Books

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Anonymous Trump critic revealed to be ex-homeland security chief of staff

      by

      The identity of Anonymous, a Trump official who claimed there was a “a quiet resistance” within the administration working to save America in a 2018 New York Times op-ed, has been revealed as Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security.
      The penning of the article, and a subsequent book on the same theme, sparked a slew of media coverage and wild Washington speculation as to the identity of the author. It also angered Donald Trump and many of his top officials, who launched a frantic and unsuccessful hunt for the mole throughout the White House staff and beyond.
      In a statement Taylor said: “I am a Republican, and I wanted this president to succeed.” But he added: “But too often in times of crisis, Donald Trump has proven he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives.” More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Kleptopia review: power, theft and Trump as leader in Putin’s own image

      by

      In a year dominated by a US presidential election between a kleptocrat and a democrat, a book about world-class thieves laundering trillions ought be the perfect bedtime reading for anyone curious about the unprecedented amounts of money that have been looted and hidden over the last 20 years.Tom Burgis, a reporter for the Financial Times, is certainly an impressive investigator. He works hard to explain how myriad financial institutions, from the Bank of New York to Merrill Lynch and HSBC, have tried to deceive regulators and wash the ill-gotten gains of countless dictators.The oligarchs of Putin’s Russia are big players in these pages. So are Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, British bankers turned regulators, a trio of Central Asian billionaires, and no fewer than 30 other major characters, all listed at the beginning.This results in so many competing storylines that it becomes almost impossible to keep track. We bounce back and forth, from the Russian and Italian gangsters of Brooklyn to the oil fields of the former Soviet Union, from the platinum mines of Zimbabwe to the copper and cobalt of the Congo.Burgis draws useful parallels between Putin’s kleptocracy and Hitler’s GermanyThere are long sections about the wholesale theft of natural resources in post-Soviet Russia and the birth of the oligarchs, all of whom were forced to become Putin’s partners – or face imprisonment or death. For example, the purchase of a three-quarter stake in Yukos, for $350m, made Mikhail Khodorkovsky the richest man in Russia. Five years later, the vast oil company with 100,000 employees was worth $12bn. Khodorkovsky was arrested, jailed and eventually sent into exile.Burgis draws useful parallels between Putin’s kleptocracy and Hitler’s Germany, each home to both a “normative state” that generally respects its own laws and a “prerogative state” that violates most of them.According to the German-Jewish lawyer who was the author of the theory in the 1930s, “Nazi Germany was not a straightforward totalitarian system. It retained some vestiges of the rule of law, chiefly in matters of business, so that the capitalist economy had the basic rules it needed to keep going. But the prerogative state – Hitler’s political machinery – enjoyed … ‘jurisdiction over jurisdiction.”Trump helped to construct a new ‘global alliance of kleptocrats’. Their whole goal is the privatization of powerPutin has used his jurisdiction over everything to vanquish almost all of his enemies. And since Donald Trump has been collaborating with Russians in one way or another for almost 40 years, our kleptocrat-in-chief does finally make an appearance in Kleptopia, on page 250. After we’ve read a lot about Felix Sater, a second-generation Russian mobster connected to several schemes including the Trump Soho in lower Manhattan, Trump is identified as the “crucial ingredient” in Sater’s “magic potion for transforming dirty money”.Once the ratings of The Apprentice had washed away the public memory of multiple bankruptcies and “reinvented” his name as “a success”, Trump’s role in real estate deals became simply to “rent out his name”.“The projects could go bust,” Burgis writes, and “they usually did – but that wasn’t a problem.” The money had completed “its metamorphoses from plunder to clean capital”.Then there was the notorious sale of Trump’s Palm Beach mansion, to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95m, more than twice what Trump paid a few years before. According to Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, Trump thought the real buyer was Putin – a story which hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it should.With his election as president, as Burgis puts it, Trump helped to construct a new “global alliance of kleptocrats”. Their whole goal is the privatization of power, and they control “the three great poles” – the US, China and Russia.In our new world of alternate facts, corruption is “no longer a sign of a failing state, but of a state succeeding in its new purpose”. The new kleptocrats have subverted their nations’ institutions, “to seize for themselves that which rightfully belonged to the commonwealth”.This is a ghastly and very important story. But the secret to great storytelling is knowing what to leave out. If Burgis had found a more focused way to tell this one, he would have written a much more powerful book. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Wicked Game review: a fascinating but flawed memoir by Trump's jailed associate

      by

      Under a title which calls to mind Chris Isaak’s hit song from 1989, the former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates offers an interesting mixture of vignettes and dish, an effort to rewrite the history of 2016 before the 2020 election is over. Wicked Game is surprisingly readable and will leave process junkies with plenty to chew on.Making sausage is seldom pretty. The book reminds us that even after Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president, with his win in the Indiana primary on 3 May 2016, the convention was more than two months away. Trump’s opponents had plenty of time to organize one last challenge.Convention fights are rare – but possible. In 1980, Ted Kennedy mounted an attempt to wrest the Democratic nomination away from Jimmy Carter, the incumbent president, on the floor of Madison Square Garden. He lost. Four years before, Ronald Reagan came close to unseating Gerald Ford. In helping the president push back, Paul Manafort won his spurs.As a rookie candidate, Trump never recognized that he could be displaced. But Manafort and Gates did. Catapulted into the Trump campaign by the businessman Tom Barrack and the profane prankster Roger Stone, they took names and put down a prospective revolt before the convention got going. In the primaries, letting Trump be Trump worked. Nailing down the nomination required different skills. Patience and attention to detail mattered.And yet, in Trump’s universe, almost no one lasts, be they wives or staffers. Manafort would be forced out in favor of Steve Bannon, Trumpworld’s dark lord who would in turn be ousted from the White House and now stands under federal indictment.The Trump campaign was a hazardous place to be. Gates emerged as Barrack’s deputy on the inaugural committee. But in the end, while a jury convicted Manafort on charges arising from special counsel Robert Mueller’s campaign investigation, Gates copped a guilty plea, cooperated and was sentenced to 45 days in jail.Despite it all, Trump 2016 kept its eye on the prize, first winning the nomination, then the electoral college. Its message was venomously acrid – but somehow coherent. It got the biggest things right. Four years later, candidate and minions are distracted. Trump’s rallies are borscht belt shtick infused with anger and self-pity, the backdrop a mounting death toll. The US is far from turning the corner against the coronavirus. The grim reaper stalks the land.What worked against Hillary Clinton is coming up short against Joe Biden, everyone’s favorite uncle. When a “billionaire” sitting president has less cash on hand than his challenger, in the final days of a campaign, something has gone wrong.As for scoop, Gates lets the reader know Mike Pence was not the vice-presidential pick of Trump’s dreams. The Indiana governor had tepidly backed Ted Cruz. As Gates reminds us, Trump is not one to forget.And then there was Ivanka.“She’s bright, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, and the people would love her!” her father gushed, according to Gates, who italicizes his reaction: “OK … He’s not joking.”It turned out Pence was a good pick: all the loyalty of a puppy without the need to housebreak. Unlike Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich, the two other actual finalists, Pence conveyed a degree of stability and helped with white evangelicals, a key constituency that has stuck with Trump throughout. The former governor also brought that beatific gaze.By contrast, Christie labored under the cloud of Bridgegate and Gingrich had a personality that sucked all the air out of the room. Trump would not abide competition. As Trump put it, in Gates’s telling, “there was something wrong and off” about the former House speaker. Gingrich’s wife was appointed ambassador to the Vatican – a consolation prize.Twisting the knife, Gates also announces that Gingrich was Jared and Ivanka’s pick. It would neither be the first nor last time the dauphins would get things wrong. Kushner thought firing James Comey would bring bipartisan plaudits. We all know it did not.Instead, firing Comey triggered a two-year special counsel investigation that snared Gates and Manafort, enveloped the president and helped hand the House to the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi should send Kushner chocolates.Gates’s judgments can be premature. He lavishes praise on Brad Parscale, data guy to the 2016 campaign, now former campaign manager for 2020. Gates describes Parscale’s data operations as invaluable but adds, inauspiciously, that they continue “to this day”.Not quite. First, Parscale grossly overestimated the demand for a June rally in Oklahoma which apparently resulted in the sad death of Herman Cain, a contender for the 2012 nomination and ardent supporter of the president who contracted Covid-19. Ultimately, Parscale was dismissed. In September, he was hospitalized, after menacing his wife and threatening to harm himself.Gates also goes all-in on denouncing Robert Mueller and attacking any suggestion of “collusion” with Russia. Here too, he may have gotten over his skis.According to the Senate intelligence committee’s final report, Russia and WikiLeaks coordinated on interference in the 2016 election, while the Trump campaign “tracked” news about WikiLeaks, “Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and the press team” paying heed to Julian Assange’s document dumps.Gates emerges from his own book as a sympathetic figure, too low on the totem pole to be a driving force, close enough to the sun to get badly burned. If nothing else, his Wicked Game is a morality tale for our times. As Isaak sang: “Strange what desire will make foolish people do.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Traitor review: American perfidy, from Benedict Arnold to Donald J Trump

      by

      One of the most important qualities a good reporter can have is a very low threshold for outrage. Useful, critical coverage of your subject becomes impossible once nonchalance or indifference has inured you to scandal.This has become a huge problem during Donald Trump’s presidency. Inside the souls of far too many Washington reporters, a never-ending wave of scandals, crimes, indictments and assorted obstructions of justice has washed away this essential capacity for indignation – just when the republic needs it most.That’s why a book like David Rothkopf’s Traitor still serves a vital purpose, even after dozens of other books and thousands of articles about the president’s felonious behavior. A former senior official in the Clinton administration and editor of Foreign Policy who has taught at Columbia and Georgetown, Rothkopf still has all of the anger a good chronicler of the Trump administration requires.“Trump is despicable,” he writes. “But beyond his defective or perhaps even non-existent character, there are the near-term and lasting consequences of his actions. We must understand these to reverse them, and we must understand how easily Russia achieved its objectives in order to prevent such catastrophes in the future.”Our president is the literal Manchurian Candidate, without the denouement which made the movie feel more like a cautionRussia’s success in putting Trump in office, he writes, “has to be seen as perhaps the most successful international intelligence operation of modern times”. Rothkopf is implying that our president is the literal Manchurian Candidate, without the denouement which made the movie feel more like a caution than a foreshadowing.Drawing on the Mueller report, assorted congressional investigations and the work of the capital’s still-functioning reporters, Rothkopf provides an important roadmap through the massive evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret services – including 272 contacts between “Trump team members and Russian-linked individuals, in almost 40 meetings”, noting that “at least 33 high-ranking campaign officials, and Trump advisers” were aware of these contacts, including, of course, Trump himself.In between detailing Trump’s transgressions at the beginning and the end of this compact volume, Rothkopf provides a brisk history of many other Americans rightly or wrongly accused of treason, from Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr to Robert E Lee and Alger Hiss. He drops in plenty of of interesting historical tidbits, like the fact Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born a hundred miles and less than a year apart.He’s particularly good on John Brown, the violent abolitionist who was convicted of treason against the state of Virginia. Victor Hugo called him a hero and predicted that if he wasn’t pardoned, it would “certainly shake the whole American democracy”. But instead of a pardon, there was a prompt hanging – witnessed by both Walt Whitman and John Wilkes Booth. And of course Brown’s death also inspired the writing of what eventually became The Battle Hymn of the Republic. When it was first sung by Union soldiers during the civil war, the essential lines were “John Brown’s body lies a mouldering in the grave, His Soul’s marching on!”Back on the main subject, of our modern traitor, Rothkopf is appropriately harsh about the shortcomings of Robert Mueller, including his failure as special counsel to secure an in-person interview with the president and his refusal to indict the president for any of the crimes his report describes, including as many as 10 counts of obstruction of justice.Mueller was relying on a famous justice department memo of 2000 which rules out the indictment of sitting presidents, but which has never been litigated in federal court.“There is no question in my mind that the memo is wrong,” writes Rothkopf, whose view is shared by the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. “But what is salient here is that by embracing its views, Mueller was relieved of the obligation to do what prosecutors do, and that is to make a charging decision.” More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      American Crisis review: Andrew Cuomo on Covid, Trump … and a job with Joe Biden?

      by

      On Thursday, the US reported 65,000 new cases of Covid-19 and Donald Trump falsely told a television town hall 85% of people who wear masks contract the disease. With more than two weeks to the election and a record-shattering 17 million Americans having already voted, the rhythms and tropes of the past seven months will only intensify between now and 3 November.Early in the pandemic, Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings emerged as must-see television, counter-programming to the campaign commercials that masqueraded as presidential press conferences. The New York governor was forthright and reassuring, even as the body count mounted.Covid-related deaths in the Empire State now exceed 25,000, the highest in the US. New York was both frontline and lab experiment. What happened there foreshadowed national tragedy. Red states were not immune. Right now, the plague rages in the heartland.Cuomo’s new book, subtitled Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic, is his effort to shape perceptions of his own performance amid the pandemic while pointing a damning finger at Trump and Bill de Blasio, New York City’s woefully inept mayor. Like the governor, American Crisis is informative and direct – but not exciting.I believe that this was on a par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl HarborAndrew CuomoThe book reads like a campaign autobiography except that Cuomo, by his own admission, will never run for president. It contains its share of heroes, villains and family vignettes. Cuomo’s three daughters appear throughout.Like the governor, American Crisis is programmatic, neither poetic nor poignant. Indeed, in a final chapter tritely titled A Blueprint for Going Forward, the governor offers 28 pages of policy proposals.Covid has taken nearly 220,000 American lives. The US suffered 58,000 combat deaths in Vietnam, 116,000 in the first world war. Only the second world war, the civil war and the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 resulted in greater casualties.Not surprisingly, Cuomo saves his harshest words for the Trump administration: “New York was ambushed by Covid. I believe that this was on a par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl Harbor.”On that score, Cuomo compares Trump to FDR and of course finds him wanting. The administration did deliver early warnings – to members of the financial community and Republican donors. With that in mind, Cuomo’s take is almost mild.Cuomo’s relationship with the president was already fraught. On top of Trump and congressional Republicans capping deductions for state and local taxes, the governor acknowledges fighting with the administration over “immigration policy, environmental policy, you name it”. He adds: “I found his pandering to the far right alternately disingenuous and repugnant.”American Crisis also relays a conversation with the president in which the governor urged the former resident of Queens, a borough of New York City, to invoke the Defense Production Act and mandate private industry to produce tests and personal protective equipment. Trump declined, claiming such a move would smack of “big government” – as opposed to issuing diktats to big tech, directing that companies relocate, unilaterally imposing tariffs on imports and offering private briefings to those favored by the administration.Time has passed. In the 1980s, Governor Mario Cuomo and his son Andrew were Trump allies, of a sort. Back then, Trump retained the services of twentysomething Andrew Cuomo’s law firm, in connection with commercial leases on Manhattan’s West Side. According to Trump, they were “representing us in a very significant transaction”. Not any more.The president is not the only member of the administration to come in for criticism. Mark Meadows, the latest White House chief of staff, receives a large dollop of Cuomo’s wrath. In Cuomo’s telling, Meadows conditioned assistance to New York on it conveying hospital test results for hydroxychloroquine, Trump’s one-time Covid treatment of choice.Cuomo said the state would provide the test data once it was available, not before. Meadows told him the federal government was ready to release hospital funding to states, but “strongly implied” that if the test results did not soon arrive, New York would not “receive any funding”. To Cuomo, that reeked of extortion. More