uncomfortable.It took a few excruciating minutes. I brought her upstairs and introduced her to Jordan as Mommy’s friend who wanted to say hello. Jordan was eager to tell her how much he loved to play chess, and liked watching Paw Patrol. Then she asked him what form of punishment his parents gave him if he misbehaved. My heart stopped. I was shocked at the implication in her question. “No cookies!” Jordan chirped back.When the investigator told me she could see that our family was closely bonded, it felt like things would be OK. Then she went on to ask me if it was possible my assessment of Anthony’s parenting lacked the accuracy it would have had if I was present in the home on a regular basis, and what I heard, between the lines, made me want to ask, “You mean if I worked less?” I had been the primary breadwinner for most of my marriage, so not working was not an option. I expressed as much to her.She nodded that she understood and kept writing her notes.On the night of 24 October I returned home to find the Children’s Services investigator waiting for me. Had I considered what life would be like if Anthony went to prison, she asked. By then, it had been alleged that Anthony had sexted with a teenage girl. Each time I thought he had reached a new nadir, he shocked me by going even lower. But I must have looked blank because she then offered, as kindly as she could, “You seem perplexed.” Perplexed didn’t begin to describe it.“I just need to get through the next 15 days,” I responded. “Just 15 days. Then I can think about things like prison.”It may have sounded flip, but I really had no answers to this question – or to so many others. I just didn’t. On 28 October, on a flight to Cedar Rapids, the reporters on board our campaign plane heard about a letter FBI director Jim Comey was sending to Congress announcing that the FBI was reopening the email investigation. When we landed, we discovered that the investigation seemed to have something to do with some emails found on Anthony’s laptop.The instant I heard the word “Anthony”, my heart stopped. No, no, no. I had handled this, I had taken control of this. I had sent him away. It had cost us a fortune, I had cobbled together a life of relative normalcy for my son, I came to the office every day. This couldn’t be happening now. But there was no time to linger on any of that. I caught up with Hillary Clinton in a tented area, as she was about to walk out to deliver her speech, to let her know about this latest development.While her eyes opened wide with surprise, she shook her head, then simply said, “OK, keep me posted,” as though it was just another hiccup, and walked out on stage.On the plane after the event, we heard that the letter Comey had sent to Congress was out. It turned out that the Southern District of New York, which was prosecuting Anthony’s case involving the teenager, had found emails of mine on his laptop and to this day I do not know where or how because I never knew they were there. They called the FBI’s New York office, who then called the DC office, which meant the laptop ended up with Comey. They didn’t alert Anthony’s attorneys or mine. I watched Clinton’s face as she processed it.The moment she made eye contact with me, I just broke down.I had held it together for months – through the night of the shocking photo, all the meetings with Children’s Services, the paparazzi on the street, becoming a single parent overnight, the daily hate messages. But now that I knew the investigation somehow involved my own email, tears flowed out of me. Clinton stood up from her seat, came over to hug me and then walked with me to the bathroom so I could compose myself. On a plane full of colleagues, Secret Service agents, reporters, photographers – everyone with eyes simultaneously averted and questioning – she did that.When I got home that night, heart pounding furiously, I called Anthony at the treatment facility he had entered. It seemed he hadn’t heard the news because he had no idea what I was talking about.“How could your emails be on my laptop?” he asked. It was a question neither of us can answer to this day. Then he went into Anthony mode, where there is a solution to every problem: “I am sure it’s a mistake and they will figure it out.” His attitude was confident, almost dismissive.“Anthony,” I said, wanting to shake him through the phone, “if she loses this election, it will be because of you and me.”That night, I wrote one line in my notebook. “I do not know how I am going to survive this. Help me God.” TopicsHuma AbedinAnthony WeinerHillary ClintonUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Misfire review: a bullseye from Tim Mak – but the NRA isn’t beaten yet

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      BooksMisfire review: a bullseye from Tim Mak – but the NRA isn’t beaten yet The NPR reporter has written an important book about the moral bankruptcy which put the powerful and merciless gun group on the back footCharles KaiserSat 6 Nov 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 6 Nov 2021 02.02 EDTTim Mak has written a sprawling tale of the greed, incompetence and narcissism which has dominated the National Rifle Association throughout Wayne LaPierre’s 30 years as its leader. Abetted by his wife, Susan, LaPierre has allegedly used his members’ dues to fund a billionaire’s lifestyle.‘We have to break through that wall’: inside America’s battle for gun controlRead moreThe LaPierres’ wedding in 1998 was a near miss: he almost ran from the altar, until she and the priest changed his mind. Mak calls this “emblematic” of “a man driven by fear and anxiety over all other forces … his reaction to these emotions is usually to flee and hide”.These qualities, Mak writes, have made LaPierre “prey” to an endless series of conmen, throughout his leadership of America’s most-feared lobbying group.“Pushed and prodded” by his wife to discover “money’s alluring glow”, Mak writes, LaPierre saw his salary balloon from $200,000 in the mid-1990s to $2.2m in 2018. According to the investigation of the New York attorney general, which has done the most to expose serial excesses at the NRA, between 2013 and 2017 the black cars, private jets and hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive clothing led to $1.2m in reimbursed expenses.Between 2013 and 2018, companies used to book the LaPierres’ private planes received an astonishing $13.5m. There were trips to Lake Como, Budapest and the Bahamas. Just the hired cars for trips to Italy and Hungary cost $18,000. LaPierre spent $275,000 on suits at a single Beverly Hills emporium, including $39,000 on one day in 2015. To disguise such excesses, the bills were sent to an outside vendor which the NRA reimbursed.Mak also does a good job of describing how every mass shooting has pushed the NRA ever further right, transforming it from advocacy group for gun rights into a fully fledged player in the culture war, especially after the massacre of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012.Mak offers a particularly depressing account of how the NRA chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, was personally involved in negotiations over the Manchin-Toomey bill, a Senate measure which would have modestly increased background checks if, as Mak points out, not enough to have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre, since that gunman used guns legally obtained by his mother.In any case, after months of negotiation the NRA double-crossed both sponsors, made sure the bill failed to get the 60 votes it needed to pass the Senate, then dropped its A-ratings for Manchin and Toomey to D and C respectively.The NRA’s role in the Trump-Russia scandal was substantial. Maria Butina, eventually convicted as a Russian spy, used “relationships within the NRA to build an informal channel of diplomatic relations with Russia”. Her efforts included a famous public exchange with Donald Trump during his first campaign, in which he expressed his affection for Vladimir Putin and promised to improve relations as president.The NRA spent $30m to help to elect Trump, more than his own fundraising super pac. Ironically, NRA membership dues fell after Trump entered the White House. The organization lost its most lucrative fundraiser when Barack Obama left office.Power struggles and a ‘personal piggy bank’: what the NRA lawsuit allegesRead moreThe great unravelling began on 6 August 2020, when the New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed a lawsuit to dissolve the NRA entirely. She accused LaPierre of using the organization for 30 years “for his financial benefit, and the benefit of a close circle of NRA staff, board members, and vendors”.Six months later, the NRA filed for bankruptcy. But despite endless infighting, Wayne LaPierre remains in charge. And because Trump was elected, with the NRA’s help, the supreme court now includes three justices appointed by him – at least two of whom seemed eager in arguments this week to demolish most of the remaining state restrictions on carrying concealed weapons, in New York and six other states.The passions of gun owners – and the fear they have instilled in a majority of public officials – remain dominant forces in American politics despite the greed and incompetence of their leaders chronicled so thoroughly in this important book.
      Misfire is published in the US by Dutton
      TopicsBooksNRAUS gun controlNewtown shootingUS crimeUS politicsUS CongressreviewsReuse this content More

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      Huma Abedin says kiss from unnamed senator was not sexual assault

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      BooksHuma Abedin says kiss from unnamed senator was not sexual assaultClinton aide gives first interview for memoir Both/AndAbedin also discusses 2016 election and Anthony Weiner Martin Pengelly in New York@MartinPengellySun 31 Oct 2021 10.13 EDTFirst published on Sun 31 Oct 2021 08.11 EDTIn her first interview to promote her new book, Huma Abedin said she did not think an unnamed senator sexually assaulted her when he kissed her at his apartment, some time in the mid-2000s.Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin describes sexual assault by US senatorRead moreShe also said she would “take to her grave” her part in the emails investigation which cost Hillary Clinton dearly in the 2016 presidential election, which the candidate lost to Donald Trump, though she knew it was not all her fault.Abedin describes the incident with the senator in Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, which will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy and reported Abedin’s description of the kiss.After making coffee, Abedin writes, the senator sat next to her on the couch, “put his left arm around my shoulder, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa.“I was so utterly shocked, I pushed him away. All I wanted was for the last 10 seconds to be erased.”Abedin does not give clues to the senator’s identity.She also writes that memories of the kiss came back in 2018, during Brett Kavanaugh’s supreme court confirmation hearings, when the judge was accused of sexual assault. In Abedin’s description, Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, was accused of “conveniently remembering” details. Kavanaugh denied the accusations and was confirmed to the court.The pressure group Rainn (the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) defines sexual assault as “sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the victim”.Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning, Abedin said: “I did go back to a senator’s apartment, a senator who I knew and I was very comfortable with, and he kissed me in a very shocking way because it was somebody who I’d known and frankly trusted.”Her interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, asked: “Are you suggesting that senator assaulted you?”Abedin paused, and said: “I’m suggesting that I was in an uncomfortable situation with … I was in an uncomfortable situation with a senator and I didn’t know how to deal with it and I buried the whole experience.“But in my my own personal opinion, no, did I feel like he was assaulting me in that moment? I didn’t, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like I needed to extricate myself from the situation. And he also spent a lot of time apologising and making sure I was OK and we were actually able to rebalance our relationship.”Earlier this week, Business Insider reported that senators from both parties expressed concern that the unnamed senator may have assaulted others.On CBS, Abedin was also asked what she thought Clinton most valued about her.“I think she would say her loyalty,” she said. “And I would say the same about her. I have tested that. Not intentionally, but I have tested it … I’ve made her life difficult with things that have happened in my personal life.”Abedin is estranged from her husband, the former congressman and New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, who served time in prison for sending explicit text messages to a teenage girl.A laptop belonging to Weiner and Abedin became part of Clinton’s 2016 presidential election defeat, when the FBI seized it as part of investigations into Clinton’s use of private email while secretary of state.“I think I’m going to take it to my grave,” Abedin told CBS. “It took me a while to reconcile that it was not all my fault.”She added: “I have reconciled – and it took me a while to reconcile – that it was not all my fault. I lived with that. I did. I don’t believe that anymore.“It’s more a sense of an ache in the heart, that it didn’t have to be. And also, my belief that [Clinton] would have been an extraordinary president, that she really would have, and what it meant for women and girls, not just in this country but around the world.”Asked why she wrote her book, Abedin said: “I think for most of my adult life, certainly in the last 25 years that I’ve been in public service or in the public eye, I have been the invisible person behind the primary people in my life. But what I realise is that if you don’t tell your story, somebody else is writing your history.”She also discussed Weiner and how she discovered his various infidelities. She and her husband, she said, were “just two severely broken, traumatised people”.Asked how their relationship was now, she said: “We’re good. He is my co-parent. And I learned the full truth, I processed it and moved on. I wish him well. He, I hope, wishes me well. I think he does.”Asked if she was still angry with Weiner, Abedin said: “I can’t live in that space anymore. I tried that. It almost killed me.”TopicsBooksHuma AbedinHillary ClintonAnthony WeinerUS politicsDemocratsUS SenatenewsReuse this content More