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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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      Stephen Cohen obituary

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      The scholar of Russian history and politics Stephen Cohen, who has died aged 81 of lung cancer, challenged the orthodox western analysis of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet affairs. In his magisterial book Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives (2009), he demolished the claim that Leninism led inevitably to totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin and that the Soviet system of one-party rule and state ownership of property could never be reformed.He cited three periods when developments could have gone differently from what actually happened: in the late 1920s, when debates within the Politburo came to a head over the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed for private enterprise and ownership of land and property; in the early 60s, when Nikita Khrushchev launched key political reforms; and in 1990 and 1991, after Mikhail Gorbachev introduced a mixed economy and social democratic solutions based on political pluralism in place of the Communist party’s monopoly of power.With his sense of humour, gravelly voice and iconoclastic arguments, Cohen entranced generations of students from his academic perch at Princeton University for the three decades from 1968, in which he rose to be professor of politics and Russian studies, and then at New York University (1998-2011).He wrote a column in the Nation, under the byline Sovieticus from 1982 to 1987 and in recent years hosted a weekly radio broadcast on Russian-American relations, which he feared were leading to a new cold war. He blamed Bill Clinton and policymakers in Washington for failing to include Russia in a new European order after the Soviet Union came to an end and for expanding Nato eastwards in a spirit of “we won” triumphalism. George W Bush and Barack Obama compounded the failure by siting US anti-ballistic missile systems on Russia’s borders.During the Soviet period Cohen was unusual among western specialists on Russia in having friends among dissidents as well as reformist intellectuals in the Moscow thinktanks. His book The Victims Return was based on interviews with dozens of survivors of Stalin’s labour camps about their problems in returning to freedom.Amid the new freedoms permitt- ed by Gorbachev after 1985, Cohen and his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher and editor of the Nation, made frequent long trips to Moscow and got to know the new Soviet leader personally. At one of the last May Day celebrations in Red Square, Gorbachev invited them both to stand beside the Lenin mausoleum to watch the parade. More

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      Brought to book: how a publishing gold rush pinned Trump to the page

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      Donald Trump is not a reader but to the publishing industry he is the gift that keeps on giving. His time in the White House has yielded an avalanche of books with titles like Fear, Rage, Unhinged and Fire and Fury. Together, they paint a withering portrait of the 45th president.Some crackle with the fury of scorned employees. Others are banquets of gossip by seasoned reporters, whether highbrow (Bob Woodward) or lowbrow (Michael Wolff). One is by a member of Trump’s own family: Mary Trump who put her estranged uncle in the psychiatrist’s chair.To anyone seeking to understand the presidency of Donald Trump, such books are a goldmine that offer startling insights into his character, personality and mental state.Here are six categories to guide you through the canon:Sex and race“Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump,” was the bold prediction of Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on The Apprentice, on PBS Frontline in 2016. Fired from the White House the following year, she turned on Trump in a book that proved single-word titles are deadly: Unhinged.“It had finally sunk in that the person I’d thought I’d known so well for so long was actually a racist,” Manigault Newman writes. “Using the N-word was not just the way he talks but, more disturbing, it was how he thought of me and African Americans as a whole.”This year’s Republican convention devoted a segment to working mothers at the White House, seeking to cast Trump as an improbable feminist. The literature tells a different story. A Very Stable Genius, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, reports the president complained that Kirstjen Nielsen, his homeland security secretary, did not “look the part”, and that he “abused”, “harassed” and “pestered” her over immigration policy.The demonization of immigrants is a constant theme. A Warning, by Anonymous, alleges Trump proposed classifying all undocumented migrants as “enemy combatants”, the same status as captured members of al-Qaida, which would thus have dispatched them to Guantánamo Bay. More