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      Newsroom Confidential review: Margaret Sullivan’s timely tale of the Times and the Post

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      Newsroom Confidential review: Margaret Sullivan’s timely tale of the Times and the PostThe public editor and media columnist is fascinating and unsparing, particularly about the Times’ Trump-Clinton fiasco Margaret Sullivan has written a beguiling memoir which shares many of the virtues of the work that brought her national attention as public editor of the New York Times and then as a media columnist for the Washington Post. The virtues of her columns, excellent news judgment and old-fashioned common sense, are again on display.Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreEspecially in the early part of the book, Sullivan pats herself on the back quite a bit for breaking a glass ceiling by becoming one of the first woman editors of an important regional paper, the Buffalo News. But she is capable of self-criticism, especially for a painful mistake when her paper decided to publish the criminal backgrounds of the victims of a mass shooting. “The Black community was furious” because the paper had deepened “the pain of family and friends who were mourning their loved ones” – and “they were right”. Too often victims of police violence in Buffalo had been described as “no angel”.She quotes Goethe on the benefits of such a mistake: “By seeking and blundering, we learn.”The next phase of her career, when she identified the blunders of editors and reporters at the New York Times, then publicized them in her columns, is the most interesting part of the book.Sullivan quickly learned what I discovered many years ago, when I switched from writing about politicians and prosecutors for the Times to critiquing journalists for Newsweek: reporters have by far the thinnest skins of any public figures. It’s not surprising: a big reason many choose to become journalists is to give themselves a feeling of being in control, so they often feel discombobulated when they are the subject of an interview instead of its progenitor.To her credit, Sullivan offended the sports editor and the politics editor of the Times equally. She showed she had the right instincts with her first blogpost, calling for “rigorous adherence not just to the facts but to the truth, and away from the defensive performative neutrality that some were beginning to call false balance or false equivalence (‘Some say the earth is round; others insist it is flat’ or, more pertinently ‘Some say climate change is real and caused partly by human behavior; others insist it doesn’t exist’.)”She almost never had “a completely comfortable day” as public editor, which means she did a good job: “If the people I worked next to were happy with me, I felt guilty for being too soft on the institution … If they were upset with me – sometimes even furious” she worried she had been too harsh.One of her worthiest crusades was against the vast use of anonymous sources, especially in Washington stories. When Eric Schmitt, a national security reporter, was appointed to a committee on reporting practices, he was astonished to learn that readers’ “number one complaint, far and away, was anonymous sources”. A reader wrote to Sullivan: “I beseech the Times not to facilitate government acting like the Wizard of Oz – behind a curtain.”Although Sullivan was at the paper a decade after its worst modern anonymous sources fiasco – dozens of stories promoting the idea that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were real – she found practically nobody had learned any lessons.The practice was still “vastly overused … not just for ultra-sensitive reporting on the national security beat but also for all kinds of frivolous purposes – in gossipy entertainment pieces, in personality profiles, in real estate stories”. Sullivan inaugurated “AnonyWatch”, asking readers to send examples of anonymous sourcing.Some of the very worst journalism practiced by the Times during Sullivan’s tenure was its coverage of the 2016 election. The paper’s first woman executive editor, Jill Abramson, assigned Amy Chozick to report on Hillary Clinton full-time in 2013. Another press critic, Tom Rosenstiel, pointed out it was probably a pretty bad idea to “perpetuate the permanent campaign” three years before the first primary.Chozick’s first big feature for the Sunday magazine was called Planet Hillary, illustrated by an image of Clinton’s face as “a fleshy globe”. Sullivan agreed with the reader who wrote, “The now-viral image is hideously ugly, demeaning, sexist and completely premature.”Times editors up to Abramson, who approved the image, “couldn’t understand the fuss”. To Sullivan it was an early warning that “when it came to covering Hillary Clinton, Times journalists often took things too far”.Things went steeply downhill in 2015 when the Times – and the Washington Post and Fox News – promoted a book by the Breitbart contributor Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: the Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.How Chozick chose to write about this crude propaganda? “Already the Republican Rand Paul has called its findings ‘big news’ that will ‘shock people’ and make voters ‘question’ the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton”.Things got dramatically worse with the paper’s obsession with Clinton’s emails, and FBI director James Comey’s decision to put them back in the news a few days before the election. By then Dean Baquet was Times editor. He vastly overplayed Comey’s announcement with three big stories, including one by Chozick and Patrick Healey headlined “With 11 Days to Go, Trump Says Revelation ‘Changes Everything’”.Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreSullivan observes that framing must have caused “rejoicing in the GOP camp”. It did.The Columbia Journalism Review reported that in six days, the Times “ran as many cover stories” about Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up the election.Comey shut down his investigation again. But the damage was done.The Times editorial page compensated a little bit for its news coverage by giving Clinton an enthusiastic endorsement. But as Sullivan points out, editorials rarely sway elections while “relentless front-page political coverage can, especially when it’s in the hugely influential New York Times”.“In this case,” she writes, “I believe it did.”
      Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life is published in the US by St Martin’s Press
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      ‘Devoid of shame’: January 6 cop Michael Fanone on Trump’s Republican party

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      Interview‘Devoid of shame’: January 6 cop Michael Fanone on Trump’s Republican partyJ Oliver Conroy A pro-Trump mob almost killed him – and some politicians want to pretend it never happened Almost a year after pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol beat and electrocuted Michael Fanone nearly to death – causing him to go into cardiac arrest, lose consciousness for four minutes and become one of the most famous police officers in America – he decided to end his 20-year law enforcement career with a resignation letter written on a paper napkin.Capitol attack officer Fanone hits out at ‘weasel’ McCarthy in startling interviewRead more“I wrote, ‘Go fuck yourselves,’” Fanone recalled, neck tattoos peeking from under a dark sport coat and grey-streaked beard, as he dined in one of the quieter corners of a steakhouse in Manhattan.A friend, he said, translated his resignation into more formal English: “You know, ‘I’m grateful for the time and memories here …’ Blah, blah, blah, blah.”While months of medical treatment had helped Fanone mostly recover from his injuries, his fury at politicians who wanted to erase January 6 from memory remained – and his desire to name and shame “sniveling weasel bitches” such as the Republican House leader, Kevin McCarthy, often and with an irreverence that was making his police career untenable.“What continues to boil my blood,” said Fanone, a one-time Trump voter, is how the Capitol attack “has become so politicized. It’s to the point where I have this adversarial relationship with most Republicans, who I see as either indifferent to what happened or on the side of the insurrectionists.”What also hadn’t gone away were the fellow cops who whispered behind his back or exited a room when he entered – because they were Trump supporters who resented his criticisms of the former president, or because they thought he was a showboat exaggerating his experience at the Capitol for money or attention.Fanone, a vice-officer who became one of the star witnesses of the January 6 hearings, could no longer do undercover work and was a political hot potato. After his superiors re-assigned him to IT (“I have no background in it. I type with one finger”) and he arrived to find a desk draped in plastic with no chair or computer, he decided, five years short of his pension, to quit.Now Fanone is adjusting to a strange new life. He declined an offer to pose for Playgirl but accepted a CNN contract as a law enforcement analyst. Learning not to curse on air has been hard – “I did get in a lot of trouble,” he has said, “for saying I thought history was going to shit on Mike Pence’s head” – so, on the infrequent occasions he actually joins a segment, he’ll bring a notecard: DON’T SAY FUCK.He has published a memoir, Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul, written with John Shiffman, an investigative reporter for Reuters. He has friends in surprisingly high places – Sean Penn once took him to dinner, and Nancy Pelosi is known to check in at 3am.Yet his financial situation, he said, isn’t what everyone assumes. His medical and insurance bills are high. He lives in a one-bedroom outfitted with lawn furniture and he’s embarrassed he doesn’t have more space for his four daughters when they visit.He spends as much time as possible with them. When he’s not doing that, he does quiet, solitary things. He lifts weights and most days runs six to eight miles; hangs out with his “failed hunting dog”, Buddy; takes to the woods to stalk deer and turkey; ruminates about the future of the country.“I’m not looking to fucking make money off my experiences on January 6, outside of feeding my family,” he said. “If people have a problem with me writing a book, they can kiss my ass.”He chewed on a steak salad and added, very deliberately: “All I want is to talk about my experience, educate a few people, maybe engage in constructive conversation about police reform. After there’s accountability for January 6, I hope to ride off into the sunset of obscurity, never to be heard from again.”Fanone speaks in a south Maryland drawl, redolent of a crab fisherman or a character on The Wire. The grandson of a steel mill worker and the son of an attorney and a social worker, he briefly attended Georgetown Prep, one of the nation’s elite schools, but it didn’t stick – after a year he was asked “not to return”.His parents separated when he was young, so he split time between his father’s white-shoe world and his mother’s more middle-class or blue-collar one. After dropping out of high school, he worked construction and eventually earned a GED.He started his law enforcement career with the US Capitol police but guard duty bored him. After a very public exchange of views with a colleague – “two Capitol cops in uniform brawling in broad daylight on Independence Avenue” – he quit to join the larger Metropolitan police department.Fanone was full of “piss and vinegar”. A vice posting suited him fine. He spent much of his time undercover or hiding in dumpsters or trees (locals called him Spider-mMan). Over the years he grew less hotheaded and more focused on meticulous operations that would hold up in court – and nail traffickers.On the grey morning of 6 January 2021, as Trump supporters converged on Congress, Fanone was supposed to be working a drug op with his partner, Jimmy Albright, and his most trusted informant, Leslie Perkins, a transgender black sex worker who has since died of illness.The drug op never happened. Fanone had assumed the Capitol protest was under control but he began hearing unsettling radio calls. An order to don “hard gear”. A plea for munitions. An ominous request for the FBI hostage rescue team.He drove 70mph to his station, arriving as a commander called an “officer down” on behalf of his entire unit – something Fanone had never heard in two decades as a cop. He changed into a uniform and grabbed a helmet, a decision he believes may have saved his life.At the Capitol, he and Albright descended to the Lower West Tunnel, where they had heard the situation was dire. Fanone’s bodycam recorded footage that will probably go down as one of the most visceral documents of January 6.Inside the tunnel, 40 exhausted officers, formed into something resembling a huge rugby scrum, were trying to stop a crowd of thousands forcing its way through a door.Many of the rioters had come prepared, with gas masks, body armor, helmets, bear spray. Some wielded stolen riot shields. In contrast, many of the cops, like Fanone, had “self-deployed” without gas masks or other gear. There was vomit on the floor.“Hold the line!” a commander, Ray Kyle, was shouting. “Do not give up that door! We are not going to lose that door!”Fanone and Albright pushed forward. At the front, Fanone confronted what he describes in his memoir as a “human battering ram” – in his bodycam footage you can hear him grunting and gasping as hundreds of pounds of force presses down. Yet for a moment, despite everything, the police actually seemed to be gaining ground.Then someone shouted: “Knife!”As Fanone glanced to see what was happening, a rioter seized him by the neck and dragged him into the crowd, yelling: “I got one!”A news photograph captured the moment Fanone was enveloped by the mob. He is surrounded by heaving bodies, his face grimacing in fear. A rioter is beating him with the pole of a “Blue Lives Matter” flag – meant to signify support for law enforcement.Blows landed from every direction. Hands fumbled at his gun. Soon Fanone was 50ft from the tunnel. He tried to turn back. A Three Percenter militiaman blocked his path.Someone pressed a taser to Fanone’s neck and repeatedly electrocuted him. He heard someone say: “Kill him with his own gun!”“I’ve got kids!” Fanone screamed. “I’ve got kids!”At that point some of the rioters intervened. Someone shouted: “We’re better than this!” People grabbed Fanone and bore him back to the police line.Fanone stumbled into the tunnel and lost consciousness. He came to as his partner prepared to drive him to hospital.“No dreams,” Fanone told me. “No flashbacks.” In fact, he can’t remember anything that happened between the time he shouted he had children and when he woke up in the tunnel. The hospital diagnosed cardiac arrest and traumatic brain injury. The rioters had bestowed the sixth concussion of Fanone’s life and seared the flesh of his neck. He was in agony but, with a narcotics officer’s wariness, refused most pain medication.Only while recovering did Fanone learn of the full mendacity of January 6: Trump’s dying Roman emperor routine; Pence’s tepid decision to do the right thing; the Missouri senator Josh Hawley’s choice to stoke the mob then flee “like a bitch”.Later, angered by news that 21 House Republicans had voted against awarding a medal to the cops who defended the Capitol, Fanone forced a meeting with McCarthy. He was joined by a fellow officer, Harry Dunn, and Gladys Sicknick, whose son, officer Brian Sicknick, died the day after the attack.Fanone asked McCarthy “about certain members of the GOP I call the ‘tinfoil hat brigade’ – Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert. These people have risen to the level of not just an embarrassment within the Republican party, but to humanity.”After some “verbal masturbation”, Fanone said, McCarthy effectively admitted that he was unwilling, or unable, to control radicals in his party. Fanone secretly recorded the entire conversation – and leaked it.It had little to no effect. Nor did Fanone’s testimony at the January 6 hearings.“These people are devoid of shame,” he said. “There’s no way to shame them into doing what’s right. And that has a lot to do with Trump as the ultimate ‘ends-justify-means’ guy.”The conspiracy sphere even painted Fanone as part of a false-flag operation, “like a love child of Nancy Pelosi that’s grown in a petri dish and has been quietly part of some sleeper cell that was awakened for this event”, as he put it to Rolling Stone.A self-described redneck, Fanone said he understands Trump’s appeal, even if it’s a fraud. He voted for Trump in 2016 because he seemed more pro-police than Hillary Clinton. He came to regret it. Fanone’s ex-wife and three of his daughters are Asian American. During Covid, he was angered by Trump’s insinuating references to the “China virus”.Fanone exudes discipline. Early in our meal he carefully removed an onion ring garnish from his salad, and did not touch the fries I ordered for the table. But his foot fluttered with nervous energy under the table.Several cops who defended the Capitol later took their own lives. Fanone has described dark moments of his own, sitting and staring at his gun.“There are a lot of officers suffering in silence or self-medicating with alcohol. It’s probably going to lead to more tragedies down the line.”Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreA waiter recognized Fanone and thanked him for what he did at the Capitol. Several diners did the same. It happens daily, he said.“I try to always talk to them. I don’t see that as a chore. It’s part of why I’m speaking out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make me feel better. I wish it did.”Fanone doesn’t know what the future holds. He might return to construction. He’d also be interested in serving on a policing commission, as an intermediary, pro-cop and pro-reform. He rejects calls to defund the police – training is the first thing cut, he said – but is sympathetic to Black Lives Matter. He’s fond of saying that overthrowing a CVS drugstore is different from overthrowing the government.That’s the only office he’d be interested in holding. Look at George Washington, he said. “When it came to the presidency, they had to drag that motherfucker – all 6ft 4in – kicking and screaming. After his term was done, he couldn’t get home fast enough.”He added: “And don’t volunteer me. I don’t want it.”TopicsBooksUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS policingRepublicansUS CongressPolitics booksinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Confidence Man: The Making of Trump and the Breaking of America review – the vain sadist and his 'shrink'

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      Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman review – the vain sadist and his ‘shrink’ The New York Times reporter’s eagerly awaited book on the ex-US president scathingly exposes the toxic mix of egotism, bigotry and delusion behind his cynical riseDonald Trump has always alternated between snarling at reporters and fawning over them. During his time in the White House he defamed Maggie Haberman as a third-rate drudge or a “crooked Hillary flunkey” and tried to hack her phone to unearth the sources for her revelations about him in the New York Times. He once tweeted an unflattering photograph of her; whenever he saw her on CNN he sneered at her smudgy specs. His animosity amounted, in Haberman’s opinion, to a “fixation”. Yet although Trump knew she was writing a book about his ignorant, incompetent and often insane conduct as president, he welcomed her to his Florida country club and during their last interview remarked to his aides: “I love being with her, she’s like my psychiatrist.”Haberman dismisses the ingratiation, then reflects that Trump “treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists”. He vents experimentally in the hope that others will be able “to decipher why he was doing what he was doing”; while in office he “drove days of news based only on his reaction to people reacting to him”. The crucial difference from a therapeutic session is that this tantrum-prone patient is not hoping for a cure. Instead, his aim is to mystify and, with luck, to madden the world. The White House during Trump’s occupancy was a crib for the mentally stunted monster Freud called “His majesty the child” and cabinet officials spent their days dangling shiny objects to distract him as he “popped off about various topics and chased fragments of conversation about things he’d heard on television”. Haberman’s book is chockablock with scoops, comprehensively leaked to the press before publication, but what singles it out from the competition is its perceptiveness about Trump’s character and the way his private vices became public menaces.Officiating as a harassed shrink, Haberman diagnostically reviews Trump’s early life, when his manias and self-delusions were already blatantly evident. His mentor Roy Cohn, a corrupt and perverse attorney with a scar-pocked face and the habit of deliciously licking his lips as he uttered curses, taught him the uses of “emotional terrorism”. Negotiating with mafia thugs and political bosses during his years as a property developer in New York, Trump devised the tricks that have served him ever since: brazen lying, performative rage, chaotic plotting that sets allies at odds with one another. These tactics expose his gamesmanship, since power for him means unhindered play, kept going by double and triple bluffs. Hence his current claim, after the FBI raided his country club to retrieve the cartons of contraband nuclear secrets hidden there, that he could declassify such documents simply by thinking that he had done so.Trump’s fabled, probably fabulated wealth also amounts to no more than random zeroes dancing in his head: his net worth, he admitted in 1991, “fluctuates with attitudes and feelings, even my own feelings”, since billions of dollars are merely “mental projections”. This confidence man defies the suckers to believe in him or vote for him and he mocks them when they are dim enough to do so. “Look at those losers,” he sneered at the customers who squandered their welfare cheques in his Atlantic City casino – though Trump himself, bankrupted by the ill-managed venture, was the ultimate loser. “They’re fucking crazy,” he often muttered as he basked in the baying adulation of the mobs at his election rallies.Trump lives, Haberman argues, in “the eternal now”, which is why in his White House no one did any long-term planning. But he is also held captive by an “eternal past” of grudges and grievances, re-enacted in assaults on those who supposedly slighted him. Barack Obama, whom he envied and therefore despised, was exorcised in a hygienic rite: Trump replaced the Oval Office’s en suite toilet because he refused, Haberman suspects, to entrust his arse to the seat used by “his Black predecessor”. On other occasions he seems crassly sadistic or downright evil. He wanted his notional border wall painted black to absorb and reflect the sun’s heat so that the skin of migrants would burn and blister when they touched it. Hitler, he proclaimed during a presidential visit to Europe, “did a lot of good things”.For all Trump’s belligerence, in Haberman’s view he remains fragile and fearful. He dispatched White House valets to fetch Big Macs for his dinner because fast-food restaurants wouldn’t know who they were serving and therefore were less likely to poison him. In the 1980s he required the models he dated to take Aids tests before he would condescend to have sex with them; he still rubs his hands red-raw with disinfectant wipes meant for use on non-porous surfaces (which may be the only symptom of guilt he has ever exhibited). At his pettiest, squeamish phobias such as these shade into prissy vanity. In France in 2018 Trump cancelled a visit to a cemetery for the American war dead when the weather changed: he explained that he didn’t want to get his hair wet in the rain. In his first television address about Covid-19, the prospect of an impending plague mattered less to him than “a visible spot on his white shirt” that he noticed just before the live broadcast began. He took the pandemic as a personal slight: his petulant refrain throughout those two terrible years was: “Can you believe this is happening to me?”Trump “used the government”, Haberman concludes, “as an extension of himself”, treating it as a private enterprise that serviced his appetites, threatened his detractors and enriched his family firm. Even more destructively, he “ushered in a new era of behaviour” by turning hatred into “a civic good”; although he began with puerile name-calling, the vituperation has advanced beyond rhetoric and he no longer bothers to euphemise his appeals to militias such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. It is all at once alarming and absurd, elated by the imminence of a spectacular apocalypse. The Trump show, as Haberman remarks, has “a menacing psychological-thriller score and a sitcom laugh track” playing simultaneously. This is the way the world ends, with both a bang and a hollow, cynical guffaw.TopicsBiography booksThe ObserverDonald TrumpPolitics booksUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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      The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas review – why it pays to talk in a polarised world

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      The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas review – why it pays to talk in a polarised world The US journalist and TV pundit has written an engaging and provocative study of the dangers of political purityIt is a mark of the problem that The Persuaders seeks to describe that I had to force myself to sit down and read it. Anand Giridharadas, well known in the US as a journalist and TV political pundit, has written a thinky book on a subject many of us may feel we’ve heard too much about already – namely, the feedback loops, filter bubbles and interference of Russian bot farms that have led to extreme polarisation in the US and beyond. Giridharadas describes this state of affairs as “Americans’ growing culture of mutual dismissal”, leading to a mass “writing-off from a distance” and the inability of anyone to change their minds about anything. In overview, it looks like a book borne of Twitter discourse, and who needs that?As it turns out, The Persuaders is, well, persuasive, with a mission to find solutions for all this by identifying strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fans. If the understanding is that no one will cede an inch to the other side, Giridharadas seeks cheering counter-examples, from the coalition behind the 2017 Women’s March, to the explosion in mainstream support for Black Lives Matter, to the rise of figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – her modern campaigning style is studied usefully alongside the less flexible and successful style of Bernie Sanders. The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause. Despite the occasional cuts-job vibe of books by busy media operators, I found it a useful, thoughtful and interesting read.Which is not to say it didn’t annoy me. That’s the point, I suppose. The clever thing about Giridharadas’s approach is that while dissecting the prejudices of others, he flushes out your own kneejerk reactions, a dynamic from which the author himself isn’t spared. In the chapter on the Women’s March, the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, one of the organisers, describes how alienated she was by the movement’s roots in “white feminism”. There are readers who, presented with other names from the Women’s March leadership team, will have an equally forceful recoil, thanks to their perceived links with antisemitic figures.The concern around white feminism is given many pages of thoughtful discussion. The latter worry, triggered by support among some march organisers for Louis Farrakhan, the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam, is given half a sentence. One requires understanding; the other is largely dismissed. The effect of this, deliberately or otherwise, is to underscore the need for everyone to consider the alternative view. Multiple interviewees with decades of activism behind them express frustration at the present state of leftwing politics and its habit of either occupying a drippy middle ground or else digging into the narcissism of small difference. In the era of no microaggression going unpunished, the book makes the case through various veteran activists that not only is the purity spiral counterproductive to broadening the movement, it is, for those pursuing it, almost addictively recreational. As the author writes: “Social media rewarded the hunt for apostates more than the conversion of non-believers.”Loretta Ross, a pioneering activist and theorist in Black radical feminist tradition, puts it this way: “I think the 90-percenters spend too much time trying to turn people into 100-percenters, which is totally unnecessary.” She means those ostensibly on the same side who say: “If you’re not working on my issue from my angle, then you’re erasing my issue. If you’re championing economic justice, you’re problematic for minimising race. If you’re championing racial justice, you don’t post enough about the ills of capitalism. If you’re focused on long-term climate change, you’re neglecting the here-and-now needs of poor communities.” These fights only hurt the progressive cause. It’s OK to call people out, but understand what you’re reaching for, she says. “You can’t change other people. You can’t even change the person you’re married to. You can help people. You can expose people to different information and help them learn – if you do so with love.”What this means in some contexts, argues Giridharadas, is shelving what feels good for what actually works. One chapter studies a fascinating programme trying to stop rapists reoffending by educating them on feminism, which requires a huge emotional effort on the part of the female educators to overcome what Ross calls “the justified instinct to focus on those hurt by the problem, not those perpetrating it”. Who wants to put resources into engaging with a rapist at the expense of funding his victims? But if it’s the most effective way to reduce rape, it’s at least worth considering.The most skippable stretch of the book is a long, Wikipediaesque biography of Ocasio-Cortez, all well-rehearsed information by this point. And there are occasional, inadvertently funny passages. An account of a consciousness-raising group of white people trying to become better educated about their own race privilege contains a testy back and forth over whether the description “recovering racist” implies that they are, in fact, racist, that is pure Monty Python.By far the most fascinating and potentially useful case study is that of Anat Shenker-Osorio, the communications strategist for progressive causes, whose tactics, pegged to the data, have exposed a lot of shortfalls in leftwing political campaigning. Shenker-Osorio points out that when people get frightened, they skew right; when they feel compassion and common cause with their fellow humans, they skew left. The left has often made the mistake of tailgating on the right’s framing of a discussion, piping up “We too are tough on law and order!” rather than calling out the right’s way of sowing disagreement between groups. “What is it about winning that is distasteful to you?” she says drily to a campaigner fixated on small differentials in language. She also counsels the left to cheer up. “Many progressive and Democratic messages basically boil down to ‘Boy, have I got a problem for you!’” – proven to be a big downer at the polls. “You’ve got to sell people on the beautiful tomorrow.”Exacerbated by new technology, these are, nonetheless, very old problems. As Saul Bellow put it in The Adventures of Augie March: “That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what’s real.” This enjoyable, helpful read may, paradoxically, suspend our solipsism for long enough to better prosecute that recruitment.TopicsPolitics booksThe ObserverBlack Lives Matter movementFeminismAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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      Waging a Good War review: compelling military history of the civil rights fight

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      Waging a Good War review: compelling military history of the civil rights fight Thomas E Ricks applies a new lens to a familiar story, showing how those who marched for change succeeded – and sufferedThomas E Ricks has written a sweeping history of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, retelling many of its moments of triumph and tragedy, from the Montgomery bus boycott spawned by the courage of Rosa Parks in 1955 to the bodies bloodied and broken by Alabama troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge 10 years later.‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Read moreThe stories are familiar but Ricks is the first author to mine this great American saga for its similarities to a military campaign.James Lawson, a key figure in training a cadre of influential movement leaders, called it “moral warfare”. Cleveland Sellers said the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi “was almost like a shorter version” of the Vietnam war. Ricks points out that “the central tactic of the movement – the march – is also the most basic of military operations”.But the greatest value of this compelling account lies in its capacity to remind us how a relatively small group of intelligent, determined, disciplined and incredibly courageous men and women managed after barely a decade of pitched battles to transform the US “into a genuine democracy” for the very first time.As Martin Luther King Jr remarked, the attempt to undo the ghastly effects of the 90-year campaign after the civil war to keep Black Americans effectively enslaved became an effort to “redeem the soul of America”.The crucial ingredient was the nonviolent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. Ricks writes that it was “at the core” of how the movement “attracted people and prepared them for action”. It was the dignity of the marchers, who declined to counterattack the hoodlums who viciously attacked them, that would gradually “catch the attention of the media, and thereby the nation”.As Gandhi explained it, nonviolence did not “mean meek submission to the will of the evil doer”. It meant “the pitting of one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant”. As an American disciple explained, “Your violent opponent wants you to fight in the way to which he is accustomed. If you adopt a method wholly new to him, you have thus gained an immediate tactical advantage.”Lawson compared the strategy to “what Jesus meant when he said ‘turn the other cheek’. You cause the other person to do the searching … We will not injure you, but we will absorb your injury … because the cycle of violence must be broken. We want the cycle of violence in America and racism stopped.”Early in the Montgomery protest, after a bomb exploded on the porch of King’s house, “filling the front room with smoke and broken glass”, the budding leader demonstrated his commitment. When supporters gathered, he ordered, “Don’t get your weapons. We are not advocating violence.” Go home, he said, “and know that all of us are in the hands of God.”King said Montgomery “did more to clarify my thinking on the question of nonviolence than all of the books I had read … Many issues I had not cleared up intellectually were now solved in the sphere of practical action.”As in a conventional war, martyrs played a vital role in inspiring soldiers. Nearly all of the students who led sit-ins at Nashville lunch counters had visions in their head of Emmett Tell, the 14-year-old boy who was tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman.During Freedom Summer, in Mississippi in 1964, the brutal murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner became the turning point in the campaign to get the federal government to transform the nation.Two of the victims were white. Ricks writes: “The simple, hard fact was that the American media and public cared more about killings of whites than of blacks. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s hard calculation about white lives mattering more than Black ones had been confirmed … It was no different from Winston Churchill celebrating the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”But the most influential martyrs of all were John Lewis and 140 fellow marchers who were brutally attacked as they tried to march from Selma to Montgomery. The images blanketed network television, leading directly to Lyndon Johnson’s speech before Congress one week later in which he electrified the nation by declaring: “We shall overcome.” Just four months later the president signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the movement’s two most significant legislative accomplishments.“Now you were having brought into every American living room … the brutality of the situation,” remembered Bayard Rustin, one of the key architects of King’s March on Washington. “I think that if we had television 50 years earlier, we would have gotten rid of lynching 50 years earlier.”Ricks does a tremendous job of putting the reader inside the hearts and souls of the young men and women who risked so much to change America. In just three months in Mississippi in summer 1964, there were at least six murders, 80 beatings, 35 shootings and 35 church bombings, not to mention policemen who routinely put guns to the heads of protesters and cocked them without firing.The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the oldRead more“There were incipient nervous breakdowns walking all over Greenwood, Mississippi,” Sally Belfrage wrote to a friend. Her roommate, Joanne Grant, said it was an understatement to say she was frightened most of the time. And yet, “as with all of us, it was the best time in my life. I felt we were changing the world.”Ricks of course points out all the reversals of this progress accomplished by disastrous supreme court decisions and hatred rekindled by Donald Trump. He ends by calling for a “third reconstruction”, a new “focused effort to organize, train, plan, and reconcile”.I only hope this riveting account of the glorious exploits of so many civil rights pioneers will inspire a new generation to make that gigantic organizational effort.
      Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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      ‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6

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      Interview‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Martin Pengelly in Washington In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thoughtThere is a direct connection from Freedom Summer to the January 6 committee,” says Thomas E Ricks as he discusses his new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.‘Now is a continuation of then’: America’s civil rights era – in picturesRead moreFreedom Summer was a 1964 campaign to draw attention to violence faced by Black people in Mississippi when they tried to vote. The House January 6 committee will soon conclude its hearings on the Capitol riot of 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked American democracy itself.But the committee is chaired by Bennie Thompson. In his opening statement, in June, the Democrat said: “I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi … I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021.”Ricks is reminded of the insurrectionists as he retells that grim history. Watching the January 6 hearings, he says, he “was looking at Bennie Thompson. And I realised, his career follows right on.“Summer ’64, you start getting Black people registered in Mississippi. A tiny minority, about 7%, are able to vote in ’64 but it rises to I think 59% by ’68. Bennie Thompson gets elected alderman [of Bolton, in 1969], mayor [1973] and eventually to Congress [1993]. And then as a senior member of Congress, chairs this January 6 committee.“Well, there is a direct connection from Freedom Summer, and [civil rights leaders] Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dave Dennis, to the January 6 committee. And I think that’s a wonderful thing.”Under Thompson, Ricks says, the January 6 committee is acting strategically, “establishing an indisputable factual record of what happened”, a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history.“It’s always good to think strategically,” Ricks says. Which brings him back to his book.As a reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Ricks was twice part of teams that won a Pulitzer prize. His bestselling books include Fiasco (2006) and The Gamble (2009), lacerating accounts of the Iraq disaster, and The Generals (2012), on the decline of US military leadership. In Waging a Good War, he applies the precepts of military strategy to the civil rights campaigns.He says: “This book, I wrote because I had to. I had to get it out of my head. The inspiration was I married a woman who had been active in civil rights.”Mary Kay Ricks is the author of Escape on the Pearl (2008), about slavery and the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, she was “president of High School Friends of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Washington DC chapter.“She would pick people up at Union Station and drive them wherever they needed to be. So her memory of [the late Georgia congressman] John Lewis is him arriving, saying, ‘I’m hungry, take me to McDonald’s.’ All our lives we would be driving along, and somebody would be on the radio, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy’ or ‘I dated that guy. Oh, I thought he was crazy.’“So I was reading about the civil rights movement to understand my wife and the stories she told me. And the more I read, the more it struck me: ‘Wow. This is an area that can really be illuminated by military thinking.’ That a lot of what they were doing was what in military operations is called logistics, or a classic defensive operation, or a holding action, or a raid behind enemy lines. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought each of the major civil rights campaigns could be depicted in that light.”In 1961, campaigners launched the Freedom Rides, activists riding buses across the south, seeking to draw attention and thereby end illegal segregation onboard and in stations. It was dangerous work, daring and remote. Ricks compares the Freedom Rides to cavalry raids, most strikingly to civil war operations by the Confederate “Gray Ghost”, John Singleton Mosby.“The Freedom Rides as raids behind enemy lines. What does that mean? Well, it struck me again and again how military-like the civil rights movement was in careful preparation. What is the task at hand? How do we prepare? What sort of people do we need to carry out this mission? What kind of training do they need?“Before the Freedom Rides they sent a young man, Tom Gaither, on a reconnaissance trip, where he drew maps of each bus station so they would know where the segregated waiting rooms were. He reported back: ‘The two cities where you’re going to have trouble are Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama.’ There are real race tensions in those cities.”Activists faced horrendous violence. They met it with non-violence.“They did months of training. First of all, how to capture and prevent the impulse to fight or flee. Somebody slugs you, spits on you, puts out a cigarette on your back. They knew how to react: non-violent.“But this is a really militant form of non-violence. Gandhi denounced the term passive resistance. And these people, many of them followers of God, devoted readers of Gandhi, understood this was very confrontational.”In 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when white authorities attacked a march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and southern racism stood exposed.Ricks says: “A line I love comes from Selma. People said, ‘What are we doing when the sheriff comes after us?’ The organisers said, ‘No, you’re going after the sheriff.’ A good example: CT Vivian, one of my heroes, a stalwart of civil rights, is thrown down the steps of the county courthouse at Selma by Jim Clark, the county sheriff. And Vivian looks up and yells, ‘Who are you people? What do you tell your wives and children?’“It is such a human question. And in this confrontational form of non-violence, I think they flummoxed the existing system, of white supremacism, which the world saw was a system built on violence inherited from slavery.”Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photosRead moreRicks has written about his time in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the end of Waging a Good War, he considers how those who campaigned for civil rights, who were beaten, shot and imprisoned, struggled to cope with the toll.“If you want to understand the full cost, it’s important to write about the effect on the activists and their families, their children. Dave Dennis Jr, the son of one of the people who ran Freedom Summer, he and I have talked about this a bit. We believe the Veterans Administration should be open to veterans of the civil rights movement. There aren’t a lot of veterans still alive. Nonetheless, it would be a meaningful gesture that could help some people who have had a hard time in life.”In a passage that could fuel a whole book, Ricks considers how Martin Luther King Jr, the greatest civil rights leader, struggled in the years before his assassination, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.Like many PTSD sufferers, King sought refuge in drink and sex. But for Ricks, “the moment that captures it for me is he’s sitting in a rocking chair in Atlanta, with his friend Dorothy Cotton. And he says, ‘I think I should take a sabbatical.’ This is about 1967. This guy had been under daily threat for 13 years. I compare him to [Dwight] Eisenhower and the pressures he was under as a top commander in world war two … yet King does this for well over a decade. The stress was enormous. I only wish he had been able to take that sabbatical.”The campaign took its toll on others, among them James Bevel, a “tactically innovative, strategically brilliant” activist who abused women and children, moved far right and died in disgrace.Ricks hopes his book might help make other activists better known, among them Pauli Murray, Diane Nash – a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and Fred Shuttlesworth, “a powerful character, a moonshiner turned minister”.Shuttlesworth lived in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of some of the worst attacks on the civil rights movement, most of all the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, in which four young girls were killed.To Ricks, “If there’s a real moment of despair in Martin Luther King’s life, it’s the Birmingham church bombing. He says, ‘At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.’ That was the focal point for how I think about what King went through.”But there is light in Birmingham too. Ricks recounts the time “the white establishment calls Fred Shuttlesworth up and says, ‘We hear Martin Luther King might be coming to town. What can we do to stop that?’ And he leans back and smiles and says, ‘You know, I’ve been bombed twice in this town. Nobody called me then. But now you want to talk?’“Shuttlesworth threw himself into things. He believed in non-violence as an occasional tactic, not as a way of life. He sent a carloads of guys carrying shotguns to rescue the Freedom Riders from the KKK in Anniston.“Then there’s Amzie Moore. I wish I could have written more about him. He came home from world war two, worked at a federal post office so he would not be under control of local government. He starts his own gas station and refuses to have whites-only bathrooms. ‘Nope, not gonna do it.’ To me, he’s like a member of the French Resistance but he does it for 20 years. When Bob Moses and other civil rights workers go to Mississippi, he’s the guy they look up. ‘How do I survive in Mississippi?’ And he tells them and helps them.”Waging a Good War also considers how campaigners today might learn from those who went before. Ricks says: “Some of the people in the Black Lives Matter era have reached back. I talked to one person who went to James Lawson, the trainer of the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and asked, ‘How do you go about this? How do you think about this? What about losses? Instructions?’“A demonstration is only the end product, the tip of an iceberg. There has to be careful preparation, consideration of, ‘What message are we trying to send? How are we going to send it? How are we going to follow up?’ So James Lawson conveys that message. Similarly, Bob Moses, who recently died, attended a Black Lives Matter meeting. There are roots by which today’s movements reach back down to the movements of the forefathers.”Democrats see hope in Stacey Abrams (again) in a crucial US election – if she can get voters to show upRead moreHe also sees echoes in two major strands of activism today.“Stacey Abrams’ work on voting rights is very similar to a lot of the work Martin Luther King did with the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Fighting voter suppression, finding ways to encourage minorities to register and to vote, looking to expand the franchise.“Black Lives Matter reminds me of SNCC, if somewhat more radical, more focused not on gaining power through the vote but on abuses of power, especially police brutality.“It’s sad that the problems the movement tried to address in the 1950s and 60s still need to be addressed. We have moments of despair. Nonetheless, one of things about writing the book was to show people who went through difficult times, and usually found ways to succeed.“The more I learned, the more I enjoyed it. It was a real contrast. Writing about the Iraq war? It’s hard. This felt good. I was hauled to my writing desk every morning. I loved writing this book.”
      Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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      The Breach review: ex-January 6 staffer on how Republicans lurched into madness

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      The Breach review: ex-January 6 staffer on how Republicans lurched into madness Denver Riggleman offers an inside track on the Capitol attack, the House committee and Donald Trump’s great GOP hijackDenver Riggleman is a US air force veteran who became a one-term Republican congressman from Virginia. In the House from 2019, he was a member of the hardline Freedom Caucus and voted with Donald Trump more than 90% of the time. Yet according to his new book, Riggleman “began to understand that some of my colleagues had fully bought into even the more unhinged conspiracy theories” he had witnessed while campaigning.Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreIn 2020, Riggleman lost his Republican nomination – after he officiated a same-sex wedding. In retaliation, someone tampered with the wheels of his truck, endangering the life of his daughter. “If I ever find the individual responsible, God help that person,” the former congressman writes now.Out of office, Riggleman became a senior staffer to the House January 6 committee. Last spring, he resigned. The Breach is an account of what he learned, his decision to publish reportedly angering some on the panel.The book is also a memoir, in which Riggleman describes growing up in a tumultuous home and his bouts with religion and his parents as well as the metamorphosis of the GOP into the party of Trump, and the events and people of January 6.“The rift between Trump’s wing of the Republican party and objective reality didn’t begin with the election,” Riggleman writes.He omits specific mention of birtherism, the Trump-fueled false contention that Barack Obama was not born a US citizen. He does acknowledge the “explosion of conspiracy theories during the Trump years”.As a former intelligence officer and contractor, Riggleman places the blame on social media, algorithms and the religious divide. Together, such factors took a toll on the nation, democracy and the lives of the Republican base.Hostility to Covid vaccines exacted an explosion in excess deaths among Republicans, 76% higher than for Democrats. In Florida, the Covid death rate eventually surpassed that of New York, to rank among the highest in the US. Owning the libs can kill you – literally. Tens of thousands died on Trump’s altar of Maga. For what?Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, actively encouraged vaccine skepticism. He refused to say whether he received the vaccine, and attempted to stop young children getting the shots. He is in the hunt for the Republican presidential nomination in two years’ time, second only to Trump.The divine injunction against bearing false witness? It has elasticity.Bob Good, a self-described “biblical conservative” who successfully challenged Riggleman for his Virginia seat, said Covid was a hoax. Jerry Falwell Jr, Good’s boss at Liberty University, left that fundamentalist powerhouse in August 2020, amid a scandal ensnaring him, his wife and a pool boy.Falwell was also one of Trump’s most prominent supporters. Riggleman laments: “It was stunning to see true born-again holy rollers lining up behind Trump, a man who shunned church and had already been caught on camera bragging about grabbing women” by the crotch.Likewise, he voices disgust for what has become of the party of Lincoln: “As a kid the people I knew respected a line between church and state. Trump’s party was veering more and more into Christian nationalism, where they demonized Democrats for having an unholy agenda.”Riggleman is also horrified by the involvement of ex-servicemen in the Capitol attack. “There’s no denying it,” he writes. “The political challenge to the election was, at least on some level, linked to a military operation.”He reserves some of his harshest criticism for those closest to Trump. Mark Meadows, his last chief of staff; Mike Flynn, his first national security adviser; Roger Stone, his longtime political aide. Each played a major role in the insurrection.As Riggleman recounts, Meadows defied the committee and refused to appear for deposition. But he did turn over 2,319 texts and messages, avoiding prosecution for contempt of Congress. Some of those texts came from 39 House Republicans and five senators.“Meadows gave us the keys to the kingdom,” Riggleman writes, also describing the Meadows texts as the committee’s “crown jewels”.As for Stone, the Republican dirty trickster was an apparent link between the brains and brawn of the Capitol attack.On 7 November 2020, hours after the networks called the election for Joe Biden, Stuart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers militia, messaged: “What’s the plan … We need to roll.” Stone was part of the chat group. Rhodes now sits before a federal jury, charged with seditious conspiracy.The final chapter of The Breach is devoted to Ginni Thomas, the wife of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. Its title: “The Better Half”. Riggleman raises Thomas’s past membership in Lifespring, a personal development program and purported cult. He says he “found Thomas in Mark Meadows’ text messages after a hot tip and a case of mistaken identity”. She wrote of “watermarked ballots” and a “military whitehat sting operation”. She mentioned “TRUMP STING w CIA director Steve Pieczenik” [actually a former state department official and conspiracy theorist]. She condemned “the Biden crime family and ballot fraud conspirators”.Liz Cheney, the House committee vice-chair, asked Riggleman to pull back. The Wyoming Republican worried about exposing the Thomases as election deniers, QAnon followers, or both.We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turnRead more“I think we need to remove that briefing,” Cheney said, according to Riggleman’s telling. “It’s going to be a political sideshow.”Months later, Cheney and the committee reversed course. On 29 September 2022, Thomas testified for more than four hours behind closed doors. She continued to claim the election was stolen.In The Breach, Riggleman looks to the future.“We have a new enemy in this country,” he writes, “a domestic extremist movement that is growing online at fiber-optic speed. Is there a road back? To be honest, I’m not quite sure.”
      The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation Into January 6th is published in the US by Macmillan
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      Trump ally Lindsey Graham told ex-cop Capitol rioters should be shot in head

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      Trump ally Lindsey Graham told ex-cop Capitol rioters should be shot in headMichael Fanone recounts meeting with South Carolina Republican senator in book to be published next week02:36Republican senator and Trump ally Lindsey Graham told a police officer badly beaten during the Capitol attack that law enforcement should have shot rioting Trump supporters in the head, according to a new book.Capitol attack officer Fanone hits out at ‘weasel’ McCarthy in startling interviewRead more“You guys should have shot them all in the head,” the now ex-cop, Michael Fanone, says the South Carolina Republican told him at a meeting in May 2021, four months after the deadly attack on Congress.“We gave you guys guns, and you should have used them. I don’t understand why that didn’t happen.”On January 6, Fanone was a Metropolitan police officer who came to the aid of Capitol police as Trump supporters attacked. He was severely beaten, suffering a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury.He has since resigned from the police, testified to the House January 6 committee and become a CNN analyst. His book, Hold the Line, will be published next week.Politico reported the remarks Fanone says were made by Graham. The site also said Fanone secretly recorded other prominent Republicans, among them Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader and possibly the next speaker, who has also stayed close to Trump.Politico said Fanone told McCarthy efforts to minimize the Capitol insurrection were “not just shocking but disgraceful”. McCarthy reportedly offered no response.Last week, Rolling Stone published an extraordinarily frank interview in which Fanone, a self-described lifelong Republican, called McCarthy a “fucking weasel bitch”. McCarthy did not comment.According to Politico, Fanone told Graham he “appreciated the enthusiasm” the senator showed for shooting rioters “but noted the officers had rules governing the use of deadly force”.Fanone says the meeting with Graham was also attended by Harry Dunn, a Capitol police officer who has also testified in Congress, and Gladys Sicknick and Sandra Garza, the mother and partner of Brian Sicknick, an officer who died after the riot.Fanone says Graham snapped at Gladys Sicknick, telling the bereaved mother he would “end the meeting right now” if she said more negative things about Trump.Nine deaths, including officer suicides, have been linked to the Capitol attack. The riot erupted after Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden, which he maintains without evidence was the result of electoral fraud. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, urged Trump’s supporters to stage “trial by combat”.Testimony to the House January 6 committee has shown Trump knew elements of the crowd were armed but told them to march on the Capitol and tried to go with them.Representatives for Graham did not comment to Politico. The senator was previously reported to have advocated the use of force against Capitol rioters on the day itself.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreThat same day, Graham seemed to abandon his closeness to Trump. In a Senate speech hours after the Capitol was cleared, he said: “Count me out.” Days later, he said he had “never been so humiliated and embarrassed for the country”.But like most Republicans, McCarthy literally so, Graham returned to Trump’s side. Like all but seven Republican senators, Graham voted to acquit in Trump’s second impeachment trial, for inciting the Capitol attack.He recently predicted “riots in the streets” if Trump is indicted for retaining classified documents after leaving the White House.In their recent book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker quote Graham as calling Trump “a lying motherfucker” … but “a lot of fun to hang out with”.TopicsBooksUS Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansUS SenateUS CongressUS policingnewsReuse this content More