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      ‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracy

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      BooksInterview‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyCharles Kaiser The California Democrat’s new memoir, Midnight in Washington, examines his life before politics as well as his leading roles in impeachment and other dramas on Capitol HillSun 10 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTGreat crises in American political life often produce a new hero, someone whose courage and charisma capture the imagination of the decent half of the country.Supreme court, Facebook, Fed: three horsemen of democracy’s apocalypseRead moreIn the 1950s, when Joe McCarthy terrorized America with wild claims of communists lurking in every army barracks and state department corridor, it was an attorney, Joseph Walsh, who demanded of the Wisconsin senator: “At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?”Twenty years later, when the country was transfixed by the Watergate hearings, it was a folksy senator from North Carolina, a first world war veteran named Sam Ervin, who won hearts with sayings like: “There is nothing in the constitution that authorizes or makes it the official duty of a president to have anything to do with criminal activities.”Forty years on, after Donald Trump entered the White House mining what Adam Schiff calls “a dangerous vein of autocratic thought” in the Republican party, the then little-known California Democrat did more than anyone else to unravel and excoriate the high crimes of a charlatan destined to be the only president twice impeached.During the pandemic, Schiff used his confinement to write a memoir which offers a beguiling mix of the personal and political. The book, Midnight in Washington, is full of new details about investigations of the president’s treason and how the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic caucus decided impeachment was necessary.But the human side of the story is the most compelling part: the history of Schiff’s Jewish-immigrant ancestors, the sustenance he received from a brilliant wife and a devoted son and daughter, a career path that made him the perfect person to meet his moment in history.“I enjoyed writing the first part of the book the most,” Schiff said. “In so many ways I feel like the life I had before Trump prepared me for the national trial that was to come.“The prosecution of an FBI agent for spying for the Russians. Living in eastern Europe and watching the rise of an autocrat in Czechoslovakia literally tear the country apart. And my own family’s history in eastern Europe. All of these things seemed to prepare me without knowing it for the rise of a xenophobic autocrat in our own country.”In choppy political waters, a brilliant spouse is a great advantage – especially one who sometimes knows you better than you know yourself. When the Democratic establishment recruited him to run for Congress, after he was elected to the California senate, Schiff thought he was undecided. His wife, Eve, knew otherwise.“You’re going to do it,” she said, after he came back from meetings in Washington.“I don’t know,” he replied.“Yes, you do,” said Eve. “You’re going to do it.”She was right.Schiff’s love of bipartisanship, which ended with the Trump presidency, was inherited from his father, a “yellow dog Democrat” (a person who would vote for a yellow dog before he would vote Republican) and his Republican mother.His father offered him advice that has served him all his life: “As long as you are good at what you do, there will always be a demand for you.”“This was a very liberating idea,” Schiff writes, “that all I needed to do was focus on being good at my chosen profession and the rest would take care of itself.”Stephanie Grisham: Trump turncoat who may be most damaging yetRead moreHis work as a federal prosecutor who got the conviction of the first FBI agent accused of spying for Russia was crucial to his understanding of how thoroughly Trump was manipulated by the Russians. He understood that Michael Cohen’s efforts during the campaign to close a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow would make Trump vulnerable to blackmail if his lawyer’s calls had been recorded. And he was astonished when he realized that that kind of kompromat wouldn’t even be necessary.When Trump “did become president, there would be no need for the Kremlin to blackmail him into betraying America’s interests,” Schiff writes. “To a remarkable degree, he would prove more than willing to do that on his own.”There’s lots more in the book, from Schiff’s unsuccessful effort to convince New York Times editors to remind readers the emails they were publishing to undermine Hillary Clinton had been stolen by the Russians for that very purpose, to Schiff’s revelation that if he had known how poorly Robert Mueller would perform as a witness after he completed his stint as special counsel, he would not have demanded his testimony.“I haven’t said this before this book,” he told the Guardian. “That was one of the difficult sections of the book to write because I have such reverence for Mueller. I wanted to be respectful but accurate.”Schiff is still at the center of political events. He sits on the House select committee investigating the deadly Capitol attack – and dealing with Trump’s obstruction.On the page, he also recalls a hearing in 2017 when he asked representatives of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube if their “algorithms were having the effect of balkanizing the public and deepening the divisions in our society”.Facebook’s general counsel pretended: “The data on this is actually quite mixed.”“Maybe that was so,” Schiff writes, “but it didn’t seem very mixed to me.”Asked if he thought this week’s testimony from the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen would create enough pressure to pass new laws regulating social media platforms, Schiff said: “The answer is yes.“I think we need regulation to protect people’s private data. I think we need to narrow the scope of the safe harbor these companies enjoy if they don’t moderate their contents and continue to amplify anger and hate. I think we need to insist on a vehicle for more transparency so we understand the data better.”But then he cautioned: “If you bet against Congress, you win 90% of the time.”‘Eureka moment’On the page, Schiff records an airport exchange with a Republican stranger, who said: “You can tell me – there’s nothing to this ‘collusion stuff’, is there?”It is a conversation which should put that question permanently to rest.The silence of Donald Trump: how Twitter’s ban is cramping his styleRead moreSchiff said: “What if I was to tell you that we had evidence in black and white that the Russians approached the Clinton campaign and offered dirt on Donald Trump, then met secretly with Chelsea Clinton, John Podesta and Robby Mook in the Brooklyn headquarters of the campaign … then Hillary lied about it to cover it up. Would you call that collusion?“Now what If I also told you that after the election, former national security adviser Susan Rice secretly talked with the Russian ambassador in an effort to undermine US sanctions on Russia after they interfered to help Hillary win. Would you call that collusion?”The Republican was convinced: “You know, I probably would.”For Schiff, it was a “eureka moment”.“Now,” he thought, “if I can only speak to a couple hundred million people.”Schiff’s book should convince a few million more that everything he said about Trump was true – and that the country was exceptionally lucky to have him ready and willing to defend the tattered concept of “truth”.
      Midnight in Washington is published by Random House
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      Why Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is having a moment

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      Pass notesCommunismWhy Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is having a momentThe Canadian musician Grimes tweeted an image of herself with the 1848 document last week – just after her reported split from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. She isn’t the only one reading it right now Mon 4 Oct 2021 13.24 EDTLast modified on Mon 4 Oct 2021 14.45 EDTName: The Communist Manifesto.Age: 173 years.Remind me what it is again. A pamphlet first published by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. I thought Marxism was dead … at least it seemed that way at the Labour party conference last week. Not so! It’s never been hotter!Really? Yes! Even Grimes has been spotted reading a copy.The Canadian musician? Real name Claire Boucher? The one who had a baby with Elon Musk? The very same. In her first public appearance since her reported split with Musk – the richest man in the world, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX – she was photographed wearing a fantasy-themed outfit on a street corner in that hotbed of communism, Los Angeles.Is she a Marxist? No. The whole thing was staged; she tweeted that she had done the stunt to spark ridiculous headlines.Even more ridiculous headlines than calling your child X Æ A-Xii? One assumes so, yes.Is it a case of her hilariously trolling her definitely-not-a-communist ex? Perhaps, although she did write on Instagram: “I’m still living with E and I am not a communist (although there are some very smart ideas in this book …)”.Remind me, what are those smart ideas? That human history was based on class struggles between the oppressors and the oppressed. And – to put it very simply – this was not good.Sounds a lot like my life in 2021. Quite, which is why it is having a bit of a moment. It is still one of the most influential political documents ever written, and its ideas do have a habit of popping up in times of economic and social crisis.Because it shows us how many of the problems in the world can be attributed to capitalist production, greed and property? Exactly. Check out the Pandora papers if you need more evidence. Or people hogging petrol.What does it say is the answer to all this then? Revolution, of course. And the elimination of social classes as well as the means to appropriate private property. Is this why young people keep saying: “Eat the rich”? Well, yes, huge numbers of young people are turning their backs on capitalism. Well, that’s because they can’t afford to get a toe on the property ladder. Whatever the reason, the Communist Manifesto is strangely popular right now. Last year, it was translated into Somali for the first time and there’s even a site where you can teach your parrot to recite it. Do say: “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”Don’t say: “My Tesla shares are doing well.”TopicsCommunismPass notesGrimesUS politicsKarl MarxfeaturesReuse this content More

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      I’ll Take Your Questions Now review: Stephanie Grisham’s tawdry Trump tell-all

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      BooksI’ll Take Your Questions Now review: Stephanie Grisham’s tawdry Trump tell-allThe press secretary who wouldn’t brief the press wants to talk. Like all else to do with Donald and Melania, truth is a casualty Lloyd GreenSun 3 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 3 Oct 2021 02.02 EDTIn 2015, Donald Trump boasted that his administration would be filled with only “the best and most serious people … top-of-the-line professionals”.Stephanie Grisham: Trump turncoat who may be most damaging yetRead moreMeet Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s third press secretary and sixth communications director, Melania Trump’s first spokeswoman and second chief of staff. All that in less than four years.Before Trump, Grisham reportedly lost one job for padding expense reports and another over plagiarism and was twice cited for driving under the influence. As White House press secretary, she never delivered a formal briefing. Instead, she ladled out interviews to Fox News and OAN.Grisham even went so far as to issue a statement proclaiming that John Kelly, a retired four-star general and past chief of staff, “was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president”. As Grisham recounts, MSNBC said that statement, which she says was dictated by Trump, had “a decidedly North Korean tone”. It had a point.Finally, on 6 January 2021, Grisham resigned. The insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol had claimed an unintended scalp. On the page, Grisham lets it be known that the election was not stolen, that she urged the first lady to denounce the storming of the Capitol, and that Melania demurred because she was more concerned with setting up a photo shoot for a rug. That, Grisham writes, was when she decided enough was finally enough.Like most things Trump, reality is a casualty. Text messages obtained by Politico indicate that Grisham was fine with challenging election results – until she wasn’t.Grisham follows into print Michael Cohen, Trump’s ex-lawyer; Omarosa, former Apprentice contestant and Trump White House refugee; Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, former friend and aide to Melania and rival to Grisham; and Stormy Daniels, adult film star and alleged recipient of $130,000 in Trump hush-money.To know Trump is to blab. As Grisham frames things, working near and for the first couple was akin to being in a “Hunger Games-style environment” and Melania morphed into a modern-day Marie Antoinette: “Dismissive. Defeated. Detached.”Grisham’s book is salacious and score-settling – but not entertaining. Yes, Grisham discusses the state of Trump’s “junk” and shares the first couple’s reactions when Daniels immortalized “Mushroom Mario”. Even so, her tone is mirthless.“Not in two million years had I ever thought I’d have a conversation with the president of the United States about his penis,” she writes. Perhaps she forgot Bill Clinton.She also portrays Rudy Giuliani as off-putting and not-quite-right. The New York mayor turned Trump lawyer “gave off weird vibes when he was around the president”, she writes. Being in a meeting with Giuliani was tantamount to “being cross-examined about it later by some committee”. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, criminally charged Giuliani associates, would surely agree.Grisham has other targets. Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, is presented as a treacherous boot-licker, instrumental in driving Grisham from her job as White House press secretary and back to the sole employ of Melania. Lindsey Graham was a two-faced leech, “Senator Freeloader” as the author has it. Both Meadows and Graham, she writes, helped undercut Mick Mulvaney as chief of staff.Where are they now? Giuliani is suspended from the bar and reportedly in prosecutors’ crosshairs. Meadows is facing a congressional subpoena over his role on 6 January. Graham is in Trump’s doghouse again.The spotlight on Melania is unsparing. Grisham says the first lady was unofficially called “Rapunzel” by the Secret Service, for her reluctance to leave her personal quarters. Unlike Michelle Obama and Laura Bush, Melania seldom ventured near her East Wing office. Some agents sought to be assigned to Melania, Grisham says, because her “limited movements and travel meant that they could spend more time at home with their families”. But Melania did care deeply about the White House Easter egg roll. We all have our priorities.In Grisham’s telling, Melania was taken aback by racial animus voiced in Charlottesville in August 2017 by white supremacists, and deplored racism herself. Intentionally or otherwise, Grisham omits the fact her former boss was a “birther” who helped her husband stoke the lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.Yet Grisham reserves her harshest takes for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the “interns”, as Grisham says they came to be known. As she saw it, the pair repeatedly conflated being born on third base with wisdom, aesthetic grace with entitlement to whatever they wanted.Grisham describes how the pair attempted to shoehorn themselves into a meeting with the Queen, how Jared offered opinions on the Mexican border and on combating Covid. Grisham appears to relish recounting Kushner’s difficulties in obtaining a security clearance and the fact he needed Trump to get it done.Still, Kushner was de facto chief of staff and no one who crossed him could hope to survive. Sure, Steve Bannon eked out a last-minute pardon, just like Charlie Kushner, Jared’s dad. But Bannon was gone from the White House in months.Wildland review: Evan Osnos on the America Trump exploitedRead moreGrisham has written a tell-all but it is also an exercise in self-pity. She tags an unnamed boyfriend for assorted bad behavior. She suspects there was another woman and regrets her choice of men. The profile matches that of Max Miller, a White House staffer now Trump’s pick for an Ohio congressional seat.Miller reportedly pushed Grisham against a wall and slapped her, allegations he denies. In 2007, he was charged with assault, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and fleeing from the cops. He pleaded no contest to two misdemeanor charges before the case was dismissed.Trump reportedly assaulted his first wife, Ivana, and faces a defamation lawsuit in connection with the alleged sexual assault of the writer E Jean Carroll. He too denies all allegations. So it goes.Grisham laments the state of the Republican party, lauds Liz Cheney and argues that the GOP is “not one man”. Reasonable people can differ. A recent poll shows most Republicans want Trump to continue as their leader.
      I’ll Take Your Questions Now is published by Harper Collins
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future

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      How I wroteBarack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his futureThe former president of the United States was at a crossroads in his life when he wrote his first book, Dreams from My Father Barack ObamaSat 2 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTI was in my early 30s when I wrote Dreams from My Father. At the time, I was a few years out of law school. Michelle and I were newly married and just beginning to think about having kids. My mother was still alive. And I was not yet a politician.I look back now and understand that I was at an important crossroads then, thinking hard about who I wanted to be in the world and what sort of contribution I could make. I was passionate about civil rights, curious about public service, full of loose ideas, and entirely uncertain about which path I should take. I had more questions than answers. Was it possible to create more trust between people and lessen our divides? How much did small steps toward progress matter – improving conditions at a school, say, or registering more people to vote – when our larger systems seemed so broken? Would I accomplish more by working inside existing institutions or outside of them?Behind all of this floated something more personal, a deeper set of unresolved questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? How do I belong?That’s what compelled me to start writing this book.A Promised Land by Barack Obama review – an impressive but incomplete memoirRead moreI’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased.These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future. In writing it, I was able to dwell inside the lives of my parents and grandparents, the landscapes, cultures and histories they carried, the values and judgments that shaped them – and that in turn, shaped me. What I learned through this process helped to ground me. It became the basis for how I moved forward, giving me the confidence to know I could be a good father to my children and the courage to know I was ready to step forward as a leader.The act of writing is exactly that powerful. It’s a chance to be inquisitive with yourself, to observe the world, confront your limits, walk in the shoes of others, and try on new ideas. Writing is difficult, but that’s kind of the point. You might spend hours pushing yourself to remember what an old classroom smelled like, or the timbre of your father’s voice, or the precise colour of some shells you saw once on a beach. This work can anchor you, and fortify you, and surprise you. In finding the right words, in putting in that time, you may not always hit upon specific answers to life’s big questions, but you will understand yourself better. That’s how it works for me, anyway.The young man you meet in these pages is flawed and full of yearning, asking questions of himself and the world around him, learning as he goes. I know now, of course, that this was just the beginning for him. If you’re lucky, life provides you with a good long arc. I hope that my story will encourage you to think about telling your story, and to value the stories of others around you. The journey is always worth taking. Your answers will come.TopicsHow I wroteAutobiography and memoirUS politicsHistory booksfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa review – the bloated body politic

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      Book of the dayPolitics booksPeril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa review – the bloated body politic The Washington Post journalists pick apart the transfer of power from Trump to Biden in an F-bomb-peppered account of the corporeal and divine in US governmentPeter ConradTue 28 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTExcept for Donald Trump, who believes only in himself, American politicians are inveterate God-botherers, sure that they were elected by their creator, not just by their constituents. While re-traversing the transfer of power between Trump and Joe Biden, Bob Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Robert Costa often pause as the wheelers and dealers they are tracking pray, text scriptural citations or glance sanctimoniously skywards. Biden fingers his rosary beads before debating Trump, and when Mike Pence performs his constitutional duty by ratifying the outcome of the presidential election, an aide congratulates him for fighting the good fight and keeping the faith. Later, Nancy Pelosi summarises her scheme for raising the minimum wage as “the gospel of Matthew”.Yet despite such homages to the soul, what truly matters in the showdowns and face-offs that Peril documents is the chunky body and its thuggish heft. Among Trump’s enforcers, only the anti-immigrant ideologue Stephen Miller, whose skinny frame and slick fitted suits are noted by Woodward and Costa, has a lean and hungry look. Otherwise, power is exhibited by a swollen paunch. Bill Barr becomes attorney general because Melania thinks his “extraordinarily large belly” is a guarantee of gravitas. Mike Pompeo is “heavy and gregarious”, which implies that he has “little tolerance for liberals”. Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, qualifies for his job because “at six foot eight and bearded, he looked like a professional wrestler”. Given this huddle of heavyweights, it amused me to learn that Biden’s entourage includes a “gut check” – no, not a dietician but a crony who offers a second opinion when the new president wants to act on instinct.Physical quirks and kinks such as these matter because they demonstrate that, in the populist era, politics is about instantly gratifying appetite, not making pondered, judicious decisions. Woodward and Costa give a revealing account of a lunch at which Trump receives the homage of Kevin McCarthy, minority leader in the House of Representatives. Trump orders his customary cheeseburger, fries and ice-cream, solipsistically assuming that his guest will have the same; he is startled when McCarthy foregoes the fries, bins the bun, and requests fresh fruit rather than a gooey dessert. “That really works?” sneers Trump, gobbling grease. What Pelosi calls his “fat butt”, on display to be kissed by McCarthy, advertises his immense self-satisfaction.After the insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January, General Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, kept anxious watch on the nuclear chain of command because he feared that Trump “had gone into a serious mental decline”. But Trump could hardly regress, since he never advanced into rational adulthood. In Peril, he is indistinguishable from the Trump Baby, the diapered balloon that bobbed above Westminster during his state visit. As he suborns Pence to discount electoral results and nullify Biden’s win, his wheedling suggests dialogue overheard in a primary school playground. “Wouldn’t it be almost cool to have that power?” he asks, as if tempting the vice-president with some shiny new electronic toy. When Pence resists, Trump’s recourse is sulky petulance: “I don’t want to be your friend any more,” he whines.Milley worries that Trump, berserk after his electoral loss, might reach a “trigger point” and order a diversionary attack China or Iran. Adam Smith, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, is less alarmist. Smith agrees that Trump is a “mentally unstable narcissistic psychopath”, but argues that he’s incapable of starting a war because “he’s a coward, he doesn’t want that level of responsibility”. We were saved by Trump’s laziness and an inability to concentrate that Woodward and Costa blame on his addictive television-watching. To the consternation of advisers, he switches subjects capriciously; with a zapper where his brain should be, he can’t help flicking through the channels to see what’s happening elsewhere. On his way out of office, he drops only F-bombs, “spewing expletives” and screaming at cabinet colleagues: “I don’t care a fuck. You’re all fucked up. You’re all fucked.”That versatile little word peppers the narrative of Peril, and turns out to be indispensable in the discourse of Washington DC. It gives Rex Tillerson legal deniability: he gets away with insisting that he didn’t call Trump a “moron” because he actually called him a “fucking moron”. When Biden resorts to curses while securing votes for his economic stimulus, “the number of ‘fucks’ he uttered seemed to multiply as the story went from senator to senator”. Partisanship likewise signs its oaths in urine, so that Mitch McConnell declares his support for a Trump nominee to the supreme court by vowing: “I feel stronger about Kavanaugh than mule piss.” In Kentucky, which McConnell represents in the Senate, the micturition of mules appears to be proof positive of sincerity. It all sounds harmlessly infantile or at best adolescent until you realise that these men determine the fate of a nation and perhaps the future of our planet.Their pretence of godliness founders when Steve Bannon, so zealously Catholic, decides to out-Herod Herod by suggesting that a campaign of lies about the election result will “kill the Biden presidency in the crib”. Yes, politics is murder by other means, and the deity, having long since retreated in despair or disgust, is not about to rescue us. The last fatalistic word should go to Biden, on an occasion when his rosary stayed in his pocket. Wrangling over the exit from Afghanistan, he tells his secretary of state: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” I’m unsure whether he meant Trump or the devil, but is there any difference?TopicsPolitics booksBook of the dayUS politicsDonald TrumpJoe BidenBob WoodwardJournalism booksreviewsReuse this content More