More stories

  • in

    Abigail Disney evokes Old Yeller in plea to reject Republicans after Kristi Noem kills dog

    Evoking the classic Disney tearjerker Old Yeller, in which a family is forced to put down their beloved dog, the US film-maker and campaigner Abigail Disney exhorted voters to oppose the Republican party of Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor whose story of killing Cricket, a 14-month-old dog, shocked the world and seemingly dynamited her hopes of being Donald Trump’s running mate.“My great-uncle Walt Disney knew the magic place animals have in the hearts of families everywhere,” Disney wrote in an email released by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and obtained exclusively by the Guardian.“When he released Old Yeller, the heart wrenching story stayed with people because no one takes the killing of a family pet lightly.“At least that’s what I thought until I read about potential Trump VP Kristi Noem shooting her family’s puppy – a story that has shocked so many of us.”Noem describes the day she killed Cricket (and an unnamed goat) in No Going Back, a campaign memoir published this week but first reported late last month by the Guardian.Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, met her fate in a gravel pit because Noem deemed her “untrainable” after she disrupted a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbour’s chickens. The goat, which had not been castrated, was deemed too aggressive and smelly and a danger to Noem’s children. By the governor’s own admission, it took two blasts with a shotgun to finish the goat off.Noem has repeatedly defended her story as indicative of her willingness to do unpleasant but necessary things in life as well as politics. Nonetheless, she has reportedly slipped way down Donald Trump’s list of possible vice-presidential picks, should the presumptive Republican nominee avoid prison on any of 88 criminal charges and should he beat Biden in November.Two weeks after the Guardian report, shock and revulsion over Noem’s story continues to ring throughout the US. This week, amid a string of uncomfortable interviews even on usually friendly rightwing networks, also questioning an untrue claim to have met the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, the governor cut short a promotional tour for her book.In her email in support of the PCCC, Disney said: “Walt Disney also understood story telling. Together, we must make sure all voters see how this sad Kristi Noem episode is part of the larger story of the 2024 election: America could vote into the White House extremists that glorify cruelty and lack basic empathy and compassion.”View image in fullscreenAsking readers to post pictures of beloved pets and the hashtag #UnleashTheVote, Disney also promoted a petition against “Trump and extreme Republicans who lack the character to lead our nation”.Old Yeller, which the Guardian called “one of the best and most poignant boy-and-his dog movies”, was released in 1957. It tells the story of a family in Texas in 1869 that adopts a large yellow dog.Disney said: “In Old Yeller, the family comes to see the lovable stray dog as an indispensable member of the family. The film’s climactic moment is a heartbreaking one, when the father has no choice but to shoot Old Yeller when the dog contracts rabies because of the inevitable threat to their lives – and, out of compassion, to end the suffering the dog would have to endure.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Noem shot her family’s 14-month-old puppy after a hunting trip, in her own account, because she was too hard to teach. ‘I hated that dog,’ she wrote, framing the killing of a puppy as an example of strength.“Kristi Noem is not strong. Like Trump, she is cruel and selfish.”Listing positions taken by Trump and supporters like Noem, Disney said: “If Kristi Noem was actually strong, she would stand up to the January 6 insurrectionists instead of celebrating them. Or she would make billionaires pay their fair share of taxes instead of lining up for their campaign donations.“If she had real courage, she might even criticise the supreme court for abolishing abortion rights or making it easier to flood our streets and schools with guns.“True strength is not demonstrated through harshness, brutality, or callous indifference, but through steadfast kindness and compassion. Our pets teach most of us this lesson every day through their loyalty and unconditional love.“Let’s make sure Americans demand leaders who do the same when it comes time to vote.” More

  • in

    Sweat review – chilling vision of a divided, alienated America

    Although principally set in 2000, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning 2015 play anticipated Donald Trump’s presidency with its portrayal of a divided, frustrated and disfranchised community in the deindustrialising city of Reading, Pennsylvania. With Trump campaigning for a second term, the Royal Exchange’s revival is timely. Jade Lewis’s production ultimately presents a chilling vision of how job insecurity can destroy one’s sense of self and lead to the poisonous othering stoked by Trump.The stage design by Good Teeth studio has huge slabs suspended from the rafters, powerfully suggesting an industrial landscape hoisted away overnight. This in effect is what happens to the play’s steelworkers who, amid a dispute with management over pay cuts, are locked out of their plant, with their machines and jobs destined for Mexico as a result of the contentious North American Free Trade Agreement whose renegotiation was a Trump campaign pledge.This conflict is heightened by a familial dimension akin to Human Resources, the 1999 film by the late Laurent Cantet in which a management trainee is embroiled in job cuts that affect his father on the shop floor. Nottage’s play centres on African American Cynthia (Carla Henry) who works at the factory with her son Chris (Abdul Sessay) and has finally crossed the floor to become a supervisor only to encounter resentment, some of it racially fuelled, from her friends. Suspicious of her new colleagues (“I wonder if they gave me this job on purpose. Pin a target on me”), Cynthia is also alienated by her former neighbours at the machines.View image in fullscreenSimilarly targeted is Colombian American Oscar (Marcello Cruz) who works at the local bar and crosses the picket line to pick up factory shifts. He is labelled a traitor by workers whose union has long been a closed shop to him and the story, framed by the aftermath of a violent climax, has a lucid sense that blustering calls for solidarity usually conceal exceptions. Nottage gave the play an epigraph from Langston Hughes’ Let America Be America Again, in which the poet declares the country “never was America to me”.With its sparse, barely stocked bar-room design, Lewis’s production perfectly conveys the play’s desolation – embodied by Cynthia’s ex, the drug-addicted Brucie (Chris Jack), one of the bar’s regulars – but missing is the atmospheric, authentic sense of place that marked Lynette Linton’s blistering 2018 staging at the Donmar Warehouse. It’s not just in the occasionally wavering accents or oddly pristine costumes but in the bonds between the characters, which need to be more fully established for the play’s second half to detonate. While the cast convey the bodily toll of work, a visceral sense of physicality is missing in their confrontations. Further use of the revolve stage, which heightens some scenes, might have prevented the energy seeping from other exchanges.If it never finds the right rhythm, there are powerful performances, especially from Henry as the weary yet steadfast Cynthia, Pooky Quesnel as her rancorous friend Tracey and Cruz as the observant Oscar who captures the lived-in tone of Hughes’ poem, which evades Maga fantasy nostalgia in its call to simply “make America again”.
    At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 25 May More

  • in

    Civil War is a terrifying film, but Trump: The Sequel will be a real-life horror show | Simon Tisdall

    Director, cast and critics all agree: Civil War, the movie depicting America tearing itself to bloody bits while a cowardly, authoritarian president skulks in the White House, is not about Donald Trump. But it is, really.Likewise, the first ever criminal trial of a US president, now playing to huge audiences in New York, is ostensibly about claims that Trump fraudulently bought the silence of a former porn star called Stormy after a tacky Lake Tahoe tryst. But it isn’t, really.Both movie and trial are about a Trump second term. They’re about sex, lies and Access Hollywood videotape, about trust and betrayal, truth and division. They’re about democracy in America, where political feuds and vendettas swirl, guns proliferate and debates over civil rights are neither civil nor right.Alex Garland’s smash-hit “post-ideological” dystopian nightmare and the Manhattan courthouse peak-time showdown are both ultimately about the same things: the uses and abuses of power, about a nation’s journey to extremes where, as in Moby’s song, it falls apart.Talking of disintegration, what a diminished figure Trump now cuts in court. Slouched, round-shouldered and silenced alongside his lawyers, he acts up, sulky, aggrieved, childishly petulant. The room is cold, he whinges. Potential jurors rudely insult him to his face! It’s all so unfair.Trump never did dignified, not even in the Oval Office. Yet even by his tawdry standards, this daily demeaning before an unbending judge is irretrievably, publicly humiliating. The loss of face and sustaining swagger begin to look terminal. For Trump the alleged criminal conspirator, as opposed to Trump the presidential comeback king, the familiar campaign cry of “Four More Years!” has a disturbing ring. Four years in chokey is what he faces if found guilty on 34 felony charges.It’s no coincidence, so Trump camp followers believe, that Civil War premiered in election year. No surprise, either, that a Democratic district attorney pushed for the trial. Or that latest polling by the “liberal media” suggests Trump is losing ground to Joe Biden.Despite all that, the Make America Great Again screenplay is unchanging. Trump’s blockbuster second march on Washington is merely on pause, Maga-men say. He’s making an epic sequel and he’ll be back in November with all guns blazing – which is the problem, in a nutshell.If you doubt it, just look at Pennsylvania. Even as the defendant, dozy and defiant by turns, snoozed in court and slandered witnesses on social media, this same presumed 2024 Republican champion was effortlessly sweeping last week’s party primary with 83% of the vote.View image in fullscreenThere’s no real-world contradiction here. A grumpy Trump scowling at the bench and a Civil War-like wannabe dictator hot for White House power and glory are united in one unlovely, vicious personage. Two sides of the same bent cent. The list of Trump’s crimes for which he has yet to be tried extends far beyond the New York indictment and the charge sheets in three other pending cases. Like Tom Ripley, the sociopathic narcissist anti-hero of Netflix’s popular TV mini-series, Trump is violently dangerous beyond all knowing.The lethal 6 January insurrection he incited and applauded was stark treason against the republic. No argument. The racist relativism of Charlottesville in 2017 foreshadowed recent, unrepentant talk of “poisoning the blood of our country”. His corrosive words burn like acid through the social fabric. No Civil War paramilitary crazy could wish for more than Trump’s eager feeding of America’s gun addiction, support for domestic execution and assassination overseas, collaboration with murderous dictators, debasement of the supreme court and hostility to open government, free speech and impartial reporting.No Ripley-style conman or fraudster could hope to emulate the master criminal’s arm-twisting of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden’s son, Hunter, his political protection rackets and shameless nepotism, his suborning of his party, Congress and the legal system or his rich man’s contempt for the ordinary Joe who actually pays taxes.A prospective second Trump term presages obsessive score-settling at home and abject appeasement abroad. Judges, law officers, witnesses, female accusers, military men, diplomats, academics and critical media may be among the early victims of a national revenge tragedy – a personalised purge of the institutions of state that could prove fatal to democracy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s fawning obsequiousness towards Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and vendetta against Kyiv’s leadership, spell disaster for Ukraine. Nor can there be much confidence, for all his bluster, that he would stand up to China should it invade Taiwan.Prepare, too, for a likely European rupture and trade war, a Nato split and an unravelling of 75 years of transatlantic collaboration. Prepare for an out-of-control global arms race, unchecked nuclear weapons proliferation on Earth and in space and the wholesale abandonment of climate crisis goals. A Trump success in November, with all the ensuing chaos, schism and constitutional outrages, would bring closer both an end to peaceful, rational debate within America and the demise of US global leadership.So truly, is Civil War so very far off the mark? Is it really not about Trump and Trumpism? It’s certainly more comforting to frame the movie as an entertainment, to interpret its studied avoidance of direct references to present-day politics as reassurance that, at heart, it’s essentially make-believe. But that denialist view is itself a type of escapism or wishful thinking. It won’t silence the guns.In one untypical, symbolic scene, the war-weary photojournalist played by Kirsten Dunst, all body armour and pursed lips, tries on a pretty dress in a downtown store insulated from the fighting. It is as if she, like America, is trying, fleetingly, to recover her humanity.It’s unclear whether she succeeds. More hopeful moments like that, and a good deal less trumpery, are badly needed now. Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator
    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

  • in

    ‘Demolishing democracy’: how much danger does Christian nationalism pose?

    Bad Faith, a new documentary on the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States, opens with an obvious, ominous scene – the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 – though trained on details drowned out by the deluge of horror and easily recognizable images of chaos. That Paula White, Donald Trump’s faith adviser, led the Save America rally in a prayer to overturn the results for “a free and fair election”. That mixed among Trump flags, American flags and militia symbols were numerous banners with Christian crosses; on the steps of the Capitol, a “JESUS SAVES” sign blares mere feet from “Lock Them UP!”The movement to overturn the 2020 election for Donald Trump was, as the documentary underscores, inextricable from a certain strain of belief in America as a fundamentally Christian nation, separation of church and state be damned. In fact, as Bad Faith argues, Christian nationalism – a political movement to shape the United States according a certain interpretation of evangelical Christianity, by vote or, more recently, by coercion – was the “galvanizing force” behind the attempted hijacking of the democratic process three years ago.Bad Faith traces the origins of the movement as a savvy, disproportionately powerful political force, from churches to Republican political operatives to donors, either from conviction or convenience. “I think a lot of Americans have a very difficult time accepting and understanding the fact that such treason, such anti-democratic activity, could be carried out by people who basically look like Sunday school teachers,” Stephen Ujlaki, the film’s director, told the Guardian. By looking back on the half-century of Christian nationalist belief, organizing and action, the events of January 6 no longer seemed shocking, but the logical endpoint of anti-democratic ideals. “It was unmistakable, once you looked in the right place and you listened to what people were saying, and you understood how to decode what they were saying,” said Ujlaki. “Little would you know that when they talk about recreating the kingdom of God on earth, they weren’t talking about something spiritual. They were talking about demolishing democracy so that God, ie themselves, could rule. And for that reason, I call it a conspiracy carried out in broad daylight.”Though Christian nationalists are quick to invoke the founding fathers, whom they claim were directed by a Christian God, the conspiracy has its modern origins in the 1970s, when the Republican political organizer Paul Weyrich began uniting evangelical parishioners and televangelist preachers like Jerry Falwell with Republican party politics opposing desegregation, via a political action group called the Moral Majority. It’s not that evangelical Christians weren’t political – as the film, narrated by Peter Coyote, points out, the idea of America as a white Christian nation undergirded the Ku Klux Klan, which at its peak in 1924 claimed 8 million members, the vast majority of whom were white evangelicals, including 40,000 ministers.Accordingly, the crucial tie between white evangelicals and the Republican party came not from the 1972 ruling in Roe v Wade, as is often misattributed, but from opposition to a different ruling preventing racially segregated institutions – including schools and churches – from claiming charitable, tax-exempt status. The ruling brought segregated church leaders such as Falwell in alignment with Republican operatives like Weyrich, who cannily realized that emotional arguments against abortion would drive more grassroots support than openly racist talk against desegregation.Bad Faith highlights Christian nationalism’s “origins in the racism, and the segregation mentality, and you can draw a straight line from that to gerrymandering and voter suppression,” said Anne Nelson, a film participant and author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Christian nationalist supporters, she added, were “very skillful at … framing and branding and messaging, that makes something like voter suppression look like electoral integrity. And they do this time after time, on every front”.The film juxtaposes the decades-long roots of the movement with its evolving principles: that America was founded as a Christian nation, for and by Christians; that maintaining such a state is a divinely sanctioned, righteous fight; that anti-democratic or violent tactics should be employed in the name of God. And in recent years, that Donald Trump – a thrice-married, profligate cheater with too many character scandals to name – is, if not a true “Christian”, a divinely sanctioned “King Cyrus” figure sent to disrupt the secular order. “The divisiveness and the distrust of institutions that we’re seeing today was part of a plan,” said Ujlaki. “It was a result of an actual plan, successfully executed to get to this point. And once the institutions are weakened and people have lost faith in elections, there’s room for the strongman to come in.”View image in fullscreenIn addition to political experts contextualizing the growth and funding of Christian nationalism, Ujlaki also enlisted several prominent, faithful Christians to dispute another of the movement’s prominent myths: that it’s a true distillation of Christian teachings. “It is absolutely not Christian. It is anti-Christian,” said Ujlaki. He quoted the theologian Russell Moore, who calls the movement “heresy” in the film, as well as the Rev William Barber II, whose faith leads him to advocate for wealth redistribution, racial equality and social justice: “They may have their Trump, but they don’t have their Jesus.”“They don’t care about the actual Jesus,” said Ujlaki. That’s underscored by the money trail, followed by Nelson and others, which leads to several non-evangelical donors – the Koch brothers and more – who nevertheless benefit from the movement’s weakening of institutions and drive to the far right, as with the Tea Party movement in 2010. “They’re in bed together, based on economic principles, not theology,” said Nelson.And yet theology continues to drive an anti-democratic movement, for which January 6 was not a disaster but a starting point. Bad Faith ends with a note about Project 2025, announced in December 2023 by the Heritage Foundation. The 900-page document builds on Weyrich’s Conservative Manifesto and recommends, among other things: placing all independent government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Justice, under direct presidential control; purging government employees considered “disloyal” to the president; and deploying the military against American citizens under the Insurrection Act.Some of the recommendations sound far-fetched and extreme, but if Bad Faith has one point, it is to take Christian nationalism as a serious threat to democracy. “These people are not stupid,” said Nelson. “They’re incredibly strategic. They’re extremely good at organization, and they have a very, very long attention span. If they set out an objective, they will give it 40 years to play out, they will build organizations, they will go into electoral districts not a month before the election, but two years before the election, organizing voters.”In Nelson’s view, major media organizations misunderstood this in the run-up to January 6. “They look at these events as independent grassroots eruptions, like the Tea Party,” she said. “And they’re actually fully integrated as a strategy with massive coordinated funding and implementation. If you don’t see that, you miss the story.”
    Bad Faith is now available to rent digitally in the US with a UK date to be announced More

  • in

    Aaron Sorkin to write film about January 6 and Facebook disinformation

    Aaron Sorkin is set to write a film about the January 6 insurrection and the involvement of Facebook disinformation.The Social Network screenwriter is returning to similar territory for an as-yet-untitled look at how social media helped radicalise Donald Trump supporters who went onto storm the US Capitol in 2021.“I blame Facebook for January 6,” he said on a special edition of The Town podcast, live from Washington DC. When asked to explain why, he responded: “You’re gonna need to buy a movie ticket.”He then announced that he would be covering the subject in an upcoming project.“Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible,” he said. “Because that is what will increase engagement and because that is what will get you to, what they call inside the hallways of Facebook, the infinite scroll.”When asked whose responsibility that was, he replied: “Mark Zuckerberg.”He continued: “There is supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity, there isn’t. It’s just growth so if Mark Zuckerberg wakes up tomorrow and realises that there is nothing you can buy for $120bn that you can’t buy for $119bn, so how about if I make a little less money, I will tune up integrity and I will tune down growth.”Sorkin said he has yet to have a conversation with the Facebook CEO that isn’t “through the op-ed pages of the New York Times”.The writer-director’s 2010 adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires looked at the origins of the site and the early controversy surrounding it. The script won Sorkin his first Oscar.Sorkin was also asked about why he dropped his agent Maha Dakhil last year after she shared a post online that criticised Israel’s involvement in the ongoing conflict with Palestine which read: “You’re currently learning who supports genocide.”“She posted something on Instagram that I just didn’t understand,” he said before adding: “There were people in my family who would have been hurt if I stayed.”Last year saw Sorkin return to the stage with an adaptation of the musical Camelot, which received five Tony nominations but mixed reviews. His last film was 2021’s Being the Ricardos starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. More

  • in

    ‘We were going down fast’: how Benjamin Franklin saved America

    “A long life has taught me that diplomacy must never be a siege but a seduction,” says Michael Douglas’s Benjamin Franklin, raising a wine glass in a world of candlelit tables, baroque music and powdered wigs. “Think of America as a courted virgin. One that does not solicit favours but grants them. And nothing speaks to romance quite as loudly as a dowry worth half a hemisphere.”This is the first episode of Franklin, now streaming on Apple TV+, which tells the story of author, printer, postmaster, scientist, statesman and all-round Renaissance man Benjamin Franklin’s late-life secret mission to France, aimed at persuading the country to help America win the Revolutionary war and gain independence from Britain.The eight-part limited series is achingly sumptuous and splashily cast: Douglas, 79, is best known for roles including Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, Andrew Shepherd in The American President, Dan Gallagher in Fatal Attraction and Liberace in Behind the Candelabra. “Ben Franklin was as charismatic as he was complicated,” says Stacy Schiff, author of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, on which the series is based. “I’ve no idea how Michael did it, but in scene after scene he drives both points quietly home.“He seems to be able to speak a paragraph with the arch of an eyebrow. He spouts Franklin’s lines, channels his mannerisms, prints his pages, raises his grandson – all without recourse to a Ben Franklin makeover. I will admit that it’s startling, even a bit eerie, to hear him speaking lines of Franklin’s that I know to have slept in foreign archives for over 200 years and that have not been spoken aloud since.”Douglas’s father was a Hollywood titan; Franklin’s was a candle and soap maker from England who married twice and had 17 children. Born in Boston, Franklin left school aged 10 and began an apprenticeship in his brother’s print shop at 12. He ran away at 17, had a spell in London then set up a print shop in Philadelphia and began to publish the Pennsylvania Gazette.Franklin was a man of many talents. He helped establish Philadelphia’s first public library, police force and volunteer firefighting company and an academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. He became postmaster of Philadelphia and served as a clerk of the Pennsylvania legislature.Franklin began researching electricity in 1748 and, in an experiment, flew a kite in a thunderstorm to prove that lightning is an electrical discharge. He came up with inventions including bifocals, the medical catheter, the odometer and the Franklin stove, a wood-burning stove that made home heating safer. For nearly a decade Franklin represented Pennsylvania in London, where he testified before the British parliament about the colony’s hatred for the Stamp Act.He returned to America as the American Revolution drew near and was a delegate at the Continental Congress. He helped draft the Declaration of Independence and signed the final document. At the same time Franklin’s illegitimate son, William Franklin, emerged as a leader of the British loyalists (he was exiled to England in 1782 for his political views).In 1776 Congress dispatched Franklin to France to secure recognition of the new United States. But it was a gamble. Why send a 70-year-old with no prior diplomatic experience who could be hanged as a traitor if caught by the British? In an email interview, Schiff, who lives in New York, explains: “Already Franklin had crossed the ocean seven times; he had more experience of the world beyond American shores than any other congressional delegate.“He was dimly understood to speak French. He was a masterful negotiator and – as the only thing the colonies had by way of a senior statesman – the unanimous choice of Congress. The obvious candidate on one side of the the ocean turned out to be the ideal one on the other; Congress had no idea they were sending a sort of walking Statue of Liberty to France, where Franklin was already a celebrity, for his scientific work.”View image in fullscreenAfter a 38-day voyage across the Atlantic, Franklin – who brought two grandsons, 16-year-old William Temple Franklin and seven-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache – was warmly greeted as the most famous American in the world. Schiff adds: “He seemed to the French to have walked out of the pages of Rousseau; he was hailed as the man who had tamed the lightning. Mobbed on his arrival, he soon saw his portrait reproduced on walking sticks and wallpaper. The callers were continuous; he came to dread, as he put it, the sound of every carriage in his courtyard.”With New York having just fallen to the British army, Franklin threw himself into the all-important effort to secure French support for the American cause. Charming and witty, and trading on his novelty value as an “American”, he cultivated relationships with King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette and the French minister of foreign affairs, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes. The TV dramatisation finds Douglas’s Franklin outfoxing British spies, French informers and hostile colleagues.Schiff reflects: “Franklin considered his eight and a half years in France the most critical – and the most taxing – assignment of his life. At the same time it’s the chapter of his life about which we know the least, partly because it takes place abroad, partly because it takes place in a foreign language, partly because the documentation for the Paris years is difficult to access.“I wanted to know how Franklin had pulled off a feat of statecraft that made the Revolution possible – and what that errand told us about Ben Franklin. Sometimes you can see a biographical subject best when he is out of context, stumbling about in a language not his own. This chapter felt a little like Franklin laid bare. He was after all on what sounded like a fool’s errand: it was his job to convince an absolute monarch to help found a republic.”Diplomats and historians still regard it as the greatest single tour of duty by an ambassador in American history. Franklin pushed a reliable button: French hatred for the British. He could also point to some battlefield successes to convince them that America had a decent chance of winning.After two years, he secured two treaties that included political recognition for the United States. The French government provided military assistance, including troops, naval support and supplies. The support was vital to the pivotal triumph of the Continental Army at Yorktown in 1781. Without French aid, the American Revolution would probably have failed; with it, the British were defeated.Douglas told the New York Times last week: “I did not realize to what degree, if it was not for France, we would not have had a free America. It would have been a colony, absolutely. We were going down fast.”View image in fullscreenOutside the White House today is Lafayette Park, where a the bronze statue is thought to portray the Marquis de Lafayette petitioning the French national assembly for help for the Americans in the fight for independence. Whenever a French president visits the White House today, the US president invariably refers to “our oldest ally”.Schiff reflects: “The war could not have been fought without the arms, money and munitions that Franklin winkled out of the French government, both before and after the 1778 alliance. At the time of Franklin’s arrival in France Washington’s army had something like five rounds of powder to a man.“The world wondered, Franklin wrote, why the Americans never fired a cannon. The reason was that they could not afford to do so. Independence rested squarely on the assistance, and the alliance, that he engineered abroad.”With John Jay and John Adams, Franklin negotiated the Treaty of Paris with Britain, confirming its acceptance of a “free, sovereign and independent” United States, which was signed in 1783.But Schiff adds: “For the posting Franklin received no syllable of gratitude. Once the peace had been signed it was preferable to think that American independence had been won by America; the foreign assist was largely written out of the picture, Franklin’s French mission with it.”Franklin, who died in 1790 aged 84, does at least enjoy recognition today in books, museums, a recent Ken Burns documentary and now the Apple TV+ series directed by Tim Van Patten (Masters of the Air, The Sopranos). There is also a statue of him in front of the Old Post Office on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of what used to be the Trump International hotel.Indeed, in an era when American democracy seems unduly fragile, politicians and commentators are fond of recalling the story that, when exiting the Constitutional Convention, Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. He replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”So what would Franklin make of Donald Trump and the divisions in America today? Schiff says: “Party politics would have horrified all of the founders. Franklin believed especially fervently in selfless public service. ‘The less the profit,’ as he put it, ‘the greater the honor.’ Enough said.”
    Franklin is now showing on Apple TV+ More

  • in

    Tulsi Gabbard repeats false Hillary Clinton ‘grooming’ claim in new book

    Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman, has repeated a discredited claim about Hillary Clinton that previously saw Gabbard lodge then drop a $50m defamation suit in a new book published as she seeks to be named Donald Trump’s running mate for US president.Accusing Democrats of making up “a conspiracy theory that [Trump] was ‘colluding’ with the Russians to win the election” in 2016, Gabbard claims: “Hillary Clinton used a similar tactic against me when I ran for president in 2020, accusing me of being ‘groomed by the Russians’.”Gabbard ran for the Democratic nomination. Clinton did not accuse her of being “groomed by the Russians”.What Clinton said, in October 2019 and on a podcast hosted by the former Barack Obama adviser David Plouffe, was that she thought Republicans would encourage a third-party bid in 2020, aiming to syphon votes from the Democratic candidate in key states as Jill Stein, the Green candidate, and the Libertarian, Gary Johnson, did four years before.“They are also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said, “and I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”Gabbard was then in the Democratic primary, though she never made any impact.Clinton continued: “She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. And, that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset. Totally. And so they know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee they’ll have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most need it.”Amid uproar, a spokesperson for Clinton said she had been referring to Gabbard and the Russians – saying “If the nesting doll fits”, thereby stoking media coverage in which Clinton’s remarks about “grooming” and “assets” were conflated.Clinton’s meaning was soon cleared up, but Gabbard seized on the “grooming” remark. She penned an op ed in the Wall Street Journal under a headline, I Can Defeat Trump and the Clinton Doctrine, that might now prove an awkward fit with her political ambitions.Later, after dropping out of the Democratic primary and endorsing Joe Biden, who she said had “a good heart” and would “help heal” a badly divided country, Gabbard sued Clinton for $50m over the “Russian asset” comment, rather than the remark about “grooming”. That lawsuit was dropped in May 2020.Four years on, Gabbard has completed a remarkable journey across the political aisle, from being seen as a rising Democratic star in the US House to hosting on Fox News and speaking at events including CPAC, a hard-right annual conference. Her book – For Love of Country: Why I Left the Democratic Party – will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.On the page, Gabbard presents a mix of memoir – from growing up in Hawaii to service in Iraq, from entering Congress to her failed presidential run – and pro-Trump screed. Light on detail and heavy on invective, the book includes excoriations of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. It will hit shops, however, in the aftermath of the passage in Congress of billions of dollars in new Ukraine aid.Gabbard is widely reported to be a contender for Trump’s running mate in his rematch with Biden. In her book, she defends the 88-times criminally charged former president on many legal fronts.Her complaint about Clinton’s remarks about Russia seems designed to stir up familiar Trump campaign furies over Clinton and the investigation of Russian election interference in 2016, which US intelligence agreed was carried out in his support but which prompts Gabbard to write: “None of it was true.”She also accuses Democrats of planting evidence and stories with a compliant press, aided by a “deep state” consisting of “active and retired officials from within the justice department and other national security agencies”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deep state conspiracy theory, which holds that a permanent government of operatives and bureaucrats exists to thwart populist leaders, is popular with Trump and followers notably including Liz Truss, a former UK prime minister. However, one of its chief creators and propagators, the Trump aide and ally Steve Bannon, has said it is “for nut cases”.Gabbard does not only repeat conspiracy theories in her book, but also makes elementary mistakes. In rehashing her inaccurate complaint about Clinton saying she was being “groomed” by Russia, she writes that Clinton was speaking to David Axelrod, also a former Obama advisor but the host of a separate podcast to Plouffe’s.Gabbard also claims that “the propaganda media repeated Clinton’s lies over and over, without ever asking for evidence or fact-checking her themselves”.In fact, Gabbard’s claims against Clinton were widely fact-checked or made the subject of article corrections.In October 2019 – months before Gabbard filed suit – the Washington Post, a leading exponent of the fact-checking form, said: “The initial news reports got it wrong, perhaps fueled by the ‘nesting doll’ comment, with many saying Clinton said the Russians were grooming Gabbard for a third-party bid.”Clinton, the paper added, “certainly said Gabbard was backed by Russian bots and even suggested she was a Russian asset”. But “within a 24-hour news cycle, Clinton’s staff made it clear she was talking about the GOP, not the Russians, eyeing Gabbard as a possible third-party candidate. A simple listen to the podcast confirmed that.“In other words, this was all cleared up 12 days before Gabbard published her [Wall Street Journal] article, making the inaccurate version of [the] ‘grooming’ statement the very first sentence. So there’s little excuse for getting this wrong.”The paper therefore awarded Gabbard three Pinocchios – denoting “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” – out of a possible four. More

  • in

    The America depicted in Civil War is not half as alarming as the real one | Emma Brockes

    As the supreme court heard arguments relating to the 6 January riot and Donald Trump sat in a criminal court in Manhattan, cinemas across America have been showing scenes from an imagined world after the end of democracy. The movie Civil War, written and directed by Alex Garland, depicts a conflict-ridden US in which rebel forces battle to overthrow the government. As a thought experiment, this would be a lot more fun in a year in which a man with 91 felony charges wasn’t standing for his second term as president. As it is, the film currently at No 1 at the US box office is under some pressure to say something meaningful about where we are now.Civil War does have things to say: about how war is bad, and violence corrupts, and once things get under way people exploit the chaos for all sorts of reasons – which explains the presence of Florida in the film’s imagined secessionist uprising. It’s a gripping ride that, depending on your view, is either shrewdly non-partisan in a way that assumes the audience can fill in the gaps for themselves (the New York Times), an empty but entertaining romp with lots of explosions (the New Yorker) or a provocation to liberals who don’t understand what movies are for (the Hollywood Reporter). Meanwhile, in court this week, prospective jurors in the former president’s hush money trial were warned to keep details of themselves confidential, to preserve against the possibility of juror intimidation – the kind of deep background detail in which the film has no interest.View image in fullscreenInstead, we jump to an unspecified near-future in which the US president, a generic strongman played by Nick Offerman, has seized an illegal third term and disbanded the FBI. Two factions across three states have popped up to secede from the US, a coalition between Texas and California fighting under a two-star flag and calling themselves the Western Front, and, separately and with perfect on-brand randomness, Florida, doing its own thing. Much has been made of the political incompatibility of the coalition states, but, it seems to me, this was Garland’s smartest move: California and Texas both have strong regional identities combined with huge resources of land and money that make a coalition against a common enemy feasible.The problem in this scenario is this: where are the president’s supporters and what are they doing? The movie has no thoughts. There’s no explanation of who the president is, how he got to the White House or what happened to the popular movement that elected him. Instead, the story focuses on a band of plucky photojournalists, led by a brilliant Kirsten Dunst, as they battle to get from New York to the capital to document the fall of DC. In this studiously apolitical setup, we hear references to the “Portland Maoists” and the “Antifa massacre”, while the Western Front is stationed at Charlottesville – a loaded reference evoking the real-life dickheads who marched with tiki torches through that city in 2017 and who, per the film’s implication, eventually managed to upgrade their weapons supplier from Bed Bath & Beyond.View image in fullscreenThe intention of these scattergun political references, is, I suspect to make a point about the incoherence of war, or rather, the irrelevance of politics to those suffering at the sharp end. That’s not how it lands. The visual imagery is stunning in the manner of Garland’s brilliant 2002 zombie flick, 28 Days Later, in a way that in other years might have carried the film. There is the burnt-out shell of a JCPenney, a downed helicopter on one side in the car park. There is the creepy gas station attendant torturing looters he went to high school with out back. There is the spectacular, minutes-long assault on the West Wing.And here, in real life, is Trump, charged with falsifying business documents with an intention to violate election laws. Held up against the events that suggested the film in the first place, Civil War has about it a vibe of the guy who doesn’t vote because “they’re all as bad as each other”. The timing matters, and the blandness of the film’s politics, along with its can’t-be-arsed approach to broadening the scope of the story, makes it feel less like a cautionary tale and more like a piece of fantasy unanchored from history. Coming home on Tuesday and turning on the news to hear about Trump nodding off in court, I flashed to the under-imagined world of the film and thought: nah, couldn’t happen here. More