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      Borat v Trump: can entertainment really affect an election?

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      Even with the United States on red alert for pandemic containment, a pernicious phrase has been creeping into the public lexicon at an unprecedented rate of spread. We’ve been beset by a plague known as “the film we need right now”, a noxious concept used to justify and amplify the profiles of nearly a dozen releases over the past year.The run-up to the presidential election has brought about an explosion of topical projects announcing themselves as a noble bulwark against the encroaching threat of another Trump term. And with them, the age-old debate over what any of this actually accomplishes has been reignited. Every time a film introduces itself as the one we need right now, it must first answer the question of whether a film is what we really need. As of late, the arguments have not been especially compelling.A variety of approaches to critique and cinematic styles have been bound together by their shared objective of pushback against the currents of Trumpism, most prominent among them the new documentary Totally Under Control. Alex Gibney’s documentary about the current administration’s grossly incompetent coronavirus response touts itself as filmed in secret, rushed to press in time for election day with the urgency of a breaking news story. Alexandra Pelosi (yes, they’re related) and Showtime have also positioned her new documentary American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself in close proximity to the first Tuesday in November, its broad portraiture of a nation in crisis speaking directly to its moment. This week, Brittany Huckabee (no, they’re not related) brings a more granular analysis to the electoral process in her non-fiction film How to Fix a Primary. In each case, time appears to be of the essence.While perhaps less rigorous in terms of reportage, the Borat sequel Subsequent Moviefilm has arrived with a similar sense of gravity, with less than two weeks on the clock before the vote. And though the small-screen series The Comey Rule gave itself a bit more lead time, the Trump critiques nonetheless gesture to the coming reckoning that may or may not result in four more years of his White House. Baldest in its intentions would be the recent reunion of executive-branch drama The West Wing, the promo copy explicitly using the phrase “a call to action” to describe the program’s star-spangled defense of the democratic process. Yet there’s an air of futility to this campaign behind the campaign.On matters like this, I often refer back to the troubling anecdote in which Donald Trump watches the 1988 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Bloodsport on a plane, fast-forwarding through all dialogue so he can get to the violence and destruction. Suffice it to say that many subscribers to the Trumpist worldview are not the most receptive to the swaying powers of art. And that’s when they engage with it in the first place, the vast majority being unlikely to give the time of day to an entertainment so openly trumpeting its liberal bona fides. Those films that make an active effort to reach across the aisle and appeal to a theoretical rightwing viewership often undermine the point they’re making. The Comey Rule often strains to paint Republican higher-ups as helpless objectors against Trump’s bulldozing influence, where complicity didn’t have to be dragged out of anyone. For this seeming reluctance to alienate the unconverted, it’s a weaker work. More

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      What Ice Cube's collaboration with Trump – and critique of Democrats – reveals | Malaika Jabali

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      Throughout this election season, the rapper Ice Cube has assumed a self-bestowed mantle as spokesperson for Black politics. He has urged that Black Americans make demands before guaranteeing anyone their vote. “Be skeptical of anybody telling you to just vote … and not get anything for your vote,” he said on Instagram in September. “You vote because your community is getting something.”Last week, Donald Trump’s senior adviser Katrina Pierson announced that Ice Cube worked with the Trump campaign to develop their “Platinum Plan” for Black America, unleashing a furious wave of public criticism and accusations. At the core of the backlash is the suspicion that Cube’s commentary and his chief political initiative, the Contract with Black America, is less about promoting a Black agenda and more about suppressing Black voter turnout for the Democratic party, which Black Americans overwhelmingly support.The accusation compelled Ice Cube to appear on a number of media outlets to clarify his position. “I’m willing to work with both teams, but I’m just working with whoever is willing to work with me,” Ice Cube said on CNN. In an interview with journalist Roland Martin, Cube said “for us not to engage with both sides of the aisle to fix what I think is an American problem … is not going to help us in the end.”’Small government’ won’t fix the mess that neoliberal public policies have created for Black peopleThis controversy reveals several things about American politics, and specifically the sad state of political affairs for Black people. For starters, the political environment is so fraught – and voters are so antsy about another four years of a Trump presidency – that any appearance of impropriety will raise alarm bells for many Black Americans. But that instinct has the effect of silencing even mild criticism of Joe Biden or the Democratic party. We’re closer and closer to the election, and two-party tribalism is in overdrive, nuance is mostly absent, and commentators are falling into their expected camps. Conservatives gleefully use Cube’s message to prop up Trump. Liberals largely dismiss Ice Cube as a race traitor without sitting with his concerns. And Ice Cube defenders reflect little on Cube’s botched political strategy or the market-based, libertarian-esque philosophy he’s proposing for problems that require radical solutions and wholesale government intervention.The fact of the matter is, Black Americans defending and criticizing Ice Cube both have valid concerns. Neither major political party is working for Black Americans economically. The Black-white wealth gap is alarming, with white households holding 11.5 times more wealth than Black ones, and the gap continues to widen. Black homeownership is at a record low. More Black people are being imprisoned than in the 1960s. And both parties have contributed to these policy failures while letting big business off the hook for practices that exploit and harm our communities. This includes encouraging manufacturing jobs to leave for cheaper, deunionized labor in sectors that were disproportionately occupied by Black men; failing to adequately regulate big banks who profited from subprime mortgages targeted to Black communities; failing to assist Black Americans when the economy crashed on their backs; and enabling corporations to make astronomical profits off the disproportionately Black and Latino workers working in essential jobs during Covid.As long as we’re stuck in a two-party system backed by big corporations, big money donors and financial institutions, Black people will never find a reprieve. We’ll simply jump from one party to the next, or out of the ballot booths altogether. We’ll frame our political power solely on the terms of what party leaders promise and consistently fail to provide. We’ll seek whatever meager concessions we can muster – taskforces, committee leadership promotions, and an assortment of patronage jobs – that ultimately leave many Black people disappointed and disillusioned.It’s the disappointment I saw in multiple Ice Cube interviews. It’s the resignation I’ve heard from working-class Black Americans all over the country in my reporting. Thus, given the acute economic crisis for Black Americans, it behooves anyone speaking on their behalf to have their shit together, to put it bluntly. We cannot afford anything less. Anyone with basic political instincts should know that any association with a white nationalist-sympathizing president could and should significantly turn off Black voters. Cube’s strategy has heaved sound policy ideas into a tribalist, corporate media meat grinder, rendering the original message unrecognizable. It reduces the 22 pages of (mostly) impressive and sweeping policy prescriptions in Cube’s Contract with Black America – proposals such as baby bonds, a jobs guarantee, and freeing people imprisoned for marijuana possession – to a two-page “platinum” talking point for Trump’s lackeys.If Ice Cube wants to reduce the Black agenda to a mere election-season transaction – without considering the more fundamental relation between Black liberation and anticapitalism – he should at least get his basic business sense right. There are some parties you just don’t negotiate with, because the starting terms are too far apart. Donald Trump comes from a party that promotes small government and normalizes white supremacy. A transformative economic agenda requires large, government investments in low-income and working-class communities. This runs counter to the entire Republican trickle-down economic platform of the past several decades. The present Republican administration has yet to provide basic economic programs en masse in an election year for millions of Americans suffering from the financial fallout of Covid-19, many of whom are Trump supporters themselves. It is beyond fantastical to believe Trump, or any Republican president, will advance programs to Black Americans that he doesn’t provide his own followers.But most of Ice Cube’s liberal critics fail to acknowledge that the Democratic party has fared little better. Though his strategy and conclusions are miscalculated, his description of the problems are not. The Republican party has moved right and dragged Democrats with them; the result is that Democrats have spent much of the past several decades working overtime to outflank Republicans on tough-on-crime policies, austerity politics, deregulation and privatization, and it’s that school of thought of which Biden has been a longtime instructor.“Small government” won’t fix the mess which exploitative business practices and neoliberal public policies have created for Black people. What it will likely take are independent voters, a mass movement and progressive organized labor – which cannot be corralled a few months before an election – to make demands for radical, systemic change. This is serious work that, at the least, requires consistent commitment and being in community with organizers and policy experts who have been thinking and working towards those demands for more than a season. Anything less will fail the very communities people like Ice Cube claim to represent.Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency at a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 27 October, 7pm GMT. Book tickets here More

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      Vote Bartlet: The 10 best episodes of The West Wing

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      If ever there was a good time to get into The West Wing, this is it. The election cycle has been so monstrous – and potentially ruinous – that it has left us all craving the stately certainty of an Aaron Sorkin screenplay, as the rapturous reception to the cast’s reunion demonstrated. And if that is the case, help is at hand. Today, The West Wing will appear as a box set on All 4 in the UK, allowing you to access the entire series. The imperial first few seasons. The wobbly middle. The unexpectedly rousing climax. All of it.But the US election is just a few days away, and there are 156 episodes. Watching the whole thing in time is an almost impossible task, which is why I have selected the 10 best episodes (in chronological order) for you to pick out and savour.In Excelsis Deo (season one, episode 10) More

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

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

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

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