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      Spooked review: exposé of murky world of private spies is a dodgy dossier itself

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      BooksSpooked review: exposé of murky world of private spies is a dodgy dossier itselfBarry Meier brings distasteful characters and episodes to light but is happy to leave out that which does not suit his aims Charles KaiserSun 11 Jul 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 11 Jul 2021 01.02 EDTWhen Christopher Steele’s dossier about Donald Trump’s connections to Russia was published by BuzzFeed News, the salacious part got more attention than anything else.Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book saysRead moreBut there was something else several reporters thought was much more intriguing: a description of a meeting between Carter Page, a Trump aide, and Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin collaborator and head of the Russian energy giant Rosneft.The dossier reported that Sechin “was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered PAGE/TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19% (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return. PAGE had expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.”As the Mueller report pointed out, the dossier was wrong about the identity of the Rosneft official Page met: it was actually one of Sechin’s deputies, Andrey Baranov. The dossier was also off by half a percentage point about the size of the privatization.But just five months after Page’s Moscow meeting, Rosneft did in fact announce the privatization of 19.5% of the giant company, the largest privatization in Russian history. And Carter Page flew to Moscow the day after the deal was announced, for reasons that remain shrouded in mystery.Reuters assigned no fewer than 11 reporters to try to find out who actually purchased the shares in the company and where the financing came from. But the resulting story said the “full identity of the new owners of the Rosneft stake” remained “a mystery”, as did “the complete source of the funds with which they bought it”.In testimony before the House intelligence committee, Page denied discussing “specifics” about sanctions with the Rosneft official. But when he was asked if they discussed the privatization of the energy giant, he said Baranov “may briefly have mentioned it”.As Martin Longman wrote for Washington Monthly: “When we try to assess whether the Steele dossier is ‘fake news’, as [Trump] insists that it is, we should keep this Rosneft deal in mind. Someone who was just making things up and didn’t have real sources could never have invented something so close to the truth.”Spooked, by the former New York Times reporter Barry Meier, identifies the Trump dossier as one of its three principal subjects. One might think Steele’s correct prediction of an imminent privatization of Rosneft, and Page’s confirmation that he “may” have been told about it five months before it happened, would at least deserve a paragraph. But only a glancing reference to this story appears.Asked about this omission, Meier cited an FBI report that quoted a “sub-source” of Steele’s “primary sub-source”, who said there was no evidence Page had been involved in any kind of bribery scheme. Meier concluded there was no evidence that Page had done anything wrong, so he omitted the whole subject.Another reason for the omission is that including it might have contributed to a more nuanced view of the Steele dossier. Nuance is not one of Meier’s specialties.Steele was a collaborator of Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who became a private spy. The purpose of Meier’s book is to prove that all private spies are evil, a clear and present danger to ethical journalists like himself. He says he wrote the book because he “wanted to understand how a predatory industry was operating unchecked”.While Meier never hesitates to attack the speculations of other reporters, the author treats his own guesses as dispositive. He dismisses the idea of an incriminating tape of Trump with Moscow prostitutes because “blackmail works best when only a few people know about it”. If such a tape actually existed, “it was unlikely it would have been the talk of Moscow”. Therefore, it should have been “clear from the start” to Steele that there was a “basic problem with the story”.However, actual Russian experts have reached the opposite conclusion. John le Carré, for one, told told the New York Times: “As far as Trump, I would suspect they have [kompromat] because they’ve denied it. If they have it and they’ve set Trump up, they’d say, ‘Oh no, we haven’t got anything.’ But to Trump they’re saying, ‘Aren’t we being kind to you?’”Meier told the Guardian the fact the tape has never become public is another reason to believe it doesn’t exist.Spooked is both a clip job, frequently relying on other people’s stories, and a hatchet job, making its subjects as unattractive as possible. Meier disparages anyone who has written a story which hasn’t been confirmed by other news outlets, including a reporter for this newspaper.No detail is too small to contribute to the author’s character assassinations. Simpson, he writes, “had an unhealthy pallor, the apparent result of too much drinking, too little exercise or both … he appeared stiff and slightly robotic”. Simpson is said to have thrown frequent parties in Washington “fueled by lots of alcohol and plenty of pot”.The book does describe some genuinely loathsome activities, including the alliance between the law firm of the noted litigator David Boies and Black Cube, a private investigation company that employed former Israeli spies.Boies claimed he was unaware of his firm’s deal with Black Cube, which promised a $300,000 bonus if it stopped the New York Times publishing an exposé of Harvey Weinstein. After Ronan Farrow published details of the deal in the New Yorker, it turned out Boies was representing the Times in an unrelated libel case. The newspaper immediately cut ties.Harvey Weinstein hired Black Cube to block New York Times article, jury hearsRead moreMeier includes dozens of other anecdotes that make private spies look very bad. But nearly all have been reported elsewhere, usually with more coherent narratives.Not surprisingly, two of the book’s principal victims, Simpson and Peter Fritsch, hit back as soon as Spooked was published, alleging Meier had repeatedly asked them for help in his reporting.Meier acknowledges this at the end of his book, writing: “While I was at the New York Times, I spoke with Glenn Simpson on several occasions though I don’t recall writing anything based on our discussions.” He insisted to the Guardian that the one tip he got from Simpson about the location of court documents pointed him in the wrong direction.Simpson and Fritsch also accuse Meier of an obvious conflict of interest, because an excerpt from Spooked was published in the business section of the Times, which is edited by Meier’s wife, Ellen Pollock.Meier told the Guardian there was no conflict, because his wife hadn’t commissioned the excerpt. That was done by one of her colleagues.TopicsBooksEspionageTrump-Russia investigationUS politicsRussiaDonald TrumpreviewsReuse this content More

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      Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from Trumpworld

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      BooksFrankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from Trumpworld As well as grabby headlines about Hitler, Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal shows us how millions have been led astrayLloyd GreenSat 10 Jul 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 10 Jul 2021 03.11 EDTOn election night in 2016, Donald Trump paid homage to America’s “forgotten men and women”, vowing they would be “forgotten no longer”. Those who repeatedly appeared at his rallies knew of whom he spoke. Veterans, gun enthusiasts, bikers, shop clerks. Middle-aged and seniors. Life had treated some harshly. Others less so.Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book saysRead moreSome had voted for Barack Obama, only to discover hope and change wasn’t all it was advertised to be. Regardless, the Democratic party’s urban and urbane, upstairs-downstairs coalition didn’t mesh with them. Or vice-versa. Politics is definitely about lifestyles.In his new book, Michael Bender pays particular attention to those Trump supporters who called themselves “Front Row Joes”. They attended rallies wherever, whenever. It was “kind of like an addiction”, Bender quotes one as saying.No longer did they need to bowl alone. Trump had birthed a community. Their applause was his sustenance, his performance their sacrament.One Front Row Joe, Saundra from Michigan, was a 41-year-old Walmart worker. On 6 January, in Washington DC, she made her way up the west side of the US Capitol.“It looked so neat,” she said.She also said she and other Trump supporters who stormed Congress did not do so “to steal things” or “do damage”. They had a different aim.“We were just there to overthrow the government.”The next day, Saundra flew home. Trump’s wishes, real or imagined, were her command. Later in January, two days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Senator Mitch McConnell declared that the mob had been “fed lies” and provoked by Trump.Bender covers the White House for the Wall Street Journal. Frankly, We Did Win This Election is his first book. It is breezy, well-written and well-informed. He captures both the infighting in Trump’s world and the surrounding social tectonics.Trump goes on the record. The interview is a solid scorecard on who is up or down. He brands McConnell “dumb as a rock”. The loathing is mutual – to a point. The Senate minority leader has made clear he will back Trump if he is the nominee again.Liz Cheney occupies a special spot in Trump’s Inferno. The Wyoming representative, daughter of a vice-president, now sits on a House select committee to investigate 6 January. But to most of Trump’s party, six months after the insurrection, what happened that afternoon is something to be forgotten or at least ignored.Mike Pence dwells in purgatory.“I don’t care if he apologizes or not,” Trump says of his vice-president presiding over the certification of Biden’s win. “He made a mistake.”Once before, in their second year in office, the two men reportedly clashed over a political hiring decision. Back then, Trump reportedly called Pence “so disloyal”.Pence still harbors presidential ambitions. Good luck with that.Bender’s book is laden with attention-grabbing headlines. He reports Trump telling John Kelly, then White House chief of staff, that Hitler “did a lot of good things”. Trump denies it. Kelly stays mum. More than 30 years ago, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, let it be known that he kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. Everyone needs a hobby.Bender writes of Trump urging the military to “beat the fuck” out of protesters for racial justice, and to “crack their skulls”. The 45th president’s asymmetrical approach to law enforcement remains on display. “Stand back and stand by” was for allies like the Proud Boys. Law and order was for everyone else. Political adversaries were enemies.Trump now embraces the supposed martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt, an air force veteran who stormed Congress on 6 January and was killed by law enforcement.“The person that shot Ashli Babbitt,” he said this week. “Boom. Right through the head. Just, boom. There was no reason for that.”To say the least, that is highly contestable.Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, cowered behind the doors Babbitt rushed. Hours later, the bulk of the House GOP opposed certifying Biden’s win. The party of Lincoln is now the party of Trump.Focusing on the 2020 election, a contest under the deathly shadow of Covid, Bender conveys the chaos and disorganization of the Trump campaign. After a disastrous kick-off rally in Tulsa, Trump began looking for a new campaign manager. Brad Parscale’s days were numbered. He was a digital guy, not a major domo.According to Bender, Trump offered the job to Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee – and niece of Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, 2012 nominee and, in Trumpworld, persona decidedly non grata. Her reply: “Absolutely not.”Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national traumaRead moreTrump also sent word to Steve Bannon, his campaign chair in 2016. He declined too. Bannon was banished from the kingdom for trashing Trump and his family. But he understood the base better than anyone – other than Trump himself.There was a reason Saturday Night Live spoofed Bannon as the power behind the throne, and that he appeared on the cover of Time. There was no return to court but Trump did pardon Bannon of federal fraud charges. Not a bad consolation prize.Parscale was demoted and kicked to the curb. Within months he appeared in the news, shirtless, barefoot, drunk and armed. His successor, Bill Stepien, brought Trump to within 80,000 votes of another electoral college win.Bender makes clear that Trump is neither gone nor forgotten. His acquittal in his second impeachment, for inciting the Capitol attack, only reinforced his desire to fight another day.“There has never been anything like it,” Trump tells Bender. So true.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

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      The Engagement review: a tour de force on the fight for same-sex marriage

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      BooksThe Engagement review: a tour de force on the fight for same-sex marriageDon’t let the length or density of Sasha Issenberg’s new book put you off – it is a must-read on the fight for true civil rights Michael Henry AdamsSun 4 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 4 Jul 2021 02.01 EDTSasha Issenberg’s tour-de-force, 900-word chronicle of “America’s quarter-century struggle over same-sex marriage” might have been even better had it been given even a few illustrations.This is the Fire review: Don Lemon’s audacious study of racism – and loveRead moreThe New Yorker contributor Michael Shaw’s cartoon of 1 March 2004 would have been one candidate. Its arch question, “Gays and lesbians getting married – haven’t they suffered enough?”, seems to encapsulate how an unlikely issue, consistently championed, achieved a broader vision of “gay liberation” than many dreamed could be attained so rapidly.Thanks to works of scholarship like Charles Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis and The Deviant’s War by Eric Cervini, it has become clear that the seemingly impossible is often achievable. With The Engagement, Issenberg adds to such proof that one can write LGBTQ+ history in a way that is engaging, authoritative and impeccably sourced.He conveys a telling truth for activists beyond the campaign for gay rights. Brimming with a promise of inclusion, of acceptance beyond mere toleration, his book shows there are indeed more ways than one to skin a cat. Awakened and empowered by Black Lives Matter and Trumpism’s exposure of widespread white supremacist alliances, many progressives were certain that only the most radical policy positions – “defund the police”, anyone? – and candidates offered any real remedy. But older black voters were certain of a different way of maneuvering. And it looks as if they were right, just as proponents of marriage equality were right – to a point at least.If The Engagement lacks snappy cartoons or colorful or insightful photographs, Issenberg manages nonetheless to present compelling depictions of fascinating individuals. Their pursuit of gay marriage propels his narrative, lawsuit by lawsuit, legislative victory by legislative victory and political endorsement by political endorsement.False starts, setbacks, losses – they are all here too. But then finally, on 26 June 2015, with Obergefell v Hodges, the supreme court invalidated same-sex marriage bans all across the land. In time, a court-sanctioned right to self-determination expanded the rights of transgender people too.Gay marriage declared legal across the US in historic supreme court rulingRead moreIf the quest began with an almost stereotypically flamboyant figure, Bill Woods, Issenberg shows with deft sensitivity how for all Woods’ drive and flair for manipulating media and politicians, two more reticent lesbians played a pivotal role. Their relatable story is one of opposites determined to fashion a life together, just three months after meeting in 1990. Initially, the LGBTQ+ community was compelled to fight just to be allowed to love one another. But this committed couple’s saga goes a long way to showing how marriage, as opposed to a brave new world of sexual revolution and limitless pairings, emerged as the definitive cause of gay civil rights.When Genora Dancel, a broadcast engineer, presented a ruby ring to Nina Baehr, she “thought our love could withstand anything”. Coming home to find Baehr in pain from an ear infection, Dancel learned otherwise. Baehr’s university health coverage had yet to take effect. Her new “wife” had two policies from her employers but could not use them for her partner. She had to pay out of pocket to to aid her.Out of this practical desire to care for each other, the pair joined two other same-sex couples organized by Bill Woods. On 17 December 1990, in Honolulu, they applied for marriage licenses. When they were denied, Dan Foley, an attorney who was straight, sued the state on their behalf. After a battle lasting nearly three years, they were vindicated. The Hawaii supreme court was the first in the US to determine that the right to wed was a basic civil right.Many, like the lesbian feminist Paula Ettelbrick, were convinced there was an alternative to marriage and that “making room in our society for broader definitions of family” was better. They saw little utility in such a gain.Jasmyne Cannick, a journalist from Los Angeles, was dubious as well. Following the passage of Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California, she outlined the looming disconnect between disaffected queers of color and our sometimes oblivious white brethren.
      The white gay community is banging its head against the glass ceiling of a room called equality, believing that a breakthrough on marriage will bestow on it parity with heterosexuals.
      But the right to marry does nothing to address the problems faced by both Black gays and Black straights. Does someone who is homeless or suffering from HIV but has no healthcare, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?
      In books such as Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage and Elizabeth Drexel Lehr’s King Lehr and the Gilded Age, one gets a poignant look at how especially for upper-class gays, conventional alliances, with partners of the opposite sex and children, are as old as time, assuring inheritances and perpetuating dynastic ties. George Chauncey’s Gay New York tells of how in Harlem same-sex couples, from the 1920s on, staged elaborate nuptial ceremonies, anticipating current trends.The Deviant’s War: superb epic of Frank Kameny and the fight for gay equalityRead moreYes, one way or another, even in the realm of queers, marriage still seems to constitute a profound idea.Issenberg contends that without overwhelming opposition, gay marriage would never have subsumed gay activism; that conservatives, lying in wait, biding their time, are poised to try to take it away. When they do, will we be ready, armed with the lesson of Issenberg’s book?Today, self-segregated into competing camps of righteous activists and dogged pragmatists, freedom fighters still at struggle and insiders who just happen to be gay, do we sincerely value the efficacy of throwing down our buckets where we stand? Have we lost hope that every road leads to a common victory? That in a street fight, every contribution adds value to our effort?
      The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage is published in the US by Penguin Random House
      TopicsBooksLGBT rightsSame-sex marriage (US)US constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US politicsActivismnewsReuse this content More

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      Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma

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      BooksNightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Washington Post show how bad things got – and how they could have been worseLloyd GreenSat 3 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 3 Jul 2021 02.21 EDTAs the world wakes from its pandemic-induced coma, Bloomberg rates the US as the best place to be. More than 150 million Americans have been vaccinated; little more than 4,100 have been hospitalized or have died as a result of breakthrough infection.Trump contempt for White House Covid taskforce revealed in new bookRead moreThe vaccines worked – but too late to save more than 600,000 Americans who have died. More than 500,000 were on Donald Trump’s watch.“This would have been hard regardless of who was president,” a senior administration official confided to Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta. “With Donald Trump, it was impossible.”Abutaleb is a health policy writer for the Washington Post. Paletta is its economics editor. Together, they supply a bird’s-eye narrative of a chaotic and combative response to a pandemic that has subsided but not disappeared in the west. Elsewhere, it still rages.At almost 500 pages, Nightmare Scenario depicts an administration riven by turf wars, terrified of losing re-election and more concerned about the demands of Trump and his base than broader constituencies and realities. It was always “them” v “us”. Sadly, this is what we expected.Under the subtitle “Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic that Changed History”, Abutaleb and Paletta confirm that life in the Trump White House was Stygian bleak. Trump was the star. Pain and insecurity were the coins of the realm.Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, laboured in constant fear of Trump and competitors inside the government. After taking a hard line against flavoured e-cigarettes early on, to Trump’s dismay, Azar never recovered. The pandemic simply deepened his personal nightmare.When Covid struck, he was all but a dead man walking. Then the White House Covid taskforce, headed by Mike Pence, neutered his authority. Think of it as a one-two punch. True to form, Trump told a taskforce member Azar was “in trouble” and that he, Trump, had “saved him”.Azar was forced to take on Michael Caputo, an acolyte of Roger Stone, as spokesman. Eventually, Caputo posted a Facebook video in which he claimed “hit squads [were] being trained all over this country”, ready to mount an armed insurrection to stop a second Trump term. Caputo embarked on a two-month medical leave. His “mental health … definitely failed”.Not surprisingly, Trump lost patience with Pence’s taskforce. It failed to deliver a magic bullet and he dismissed it as “that fucking council that Mike has”. For the record, in April 2020 Pence remarked: “Maybe I’m a glass half-full kind of guy, but I think the country is ready to reopen.” For all of his obsequiousness, Pence could never make Trump happy.Instead, Peter Navarro, Scott Atlas and Stephen Moore emerged as Trump’s go-to guys. Predictably, mayhem ensued.Navarro suggested his PhD in economics made him an expert in medicine as well. He jousted with Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease since 1984 – seemingly for giggles.Atlas was a radiologist whose understanding of infectious diseases was tangential. As for Moore, he played emissary for a libertarian donor base distraught by shutdowns and mask mandates.“Fauci is the villain here,” Moore intoned. “He has the Napoleon complex, and he thinks he is the dictator who could decide how to run the country.” Trump’s own authoritarian streak seems to have escaped him.Moore also referred to Fauci as “Fucky”, and advised state-based “liberation” movements against public health measures that served as precursors and incubators to the invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January this year.Going back to 2019, Moore was forced to withdraw from consideration for the board of the Federal Reserve after the Guardian reported on his bouts of alimony-dodging, contempt of court and tax delinquency.With one major exception – financing and developing a vaccine – the Trump administration left Covid to the states. Hydroxychloroquine never saved the day, though Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, ordered a bunch of it from India to sate Trump’s ego. Six days after the 2020 election, the National Institutes of Health issued a statement that insisted: “Hydroxychloroquine does not benefit adults hospitalized with Covid-19.” Trump was callous and mendacious before the pandemic. Yet even as he embraced medical quackery, bleach injections and self-pity, he presided over unprecedented vaccine development, the medical equivalent of winning the space race and the cold war at once.Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all tooRead moreWhen Trump signed off on Operation Warp Speed in May 2020, “he thought vaccines were too pie in the sky”, Abutaleb and Paletta report. When Trump learned the first contract executed under the program was with AstraZeneca, from the UK, he growled: “This is terrible news. I’m going to get killed.”Boris Johnson would “have a field day”, he said. Things didn’t work out that way.Right now, countries that relied on Chinese vaccines are experiencing a death spike in the face of the Delta variant. In the Seychelles, almost seven in 10 are fully vaccinated – yet deaths per capita are currently running at the highest rate in the world.Added to Chinese opacity surrounding its role in the outbreak, the limits of vaccine diplomacy and technology are apparent. From the looks of things, Trump has left multiple legacies, some more complex and alloyed than others. But things could have been worse.TopicsBooksCoronavirusInfectious diseasesPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationreviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump’s true battle with coronavirus: Politics Weekly Extra

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      Jonathan Freedland speaks to Yasmeen Abutaleb, author of a new book that details just how serious the president’s condition was when he contracted Covid-19 last October

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      When Donald Trump was hospitalised last October after testing positive for Covid-19, some in the White House were hoping it would change his approach to the pandemic. In their new book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic that Changed History, the Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta look at the Trump administration’s failure to control the coronavirus outbreak in the US. They also examine those chaotic few days during which the president tested positive and was given radical treatment in hospital. In their discussion, Jonathan Freedland and Yasmeen Abutaleb also look at the history of presidents battling illnesses while occupying the Oval Office, and why any ailments, no matter how serious, are often kept a secret. Special thanks to David Smith for recording audio from the Trump rally Check out The Guardian’s new audiovisual project, Auditorial Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      in Elections

      New Michael Wolff book reports Trump’s confusion during Capitol attack

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      Donald Trump told supporters he would march on the Capitol with them on 6 January – then abandoned them after a tense exchange with his chief of staff, according to the first excerpt from Landslide, Michael Wolff’s third Trump White House exposé.The extract was published by New York magazine. Wolff’s first Trump book, Fire and Fury, blew up a news cycle and created a whole new genre of salacious political books in January 2018, when the Guardian revealed news of its contents.That book was a huge bestseller. A sequel, Siege, also contained bombshells but fared less well. Wolff’s third Trump book is among a slew due this summer.On 6 January, Congress met to confirm results of an election Trump lost conclusively to Joe Biden. Trump spoke to supporters outside the White House, telling them: “We’re going to walk down [to the Capitol to protest] – and I’ll be there with you.”According to Wolff, the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was reportedly approached by concerned Secret Service agents, who he told: “No. There’s no way we are going to the Capitol.”Wolff, one of a number of authors to have interviewed Trump since he left power, writes that the chief of staff then approached Trump, who seemed unsure what Meadows was talking about.“You said you were going to march with them to the Capitol,” Meadows reportedly said. “How would we do that? We can’t organize that. We can’t.”“I didn’t mean it literally,” Trump reportedly replied.Trump is also reported to have expressed “puzzlement” about the supporters who broke into the Capitol in a riot which led to five deaths and Trump’s second impeachment, for inciting an insurrection.Wolff says Trump was confused by “who these people were with their low-rent ‘trailer camp’ bearing and their ‘get-ups’, once joking that he should have invested in a chain of tattoo parlors and shaking his head about ‘the great unwashed’.”Trump and his family watched the attack on television at the White House.As reported by Wolff, the exchange between Trump and Meadows sheds light on how the would-be insurrectionists were abandoned.The White House, Wolff writes, soon realised Mike Pence had “concluded that he was not able to reject votes unilaterally or, in effect, to do anything else, beyond playing his ceremonial role, that the president might want him to do”.Trump aide Jason Miller is portrayed as saying “Oh, shit” and alerting the president’s lawyer and chief cheerleader for his lie about electoral fraud, Rudy Giuliani.Wolff writes that the former New York mayor was “drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania”.As the riot escalated – soon after Trump issued a tweet attacking the vice-president – aides reportedly pressed the president to command his followers to stand down.Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, reportedly saw the assault on the Capitol as “an optics issue”. After an hour or so, Wolff writes, Trump “seemed to begin the transition from seeing the mob as people protesting the election – defending him so he would defend them – to seeing them as ‘not our people’”.In a further exchange, Trump reportedly asked Meadows: “How bad is this? This looks terrible. This is really bad. Who are these people? These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits. They look like Democrats.”Trump reportedly added: “We didn’t tell people to do something like this. We told people to be peaceful. I even said ‘peaceful’ and ‘patriotic’ in my speech!” More

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      The Constitution of Knowledge review: defending truth from Trump

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      Jonathan Rauch is among America’s more thoughtful and rigorously honest public intellectuals. In his new book, he addresses the rise of disinformation and its pernicious effects on democratic culture.Through an analogy to the US constitution, he posits that the “values and rules and institutions” of “liberal science” effectively serve as “a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways. And so I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge.”What he calls the “reality based community [is] the social network which adheres to liberal science’s rules and norms … objectivity, factuality, rationality: they live not just within individuals’ minds and practices but on the network”. This community includes not only the hard sciences but also such fields as scholarship, journalism, government and law, in a “marketplace of persuasion” driven by pursuit of truth under clear standards of objectivity.Rauch puts the Trump era at the heart of the challenge, as Trump felt no “accountability to truth”, telling reporter Lesley Stahl that he did so to “demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you”.To Rauch, “Trump and his media echo chambers [lied] because their goal was to denude the public’s capacity to make any distinctions.” Thus “every truth was met not just with denial but with inversion … to convey … that the leader was the supreme authority”.The result is a crisis of democracy. As Senator Ben Sasse warned, “A republic will not work if we don’t have shared facts.” What emerges, in Rauch’s term, as “epistemic tribalism” effectively denies “the concept of objective knowledge [which] is inherently social”.There is much here and the diagnosis is superb, with clear explanations of how and why disinformation spreads. Rauch finds glimmers of hope and positive change, as digital media act “more like publishers … crafting epistemic standards and norms”. Solutions, though, involve self-regulation rather than government action. Rauch cites Twitter’s Jack Dorsey in noting “that the battle against misinformation and abusive online behavior would be won more by product design than by policy design”.True, yet Rauch admits there are “no comprehensive solutions to the disinformation threat”, instead hoping for reactions that will promote “something like a stronger immune system … less vulnerable”.Rauch is a “radical incrementalist”. Hearty praise for John Stuart Mill makes clear that he seeks solutions principally from within classical liberalism, which the analogy to a social network reinforces: individuals working as a community, not a collective. Thus he shies from using government to enforce adherence to the Constitution of Knowledge.“Cause for alarm, yes,” Rauch writes. “Cause for fatalism – no.”Surely there is a third perspective. Referring to a director of the National Institutes of Health known for rigorous science and deep faith, Rauch states that “a person who applied the Constitution of Knowledge to every daily situation would be Sherlock Holmes or Mr Spock: an otherworldly fictional character. In fact, when I compare Francis Collins’s worldview with my own, I think mine is the more impoverished. He has access to two epistemic realms; I, only one.”It shows Rauch’s generosity of spirit and intellectual integrity that he recognizes the validity and worth of other epistemic realms. They may, in fact, be a clue to solving the broader problem.Does the constitutional order contain sufficient self-correcting mechanism? Rauch’s response, in a forceful and heartfelt final chapter, is to renew engagement in defence of truth. This is right so far as it goes. Waving the white flag, or silence (as Mill, not Burke noted) enables and ensures defeat in the face of attacks on the concept of truth. It’s good that “Wikipedia figured out how to bring the Constitution of Knowledge online”, but that only works with a presumed universal acceptance of truth, a challenge in an era where a 2018 MIT study found falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than truths.One may heartily agree with Solzhenitsyn (whom Rauch quotes) that “one word of truth outweighs the world” and yet note with horror (as Rauch does) that a few powerful algorithms can overwhelm it in the heat of a tech-amplified campaign.Does individual action mean fervent defence in response to every inaccurate social media post? How to judge? (The individual rational response is generally to ignore the false post, hence the collective action issue.) And would that defence guarantee success when disinformation has destroyed trust in institutions and in the concept of truth itself?Rauch’s optimism is infectious but it may fall short. The reality-based community seems no longer to have a hold on the common mind, weakening its power in the face of organized and mechanical opposition.Shorn of an appeal to what Lincoln termed the “mystic chords of memory” – itself not subject to empirical verification – how does the reality-based community avoid consignment to the margins? If a pandemic hasn’t convinced many people of the truth of science, what will?Calling for “more truth” may not be enough when people don’t want to know the truth or cannot tell what it is. If “Trump was waging warfare against the American body politic”, why should that body not respond collectively? Lincoln’s appeal – a strong use of political savvy and rhetoric to call his hearers to something beyond ourselves – can help.That is Rauch’s challenge – and ours. One may agree with him about the progress of science and support its extension to fields of social and political science. But the very urgency of the situation demands wise prediction on whether that will be sufficient. Rauch states his case as well as possible, but repairing the breaches in the body politic may require more than he is willing to endorse.Rauch begins with Socrates (“the sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher”) and describes continued debate towards truth in Socrates’ words: “Let us meet here again.”Indeed, and with Rauch, we will. In the meanwhile, less Mill, more Lincoln. More