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      Wildland review: Evan Osnos on the America Trump exploited

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      BooksWildland review: Evan Osnos on the America Trump exploited The New Yorker writer delivers a sweeping and brilliant portrait of a people subjected to 50 years of rightwing aggression

      Interview: Evan Osnos on the US 20 years after 9/11
      Charles KaiserSun 19 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 19 Sep 2021 02.01 EDTEver since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, bookstores have been flooded with volumes attempting to explain America’s unraveling.George Packer’s Last Best Hope, published earlier this year, provided one of the best diagnoses. But this new volume by New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos offers the most personal and the most powerful description yet of a country “so far out of balance that it [has] lost its center of gravity”.Peril review: Bob Woodward Trump trilogy ends on note of dire warningRead moreTo tell a story bookended by the attacks of 9/11 and the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January this year, Osnos travels to three places in which he has lived: Greenwich, Connecticut; Chicago; Clarksburg, West Virginia. His subjects range from the decline of local newspapers and the opioid crisis to the tremendous hidden costs of idiotic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.But the leitmotif of the book is best captured by a phrase he cites from the great liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who described “one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful” quests: “The search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness.”Osnos’ book is replete with ghastly statistics. The three men – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos – who have “more wealth than the entire bottom half of the US population combined”. The CEO salaries which spiraled from 20 times as much as a frontline worker in 1965 to 278 times in 2019. The fewer than 200 companies with Washington lobbyists in 1971 to the 2,500 that had them just 11 years later.But what makes the book come alive are the personal stories. Billionaires, coal miners and soldiers who suffer from post-traumatic stress, and all the evidence Osnos offers of failure to control excess at the top or provide meaningful help at the bottom.Above all this is a story of how mega-rich Americans have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to give themselves the power to pillage the earth, destroy the air and corrupt democracy in a thousand ways without ever being held to account.Lee Hanley is a perfect example. A Yale graduate and Greenwich resident, in 1980 he dumped George HW Bush for Ronald Reagan. Osnos’ keen eye provides a crucial detail about how Hanley’s wife, Allie, pinpointed Regan’s greatest flaw before presenting him to the Connecticut gentry: “He had on a brown tie and it was ghastly. When you go to a different part of the country, the most important thing you need to do is dress like they do. So I ran to Bloomingdale’s and bought four ties.”Reagan “wore them in all the posters after that”.Hanley spent millions more than his wife. In alliance with Richard Scaife, Robert Mercer and the Koch brothers, he trained “a generation of Republicans to adhere to ideological orthodoxy” with “a string of historic political investments”.“He saved the conservative publisher Regnery with an infusion of cash, he founded a Connecticut affiliate of a network of think tanks to advocate for low taxes and small government, and he became the principal backer of a political consulting firm formed by Roger Stone, Charlie Black and Paul Manafort, whose early clients included Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump.”Rarely has a handful of clever investments done more damage to more people.In West Virginia, where Osnos once worked for the Exponent Telegram of Clarksburg, he offers a nuanced history of a state’s transformation from hardcore Democratic to reliably Republican. A West Virginia think tank funded partly by the Kochs made a moving argument against mine-safety regulations – “Improved safety conditions result in lower money wages for workers” – then asked, “Are workers really better off being safer but making less income?”Then-governor Joe Manchin asked the author of the study to brief his cabinet and a joint session of the state legislature finance committees.Juxtaposed with the lobbyists’ many successes are heartbreaking tales of ecological catastrophe spawned by coal companies removing mountain tops. Osnos also reminds us of Manchin’s first big contribution to the national political discussion, when he ran for Senate in 2010: an ad in which he fired bullets through climate-change legislation.“For decades candidates had been photographed with guns,” Osnos writes, “but this was the first time anyone had assassinated a piece of proposed legislation on film.”Four years later, an Arizona Republican “upped the stakes” by shooting the Affordable Care Act with “a handgun, a rifle and a semiautomatic”.There is so much more in this book, including the horrific fact that America has now accumulated 310m private firearms, the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world.“The second highest,” Osnos writes, “was Yemen, which had barely half the rate.”Joe Biden by Evan Osnos review – a story of survivalRead moreThe story of the electoral backlashes, when Democrats took the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020, is one of Osnos’ only hopeful sections. The right has spent so much money to end government regulation and purchase elections, especially since the disastrous supreme court decision of Citizens United, it is astonishing American democracy has survived at all.America’s richest “launched a set of financial philanthropic and political projects that changed American ideas about government, taxes and the legitimacy of the liberal state,” Osnos writes.“In every element of his commercial and political persona, Trump was a consummation of that project … Most of all, of course, he stood for a belief in unbridled self-enrichment, and on that basis some of his most genteel supporters were willing to overlook” every other disgusting thing about him.Osnos says the assault on the Capitol reminded him of an observation by Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward: “There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare.”My hope is that everyone who reads this great book will be enraged enough to redouble their efforts to undo the damage the greedy have wrought, and to take back America for its decent citizens, once and for all.
      Wildland is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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      Peril review: Bob Woodward Trump trilogy ends on note of dire warning

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      BooksPeril review: Bob Woodward Trump trilogy ends on note of dire warning Behind the headlines about Gen Milley, China and the threat of nuclear war lies a sobering read about democracy in dangerLloyd GreenSat 18 Sep 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 18 Sep 2021 01.02 EDTDonald Trump is out of a job but far from gone and forgotten. The 45th president stokes the lie of a rigged election while his rallies pack more wallop than a Sunday sermon and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.Melania Trump like Marie Antoinette, says former aide in hotly awaited bookRead more“We won the election twice!” Trump shouts. His base has come to believe. They see themselves in him and are ready to die for him – literally. Covid vaccines? Let the liberals take them.Deep red Mississippi leads in Covid deaths per capita. Florida’s death toll has risen above 50,000. This week alone, the Sunshine State lost more than 2,500. Then again, a century and a half ago, about 258,000 men died for the Confederacy rather than end slavery. “Freedom?” Whatever.One thing is certain: against this carnage-filled backdrop Bob Woodward’s latest book is aptly titled indeed.Written with Robert Costa, another Washington Post reporter, Peril caps a Trump trilogy by one half of the team that took down Richard Nixon. As was the case with Fear and Rage, Peril is meticulously researched. Quotes fly off the page. The prose, however, stays dry.This is a curated narrative of events and people but it comes with a point of view. The authors recall Trump’s admission that “real power [is] fear”, and that he evokes “rage”.Peril quotes Brad Parscale, a discarded campaign manager, about Trump’s return to the stage after his ejection from the White House.“I don’t think he sees it as a comeback,” Parscale says. “He sees it as vengeance.”Parscale knows of whom and what he speaks. His words are chilling and sobering both.The pages of Peril are replete with the voices of Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Bill Barr, Trump’s second attorney general. Each seeks to salvage a tarnished reputation, Milley’s somewhat, Barr’s badly.In June 2020, wearing combat fatigues, Milley marched with Trump across Lafayette Square, a historic space outside the White House which had been forcibly cleared of anti-racism protesters so the president could stage a photo op at a church. The general regrets the episode. Others, less so.In an earlier Trump book, I Alone Can Fix It, Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker, also of the Post, captured Milley telling aides just days before the attack on the Capitol on 6 January, “This is a Reichstag moment.” This week, in the aftermath of reports based on Peril of Milley’s contacts with China in the waning days of the Trump administration, seeking to reassure an uncertain adversary, Joe Biden came to the general’s defense.As for Barr, for 20 months he bent the justice department to the president’s will. Fortunately, he refused in the end to break it. Overturning the election was a far greater ask than pouring dirt over the special counsel’s report on Trump and Russia or running interference for Paul Manafort, Trump’s convicted-then-pardoned campaign manager. Barr, it seems, wants back into the establishment – having smashed his fist in its eye.Woodward and Costa recount Barr’s Senate confirmation hearing, in which he promised to allow Robert Mueller to complete the Russia investigation, Trump’s enraged reaction and an intervention by his wife, Melania. According to the author, Barr may have owed his job to her.Emmett Flood, then counsel to Trump, conveyed to Barr his mood.“The president’s going crazy,” he said. “You said nice things about Bob Mueller.”Melania was having none of it, reportedly scolding her husband: “Are you crazy?”In a vintagely Trumpian moment, she also said Barr was “right out of central casting”.In another intriguing bit of pure political dish, Mitch McConnell is seen in the Senate cloakroom, joking at Trump’s expense.“Do you know why [former secretary of state Rex] Tillerson was able to say he didn’t call the president a ‘moron’?” the Senate Republican leader asks.“Because he called him a ‘fucking moron’.”By contrast, McConnell has kind words for Biden – a man he is dedicated to rendering a one-term president. America’s cold civil war goes on. Some, sometimes, still send messages across no man’s land.Woodward and Costa show Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, the goddess of alternative facts, reminding Trump that he turned voters off in his second election. In 2020, Trump underperformed among white voters without a college degree and ran behind congressional Republicans.“Get back to basics,” Conway tells him. Stop with the grievances and obsessing over the election. From the looks of things, Trump has discounted her advice. Conway has a book of her own due out in 2022. Score-settling awaits.Ending somewhere near the political present, Woodward and Costa shed light on the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Senator Lindsey Graham with it.In office, Trump affixed his signature to a document titled “Memorandum for the Acting Secretary of Defense: Withdrawal from Somalia and Afghanistan”. It declared: “I hereby direct you to withdraw all US forces from the Federal Republic of Somalia no later than 31 December 2020 and from the Islamic Republican of Afghanistan no later than 15 January 2021.”Steve Bannon prepped Jeffrey Epstein for CBS interview, Michael Wolff claimsRead moreApparatchiks were baffled as to where the memo had come from. Then they blocked it. Trump folded when confronted.As for Graham, the South Carolina Republican and presidential golfing buddy expresses “hate” for both Trump and Biden over Afghanistan.Graham and Biden were friends once. As Graham has repeatedly trashed Hunter Biden, expect the fissure between him and the new president to prove to be long lasting. As for Graham and Trump, it’s a question of who needs whom more at any given moment. With John McCain gone, it’s a good bet Graham will latch on to an alpha dog again.Fittingly, in their closing sentence, Woodward and Costa ponder the fate of the American experiment itself.“Could Trump work his will again? Were there any limits to what he and his supporters might do to put him back in power?“Peril remains.”TopicsBooksBob WoodwardPolitics booksUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsUS CongressreviewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met Gala

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met Gala‘The time is now for childcare, healthcare and climate action for all,’ the congresswoman wrote on Instagram02:25Alexandra VillarrealTue 14 Sep 2021 14.06 EDTFirst published on Tue 14 Sep 2021 09.25 EDTWhen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a white gown with the message “tax the rich” emblazoned in red to the Met Gala, one of New York’s swankiest events, she was sure to ruffle some feathers.The Met Gala 2021: eight key moments from fashion’s big nightRead moreCritics duly disparaged the move as both hypocritical and tone deaf. The New York congresswoman, a leading House progressive, was happy to set the record straight.“The medium is the message,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram.“NYC elected officials are regularly invited to and attend the Met due to our responsibilities in overseeing our city’s cultural institutions that serve the public. I was one of several in attendance. Dress is borrowed.”Ocasio-Cortez was also determined to use the spotlight to reiterate her commitment to principles that have made her both an icon and a lightning rod on the national political scene, widely known by her initials, AOC.“The time is now for childcare, healthcare and climate action for all,” she wrote. “Tax the Rich.”The dress turned heads at arguably the hottest red carpet event of the year. Ocasio-Cortez lauded Aurora James, the Black, immigrant creative director and founder of luxury brand ​​Brother Vellies, for helping her “kick open the doors” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.“Fashion is changing, America is changing,” James said, according to Vogue. “I think Alexandria and I are a great embodiment of the language fashion needs to consider adding to the general lexicon as we work towards a more sustainable, inclusive and empowered future.”Fans dubbed the look “simply iconic” and called Ocasio-Cortez “an anti-capitalist queen”. Some appreciated that when surrounded by the elite, Ocasio-Cortez chose to flash a message meant to make fellow guests sweat.“AOC wearing this dress at an event full of rich people … this woman has more balls than any man in Congress,” one supporter tweeted.Detractors across the political spectrum highlighted what they saw as hypocrisy.“If [AOC] hates the rich so much, why is she attending an event that only the wealthiest people in America can afford to attend?” asked writer David Hookstead.Vanessa Friedman, fashion director for the New York Times, called the disconnect between Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance at the gala and her message “a complicated proposition”.A leading progressive voice, Black Lives Matter Greater NY, accused the congresswoman of being “performative” and “not very socialist”, especially after protesters were arrested outside the Met.“If you wanted to party with celebs … we get it,” a statement said. “But this right here cannot be excused.”Others came to Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, noting how her dress made a “core message” go viral.In response to her critics, Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram that she was accustomed to being “heavily and relentlessly policed from all corners politically”.“Ultimately the haters hated and the people who are thoughtful were thoughtful,” she wrote. “But we all had a conversation about Taxing the Rich in front of the very people who lobby against it, and punctured the fourth wall of excess and spectacle.”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezMet Gala 2021US taxationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Twenty years on from 9/11, is US democracy working?

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      Politics booksTwenty years on from 9/11, is US democracy working? From 9/11 to the storming of the Capitol, a new book by Biden biographer Evan Osnos covers a tumultuous period of US history. He talks to David Smith about Trump, Afghanistan and the beginning of a new eraDavid Smith in Washington@ More

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      The Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies

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      BooksThe Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post used freedom of information to produce the definitive US version of the warJulian BorgerSun 5 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 5 Sep 2021 02.02 EDTIn the summer of 2009, the latest in a long line of US military commanders in Afghanistan commissioned the latest in a long line of strategic reviews, in the perennial hope it would make enough of a difference to allow the Americans to go home.‘The intensity has not changed’: Jason Kander on the fall of Afghanistan – and trying to get friends outRead moreThere was some excitement in Washington about the author, Gen Stanley McChrystal, a special forces soldier who cultivated the image of a warrior-monk while hunting down insurgents in Iraq.Hired by Barack Obama, McChrystal produced a 66-page rethink of the Afghan campaign, calling for a “properly resourced” counter-insurgency with a lot more money and troops.It quickly became clear there were two significant problems. Al-Qaida, the original justification for the Afghan invasion, was not even mentioned in McChrystal’s first draft. And the US could not agree with its Nato allies on whether to call it a war or a peacekeeping or training mission, an issue with important legal implications.In the second draft, al-Qaida was included and the conflict was hazily defined as “not a war in the conventional sense”. But no amount of editing could disguise the fact that after eight years of bloody struggle, the US and its allies were unclear on what they were doing and who they were fighting.The story is one of many gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities uncovered by Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post. His book is based on documents obtained through freedom of information requests, most from “lessons learned” interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a watchdog mandated by Congress to keep tabs on the hundreds of billions flowing into Afghanistan.In the Sigar files, and other interviews carried out by military institutes and research centres, Whitlock found that soldiers of all ranks and their civilian counterparts were “more open about their experiences than they likely would have been with a journalist working on a news story”.Blunt appraisals were left unvarnished because they were never intended for publication. The contrast with the upbeat version of events presented to the public at the same time, often by the very same people, is breathtaking.The Afghanistan Papers is a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years. The title and the contents echo the Pentagon Papers, the leaked inside story of the Vietnam war in which the long road to defeat was paved with brittle happy talk.“With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict,” Whitlock writes. “Instead, they chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”As Whitlock vividly demonstrates, the lack of clarity, the deception, ignorance and hubris were baked in from the beginning. When he went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, George Bush promised a carefully defined mission. In fact, at the time the first bombs were being dropped, guidance from the Pentagon was hazy.It was unclear, for example, whether the Taliban were to be ousted or punished.“We received some general guidance like, ‘Hey, we want to go fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan,’” a special forces operations planner recalled. Regime change was only decided to be a war aim nine days after the shooting started.The US was also hazy about whom they were fighting, which Whitlock calls “a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover”.Most importantly, the invaders lumped the Taliban in with al-Qaida, despite the fact the former was a homegrown group with largely local preoccupations while the latter was primarily an Arab network with global ambitions.That perception, combined with unexpectedly easy victories in the first months, led Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to believe the Taliban could be ignored. Despite offers from some leaders that they were ready to negotiate a surrender, they were excluded from talks in December 2001 on the country’s future. It was a decision the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, called the “original sin” of the war.Rumsfeld declared there was no point negotiating.“The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them,” he said in March 2002. “And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone.”Not even Rumsfeld believed that. In one of his famous “snowflake” memos, at about the same time, he wrote: “I am getting concerned that it is drifting.”In a subsequent snowflake, two years after the war started, he admitted: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”’The Taliban had not disappeared, though much of the leadership had retreated to Pakistan. The fighters had gone home, if necessary to await the next fighting season. Their harsh brand of Islam had grown in remote, impoverished villages, honed by the brutalities of Soviet occupation and civil war. The Taliban did not represent anything like a majority of Afghans, but as their resilience and eventual victory have shown, they are an indelible part of Afghanistan.Bruised Biden tries to turn the page after US debacle in AfghanistanRead moreWhitlock’s book is rooted in a database most journalists and historians could only dream of, but it is far more than the sum of its sources. You never feel the weight of the underlying documents because they are so deftly handed. Whitlock uses them as raw material to weave anecdotes into a compelling narrative.He does not tell the full story of the Afghan war. He does not claim to do so. That has to be told primarily by Afghans, who lived through the realities submerged by official narratives, at the receiving end of each new strategy and initiative.This is a definitive version of the war seen through American eyes, told by Americans unaware their words would appear in public. It is a cautionary tale of how a war can go on for years, long after it stops making any kind of sense.TopicsBooksAfghanistanSouth and Central AsiaUS militaryUS foreign policyUS national securityGeorge BushreviewsReuse this content More