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      John Kerry: 'People want a future. The orange menace is not providing that'

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      In 2004, the Democrats’ presidential candidate, John Kerry, was on the receiving end of one of the most egregious smear campaigns in modern history. At the height of the Iraq war, the Republicans came up with a strategy to combat the glaring military mismatch between Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet, and the incumbent George W Bush, whose record consisted of a spell in the Texas Air National Guard. They concocted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam vets who claimed that Kerry had lied about and exaggerated his record. The claims were later discredited, but the lies travelled around the world, and the damage was done.“It was really the first of the fake news elections,” says Kerry, speaking via Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Where you can take a legitimate military record, which the US navy had certified, and you can lie about it. And that’s where we are today: massive lies. We’ve had tens of thousands of lies told by the president of the United States. We’re just completely divorced from the reality of what is happening to people’s lives.”Does it still make him angry? “Yeah,” he says, “which is why I try not to think about it too much. I made the decision very shortly after that I did not want to get lost in anger.” Having seen what Al Gore went through in the 2000 election, which saw similarly questionable tactics, Kerry decided against a long court process, but now, with the 2020 election days away, he is reconsidering.“The recent machinations about voter-suppression and interference in the election have prompted me to question not litigating. Because we’re seeing it still challenging our democracy in ways that are unacceptable. I wonder if that would have changed if we’d done it.”Since he left office as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State in January 2017, closing a five-decade political career, Kerry has kept a relatively low profile, but he has been transitioning from hard power towards soft. This is becoming a well-trodden route, with Gore making An Inconvenient Truth, and the Obamas signing a deal with Netflix in 2018. “After a long career in politics, if you’re doing it right, it’s about storytelling. It’s about having an impact on culture, and understanding what the culture is,” he says. More

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      Can late-night comedy recover from the Trump presidency?

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      As the results trickled in on election night 2016, Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show on CBS, processed Donald Trump’s victory live, before a shocked audience. He lamented America’s partisan divide (“how did our politics get so poisonous?”), professed belief in the utility of comedy (“in the face of something that might strike you as horrible, I think laughter is the best medicine. You cannot laugh and be afraid at the same time”) and offhandedly prefigured the identity crisis to come for late-night television: “I’m not sure it’s a comedy show any more.”
      Colbert performed the role of late-night host nimbly, even if the genre of an election night comedy hour was poorly suited for the victory of a candidacy that had been viewed by many as a joke. Trump, as the TV critic Emily Nussbaum argued in January 2017, had long performed, and audience-tested in rallies, the role of a boozy, heckling, aggrieved standup comic, one who shrugged off countless taboos as “sarcastic” jokes, one with an endless appetite for attention.
      Nussbaum’s essay, published in the first week of Trump’s presidency, evinced the trap facing liberal political comedians: “How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” How do you skewer a performer who never made any attempt at sincerity? How could network and cable comedy, overwhelmingly delivered by straight white men, effectively lampoon a self-evidently ridiculous social media troll whose only currency was attention? Trump may have seemed at the outset like a boon to jokesters, but his presidency – the flat denials, the destabilizing cascade of crises and a fractured, contemptuous media landscape – has killed political comedy.
      Where does late-night go from here? Regardless of whether or not Trump is re-elected, his presidency has altered the genre in form and function. For four years, political comedy, and in particular late-night television, has lurched through a cyclical Trump attention loop: hosts mock the president, Trump continues with the next galling lie or lashes out on Twitter (or both), hosts mock Trump again, attention paid and courted and repaid. In the 2010s, as the lines in American cultural commentary blurred – political propaganda, social life and memes blended in a gorging timeline of content – Trump jokes became the default late-night currency. Even Jimmy Fallon, the affable Saturday Night Live (SNL) alum who infamously tousled Trump’s hair in 2015, was forced by a ratings war into more political monologues.
      In the Trump era, the genre has morphed to shoulder two burdens: to metabolize liberal outrage through short-circuited Trump jabs (Seth Meyers’ Closer Look segments, SNL’s too-numerous cold opens, whose main insight seems to be the sight of various celebrities game for impersonation); and to process the torrent of headlines in our confounding, infuriating, oversaturated reality.

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      The latter is not an insignificant function, given the time and sanity-erasing blankness of constant disruption and, say, a global pandemic. During the nationwide protests against anti-black police brutality this summer, late-night shows helped keep people tethered to, rather than escape from, the feverish timeline of deeply unfunny police crackdowns and ongoing pandemic surges. Many people got the gist of impeachment, the Mueller report, the Russia investigation, Trump corruption and justice department manipulations through late-night comedy shows. (The leading program, Colbert’s Late Show, averaged 3.45m viewers in 2019-2020; Saturday Night Live drew 8.24m viewers for its 46th season premiere last month, its highest audience since 2016.)
      There’s certainly a democratic function to that processing; when everything is politicized and the news landscape is calcified either in bad faith propaganda (Fox News) or norms of impartial politeness (the Sunday talkshows), late-night “comedy” – a pastiche of recaps, clips and jokes delivered by a host allowed to call bullshit – becomes a manageable way to keep up with things. But that doesn’t mean it was necessarily funny or sustainable or, to quote Colbert on election night, really a comedy show any more. Kimmel and Fallon seem to view jokes as a formality before the more entertaining work of interviewing celebrities; Late Night’s Seth Meyers has almost dispensed with jokes entirely in his outrage-laden, indignant Closer Look warnings on America’s descent into authoritarianism.

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      Late-night political comedy, following the model of The Daily Show, built a common language through the George W Bush and Barack Obama years: point out bad faith and dishonesty through videos stitched with hard news reports, then voice collective outrage at the con. But the past four years have undermined the belief that comedy could serve as an effective weapon against an administration whose reality show is outdone by its horrifying, very real “accomplishments”. The late-night shows once seemed to get under Trump’s skin, but to what effect? He might call the hosts “very weak and untalented” on Twitter, or continue his longstanding feud with SNL (and especially his impersonator, Alec Baldwin, although his attention for late-night shows appears to have waned this year). But in a polarized, post-hypocrisy world, jokes don’t so much thwart the hypocrite as draw viewers back into the reactive loop.
      The host perhaps most successful at navigating the Trump years, and the most critically acclaimed, is John Oliver, whose unsparing, morally clear, melodically ranting explainers on HBO’s Last Week Tonight focus on the rot around or tangential to Trump, rather than the man himself. Full Frontal’s Samantha Bee similarly works in allusive jokes around issues-driven monologues, as one of the few female hosts and a rare success in the 2010s boom and bust of liberal news comedy shows which evince the struggle to break fresh ground in the Trump era. The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj, The Opposition With Jordan Klepper, Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, The Jim Jefferies Show and The Break With Michelle Wolf all premiered after January 2015, and have all since been cancelled.
      Sharp-toothed political comedy, meanwhile, has shifted to the masses on social media, and in particular TikTok. Political accounts run by Zoomers, which overlay pop music on bespoke factchecking, dances, healthcare advocacy and nihilistic memes, have become “cable news for young people”. Sarah Cooper’s lip-syncing Trump impressions blew up on TikTok and Twitter, leading to a guest-host gig on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. But her Netflix comedy special, Everything’s Fine, slams into the wall of Trump-centric satire and exemplifies the dilemma of traditional comedic forms; absent the fundamental insight of her impressions – that nothing satirizes Trump more than his own words – comedy rooted in the destabilizing chaos of the current moment sprouts starchy, disposable bits, jokes that strain when they should zing.
      What, then, can late-night comedy do? The shows do, after all, retain huge audiences, with institutional legitimacy and social media platforms that reach millions. Their guest slots can and have elevated diverse and “radical” perspectives, such as prison abolition advocates and Black Lives Matter activists. In 2020, late-night TV has gained the most cultural cachet when it embraces not redundant Trump jokes but the flexibility of the format – performing the duties television journalists refuse to do, for example, such as Colbert’s grilling the motives of the former Trump adviser John Bolton.

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      Ironically, it’s perhaps most relevant when it’s serious, self-aware, stripped down. In June, Trevor Noah released a quarantine-filmed video in reaction to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, in which he spoke plainly to white audiences as a person of color, a child of apartheid South Africa who understood state violence. “That unease that you felt watching that Target being looted, try to imagine how it must feel for black Americans when they watch themselves being looted every single day,” he said. “Because that’s fundamentally what’s happening in America: police in America are looting black bodies.”
      Noah’s video was shared widely on social media and cited by activist Kimberly Jones in Minneapolis, whose words were then incorporated in an episode of Last Week Tonight. More recently, Colbert has straight-up implored people to vote out the president; “We have two weeks to decide what kind of country this is gonna be,” he said last week, in reaction to news that the administration still had not reunited 545 children, separated from their families at the border, with their parents.
      There’s no laughter in such statements, no finding humor as an antidote. Earnestness – anathema to internet humor – is an awkward spot for late-night comedy to find itself in. But it’s cutting through bullshit, the leg work of sorting context and promoting inquiry, where late-night comedy can still find wiggle room, fresh territory with or without Trump. It’s not so much telling jokes as telling it straight – humor as a prerequisite but not the punch. More

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      Drag Race stars get political: 'People were like, you queens should stick to wigs and makeup'

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      Drag and activism have always gone hand in hand. In June 1969, Marsha P Johnson, a Black drag performer reputedly threw the first brick in the Stonewall uprising in New York City; the violence that followed inspired LGBTQ+ people the world over to stand up to oppression and discrimination. Now, 51 years later, drag is more visible than ever, due in no small part to the multiple Emmy award-winning reality series RuPaul’s Drag Race. The show has given a powerful platform to a new generation of drag, trans and non-binary performers. And, whereas early activists often had to contend with police batons, water cannon and prison cells, these queens have more freedom to speak their minds.
      “Drag has always been a stronghold against shitty politicians,” says Alaska, in her trademark vocal fry. The ferociously witty winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars season 2 says her political role models include Act Up (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), the movement that advocates to end Aids, and Elizabeth Taylor, one of the first Hollywood icons to speak up during the Aids crisis in the 1980s, who “wasn’t technically a drag queen, but she kind of was, right?”“Act Up had this badass element and ‘enough is enough’ attitude. It was during the Reagan presidency and they were, like: ‘This man doesn’t see us, we have a crisis, people are dying – we’re burying all our friends and the president won’t even acknowledge it.’ They had to take really drastic measures because it was the only way to get through,” she says.Alaska has also found an effective medium to get her point across. The bi-weekly podcast Race Chaser, which she co-hosts with fellow Drag Race contestant Willam, features Let’s Get Political, a segment in which the queens share crucial information about registering to vote and engaging with good causes, while making no secret of their personal sentiments. Alaska recently said, “An empty suit on a hanger in a closet would do less damage than the current person in the White House.” With 1.2 to 1.5m downloads a month, their platform is not to be sniffed at.
      “People didn’t like it at first. They were like: ‘I don’t think you drag queens know anything about politics and you should just stick to talking about Drag Race and wigs and makeup.” But we persisted. Even though we’re talking about something we may not know about, there’s a lot of people who don’t know shit about politics but, right now, there’s so much injustice and so much lying, we have no choice but to be active and fight against it,” Alaska says. Her message to her US followers is, simply: vote.
      With her teased blond beehive, love of leopard print and notorious potty mouth, Alaska is not the most obvious political role model – a paradox not lost on the leggy diva: “It’s sort of a topsy-turvy world where a drag queen named Alaska Thunderfuck is someone who’s a role model for young people, but sure, why not? I’m always trying to be a better person, a better citizen, a better drag queen. I guess it’s just a case of trying to do good and not do harm.”For Peppermint – actor, singer, Broadway performer and fan favourite from Drag Race season 9 – there were no public figures that represented her experience growing up. As a young Black trans woman, she was inspired by those who dared to stand for change and challenge social and gender norms.
      “People who were being ostracised or fired from their jobs, or being made fun of on television – those are the trailblazers who paved the way for people like me,” says Peppermint, whose role models include the Minneapolis councilwoman Andrea Jenkins, the first Black openly transgender woman elected to public office in the US, and earlier on, gender non-conforming pioneers such as Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson and Stormé DeLarverie, who are credited with starting the modern queer rights movement.
      Since the start of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, “sassy, but never shady” Peppermint has emerged as one of the most eloquent voices in the Black Trans Lives Matter movement, which aims to raise awareness of the violence directed at the Black trans community, and Black transgender women in particular. “It’s absolutely necessary for people to become outraged and mobilised when we see images of injustice. I’m so thankful that the Black Lives Matter movement began after the murder of Trayvon Martin and continued with George Floyd, but what we’re not seeing is the same sort of energy when it comes to the women who have been killed: Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland and many others,” Peppermint says.
      In 2019, at least 27 transgender people were murdered in the US, of whom the vast majority were Black women, according to Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group. Peppermint believes the lack of public indignation surrounding the murders of Black trans women is rooted in misogyny and transphobia – issues that have become glaringly apparent under the current Republican administration. More

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      The strategist who could have put Hillary in power: Christopher Shinn on his play The Narcissist

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      Continuing our Future Plays series, the writer introduces an extract from his unstaged script about a disillusioned ex-Clinton adviser navigating the slow-motion apocalypse of US politicsThe Narcissist takes place in 2017, a year after Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton. Jim, one of Clinton’s former campaign strategists, has left politics, disillusioned after his warnings that Trump could win were ignored. At the start of the play, he is at a fundraiser for a prominent female senator who is in the early stages of planning a run for the 2020 Democratic nomination. She has her aide arrange for Jim to meet her in the penthouse kitchen for a few minutes, as she’s heard rumours that his 2016 advice, had it been heeded, would have led to a Democratic victory.I wrote The Narcissist in order to explore what is happening in the American psyche. It is a kind of loose sequel to my 2008 play Now or Later, in which a centrist Democrat took power just as nascent resentments on the right and left were beginning to intensify. Twelve years later, these resentments are the mainstream of American politics, and we are living in a kind of slow-motion apocalypse. But the centre-left establishment still struggles to integrate this cultural development into its conception of the country. Continue reading… More

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      Kleptopia review: power, theft and Trump as leader in Putin’s own image

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      In a year dominated by a US presidential election between a kleptocrat and a democrat, a book about world-class thieves laundering trillions ought be the perfect bedtime reading for anyone curious about the unprecedented amounts of money that have been looted and hidden over the last 20 years.Tom Burgis, a reporter for the Financial Times, is certainly an impressive investigator. He works hard to explain how myriad financial institutions, from the Bank of New York to Merrill Lynch and HSBC, have tried to deceive regulators and wash the ill-gotten gains of countless dictators.The oligarchs of Putin’s Russia are big players in these pages. So are Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, British bankers turned regulators, a trio of Central Asian billionaires, and no fewer than 30 other major characters, all listed at the beginning.This results in so many competing storylines that it becomes almost impossible to keep track. We bounce back and forth, from the Russian and Italian gangsters of Brooklyn to the oil fields of the former Soviet Union, from the platinum mines of Zimbabwe to the copper and cobalt of the Congo.Burgis draws useful parallels between Putin’s kleptocracy and Hitler’s GermanyThere are long sections about the wholesale theft of natural resources in post-Soviet Russia and the birth of the oligarchs, all of whom were forced to become Putin’s partners – or face imprisonment or death. For example, the purchase of a three-quarter stake in Yukos, for $350m, made Mikhail Khodorkovsky the richest man in Russia. Five years later, the vast oil company with 100,000 employees was worth $12bn. Khodorkovsky was arrested, jailed and eventually sent into exile.Burgis draws useful parallels between Putin’s kleptocracy and Hitler’s Germany, each home to both a “normative state” that generally respects its own laws and a “prerogative state” that violates most of them.According to the German-Jewish lawyer who was the author of the theory in the 1930s, “Nazi Germany was not a straightforward totalitarian system. It retained some vestiges of the rule of law, chiefly in matters of business, so that the capitalist economy had the basic rules it needed to keep going. But the prerogative state – Hitler’s political machinery – enjoyed … ‘jurisdiction over jurisdiction.”Trump helped to construct a new ‘global alliance of kleptocrats’. Their whole goal is the privatization of powerPutin has used his jurisdiction over everything to vanquish almost all of his enemies. And since Donald Trump has been collaborating with Russians in one way or another for almost 40 years, our kleptocrat-in-chief does finally make an appearance in Kleptopia, on page 250. After we’ve read a lot about Felix Sater, a second-generation Russian mobster connected to several schemes including the Trump Soho in lower Manhattan, Trump is identified as the “crucial ingredient” in Sater’s “magic potion for transforming dirty money”.Once the ratings of The Apprentice had washed away the public memory of multiple bankruptcies and “reinvented” his name as “a success”, Trump’s role in real estate deals became simply to “rent out his name”.“The projects could go bust,” Burgis writes, and “they usually did – but that wasn’t a problem.” The money had completed “its metamorphoses from plunder to clean capital”.Then there was the notorious sale of Trump’s Palm Beach mansion, to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95m, more than twice what Trump paid a few years before. According to Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, Trump thought the real buyer was Putin – a story which hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it should.With his election as president, as Burgis puts it, Trump helped to construct a new “global alliance of kleptocrats”. Their whole goal is the privatization of power, and they control “the three great poles” – the US, China and Russia.In our new world of alternate facts, corruption is “no longer a sign of a failing state, but of a state succeeding in its new purpose”. The new kleptocrats have subverted their nations’ institutions, “to seize for themselves that which rightfully belonged to the commonwealth”.This is a ghastly and very important story. But the secret to great storytelling is knowing what to leave out. If Burgis had found a more focused way to tell this one, he would have written a much more powerful book. More

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

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      Under a title which calls to mind Chris Isaak’s hit song from 1989, the former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates offers an interesting mixture of vignettes and dish, an effort to rewrite the history of 2016 before the 2020 election is over. Wicked Game is surprisingly readable and will leave process junkies with plenty to chew on.Making sausage is seldom pretty. The book reminds us that even after Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president, with his win in the Indiana primary on 3 May 2016, the convention was more than two months away. Trump’s opponents had plenty of time to organize one last challenge.Convention fights are rare – but possible. In 1980, Ted Kennedy mounted an attempt to wrest the Democratic nomination away from Jimmy Carter, the incumbent president, on the floor of Madison Square Garden. He lost. Four years before, Ronald Reagan came close to unseating Gerald Ford. In helping the president push back, Paul Manafort won his spurs.As a rookie candidate, Trump never recognized that he could be displaced. But Manafort and Gates did. Catapulted into the Trump campaign by the businessman Tom Barrack and the profane prankster Roger Stone, they took names and put down a prospective revolt before the convention got going. In the primaries, letting Trump be Trump worked. Nailing down the nomination required different skills. Patience and attention to detail mattered.And yet, in Trump’s universe, almost no one lasts, be they wives or staffers. Manafort would be forced out in favor of Steve Bannon, Trumpworld’s dark lord who would in turn be ousted from the White House and now stands under federal indictment.The Trump campaign was a hazardous place to be. Gates emerged as Barrack’s deputy on the inaugural committee. But in the end, while a jury convicted Manafort on charges arising from special counsel Robert Mueller’s campaign investigation, Gates copped a guilty plea, cooperated and was sentenced to 45 days in jail.Despite it all, Trump 2016 kept its eye on the prize, first winning the nomination, then the electoral college. Its message was venomously acrid – but somehow coherent. It got the biggest things right. Four years later, candidate and minions are distracted. Trump’s rallies are borscht belt shtick infused with anger and self-pity, the backdrop a mounting death toll. The US is far from turning the corner against the coronavirus. The grim reaper stalks the land.What worked against Hillary Clinton is coming up short against Joe Biden, everyone’s favorite uncle. When a “billionaire” sitting president has less cash on hand than his challenger, in the final days of a campaign, something has gone wrong.As for scoop, Gates lets the reader know Mike Pence was not the vice-presidential pick of Trump’s dreams. The Indiana governor had tepidly backed Ted Cruz. As Gates reminds us, Trump is not one to forget.And then there was Ivanka.“She’s bright, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, and the people would love her!” her father gushed, according to Gates, who italicizes his reaction: “OK … He’s not joking.”It turned out Pence was a good pick: all the loyalty of a puppy without the need to housebreak. Unlike Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich, the two other actual finalists, Pence conveyed a degree of stability and helped with white evangelicals, a key constituency that has stuck with Trump throughout. The former governor also brought that beatific gaze.By contrast, Christie labored under the cloud of Bridgegate and Gingrich had a personality that sucked all the air out of the room. Trump would not abide competition. As Trump put it, in Gates’s telling, “there was something wrong and off” about the former House speaker. Gingrich’s wife was appointed ambassador to the Vatican – a consolation prize.Twisting the knife, Gates also announces that Gingrich was Jared and Ivanka’s pick. It would neither be the first nor last time the dauphins would get things wrong. Kushner thought firing James Comey would bring bipartisan plaudits. We all know it did not.Instead, firing Comey triggered a two-year special counsel investigation that snared Gates and Manafort, enveloped the president and helped hand the House to the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi should send Kushner chocolates.Gates’s judgments can be premature. He lavishes praise on Brad Parscale, data guy to the 2016 campaign, now former campaign manager for 2020. Gates describes Parscale’s data operations as invaluable but adds, inauspiciously, that they continue “to this day”.Not quite. First, Parscale grossly overestimated the demand for a June rally in Oklahoma which apparently resulted in the sad death of Herman Cain, a contender for the 2012 nomination and ardent supporter of the president who contracted Covid-19. Ultimately, Parscale was dismissed. In September, he was hospitalized, after menacing his wife and threatening to harm himself.Gates also goes all-in on denouncing Robert Mueller and attacking any suggestion of “collusion” with Russia. Here too, he may have gotten over his skis.According to the Senate intelligence committee’s final report, Russia and WikiLeaks coordinated on interference in the 2016 election, while the Trump campaign “tracked” news about WikiLeaks, “Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and the press team” paying heed to Julian Assange’s document dumps.Gates emerges from his own book as a sympathetic figure, too low on the totem pole to be a driving force, close enough to the sun to get badly burned. If nothing else, his Wicked Game is a morality tale for our times. As Isaak sang: “Strange what desire will make foolish people do.” More

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      Film-maker Alexandra Pelosi: ‘I think phones are more dangerous than guns’

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      The documentarian and daughter of the House speaker discusses her new film that looks at an angry and divided AmericaAmerica is, as the refrain goes, divided. This has been demonstrated empirically, with evidence on America’s increasing political polarization, and anecdotally, if you’ve lived in America for the past decade, and especially the last four years. Easily legible examples of a country fraying at the seams abound; American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself, a new documentary from Showtime, serializes some of the most prominent ones of the last year, with a retrospective of such indelible yet quickly faded images as crematory trucks in the height of pandemic New York, the Trump motorcycle rally in pandemic summer South Dakota, and a fraught border checkpoint in El Paso, Texas. Related: ‘There’s a whole war going on’: the film tracing a decade of cyber-attacks Continue reading… More