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      ‘Going against the grain’: is bipartisanship really possible in America?

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      On election night 2016, Van Jones, the criminal justice advocate and former Obama administration official turned CNN anchor, processed his shock on live television. “This was a whitelash against a changing country,” he said. “It was a whitelash against a Black president, in part. And that’s the part where the pain comes.” The clip, in which Jones appeared near tears and essentially called Donald Trump a “bully” and a “bigot”, went viral. For many, it was shorthand for shock and dismay, an articulation of unspeakable anger, and a rare example of a pundit calling it like it was.So it was confusing that over the next few years, Jones, a Black man from western Tennessee, was seen at the Trump White House, conducted the first (and uncomfortably chummy) TV interview with Trump’s son-in-law/adviser Jared Kushner, and touted his communication with the administration and congressional Republicans in the name of bipartisan criminal justice reform. In spring 2019, Jones appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference – the Maga hat-filled, far-right convention known as CPAC – as an avowed Democrat willing, for better and for worse and with a considerable amount of controversy, to engage with the opposition. He appeared on stage with the chairman of the American Conservative Union, prompting the question, from myself, from the panel’s moderator and surely from audience members: “Why are you here?”The answer – the distance between 2016 and 2019, and the messy, at times contradictory journey in between – forms the backbone of the The First Step, a new, wide-ranging and thoughtful documentary on his fraught activism and the bipartisan criminal justice legislation he championed. Created by the brothers team of director Brandon Kramer and producer Lance Kramer, The First Step opens with that CPAC appearance and takes it name from the First Step Act, the bill heralded by Jones and his criminal justice organization, #cut50, that was signed into law by President Trump in 2018. The measure barred punitive practices such as shackling pregnant prisoners, placed inmates in facilities closer to their families, cut down some federal sentences by anywhere from weeks to years and allowed those convicted of pre-2010 crack cocaine offenses to apply for resentencing to a shorter term.During the initial Trump years, Jones “felt like somebody needed to be engaging and reaching across the aisle and trying to see if there was any sliver of room to get something accomplished on some of the issues where there is some bipartisan support”, said Brandon Kramer. The First Step Act was thus a hodgepodge of reforms and concessions, with a wide range of supporters (people as ideologically opposed as Kamala Harris and Ted Cruz) and skeptics. Some Republicans interested in decreasing mass incarceration backed it; other hardliners, such as the then attorney general, Jeff Sessions, opposed it. Many progressives viewed the measure as too little, too patchwork, one whose passage would allow Republicans to claim criminal justice reform without meaningfully addressing mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Jones’s bipartisan approach – as in, courting Republicans, Jared Kushner and Democrats – drew plenty of critics; the bill was initially opposed by liberal groups including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU.It also makes for a fascinating, thorny watch, one which, Jones’s occasional foot-in-mouth moments or glad-handing aside, tangles with evergreen questions of political work: incremental change versus radical reform, resoluteness versus compromise, how and when to build a coalition. The Kramers, who worked with Jones on a 2016 web series called The Messy Truth, in which Jones spoke to people across the political spectrum, were interested in someone “going against the grain and doing something really tough and controversial and being able to tell those stories in a really complex way,” said Brandon. “It felt like no matter what would come out of that, it would be a really important document and story for the American public to have.” The First Step began production during the Women’s March in January 2017 and filmed into 2020, as the bill was worked and nearly killed, reworked and nearly killed and then passed, and beyond. “People talk about bridge-building, but it’s very rare that you get to see bridge-building in action,” said Brandon.The film proceeds along three intertwined tracks: first, the work to pass the bill itself, trying to nail down support from Democrats and attract Republicans with a Trump endorsement, as well as Trump’s Oval Office, on the day of signing. (Jones addresses Trump personally and gratefully.) Second, on Jones’s personal journey to activism, from shy, bookish kid to Yale Law School to fighting to shut down prisons in San Francisco in the 1990s, which convinced him that “you cannot help people en masse with one party or with one race. The only way you’re gonna help is you get everybody together.”Jones, whose style encompasses hard-won insights (“you can’t fight an opponent you don’t understand,” he says of researching the right), whiffs and bromides in one impassioned mix, is often a besieged island of one; “He who walks in the middle of the road gets hit on both sides,” says the bishop TD Jakes in a phone call with a fatigued Jones. We meet his small #cut50 team as well as some of his prominent liberal critics, from his friend Senator Cory Booker to progressive criminal justice advocates. The First Step Act is “not the law that we need right now”, says the Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors in the film. “This bill is going to jeopardize the work that we’ve done for the last couple decades.”And third, the film sits in on meetings facilitated by Jones between two grassroots groups grappling with addiction and incarceration: an organization of Black and Hispanic residents from South Central LA besieged by the crack epidemic and the “war on drugs”, and some predominantly white, Trump-voting citizens of McDowell county, West Virginia, reeling from the opioid crisis and cyclical arrests. Each group visits the other; most find common ground in shared trauma and frustration over a system that punishes rather than rehabilitates, if not in justifying the others’ vote in 2016. In one of the film’s most riveting scenes, Jones tries to convince the LA group members to visit Trump’s White House to tell their stories, because the people who shouldn’t be in power will make the trip, and “the right people won’t go” to make an impact. Some do make an uncomfortable visit, greeted by Kellyanne Conway; others view engagement as a bridge too far, certain that Trump and Conway “will find a way to misuse it”.The tension between engagement and non-engagement, incremental work versus comprehensive reform, course throughout the film with, of course, no definitive resolution. “There are very legitimate and important reasons why to engage, and there’s legitimate and important reasons why some people don’t engage or why they’re fighting for a more comprehensive reform,” said Brandon. “The hope is that you see people who represent your view, but you’re also given a window into a different strategy or opinion or view.”“It’s valuable for the human experience but also the political process to be able to engage with these kind of narratives but also just paradoxes in this space,” said Lance Kramer of the multitude of experiences and approaches professed in the film. “I think it’s a healing space, when you have that opportunity.”If anything, the US political environment has only grown more polarized, and the Republican party more untethered from reality, in the years since The First Step was filmed; it can feel weird to watch the film, and its depiction of bipartisan efforts, in a post-January 6 context. But, as Jones and the film-makers point out, there is still a point to political bridge-building. The First Step Act did get passed, allowing thousands of federal prisoners to go home early. The film ends with immediately eye-watering clips of former inmates reunited with their families, months or years ahead of time. “There’s virtues in still trying to get things done and not just throwing up our hands and giving up,” said Lance. “At the end of the day, it’s people’s lives that depend on it.”
      The First Step is now available digitally in the US More

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      ‘It’s been very dark for all of us’: film-maker Alexandra Pelosi on a family on America’s political frontline

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      Interview‘It’s been very dark for all of us’: film-maker Alexandra Pelosi on a family on America’s political frontlineDavid Smith in Washington With her father recovering from a brutal hammer attack, the director’s latest film shows her mother Nancy Pelosi resisting the January 6 insurrectionAlexandra Pelosi is at home in New York, preparing a birthday party for her 15-year-old son, and pops up on Zoom beside a sign that says: “Don’t work for assholes. Don’t work with assholes.” When our interview begins with the most unimaginative of queries – “How are you?” – she is in no mood for casual conversation.Pelosi in the House: documentary captures speaker’s January 6 struggleRead more“How am I supposed to answer that question?” the fast-talking film-maker bats back. “Look, I don’t know how you do polite small talk because I’ve just been through basically like both of my parents’ funerals.”To be clear, neither of Alexandra’s parents is dead. Her father Paul Pelosi, 82, is undergoing a slow and painful recovery from a hammer attack in late October by a home intruder. Her mother Nancy Pelosi, also 82, last month announced her retirement as Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, assured of a place in history as the first female speaker.Alexandra, 52, recalls that, when her father emerged from intensive care, his house looked like a funeral home because so many well-wishers sent flowers. “I was reading the notes from his friends and I was like, this is great, ’cos you get to go to your own funeral, ’cos you get to see what people say about you when you die. I’m putting a good spin on it, trying to cheer him up.”Then she went to Washington for her mother’s long goodbye. “If you’re in politics and you step down, it’s like going to your own funeral because you get to read your own obituary. Essentially it’s like I’ve read both of my parents’ obituaries and now I have to keep living with two living people. That’s surreal.”The pitiless assault on Paul Pelosi was one of the most disturbing examples yet of America’s increasingly coarse, polarised and violent political culture. He has told how he was sleeping when a man he had never seen before entered his bedroom looking for Nancy, who was in Washington at the time.Officers responding to Paul’s 911 call found him and David DePape, 42, fighting over a hammer, according to a federal indictment. An officer ordered DePape to drop the hammer but he responded, “ummm nope,” before forcefully swinging it at Paul, who was treated at a hospital for a fractured skull.DePape last month pleaded not guilty to federal charges of attempting to kidnap a federal official and assaulting a federal official’s family member. Paul, wearing a hat and glove on one hand, made his first public appearance since the assault at the recent Kennedy Center Honors in Washington.“Wasn’t that amazing?” asks Alexandra, who has been struggling to sleep and has had nightmares about the incident. “Come on, you can’t be a bitter old journalist! I think every member of our family cried when they saw that because that’s the first time he left the house. That was a nice 10 seconds of his life but he has to live with traumatic brain injury for the rest of his life and he’s 82. If it could’ve been me, I would have loved to have been in his place.”She reflects: “It’s been very dark for all of us. We all process it differently. I’ve been very dark because the minute it happened I got on a plane with my mom and went to San Francisco. We sat in the ICU for a week and I was very upset because my mother loves to tell the story that, when I was 16, she came to me and said, ‘Mommy has the chance to run for Congress and I will only do it if you give me your permission but I’d have to be gone three nights a week.’ I was like, ‘Mom, get a life!’“She loves that story and so then we were sitting in the ICU 35 years later and I was like, ‘If I had known that this is where it was going to end, I never would have given you my blessing that day 35 years ago.’ But my dad was like, you can’t say that because it’s not fair to erase her career just because of this; you have to say, if you came to me today, I would not give you my permission because of how toxic the social media environment is.”Alexandra’s son, Paul, is named after her father and worships him. He was with her at the US Capitol when it came under attack from a mob of Donald Trump supporters on 6 January 2021. “He was asking me that day, ‘Mom, why do all these people want to kill MiMi?’ I couldn’t come up with an answer. Because of the Affordable Care Act? I don’t know.“I know that if you watch Fox News, you hate Nancy Pelosi because they’ve programmed you to hate Nancy Pelosi and, if I watched Fox News, I would hate Nancy Pelosi too. But I don’t know how it gets from that to, ‘I want to break into her house and try and kill someone in her family.’ That’s a leap and so it’s been a lot for my teenagers to try and process that.”The Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, and Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake made fun of it while Trump’s son, Don Jr. retweeted a “Paul Pelosi Halloween costume” featuring a hammer.Alexandra, who had to clean up the mess and has photos of her father’s bloody pyjamas on her phone, comments: “I can’t see how the governor of Virginia can make jokes about it or the wannabe governor of Arizona can make jokes about it and then how elected members of Congress can tweet these insane Pizzagate-style conspiracies. That’s unforgivable. That’s who I’ll never forgive. I’m trying to make peace with that.”Both her parents feature in her latest film, her 14th documentary for HBO, broadcast on Tuesday. Pelosi in the House is shot in a cinéma vérité style across three decades with plenty of shots of Nancy’s back as she strides through the corridors of power. At one point she is seen putting Vice-President Mike Pence on speakerphone while doing household chores.Alexandra admits: “She never gave me permission. She has not signed a release. She has not seen the film. She does not know what this is. I don’t know if she’s ever going to watch it.” Indeed, Alexandra could never get her mother to sit down for an in-depth interview. “This is watching her work because Nancy Pelosi is her job. The only way to understand her is to watch her work so the only way I could explain her is watching her work. But if I tried to talk to her or ask a question, it just wouldn’t work. She just didn’t play ball with me. That’s not what she does. ”The documentary sometimes revels in the quotidian but, when it arrives at January 6, moves to a different plane. Watching on TV as Trump delivers an incendiary speech urging his supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat, Nancy vows to “punch him out” if he sets foot in the US Capitol, her sacred ground.Alexandra recalls: “She was protecting her turf. It was the House of Pelosi and they broke into her house and tried to kill all of her family members because the caucus is her family. Nancy Pelosi has two families. She has us, her children and grandchildren, then she has her political family, the members, the caucus.”Whipped up into a frenzy, the mob marched on the Capitol. Alexandra’s husband, the Dutch TV journalist Michiel Vos, was outside reporting the drama; she and her teenage son were inside, watching with alarm. “I was looking out the window: ‘Oh, look at those protesters out there.’ I’m trying to get her [Nancy’s] attention because she’s very laser-focused. Then my son kept saying like, ‘What if they stormed the Capitol?’“At some point the security came over and said we’re leaving. They [the mob] had already broken the window to come in. The security camera shows that the protesters were two minutes from us but we found out that after. At the time we did not know how close they came so it wasn’t as scary as it seemed.”Nor did the threat come as a complete surprise. “The Republicans have spent hundreds of millions of dollars demonising her and turning her into a target. The Capitol police have protected her for decades. There was a pig’s head on her doorstep in San Francisco a few days before that attack. It’s not as if this all came completely out of the blue.”Alexandra accompanied her mother into the back of SUV that sped them away to safety. The speaker, full of cold fury, and other congressional leaders gathered at a military base, working the phones to demand that order be restored so they could certify Joe Biden’s election victory.Alexandra melted into the background and filmed for posterity. Some of the footage made its way into the House’s January 6 committee hearings. “It’s like a soccer player. What do you do when you put a ball in front of me? I’m going to kick it. I knew my job was to kick the ball.”The rioters, meanwhile, had overrun the Capitol and were ransacking the speaker’s office. Among the most haunting footage from that day is the sound of one demanding, “Where’s Nancy?” Subsequently Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right Oath Keepers, reportedly said he wanted to hang Nancy “from the lamp-post”.Jokes about Paul Pelosi aren’t just in bad taste. They normalize political violence | Arwa MahdawiRead moreAlexandra reflects: “Stewart Rhodes was prosecuted so my son comes down for breakfast the other day and he’s like, ‘Hey, did you see that this guy was found guilty? He said he wanted to hang Nancy Pelosi from a lamp-post. Why did he want to hang Nancy Pelosi from a lamp-post?’ I don’t know. I still haven’t been able to come up with a good answer for Nancy Pelosi’s grandchildren about why people want to hang her from a lamp-post.”Such unanswerables underline that it has been a bruising couple of months. But a trip to Washington boosted Alexandra’s spirits. First, she was reunited with her “old friend” former president George W Bush – a relationship that bemuses her liberal friends. “It’s renewing my faith in humanity because I know there’s hope that the Republican party does have a life after Donald Trump and then I can live in America and we can all live happily ever after.”Then she attended a state dinner at the White House, sitting across from Biden and next to the guest of honour, the French president, Emmanuel Macron. “Let’s face it, I’m the least interesting person at the table so it’s my job to entertain them.” She began with a mother-in-law joke for Macron’s benefit: “When I met my husband’s mom, the first thing she said to me was, ‘Why can’t you be French?’”Now, in another welcome diversion from her parents’ “funerals”, she has to get ready for her younger son’s birthday party and so ends the interview with a final plea. “Be nice,” she says mischievously. “Haven’t the Pelosis suffered enough? I don’t want to retraumatise my family when they read the Guardian. That’s all.”TopicsDocumentary filmsNancy PelosiUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Pelosi in the House: documentary captures speaker’s January 6 struggle

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      Pelosi in the House: documentary captures speaker’s January 6 struggle Film by her daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, captures how Nancy Pelosi fought to preserve democracy in the dramatic hours of the Capitol attackThe struggle of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, to preserve American democracy in the dramatic hours of the January 6 attack are captured in a new documentary film shot by her daughter.Pelosi is seen watching on TV Donald Trump’s incendiary speech to his supporters, getting rushed out of the US Capitol building and making calls to Vice-President Mike Pence and other officials from the Fort McNair military base, where congressional leaders took refuge from the mob.Despite the chaos and confusion, she is immediately clear that Trump is responsible for instigating what she describes as an “insurrection”.The blow-by-blow reconstruction of the assault on democracy is contained in Pelosi in the House, produced and directed by the speaker’s daughter, film-maker Alexandra Pelosi, broadcast on HBO on Tuesday. Some of the behind-the-scenes footage was seen in edited form during the House January 6 committee hearings.Early in the day Pelosi is in her office, wearing a face mask and adjusting her hair, as three TV screens show Trump whipping up his supporters at the Ellipse and vowing never to concede the 2020 presidential election. She tells her staff with a laugh: “Tell him if he comes here, we’re going to the White House.”Watching through a window, Alexandra’s teenage son, Paul, spots a flag-waving mob gathering ominously outside the US Capitol. Pelosi’s chief of staff, Terri McCullough, reports that the Secret Service have dissuaded Trump from coming to the Capitol because they would not have the resources to protect him.Pelosi replies defiantly: “If he comes, I’m going to punch him out. I’ve been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds, I’m going to punch him out and I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.”Members of Congress adjourn to consider objections to the 2020 election results. A car has “Trump” and “Pelosi is Satan” signs on its windscreen. The chanting, horn-blowing mob attacks police, smashes windows and force its way into the building, shouting: “This is our house!”Pelosi escapes with just two minutes to spare. At 2.15pm she is escorted to safety down a staircase. She asks: “Are they calling the national guard?” A woman replies: “Yes. Yes, ma’am.”Hastening through a tunnel, she asks: “Did you reach McConnell?” – a reference to the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Someone says: “We did.” Pelosi: “And will they call the national guard?” Reply: “That’s correct.”Upstairs, the rioters are demanding to know where votes are counted. Walking through another corridor with aides around her, Pelosi evidently realises what a perilous moment this is for democracy. She says: “If they stop the proceedings, they will have succeeded in stopping the validation of the president of the United States. If they stop the proceedings, we will have totally failed.”She is then seen on a phone, telling an unidentified person: “We have got to finish the proceedings or else they will have a complete victory.”Both Pelosi and her daughter climb into the back of a black SUV so they can be taken to safety. Upstairs, her office is being ransacked by Trump supporters. One thinks he has found Pelosi’s laptop. Another asks: “You want Nancy’s pink boxing gloves?” Someone shouts with primal rage: “Fuck Nancy Pelosi!”Sitting in the moving vehicle, the speaker is livid at the disruption of Congress’s sacred duty. “So what’s the prospect? We’re gonna stay here all day, for the rest of our lives, or what? We’re here until what, until the national guard decides to come and get rid of these people?”By now the insurrectionists are inside the Senate chamber. One demands: “Do you see Nancy Pelosi?” Another asks: “Where the fuck is Nancy?” Outside, a bearded man in a “Maga” cap picks up a phone and shouts: “Can I speak to Pelosi? Yeah, we’re coming, bitch.”Pelosi is seen entering the military base at Fort McNair. As Congressman James Clyburn looks on, she says: “There has to be some way we can maintain the sense that people have that there is some security, some confidence that government can function and that we can elect the president of the United States.”Chuck Schumer, then the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, informs Pelosi: “My wife just called watching TV. There are people with guns trying to get into the House chamber.”Pelosi had to leave the Capitol without her phone so is forced to borrow others’. Sitting and studying a photo on one phone, says: “Oh, one of them is in the president of the Senate’s seat.”Schumer notes that some senators are still in hiding and pleads by phone with Ryan McCarthy, the army secretary, to send in military personnel. Pelosi, watching the carnage on CNN, speaks to Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia: “They’re just breaking windows. This is horrendous. And all at the instigation of the president of the United States.”She tells Schumer that Northam agreed to dispatch 200 state police and a national guard unit.At 3.30pm Pelosi and Schumer speak by phone to Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general. Pelosi tells him: “Safety just transcends everything but the fact is, on any given day, they’re breaking the law in many different ways and, quite frankly, much of it at the instigation of the president of the United States.”Schumer adds sharply: “Why don’t you get the president to tell them to leave the Capitol, Mr Attorney General, in your law enforcement responsibility? A public statement they should all leave?”Rosen begins to say his team is “coordinating as quickly and as –” before getting cut off by Schumer, who demands: “No, no, no – please answer my question, answer my question!”Congressional leaders then have a call with the acting defence secretary, Christopher Miller. Pelosi says forcefully: “Just pretend for a moment it was the Pentagon or the White House or some other entity that was under siege. You can logistically get people there as you make the plan and you have some leadership of the national guard there they have not been given the authority to activate.”Then Pelosi speaks to Pence as he waits in a parking garage beneath the Capitol, where rioters chanted for him to be hanged.Taking a seat beside a plant and cabinet full of decorative plates, the speaker says she and other congressional leaders are OK, then asks: “How are you? Oh, my goodness, where are you? God bless you. But are you in a very safe –?”She says she has been told that it will “take days” to clear the Capitol and that Fort McNair has facilities for the House and Senate to meet, adding: “We’d rather go to the Capitol and do it there but it doesn’t seem to be safe.”Pelosi continues: “We’ve got a very bad report about the condition of the House floor, with defecation and all that kind of thing.”She is then seen using her teeth to help unwrap a beef jerky stick and eating while holding the phone in her right hand. She tells Pence: “I worry about you being in that Capitol room. Don’t let anybody know where you are.”Finally, Trump releases a video calling his supporters to go home, but Pelosi and Schumer are not impressed. She comments: “Insurrection. That’s a crime and he’s guilty of it.”By 5.45pm the security forces have regained control. Pence informs Pelosi and Schumer by phone that Congress will be able to reconvene. The backup plan of doing so at Fort McNair is therefore not necessary.Sitting in a vehicle heading back through darkened streets, Pelosi expresses her disgust towards Trump. “I just feel sick at what he did to the Capitol and to the country today. He’s got to pay a price for that.”Back inside the Capitol, Pelosi is informed that the sign outside her office has been taken. She responds phlegmatically: “They took the sign? We’ll get another.”Entering the office, she is warned that there is still a lot of broken glass. A gold framed mirror above the fireplace is smashed. She observes: “Boy, the staff looks scared. They’re traumatised.”The Senate reconvenes around 8pm and the House around 9pm. Pelosi watches on TV as Schumer compares the insurrection to the attack on Pearl Harbor as a “day of infamy”. At 3.48am on 7 January, Joe Biden’s election victory is ratified after all.At 9am Pelosi is in a car, telling Clyburn: “We have to stop this man, the insurrectionist in the White House.” Clyburn warns that invoking the 25th amendment would be a “complicated process” and there may not be enough time, “but there is enough time – and it’s rather simple – to tag him with the uniqueness of a second impeachment”.On 13 January, a week before he left office, the House voted to impeach Trump by a vote of 232-197 for incitement of insurrection. He was the first president in history to be impeached twice.TopicsNancy PelosiDocumentary filmsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Enabling a demagogue: a new film traces Republicans’ capitulation to Donald Trump

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      InterviewEnabling a demagogue: a new film traces Republicans’ capitulation to Donald TrumpDavid Smith in WashingtonMichael Kirk’s documentary Lies, Politics and Democracy is a chilling study in how Trump subdued the Republican party Michael Kirk has been making documentary films for more than half a century. He has chronicled the peaks and troughs of US politics, winning every significant broadcast journalism award along the way. But nothing prepared him for the scale of the threat now facing American democracy.“There’s never been a film I made where I was more anxious, unhappy to make it, unwilling to discover the things we were discovering,” Kirk, 74, says of his latest project for PBS’s investigative series Frontline. “‘Worried’ is not a strong enough word for how I feel about where we are as a country and I don’t think I’m alone.”Lies, Politics and Democracy tells the story of how, like a colonial army of occupation, Donald Trump subdued the Republican party with a combination of brute force and manufactured consent. It is a chilling character study in how, one after another, party leaders ignored, acquiesced, collaborated and enabled a demagogue while fearing his fervent fanbase.The film draws on more than 30 interviews with former government officials, political journalists and experts. Like the congressional January 6 committee hearings, it provides a compelling narrative of half-forgotten turning points that, viewed in totality, resemble a Greek tragedy hurtling towards the inevitable and deadly climax of 6 January 2021.It is striking, for example, that three of Trump’s most oleaginous loyalists have also, at various stages, suffered the harshest blowback for defying him. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was publicly humiliated at the 2016 Republican National Convention after pointedly refusing to endorse the party nominee. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was heckled as a “traitor” by furious Trump supporters after appearing to disown the president on January 6. Lesson learned, he was soon back on board. Vice-President Mike Pence, who for four long years remained unswervingly loyal, may have been hanged if the mob had their way after he refused to overturn the 2020 election.Lies, Politics and Democracy – which will be broadcast on PBS on Tuesday at 9pm – complements a growing body of literature tracking the Republican party’s capitulation that includes It Was All a Lie by Stuart Stevens, American Carnage by Tim Alberta, Insurgency by Jeremy Peters, Why We Did It by Tim Miller and Thank You for Your Servitude by Mark Leibovich.It has a heartbreaking opening for anyone who cherishes democracy: graceful concession speeches from Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, John McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore and other defeated presidential candidates going back decades. Cut to Donald Trump in 2020 falsely claiming, “Frankly, we did win this election.”Kirk explains: “The one non-negotiable rule in American politics is peacefully transfer the thing. It’s just too tenuous otherwise. Around the inauguration, there’s always some news anchor who says, ‘Here it is again, the thing that makes us the strongest country in the world: the peaceful transfer of power.’ It says everything about where we are.”The documentary recalls how, during his reality TV days, Trump claimed that the Emmy awards were rigged when his show The Apprentice was beaten by The Amazing Race. So it was hardly surprising that, when he lost the Republican caucuses in Iowa in February 2016, he tweeted that Cruz “cheated” and should be disqualified.Speaking via Zoom from a book-lined room in Brookline, Massachusetts, Kirk reflects: “You see so obviously what his method is and that he is this kind of rich guy: ‘I didn’t get the table I wanted in the restaurant, I’m going to trash the restaurant. Or I didn’t win an Emmy for my show, The Apprentice; I’m going to trash the Emmys and all the competition.’”In probably the nastiest primary in history, Trump insulted Cruz’s wife’s looks and implicated his father in the assassination of President John F Kennedy. The defeated Cruz was a speaker at the convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and agonised with his team for days over whether to support the strongman nominee.Alberta, who along with fellow journalist Jelani Cobb worked with the film’s producers, says on camera: “He tells them his decision, that he’s not going to endorse Donald Trump in his speech, and they ask him why and Cruz looks at them and he says: ‘History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket.’”The convention floor was not kind to Cruz, however. As he urged Republicans to vote their conscience, the crowd turned on him with boos, jeers and shouts of “Get out!”, “Pull the plug!” and “Get off the stage!” To view their snarling expressions with seven years’ hindsight is to witness the “Make America great again” base emerge screaming from the womb.Kirk, who was in the arena that day, says: “It felt like a potent moment for sure when it happened, but to see it again now, all these years later, and to see the faces of the people – and I was really determined to try to show who’s complaining; it’s not Nazis; it’s Mr and Mrs Republican complaining about Ted Cruz of all people, booing him off stage – I said, there’s the Maga party right there.“It’s growing right before our eyes because that was probably the purest manifestation even for Trump. He’s been seeing it in crowds out around America but right there among the Republican establishment, he had them. Boy, that sent a powerful message. I promise you it wasn’t lost on Mitch [McConnell] or Kevin [McCarthy] or any of the other establishment leaders.”Cruz proved spineless and went on the campaign trail for Trump in an effort to stay politically relevant. Meanwhile Pence had agreed to be Trump’s running mate, a decision that did much to normalise and legitimise the nominee, giving Christian conservatives permission to support him.Kirk continues: “This is the way authoritarians rise. They get the collaboration. Sometimes even the collaborator doesn’t really know that they’re collaborating. They also have their own agenda. They want to win. They want to get a heartbeat away from the presidency.“Pence [then governor] was in deep electoral trouble in Indiana so sure, why not? ‘I’ll get on that train. I’ll get on TV 500 times over the next six months. I’ll stay there and wave and he’s not going to win anyway but it will rejuvenate me and I can run in four years.’“There he is making a political calculation and not understanding that what he’s conferring on someone like Donald Trump to Pence’s own base, evangelical Christians and the right wing, is his power. Trump – no fool in any way about all of this stuff – knows how to use something like that and he sure did.”Trump stunned the world by beating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Republican leaders thought that he would be a useful idiot, easy to manipulate, only to find themselves manipulated in turn. They enjoyed policy wins, for instance on tax cuts, and instinctively defended him when Democrats attacked. But under constant pressure from Fox News and other rightwing media, they willfully ignored Trump’s authoritarian impulses.Bill Kristol, a conservative commentator and former White House official, tells the film: “Rationalisation is a very powerful force, it turns out, in human psychology. It was a funny kind of choice, though, because you read history books and it’s like, ‘this is the moment’ and you choose this or that. But there are also ways in which you choose gradually and incrementally and the choice is more of an accommodation and a rationalisation and an enabling.“It’s not a sort of, ‘I’m standing up here and choosing this path’. Some did that but an awful lot went along and they kept on going along and then they had to rationalise where they were going along so they became sort of enthusiastic about going along. You can rationalise your way into a series of choices, which becomes a very damaging and dangerous choice.”That said, Kirk highlights an inflection point when Republican leaders could have said enough is enough: a 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent and resulted in the death of the civil rights activist Heather Heyer. Trump insisted there were “very fine people on both sides”. Paul Ryan, the House speaker, seemed ready to disavow the president but ultimately bit his tongue.Kirk says: “That seemed like a real moment for Ryan and obviously a dramatic moment for the Republican party and what they were enabling in such an obvious racist act. It seems to fly in the face of who the Republicans used to be in Reconstruction in America after the civil war.“They were the heroes in so many ways and, for the Republican party after Charlottesville to be where it found itself, either silence from somebody like Mitch, or shrinking back in a way like Ryan did, it’s just tragic to watch.”If Charlottesville failed to break the fever, and if the heavy-handed clearance of protesters outside the White House for a photo op in 2020 also failed, then surely the big lie of a stolen election and the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol would do it? For a while, it seemed that way. Graham announced that he was done. McCarthy said Trump bore responsibility for the riot.But as Lies, Politics and Democracy recounts, when Trump relinquished the presidency on 20 January, he had one more ace up his sleeve. From his last flight on Air Force One, he reportedly called Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, and threatened to quit and form his own party – a potentially devastating split.Kirk goes on: “That threat – that I’m going to create my own party, I’ve got the voting lists, I can wreck your Republican dream of a midterm in ’22 and a new president in ’24 – was Trump’s maximum moment of humiliation and loss and also his last great threat. And it worked.”Sure enough, soon McCarthy was making a pilgrimage to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to kiss the ring once more. Graham was playing golf with him again. Republican senators could have banned Trump from running for office in future but acquitted him at an impeachment trial. It was, despite everything, still Trump’s party.He has always boasted that he can identify an opponent’s weakness and exploit it. Kirk’s take: “It’s possible that he’s not a master strategist but it is very possible that the guy is a street fighter at the highest magnitude. This is somebody who seems to know how to intimidate, how to strike fear, how to manipulate.“It’s always an astonishing thing to me. How does he get people like [former attorney general] Bill Barr to do his bidding when there’s nothing about it that would make them do it if they wanted to keep their legacy? They go along. What is it about him? That may be at the heart of this film.“It may just be that politicians are a different breed and for them the purity and the simplicity of right and wrong is very fungible. Their calculus about somebody is all about them. I was talking to somebody when we were making this film and they said, ‘The definition of a politician is somebody who wants to get reelected’. Say no more.”Internal critics, such as Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have been purged. Many received vile abuse and death threats from the angry Maga base seeking to intimidate them and influence their votes – another intimation of authoritarianism.But not even Trump is immune. Last year he was booed for telling his supporters to get vaccinated against the coronavirus and again for revealing that he had received a booster shot. There have been moments during this year’s Republican primary elections when the base has appeared to take on a life of its own.Alyssa Farah Griffin, former White House director of strategic communications, says in the film: “The biggest misunderstanding of the Trump era is that he leads the base and the base goes where he does. I actually think that he’s created a monster that he doesn’t even control and he is actually very much driven by the base, not other way around.”That implies Trumpism will survive Trump; even when the man has gone, his dangerous anti-democratic movement will thrive and metastasise. With polls showing that a majority of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was illegitimate, is there any hope that the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower can be saved?It was a question that Kirk put to many people in the party and many scholars who study it. “Something really fundamental has happened and all the old paradigms don’t fit,” he says. “The invasion of Donald Trump may have really, really changed the Republican party in a way that it’s hard to see how the current players remake it, if that’s what they try to do.”Kirk and his team have made more than 15 documentaries seeking to understand Trump’s impact on American politics, including Trump’s American Carnage, The Choice 2020: Trump vs Biden and Trump’s Takeover. This latest film, showing days after Joe Biden gave a prime-time speech about the battle for the soul of the nation, is a portrait of a democracy more fragile than he ever imagined.“Every single person we talked to, even among very conservative Republicans, you’re not finding any kind of, ‘Hey, it’s going to be OK, hey, it’s all right,” he says bleakly. “I am very, very concerned about where we find ourselves right now and I don’t know how it fixes itself. I don’t know what happens.”TopicsRepublicansDocumentary filmsDonald TrumpUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Name names? Never, never, never!’ Lee Grant on her decades of defiance

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      Interview‘Name names? Never, never, never!’ Lee Grant on her decades of defianceEmma Brockes The Oscar-winning actor lost 12 years of her career refusing to out her partner as a communist, then had to endure his lectures about Marx while being treated as a ‘maid’. But a remarkable third act as a documentarian showcased her unique voiceLee Grant, child of the Depression, survivor of the anti-communist blacklist, director, Oscar winner and – incredibly – 95 and looking nothing of the sort, is standing in her Manhattan kitchen. It is the size of a medieval castle’s, with copper pots hanging from the ceiling, a catering-size fridge and what appear to be three ovens. “They’re all used,” says Grant, triumphantly, a tone she has earned. For 12 years during the McCarthy-era witch-hunt of the 1950s, Grant was banned from working in Hollywood, re-emerging in the 60s to become not only a wildly successful actor, but one of the US’s finest documentary makers of the late 20th century. Over the course of our conversation, the phrase she uses most often is “I was lucky”.If you have seen Grant on screen, it was most likely in one of her two best-known roles, from very different, seminal films. In 1967, she appeared as Mrs Colbert, the grieving widow, in the classic Sidney Poitier movie In the Heat of the Night. Eight years later, she played opposite Warren Beatty in the cult favourite Shampoo, for which she won an Oscar. Grant is a terrific actor, with a Zelig-like performance history that begins as a child dancer at the New York Ballet under George Balanchine (“My only memory of him is of my mother flirting with him; I was a fat little girl, that’s how I got in”), on through a scholarship at New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theater under Martha Graham, and, after her acting career was unfrozen at the age of 33 – “old for Hollywood!” – includes a heady decade living in Malibu knocking around in Joan Didion’s circle. “It was like entering The Truman Show. I get to live here? On the beach? With my eight-year-old daughter? Are you sure?! It was so delicious. And then I met Joey.”Grant sits at her kitchen table, her second husband, Joe Feury, working in the vast living room next door. Together, they ran a successful production company specialising in documentary film, a genre in which Grant says she would never have been successful had she not survived those 12 years on the blacklist – or met Feury. (“Joey thought I could do anything,” she writes in her memoir, I Said Yes to Everything. “And I could.”) Grant grew up 50 blocks north of where we are sitting in Washington Heights, the only child of successful immigrants to New York. Her mother’s family were from Odessa, in present-day Ukraine, her father’s from Poland. Her father ran the YMHA, the Hebrew youth hostel in the Bronx, and her devoted mother and aunt Fremo ran a nursery school from the brownstone where they lived.It was a charmed childhood. “Fremo!” Grant’s mother would exclaim, pointing at four-year-old Grant, or Lyova Rosenthal as she was, then. “Look how she walks! How she talks! Sing something! Did you see that, did you hear that? Genius!” Grant bursts into laughter, remembering the scene. “I knew it was crazy; it was so theatrical. And delicious. They were very delicious, and funny.” And although it wasn’t a political household, they were political times, not only as the Depression raged across the US, but closer to home. Walking down Convent Avenue in the early 30s, says Grant, “the little girls who were on the steps of the Catholic school would shout: ‘You killed our Lord!’” She found this both surprising and comic. “I don’t think I felt sad about it; it was more like: ‘That’s strange. Me? I killed your Lord?’”Grant was innately confrontational, “something I was born with, no question about it”. The first time she recalls standing up for something in public, she was a teenager, walking along a stretch of Broadway near her house when she witnessed a man attacking a woman. The woman tried, desperately, to board a bus, but when the bus driver clocked the commotion, he shut the doors and drove on. Others in the street ignored it. Only Grant reacted. “I ran for a cop.” She ran three blocks, and the couple were gone by the time they returned. “Oh,” said the cop, “they’re probably in a bar now. It’s just a normal thing, don’t worry.” She did worry. “They didn’t have the kind of sensibility that I had. And then I married a blacklisted writer. And there was no hesitation. I certainly was not going to give names in order to work in film or television.”There wasn’t a second when …?“NOT EVEN A SECOND!” she booms. “Never, never, never!” Decades later, when she started to make searing documentaries about homeless Americans, victims of domestic violence and women in prison, she says, “I’d been there. I’d been on the other side almost all my life.”The man she married was called Arnold Manoff, and it cost her the first 12 years of her career. In 1951, straight out of acting school, Grant won a role in a Hollywood movie, Detective Story, with Kirk Douglas, and was promptly nominated for a best supporting Oscar. She was 23 years old and a huge future awaited. But by the time the film came out, Manoff, a communist writer, had been blacklisted – and so, by association, had Grant. A different person would have been furiously bitter. Grant was furious all right: “I was filled with rage and frustration at the blacklisters, who I was living among.” But she wasn’t bitter. She was ignited by a sense of injustice and common cause. In the beginning, she says, “we all stuck together and I really loved those people. And respected them. And they educated me. I had no education, I never went to college. I went right into acting. I felt lucky.”Soon, however, the situation curdled. Manoff was a bully and a hypocrite. “I was living with a man who had nothing but contempt for me,” says Grant. He tried to make her read Marx and Engels. “But I couldn’t get it,” she says. “I didn’t know what it meant.” She found a box of old letters she wrote to him, recently (he died in 1965), and was horrified. “They’re all supplications: ‘I can’t learn Marx, I’m sorry but I can’t.’” Looking back, she understands that he married her mainly to have someone to look after this two children from his first marriage. He belittled and controlled her. When, after the birth of their daughter, Dinah, Grant had an opportunity to appear in a play in upstate New York, her husband said he’d leave her if she took the job. Without hesitation, she took it. “I knew I had to go. Life was over. He didn’t like me at all. He was attracted to me in the beginning, and then it was over. I was the maid, I really was.” The funny thing is, I say, you ended up making a more political body of work than any of the men lecturing you to read Marx before putting on the dinner.“Lecturing the women around them, yes,” she hoots, then looks infinitely fierce. “Those fuckers.”The takeaway from those years was that Grant learned how to fight. She and some of her friends took on the fanatically pro-McCarthy clique that ran the TV union, and slowly, methodically lobbied members to vote them out and replace them with moderates. Eventually, she was permitted to return to Hollywood – three years after everyone else, “because they still thought I’d name my husband”. (She didn’t.) By then she was ancient by the standards of the era. She booked a very good facelift, lied about her age for the next four decades and started another phase of her career. After moving to Malibu and working a stint on the hit soap Peyton Place, offers started to flood in, particularly from liberal and leftwing film-makers, who “were stumbling over each other to give me work. Me first, me first! And they were artists, and brilliant.” She met Joe, 12 years her junior, and the opposite of her domineering first husband: “This really cute boy, and so dear, and so in love. A working-class Italian non-intellectual. It was like the biggest nourishment I could’ve had.”The greatest shift came, however, when Grant started to make documentaries. Before preparing for this interview, I had never seen any of them, but they are available on Amazon and I urge you to watch. They are staggeringly good. The first, made at the suggestion of Grant’s friend Mary Beth Yarrow, was about the Willmar Eight, a group of female bank tellers in a tiny town in Minnesota, who went on strike in 1977 after years of being paid a fraction of what their male colleagues earned. It is a deeply moving and shocking film – “A hell of a little piece that was really a calling card,” says Grant – and more were to follow, all for HBO. In 1986, Grant’s documentary Down and Out in America, in which she investigates the homeless and impoverished underbelly of Ronald Reagan’s America, won the Oscar for best documentary.What is striking about all her films is just how much she gets out of her subjects, who speak with an unselfconsciousness you no longer see on TV. Grant says much of this was down to her brilliant producers finding the right case studies. But her direction, and questioning, was a large part of it, too. In her 1989 film Battered, about domestic violence, she coaxes extraordinary testimony out of victims and perpetrators. One particular man, convicted of beating his wife, tells Grant how he can pick the one woman out of a hundred who is a soft target for abuse. “That’s the guy who stayed in my mind, too, that devil,” she says. “And he was attractive. Scary attractive. That was my first marriage! That guy who said I can come into a room and pick them out – that was me.”The Big Scary ‘S’ Word: why are people so terrified of socialism?Read moreGrant went on to make films about her old friend Sidney Poitier, and about Kirk Douglas and his family, and to strike a huge development deal with the US cable channel Lifetime. If she was shooting now, where would she look? “I would be fighting with HBO to let me go to Ukraine.” She thinks: “Or I’d be looking at Elon Musk, or at January 6th.”As it is, she says, “I’m old. I don’t look that old; I don’t feel that old, probably because I have a young husband – but …” In her memoir, she writes, “death makes me furious, which is a pity because I’m really up there myself”. But having survived all those waves of oppression in her youth, she isn’t done yet. “I feel there’s some way that I can still somehow do something. I don’t know what.” Experience makes her confident: something always turns up. “Life is like that. You slip to another place, go into another world, and you’re curious, and you take sides. And it’s a kind of miracle.”TopicsFilmDocumentary filmsFilm industryUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content 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

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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