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      Trump’s dangerous attacks on rule of law have US historical precedents | Corey Brettschneider

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      Donald Trump’s threats to democracy – including his promise to govern as a dictator on “day one” and his refusal to abide by the norm of a peaceful transition of power – are often called unprecedented. While commentators and journalists are rightly focused on the danger of the moment, there are precedents for what we face today. Three examples, far from minimizing the current danger, show both how fragile American democracy has always been and how American citizens can fight successfully to save it.The first example of a presidential threat to democracy came close to the founding. The second US president, John Adams, criminalized dissent and sought to prosecute his critics. The number of these prosecutions was vast. The most recent research on the subject identifies 126 individuals who were prosecuted. These cases were not just based on the hurt feelings of a thin-skinned president (although they were partly that). They came in response to reports that Adams’s party was attempting a kind of self-coup, not unlike the events of January 6.Specifically, when a newspaper editor published a plan that Adams’s Federalist party had developed to refuse to certify electoral votes for their opponents, Adams signed a retaliatory law that allowed for the punishment of critics of the president. The law was drafted with its targets in mind. It made criticism of the president a crime but held no such penalty for critics of the vice-president, Thomas Jefferson, a leader of the opposition party. And the prosecutions were swift and harsh. Newspaper editors found themselves facing prison for their words.The second example came after the civil war. Andrew Johnson’s presidency was devoted to defending white supremacy and ensuring that the end of slavery did not mean equality for Black Americans. It was also marked by threats against his perceived enemies, including a notorious speech in which he called for violence against his pro-Reconstruction opponents in Congress.The third example came more recently. Like Adams, Richard Nixon sought to silence his enemies, but not by signing a questionable law – by engaging in a criminal conspiracy. We know now that his plans included crimes well beyond those of Watergate, even potentially firebombing the Brookings Institution. Nixon believed that a safe at Brookings held documents damaging to him. When his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, told him that such documents should be retrieved by a legal process, he retorted: “I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”One major target of Nixon’s criminal schemes was Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers. In an an interview shortly before his death, Ellsberg told me that, as recently released evidence suggests, Nixon sought to “incapacitate” him.The danger of presidencies like Adams’s, Johnson’s and Nixon’s consisted not just of their attacks on legal and democratic norms. It also lay in the way they read the constitution to support an authoritarian vision of the presidency. Adams saw analogies between monarchs and presidents. Johnson compared himself to Moses. Nixon spoke of his vast domestic powers that were the result of what he saw as an ongoing civil war with student protesters – a view that led him to famously proclaim, in his interview with David Frost, that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”.In each of these three dangerous moments, however, American democracy fought back. During the Adams administration, the newspaper editors standing trial published stories about their own prosecutions to highlight Adams’s authoritarianism and to demand a right to dissent under the first amendment. They also turned the outrage at Adams into a major issue in the 1800 election, resulting in the election of Jefferson. When Jefferson proclaimed in his first inaugural “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he sent a clear signal that the Sedition Act, the Adams administration’s tool for prosecuting opponents, would be allowed to expire.As for Johnson, the House impeached him, and though he survived his Senate trial, he was so discredited that he failed to receive his own party’s presidential nomination in 1868. The general election in that year saw pro-Reconstruction citizens elect Ulysses S Grant with the aim of putting down Klan violence and protecting equal citizenship, promises partially realized with the passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act and the indictments of more than 3,000 white supremacist terrorists. Pro-Reconstruction Americans rallied around the cause of equal citizenship championed by Frederick Douglass, who opposed Johnson in a White House confrontation and in his public speeches.In the case of Nixon, Ellsberg, rather than allowing himself to be silenced, only grew bolder in criticizing the president. In fact, he used his own trial to expose Nixon’s abuses, just as newspaper editors had done under Adams. Ultimately the judge in his trial dismissed the case. Finally, the unknown citizens of Grand Jury One, convened in the Watergate trial, fought to gather the evidence of Nixon crimes, handing over information to Congress that led to his resignation.In stark contrast to Nixon’s authoritarian understanding of the constitution, these citizens emphasized the idea that no person, not even a president, was above the law.These three examples demonstrate that the danger to American democracy has always lain partly in the power of the presidency itself. At the founding, Anti-Federalists argued against ratifying the constitution on the grounds that presidential power was too vast and dangerous. The behavior of Adams, Johnson and Nixon shows clearly that the Anti-Federalists’ worries were well founded – and that presidential threats to democracy are not unique to today’s moment.Despite these precedents, however, there is one sense in which the current moment is uniquely dangerous. In these past examples, authoritarian presidents were cast into the dustbin of history, lacking the political power to continue their constitutional abuses. This time, a president who threatened democracy is doubling down, and we risk seeing him take office once again.The current threat is also unique in that Trump has learned from his previous term where the choke points of American democracy lie. Unlike Adams, Johnson and Nixon, he threatens to recapture the presidency with a clear roadmap for toppling the traditional checks on the office.Trump understands, for instance, that with a loyalist attorney general, he might never face accountability for his crimes. He would certainly see to it that such an AG fired special prosecutor Jack Smith, currently pursuing two cases against him. Thanks in part to sympathetic justices he appointed, he might also be immunized by the supreme court for any future crimes committed in office as long as these crimes are construed as “official acts”. While Nixon eventually resigned under threat of impeachment and indictment, Trump withstood two impeachments with no hint of even remotely backing down. Unlike Nixon, Trump not only shamelessly refused to resign but has continued his assault on democracy.So, what can we learn about the threat of the moment from these historical examples? One lesson is clear: we the people are ultimately responsible for rescuing democracy and our democratic constitution. We should find inspiration from those figures who opposed Adams, Johnson and Nixon as we demand accountability in two senses.First, we should demand the legal accountability Nixon escaped. The jury in Trump’s New York case has made the first step here. And that legal accountability should continue in the other cases against the president.Second, and most importantly, the American people need to seek accountability at the ballot box. This election, just like the elections in 1800 and 1868, is a referendum on the future of self-government. In those past moments, the American people rejected authoritarianism and voted for presidents who sought to restore fundamental pillars of American democracy that were under threat.Today, we must persuade our fellow Americans to do the same.
      Corey Brettschneider is professor of political science at Brown University and the author of The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It More

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      In South Carolina, Black voters are split on immigration

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      Republicans claim that their election-year rhetoric about immigration has a new audience in Black communities. North Charleston’s newfound racial complexity tests that claim.The working-class city of about 120,000 people is one of the most strongly Democratic in South Carolina, more so even than Charleston, its larger, storied neighbor to its south. It has also long been split almost evenly between Black and white residents. Immigration has been adding a third dimension to what was a two-way relationship.In the “neck” of the barbell-shaped city, between the primarily white northern neighborhoods and the primarily Black southern neighborhoods, are stretches where the shops advertise in Spanish and almost all the children getting off the school bus are Latino.About 2.5% of North Charlestonians identified as Hispanic in the 1990 census. That rose to 4% in 2000, 10% in 2010 and, on paper, about 12% today, with 8% “other”. But the current census figures are questionable, said Enrique “Henry” Grace, CFO of the Charleston Hispanic Association: “Forget about it. Because Hispanics don’t do the census. Whatever the census says, double it.”Immigration can be a tough topic to discuss in South Carolina’s Black community, which isn’t keen on offering white conservatives who regularly attack cities as “crime-infested” yet another reason to snipe at North Charleston, especially in an election year when immigration rhetoric on the right has become increasingly toxic.But it doesn’t mean they aren’t asking more from Democratic leaders. In early June, Joe Biden announced changes to border policy, significantly curtailing asylum claims in a bid for bold executive action on a campaign issue.The US president’s border order came with political pressure mounting on the president and Congress to resolve negotiations on a bill to change America’s immigration policies and stem undocumented migration. Some of that political pressure comes from big-city leaders like the mayors of New York and Chicago, after border state governors began shipping people who had crossed the border to them last year, straining the social services infrastructure.But the border action has an audience among Democrats in South Carolina, too.Biden was serving red meat to Democratic party loyalists at a January campaign speech in Columbia, South Carolina, talking about his appointment of Black judges and lowering Black unemployment rates, when he threw them one nugget of red-state steak. He complained that Republicans in Congress were thwarting legislation on the border – despite getting almost everything they wanted in the bill – at the bidding of Donald Trump in order to preserve it for him as a political issue.View image in fullscreen“If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” Biden said, to applause.As attendees awaited the president before the speech, Michael Butler, mayor of Orangeburg, South Carolina, a Democrat, expressed sympathy with this idea. “I would expect the president, if he’s elected a second time, to close the border,” Butler said.The population of both the city and county of Orangeburg, about 45 minutes north of North Charleston, is mostly Black, poor, rural and Democratic. Biden won 70% of Orangeburg in the 2020 primary – his best showing statewide – and two-thirds of votes in the November election.Without a careful message, this time could be different. Shipping border crossers to big cities seemed like a publicity stunt, but it was one that worked, in Butler’s view, to highlight how problems at the border are problems everywhere, including Democratic strongholds.“I empathize with those mayors,” Butler said. “They have to deal with the expectations of migrants, and the security of them. You know we’re the land of the free and the brave, and we believe in taking care of all citizens. But those borders need to be secured to protect the citizens.”Butler’s take on immigration isn’t uniformly held across the state.Some Black political leaders in North Charleston beam about how immigration has changed their communities. State representative JA Moore, a North Charleston Democrat, boasts of having the most diverse district in the state. “I’m proud of that,” he said. Moore pushes back, hard, against the suggestion that there’s tension between Black and Latino people about housing or jobs where he lives.North Charleston presents a more nuanced test of the Black electorate’s reaction to immigration, because the growth of its immigrant community has come with booming economic growth and overall population increases. Even so, Moore admits that some could conflate something like the rapid increase in housing prices with the rapid increase in immigration.“The housing market in general and in Charleston is higher than it was 10, 15 years ago,” Moore said. “And also the amount of Hispanics that are moving in has increased tremendously in the past 15 years. They see a Hispanic person move into their neighborhood, and they’re seeing the prices of the houses going up … People may be correlating the two.”Donald Trump is counting on those kind of inferences.Biden’s Republican challenger, known for his increasingly strident immigration rhetoric, responded to the border closure at a rally in the Las Vegas heat after Biden’s announcement, describing it as insufficient while arguing that the president is “waging all-out war” on Black and Latino workers. He falsely claimed that the wages of Black workers had fallen 6% since 2021.The international manufacturers that have driven growth aren’t hiring undocumented labor, said Eduardo Curry, president of the North Charleston chapter of the Young Democrats of South Carolina. “A lot of jobs here in Charleston are skilled labor jobs,” he said. “It’s not just … walk off the street and let me hire you.”The problem, Curry said, is that too few Black workers in North Charleston have the training to take those jobs, even as those employers are yearning for more labor. Working-class Black laborers instead compete with recent immigrants for jobs that require less formal education.Tension between Black and Latino people in North Charleston has been relatively low, but may be rising because of job competition, said Ruby Wallace, a job recruiter at a staffing agency in North Charleston that serves warehouses and distribution centers – working-class employers. “Hispanics are working for whatever they can get at this point,” she said. “And they’re doing a lot of work.”The North Charleston native said her staffing agency has lost 40% of its business year over year after some clients found it less expensive to hire undocumented labor through shady organizations.The neighborhood around the staffing agency has become populated primarily with immigrants, and the office, which has historically employed working-class and poor Black people, turns away undocumented applicants every day.A cottage industry of undocumented labor has emerged, undercutting legal operators by skirting federal E-Verify laws and omitting payments into workers’ compensation and unemployment taxes.Wallace has been reporting the violations she sees to the US Department of Labor, to no avail. “I’m trying to figure out, how is it possible for them to load people up and bring them, working here in South Carolina? Is it not illegal for them to do that?” she said.Republican messaging aimed at Black voters mixes threats about job losses with invective about immigration, crime and cities.Black voters are expected to ignore the racial undercurrent of attacks on cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia or most recently Milwaukee – a “horrible city” in Trump’s most recent tirade – while being receptive to the idea that undocumented people from Central and South America make those cities more unsafe.That hasn’t happened in North Charleston.North Charleston began assessing the city’s racial disparity in arrests and victimization in 2020. A majority of North Charleston’s immigrants are Latino. According to a report released in 2021, Hispanic suspects represented about 7.5% of arrests, while Hispanic residents comprised 10% of the city’s population that year.Violent crime increased during the pandemic in North Charleston, as it did in most cities with more than 100,000 residents. It has fallen since. But it is among the higher-crime cities in the state, with a murder rate about five times the national average.Keeping the peace in North Charleston has meant navigating racial tension in a city experiencing poverty and crime. Immigration adds a new element to that challenge.Reggie Burgess, 58, grew up in North Charleston and served on its police force for more than 30 years – five as its chief – before winning election as the city’s first Black mayor in 2023. He said he contends with a common trope: that undocumented immigrants bring with them an uptick in crime.But that depiction of immigrants as criminals is false; they are measurably less likely to commit crimes than the US-born. Burgess, who has witnessed the changes in his community first-hand, said he has had to meet with immigrants to discuss how they are too often victimized by other poor people who look like him.Back when Burgess was still chief of police in 2017, he found himself conducting role-playing exercises with Latino immigrants about identifying Black people, trying to build some trust with the community.“We would actually turn them backwards, and we’d turn them around real quick and say: ‘Look at this person,’ and turn ’em back around,” Burgess said. “I’d ask, can you give me a description of the person? We were trying to teach them to understand that a Black male was more than this Afro. You’ve got to [describe] a shirt, or this lanyard.”It became evident to Burgess 20 years ago that undocumented individuals were being targeted for robberies because they tended to work in cash trades, he said. That revelation led the city to start pushing the financial-services industry to provide banking services, and was the start of relationship-building exercises between civic leaders and immigrants.But the federal government doesn’t do enough to keep victims from being deported long enough to sustain prosecutions, he said, leaving undocumented individuals as easy targets for crime and exploitation.“The U visa is supposedly supposed to help us lock in the witness for a period of time,” Burgess said, describing a victim witness visa program. “And Hispanics and Latinos would fill out the form, and I’m thinking: ‘OK, we’re good.’ The next thing you know, they tell me the prime witness has to go back or got caught up at a traffic stop and is being deported.”Underlying this issue is unstable housing and endemic poverty.“There’s a lot of need in Charleston in the Hispanic community. Need for everything, housing, jobs, everything,” said Grace of the Charleston Hispanic Association.The undocumented community in North Charleston tends to be concentrated in an area of the city with trailer parks and affordable housing. They are too often living in substandard or overcrowded conditions, said Annette Glover, who operates an immigrant-oriented community ministry in North Charleston.North Charleston is part of a three-county metropolitan area of about 830,000 residents. Glover’s organization, Community Impact, assisted 86,387 people within that area last year, she said, with food, language training, housing assistance and other help. Most were immigrants. About 75% – to 80% were undocumented, she said. With that has come a fear of appearing on the government’s radar, even while applying for help from nongovernmental organizations like hers, she said.“We have found a way to actually get them to fill out applications, by allowing them to understand that we’re not going to be giving it to Ice or to anything like that,” she said.Burgess said economic conditions and education are stress points. “I mean, some of these neighborhoods, the [adjusted median income] is $29,000. And then you can go a little further up, and AMI is probably is $101,000,” he said. “And without education, there’s no options. You have to settle for whatever you get.”The gridlock in Washington DC on immigration has an impact on places like North Charleston.Biden’s move to close the border to asylum seekers is a short-term approach to a long-term problem, Burgess said.Without actual reform to the immigration system, undocumented immigrants will remain in the shadows.“We have to step back and push aside these little personal vendettas and squabbles in these parties, and think as Americans,” Burgess said. “My people came here in chains 400 years ago. We’re free now, right? Why? We’re free because the country said enough is enough. And they fought, brothers and sisters, fought each other, and they said: ‘OK, everybody’s free.’ They could do that in 1865. They can do the same thing in 2024.” More

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      Videos of Biden looking lost are a viral political tactic: ‘low-level manipulation’

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      Joe Biden wandered off.Standing among the west’s major leaders in Italy last week, the US president turned away, seemingly in confusion, and had to be alerted back to the group to take a photo – at least, that’s what rightwing media showed.“WHAT IS BIDEN DOING?” the Republican National Committee’s research Twitter account wrote.In actuality, it was nothing strange at all. Biden had turned toward skydivers and given them a thumbs up, a broader view of the video showed.It happened again at a fundraiser with former president Barack Obama. Biden “appears to freeze up” on stage, the New York Post wrote, saying Obama had to lead Biden off the stage in the latest example of the president being “dazed or confused”.A zoomed-out video of the incident showed Biden waving and taking in the applause from the crowd after a lengthy discussion moderated by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.For viewers of rightwing media or social media feeds tailored toward conservatives, these videos of Biden surface near-daily in an attempt to underscore one of the president’s key liabilities, his age.They’re often selectively edited to make Biden look, well, old. They kick off a series of headlines about how his age or senility is showing, then another series of headlines about how the videos are created to mislead.The videos, and the subsequent hand-wringing over them, show how bifurcated today’s political and social media ecosystems are. Few watch a full speech or a full newscast, instead getting a quick example of what they missed from an account they align with. Your view of a given event – of a speech by a president, or a campaign rally – is colored first, and often predominantly, by the way it’s presented by the people you follow.An NBC News editor referred to these video news cycles as a reflection of the online media ecosystem this election, calling them “a bizarre Rorschach test in which some people see one thing and most everyone else sees something else”.They also show that the looming threat of deepfakes – AI-generated content that makes people say or do things they haven’t actually done – doesn’t hold a candle to the much more common, and easier to create, cheap fakes – videos edited specifically to mislead.“This old-fashioned, sort of low-level kind of manipulation has been perfectly capable of misleading and manipulating people for quite a long time,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow for media and digital disinformation for the Alliance for Securing Democracy.While deepfakes or other AI-generated content would likely be flagged and potentially removed from social media channels for going against their policies, these selectively edited videos typically don’t break rules because, to some degree, all content is edited in some way, Schafer said.The Biden administration derided the videos as cheap fakes made in bad faith and defended the president’s mental fitness, though at one point Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, called the videos “deepfakes”, which they are not. That kicked off another round of criticism on the right, with people claiming Jean-Pierre was spreading misinformation herself.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe left isn’t immune from posting misleading images about Trump, either. One photo showing Trump holding his son’s hand claims the former president needed help walking off a stage, while a video showed he was actually shaking his son’s hand.There are often similar videos of Trump posted either separately or in response to a Biden video news cycle – of the former president waxing on about sharks and electricity, or wandering away, or holding someone’s hand while walking. He notably got the name of his own doctor wrong in a speech over the weekend while challenging Biden to take a cognitive test.In reality, both presidential candidates are old, a fact that doesn’t change. Trump is 78; Biden is 81. Whether you view them as prone to senior moments, incoherent and rambling, or slow on their feet relates mostly to your views on who they are – and the content you’re seeing about it.The two candidates’ ages may create more of these gaffes, and the coverage of these gaffes gets extended because voters are concerned about the age of the next president. There seems to be a “little bit of a ping pong game of who has the senior moment du jour”, Schafer said. Endless repetition of age-related criticisms can influence voters and reinforce concerns they have over fitness for office, which is why these news cycles, and promotion by both campaigns, continue.These separate media ecosystems aren’t new this election cycle, though they create alternate realities for their viewers. It’s not just how something is covered, but whether it’s covered at all, Schafer noted. A viewer of some rightwing media could be served coverage of a story incessantly while it doesn’t make headlines in the broader press.“It is highly problematic when we talk about having a shared sense of reality because that’s what the real function of democracy should be,” he said. “We have an agreed-upon set of facts, and then there’s a lot of interpretation of those facts.” More

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      Ethics committee investigating Matt Gaetz over alleged sexual misconduct

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      A bipartisan Capitol Hill committee is investigating Matt Gaetz, the far-right Republican congressman and vocal Donald Trump supporter, over longstanding allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and other alleged ethical breaches, it said on Tuesday.The announcement by the House ethics committee – which contains an equal number of Democrats and Republicans – reignited a swirl of scandal surrounding the outspoken Trump ally that had abated somewhat after an earlier criminal investigation into allegations against him was dropped.In a statement, the committee said it had spoken to dozens of witnesses, issued 25 subpoenas, and reviewed thousands of pages of documents as part of its long-running investigation into Gaetz’s conduct, which was initially opened in April 2021.As a result of that review, the committee said, certain allegations deserved further examination.“The committee is reviewing allegations … that Representative Gaetz may have: engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favours to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct,” it said.The committee said other allegations made against Gaetz – specifically those of sharing inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misusing state identification records, improper personal use of campaign funds and accepting a bribe – were no longer being investigated.The committee’s statement came a day after Gaetz issued what appeared to be a pre-emptive post on X in which he accused it of pursuing “frivolous investigations” into him and compared its tactics to the Soviet Union.“The House ethics committee has closed four probes into me, which emerged from lies intended solely to smear me,” he wrote. “Instead of working with me to ban congressional stock trading, the ethics committee is now opening new frivolous investigations. They are doing this to avoid the obvious fact that every investigation into me ends the same way: my exoneration.”He added: “This is Soviet. Kevin McCarthy showed them the man, and they are now trying to find the crime. I work for north-west Floridians who won’t be swayed by this nonsense, and McCarthy and his goons know it.”The latter comment referred to his antagonistic relationship with McCarthy, the former Republican House speaker who was toppled last October in an internal party coup that Gaetz spearheaded.McCarthy said Gaetz’s enmity towards him was fuelled by his refusal to shut down the House ethics committee inquiry. However, the inquiry has continued under McCarthy’s successor, Mike Johnson, who has forged a close alliance with Trump.In its statement, the committee acknowledged Gaetz’s denial of the allegations against him but suggested he had given less full cooperation, complaining of “difficulty in obtaining relevant information” from him and others.It added: “The committee notes that the mere fact of an investigation into these allegations does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred.”The committee’s investigation was opened after the New York Times reported in March 2021 Gaetz was being investigated by the Department of Justice over whether he had sex with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, thus violating federal sex-trafficking laws. The investigation had been opened in the latter stages of Trump’s presidency, under the then attorney general William Barr.It was eventually closed in 2023 without any charges being brought, enabling the committee – which had earlier stalled its inquiry in response to a request the DoJ – to reauthorise its investigation. More

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      The Guardian view on the US and vaccine disinformation: a stupid, shocking and deadly game | Editorial

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      In July 2021, Joe Biden rightly inveighed against social media companies failing to tackle vaccine disinformation: “They’re killing people,” the US president said. Despite their pledges to take action, lies and sensationalised accounts were still spreading on platforms. Most of those dying in the US were unvaccinated. An additional source of frustration for the US was the fact that Russia and China were encouraging mistrust of western vaccines, questioning their efficacy, exaggerating side-effects and sensationalising the deaths of people who had been inoculated.How, then, would the US describe the effects of its own disinformation at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic? A shocking new report has revealed that its military ran a secret campaign to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine with Filipinos – when nothing else was available to the Philippines. The Reuters investigation found that this spread to audiences in central Asia and the Middle East, with fake social media accounts not only questioning Sinovac’s efficacy and safety but also claiming it used pork gelatine, to discourage Muslims from receiving it. In the case of the Philippines, the poor take-up of vaccines contributed to one of the highest death rates in the region. Undermining confidence in a specific vaccine can also contribute to broader vaccine hesitancy.The campaign, conducted via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X) and other platforms, was launched under the Trump administration despite the objections of multiple state department officials. The Biden administration ended it after the national security council was alerted to the issue in spring 2021. The drive seems to have been retaliation for Chinese claims – without any evidence – that Covid had been brought to Wuhan by a US soldier. It was also driven by military concerns that the Philippines was growing closer to Beijing.It is all the more disturbing because the US has seen what happens when it plays strategic games with vaccination. In 2011, in preparation for the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the CIA tried to confirm that it had located him by gathering the DNA of relatives through a staged hepatitis B vaccination campaign. The backlash was entirely predictable, especially in an area that had already seen claims that the west was using polio vaccines to sterilise Pakistani Muslim girls. NGOs were vilified and polio vaccinators were murdered. Polio resurged in Pakistan; Islamist militants in Nigeria killed vaccinators subsequently.The report said that the Pentagon has now rescinded parts of the 2019 order that allowed the military to sidestep the state department when running psychological operations. But while the prospect of a second Trump administration resuming such tactics is alarming, the attitude that bred them goes deeper. Reuters pointed to a strategy document from last year in which generals noted that the US could weaponise information, adding: “Disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”The US is right to challenge the Kremlin’s troll farms, Beijing’s propaganda and the irresponsibility of social media companies. But it’s hard to take the moral high ground when you’ve been pumping out lies. The repercussions in this case were particularly predictable, clear and horrifying. It was indefensible to pursue a project with such obvious potential to cause unnecessary deaths. It must not be repeated. More

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      Biden surges in the 2024 race … for celebrity support

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      Hello!We’re sending the newsletter out slightly early this week, as Wednesday is Juneteenth. The holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free – more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Juneteenth has been celebrated by Black Americans since the late 1800s and was made a federal holiday in 2021.While the day will be marked by parades and events across the US, the Biden and Trump campaigns are continuing their sprint to November.In the past week Joe Biden raised more than $30m at a star-studded fundraising event in Los Angeles. Jack Black, George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand were among the big name acts, and Biden is certainly leading the race for celebrity endorsements: Donald Trump can only offer the musician Kid Rock, the British actor turned strange man Laurence Fox, and the guy who played Superman on TV in the 1990s.But does it matter? Should we care whether or not Taylor Swift endorses Biden? (His campaign has been courting her for months.) We’ll take a look after the headlines.Here’s what you need to know1. A silent debate?The debate between Biden and Trump later this month will feature muted microphones, CNN announced on Sunday: meaning neither man will be able to talk over the other during the 90-minute event. The first Biden-Trump debate in 2020 was one of the great farces of our time, with Trump continually interrupting and heckling Biden, before telling a white supremacist group to “stand by”.2. Trump can’t remember his doctor’s nameTrump was in Michigan on Saturday, bragging about his mental acuity and demanding Biden take a cognitive test. Trump said he had “aced” a cognitive test administered by his presidential doctor, whom he identified as “Ronny Johnson”. “[Ronny Johnson] was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history. So I liked him very much,” Trump said. The only problem was that Trump was thinking of Ronny Jackson. The Biden campaign was quick to point out the error.3. Biden acts on immigrationBiden is set to announce a new executive action that will allow some undocumented immigrants who are spouses and children of US citizens to become American citizens themselves. The action will help about 500,000 American families, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and 50,000 children. Politically it could help insulate Biden somewhat from accusations from the left that he has given in to hard-right Republican demands on border immigration, while potentially shoring up his support with minority communities, which has slipped slightly since the last election.George Clooney and Julia Roberts v Phil Robertson and Randy QuaidView image in fullscreenIn the celebrity endorsement race – if such a race exists – Biden is defeating Trump comfortably.Saturday night was the perfect illustration. Biden flew west, to Los Angeles, for a campaign fundraiser with a who’s who of Hollywood names, including Clooney, Roberts, Black, Streisand, Jason Bateman, the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel – who compered proceedings – and Barack Obama, appearing alongside his former vice-president. The celebs coughed up $30m, a significant boost to the Biden campaign coffers.In May, Robert De Niro popped up to criticize Trump outside court in Manhattan, while Queen Latifah and Lizzo were featured at a fundraiser in New York in March. Michael Douglas hosted Biden for a campaign event at his home earlier this year.Trump, the former TV host and celebrity builder who has a long-running obsession with the rich and famous (he sent invitations for his third wedding to various stars including Billy Joel, who attended but later said he wasn’t sure why he was invited), has a less deep bench.Dean Cain, a former actor who played Superman in the 1990s TV series Lois and Clark, backed Trump in April – “I’m endorsing President Trump 100%. No question about it,” Cain told Fox News – but hardly anyone noticed because, well, very few people know who Dean Cain is.Kid Rock, the country singer and cowboy-hat wearer, has been a long-term Trump backer (“Many close to him wonder what the hell happened,” Rolling Stone reported last month.) There’s also Randy Quaid, best known for playing a booze-addled, alien-obsessed, ex-pilot in Independence Day, and Dennis Quaid, Randy’s brother. There’s the actor Jon Voight, who these days is perhaps most known for being Angelina Jolie’s dad. Phil Robertson, who invented a sort of pipe thing that replicates the quack of a duck and was a reality TV star before voicing his homophobia, is also keen.But that’s about it. If this was a celebrity-gathering competition, Biden would definitely win.But it isn’t. It’s an election. So does it matter?Kind of. Sometimes. Although not always.Hillary Clinton had the backing of all the hip-ish A-listers in 2016 – I remember listening to Demi Lovato belting out her hits at a Clinton event in Iowa one evening – and still lost. But studies have found that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008 did make an impact: it boosted Obama’s vote and increased contributions.There is a difference between then and now, however. In May 2007 the future president was a relative unknown: Winfrey was introducing him to some people for the first time. Few Americans alive haven’t heard of Biden and Trump, so the effect of an endorsement from, say, a duck-noise inventor is debatable.What some politicos believe really could make a difference is the backing of Taylor Swift. In 2023, one fairly innocuous Instagram post from Swift – “I’ve heard you raise your voices, and I know how powerful they are. Make sure you’re ready to use them in our elections this year!” – inspired tens of thousands of people to register to vote.It’s safe to assume plenty of those new voters were young people – exactly the kind of voter Biden needs in November. No wonder that the Biden campaign is eagerly pursuing Swift, who backed Biden in 2020: the New York Times reports that Swift is “the biggest and most influential endorsement target” for the president.Swift is clearly on Trump’s mind, too. He brought her up at a meeting with Republican lawmakers in DC last week, spoke about Swift at length – “She probably doesn’t like Trump” – in an interview for a new book.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOf course, Swift hasn’t actually endorsed anyone yet. In 2020 she announced her support for Biden just one month before the election, so we could be waiting a while yet.Out and about: DetroitView image in fullscreenIf Trump had been hoping that the 80-minute headline speech at the Turning Point USA convention would improve his standing with Black voters, he would have been disappointed. The crowd before him on Saturday night in Detroit – which is 77% African American, and overwhelmingly Democratic – was almost exclusively white.The former president has been attempting in recent campaign appearances to present himself as popular with Black and Latino voters, as polls show his support among these demographic groups edging upwards. Michigan is also one of a handful of critical battleground states that are likely to determine the outcome of this year’s presidential race.Earlier on Saturday Trump visited a Black church in Detroit for an event billed as a “community roundtable” – but there was little audience crossover into the Turning Point event. Those attending were able to hear speeches from a range of Trump luminaries, including his former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon. Supporters could also pose for selfies in front of a gold-plated Mercedes bearing Trump’s image on the hood.– Ed Pilkington, chief US reporter, Detroit, MichiganBiggest lie: the vice-presidential hopefulsView image in fullscreenTim Scott, the South Carolina senator, and Byron Donalds, a Florida congressman, who are both auditioning to be Trump’s vice-president, each made similar claims during TV appearances this weekend – namely, that Biden is responsible for rampant violent crime.Scott said communities have been “ravaged by a wave of violent crime that we haven’t seen in five decades”, while Donalds claimed that while the murder rate might be down, it doesn’t mean violent crime overall is.Both are actually down. Recently released data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed big declines in violent crimes, including murder, and in property crimes in 2024 compared to 2023. Nor is it just a one-year drop. Violent crime is now at a nearly 50-year record low, Biden has said – and FBI crime data backs this up: it peaked in 1991, then has largely fallen, with occasional upward ticks such as 2020, which is often attributed to pandemic stresses.Unfortunately, while crime may be down, the public’s perception of crime is different. A Gallup poll in October found that 77% of Americans believe there is more crime in the US than a year ago, and Republicans seem to be happy to stoke those fears.– Rachel Leingang, misinformation reporterWho had the worst week: Republicans who like to smoke cigarsView image in fullscreenPity Tom Cole, the Republican congressman from Oklahoma, and his cigar-smoking pals, who have been left without a place to suck on their stogies after Cole left his position as chairman of the House rules committee.Cole spent 15 months as the Rules head honcho, and he allowed colleagues to puff on cigars in the rules office in the Capitol building. But it seems the new chair clamped down.“We desperately need a place to smoke cigars,” Cole told Business Insider this week.Smoking is banned in many public places in the US – including in Washington DC – but members of Congress can smoke all they like in their offices … which does little to counter the notion that politics is an elite little club, with its own little rules. More

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      Trump to stage Wisconsin rally days after calling Milwaukee a ‘horrible city’

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      Donald Trump is set to pitch for support in the key battleground state of Wisconsin on Tuesday, just days after calling its biggest population centre, Milwaukee, “a horrible city”.In what will also be his first visit to the midwestern state since last month’s felony conviction related to hush-money payments, Trump will stage a ticket-only rally in Racine, a city of about 76,000 on the shores of Lake Michigan, about 30 miles from Milwaukee.The former president will deliver remarks “on Joe Biden’s failed presidency”, according to his campaign.His message will compete with an advertising billboard placed nearby by the Democratic National Committee aimed at reminding locals of his Milwaukee comments, reportedly made last week to House Republicans during Trump’s first visit to Capitol Hill since the January 6 attack by a mob trying to overturn his presidential election loss to Joe Biden.“Want to know what’s really ‘horrible?’ Donald Trump for Wisconsin’s economy,” the ad will say.Republicans have scrambled to downplay or otherwise explain the unflattering reference to Milwaukee – all the more embarrassing because the city will host the party’s national convention, which starts 15 July and at which Trump’s nomination as its presidential candidate will become official.Trump himself, in characteristic fashion, has denied even uttering the remark, which was first reported by the Punchbowl website.“The Democrats are making up stories that I said Milwaukee is a ‘horrible city’. This is false, a complete lie, just like the Laptop from Hell was a lie, Russia … was a lie, and so much more,” he posted on his Truth Social site.“It’s called disinformation, and that’s all they know how to do. I picked Milwaukee, I know it well. It should therefore lead to my winning Wisconsin. But the Dems come out with this fake story, just like all of the others. It never ends. Don’t be duped. Who would say such a thing with that important state in the balance?”He conveyed a different message in an interview with Fox 6 News, in which he implicitly admitted the comment by attempting a clarification.“I think it was very clear what I meant. We’re very concerned with crime. I love Milwaukee,” he said. “But as you know the crime numbers are terrible, and we have to be very careful. But, I was referring to, also, the election,” when he unsuccessfully challenged vote tallies by falsely alleging fraud.Whatever the explanation, Democrats have announced plans to cash in by placing 10 billboards throughout Milwaukee blaring out Trump’s negative description in the run-up to the convention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe ads coincide with a $50m advertising offensive in battleground states, the focal point of which is a Biden campaign video zeroing in on Trump’s convicted felon status following the conviction in a Manhattan court of falsifying documents to hide hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actor.The intense messaging reflects Wisconsin’s status as a potentially crucial swing state, with Racine county being one of its most competitive bellwether districts. Trump won the county by 50% and 51% in 2016 and 2020 respectively. Former presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush won it by comparable margins in their two election victories.Biden, who won Wisconsin by 21,000 votes in 2020, visited Racine last month, when he highlighted a $3.3bn investment planned in the area by Microsoft as evidence of the benefits of his economic policies.A RealClearPolitics survey this week showed Biden recording a 39.3% approval rating in Wisconsin, with 55.7% disapproving.Trump and Biden are running neck-and-neck in most national polls, with the former president showing leads in several battleground states. More

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      Trump’s enablers in Congress are a fascinating case study of political amnesia | Sidney Blumenthal

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      After 40 months and two weeks Donald Trump succeeded in being driven by car to the Capitol. The last time he attempted to get there was 6 January 2021. The mob was rampaging, ransacking offices and chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump was “irate”, according to the account of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide, because he was not among the mob. “The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now.’” Hutchinson stands by her story of being told he had tried to grab the steering wheel and lunged at his driver.If the US supreme court had not intervened to postpone Trump’s January 6 trial it would likely be proceeding today or perhaps even have already reached a verdict on his conspiracy, according to the indictment of the United States of America v Donald J Trump, “to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government”.But on Thursday, in this universe, under the shadow of the insurrectionist banners displayed by Samuel Alito, the associate justice, and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, a key player in Trump’s January 6 scheme, Trump arrived as a conquering hero before the Republicans of the Congress, key members of whom were his confederates in his plot while others on that day raced to safe rooms, yet all now desperately rallying for party unity around their nominee against the rule of law.Trump’s conviction a week earlier on 34 felonies in New York for business fraud to deceive the voters in the 2016 election excited Republican hysteria to embrace him to a frantic level. Johnson assembled the Republican members into an impromptu J6 Choir, after the imprisoned members of the Capitol mob whose violent crimes Trump has pledged to pardon, to serenade the beaming felon with a rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr President.”Lindsey Graham unsteadily took his Marilyn Monroe turn. He tweeted on X: “Happy Birthday to @realDonaldTrump. Your golf game has never been stronger, and America needs you now more than ever. Your best present will come in November when the American people elect you as our next President and Commander in Chief.” Then prodded by the Trump Stasi that he had neglected a crucial word, he sent a revised tweet: “Happy Birthday to President @realDonaldTrump.”Unlike Graham, Monroe got it right from the start, and JFK was in fact the president. Unlike Monroe, a Georgia grand jury recommended Graham’s criminal indictment as a co-conspirator in Trump’s election fraud in the state, though he escaped when the prosecutor decided not to charge him. He’s been freed to genuflect another day.One after another the Republicans came to bend the knee and offer tribute to their overlord. “No real Republican with any credibility in the party is still blaming him for January 6,” said JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, desperately seeking the vice-presidential nod. Vance, whose career has advanced by assuming multiple identities, now worships at the shrine of the one and only cult of personality.Of course, inevitably and naturally,Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, stood cheering behind Trump, despite the testimony in Trump’s trial of David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, about the deal he made with Trump not only for the “catch and kill” payoffs but also to print scurrilous falsehoods about his opponents, pointedly Cruz, whose father was smeared as an associate of JFK’s assassin. Trump once went out of his way to demean Cruz’s wife as unattractive. And there was Cruz furiously clapping as if his life depended on it and if he stopped he would be taken to the Lubyanka prison basement.The Old Crow, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, performed a literally incredible act of willful amnesia, forgetting and forgiving everything. In a tone of barely restrained anger after January 6, he had called for Trump’s prosecution for his responsibility for the attack on the Capitol. Trump called him a “dumb son of a bitch”, a “stone cold loser”, and his wife, Elaine Chao, a member of Trump’s cabinet as Secretary of Transportation, who quit in protest on January 6, his “China loving wife, Coco Chow!”Now, walking out of his meeting with Trump, McConnell eked out a rigid semblance of a smile, as he said: “We shook hands a few times. He got a lot of standing ovations. It was an entirely positive meeting. I can’t think of anything to tell you out of it that was negative.” He did not even recall Trump disparaging Milwaukee, the host city for the Republican National Convention, as “horrible”. Thus spake the institutionalist, the adult in the room.Loss of memory about Trump, down to his coldly calculated refusal to acknowledge the Covid crisis because it would affect the stock market in the election year and his utter incompetence in handling the pandemic, is essential to his current poll standing. It is a form of mass aphasia masked as nostalgia that is at the core of Republican politics. Trump nostalgia is the political equivalent of long Covid, with similar symptoms of lack of mental focus and fatigue. McConnell, for his part, emerged from his meeting with Trump to act as though he had instantly suffered short-term memory loss about Trump’s weird meandering and perverse maundering in the room. He may reason that the greater Trump’s buffoonery, the more space for him to be the true hidden power, his immovable illusion.In the entire history of the Congress, there has never been such a scene of wholesale self-abasement, humiliation and degradation. The Congress has been the site of countless indignities since its beginning. In the early 19th century there was a deadly duel. There was a shocking caning by a South Carolina congressman of the abolitionist Charles Sumner, a senator, in 1856 on the floor of the Senate as he sat at his desk. There were other scuffles before the Civil War. Even the Confederacy, while it existed, made no effort to build a cult of personality around Jefferson Davis.This recent disgraceful and shameful episode glaringly stands as the diametric opposite example from the Republican congressional leaders who 50 years ago decided in the Watergate scandal that they must pressure Richard Nixon to resign. Until now, there has never been a more dishonorable spectacle than of members prostrating themselves before the cult of a criminal who has attempted to overthrow democracy and subvert the constitution – and who promises to complete his “retribution”.Since Trump’s conviction he has been obsessed with retribution and revenge, with crime and punishment. He intersperses his vindictive projections about the injuries he will inflict on his enemies with paranoid projections about the fate that awaits him. “Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them,” Trump told Dr Phil on his Fox News show.At the same time, Trump wondered aloud at a Nevada rally about whether he would choose to be electrocuted on a sinking electric boat or eaten by a shark. Trump’s Thanatos fantasies are a Freudian field day. He ruminates about his impending death by the most violent and bloody means. Which will it be?Contemplating his death by electrocution, he has substituted an electric boat for the electric chair, Old Sparky, which was in use to execute prisoners at Sing Sing prison in New York until 1963, and whose most famous victims were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were condemned as espionage agents stealing nuclear secrets for the Russians, and railroaded to the chair by the prosecutor, Roy Cohn, who became Trump’s lawyer and tutor in malice.Now, Trump has been indicted for “felony violations of our national security laws”, including unlawful possession of nuclear secrets, and “participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice”. The case may be bottled up by a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, but Trump surely knows that the sentence for espionage in the past was a death sentence. Perhaps the Rosenbergs are the Rosebud of his electrocution-inspired night sweats. Through the ghost of Roy Cohn, he has entered a new phantasmagorical scene in Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s play in which Cohn, dying of Aids, is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. In Trump’s nightmare, he’s the one walking the lonely mile to Old Sparky, except it’s an electric boat.Imagining his death by sharks, Trump has returned to his long recurrent terror. “He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks,” Stormy Daniels told an interviewer. When she entered his hotel suite for their tryst, he had the television set tuned to a series called Shark Week. “He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was like riveted. It’s so strange.” Now, the sharks are circling him. If he needs a bigger boat he must hope it will not be electric.Before the Republicans in the Congress, Trump momentarily set aside his fear of death, perhaps in order not to dampen their adulation. The warm atmosphere instead stirred his sexual fantasies. In the meeting he spoke about his objects of desire, his previously undisclosed lust for Nancy Pelosi and abiding longing for Taylor Swift.Basking in the idolization of the House Republicans, Trump, according to some people present, suddenly blurted, “Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is a whacko, her daughter told me if things were different Nancy and I would be perfect together, there’s an age difference though.” Then he reportedly expressed his wish for Taylor Swift to come to his side: “Why would she endorse this dope?” Trump wondered about his presumption that the liberal Swift would support Biden as she did in 2020.His daydream about Pelosi was quickly smacked down by her daughter Christine Pelosi, who tweeted, “Speaking for all 4 Pelosi daughters – this is a LIE. His deceitful, deranged obsession with our mother is yet another reason Donald Trump is unwell, unhinged and unfit to step foot anywhere near her – or the White House.”Pelosi’s relationship to Trump is one of unrelenting contempt and domination. He is the one dominated. At a meeting with Pelosi and other congressional leaders in October 2019 in the White House Cabinet Room, he had what she described as “a meltdown”, and she stood, pointed her finger at him, and the Democrats walked out. Trump tweeted back at her, “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!”After Trump delivered his State of the Union address months later, she stood at the podium ripping it into pieces and proclaiming she felt “liberated”. On January 6, during the mob attack, sequestered in her office, when she was told Trump wanted to come to the Capitol, she said, “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.”But, as Stormy Daniels testified, Trump likes a stern hand; she has said he asked her to spank him with a rolled copy of Forbes magazine with his picture on it. Apart from the kinky spanking, she described his sexual technique as “textbook generic”. Now, he fantasizes about a romance with Pelosi, an older woman – “perfect together”.His fantasy for a younger woman has fixated on Swift. Here he is his younger self, the leering creep whispering in the ear of Jeffrey Epstein as he points out this one or that one in a roomful of women dancing. Here he is, the proprietor of the Miss Teen USA and Miss Universe Pageant, walking in on naked contestants in the dressing room. “Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show,” Trump told Howard Stern on his radio show in 2005, “and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it … You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”Here was the earliest statement of his seductive technique he elaborated in the Access Hollywood tape that precipitated his “catch and kill” payoffs: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”“I think she’s beautiful – very beautiful!” Trump says about Swift. “I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump,” he told a reporter. He wondered if Swift is “legitimately liberal” or it’s “just an act”. Worried she would choose Biden over him, he has sworn to wage a “holy war” against her. He is, he says about the most popular pop singer in the world, “more popular”. He anticipates rejection and plots revenge.The giddy Republicans in the room, listening to the unfiltered sexual reveries of the adjudicated rapist in their midst, said nothing. They burst into song: “Happy Birthday, Mr President!”The tableau of the authoritarian leader surrounded by his fawning followers had a distinctly foreign flavor, reminiscent of Soviet totalitarian art. The Republican members staged themselves like the commissars of the Politburo, smiling faces upturned to the Leader, in unison sustaining “stormy applause”, as the Soviet newspapers always interjected in transcripts of Stalin’s speeches.“He was extremely gracious by the way. There was no score settling,” said Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, who had signaled his support to the mob on January 6 with a raised fist and later in the day was filmed running for cover inside the building.It is fitting that the most apt commentary on the nature of the Republican meeting at the Capitol was written by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in his Memoirs about life in the bizarre court of Joseph Stalin: “Stalin found it interesting to watch the people around him get themselves into embarrassing and even disgraceful situations,” wrote Khrushchev. “Once Stalin made me dance the gopak before some top Party officers. I had to squat down on my haunches and kick out my heels. Later, I told Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan ‘when Stalin says dance, wise man dances.’”After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev became the first secretary of the Communist party and premier of the Soviet Union. At the 20th Party Congress, on 25 February 1956, he exposed and denounced Stalin’s crimes, which he attributed to a cult of personality. “Comrades, the cult of the individual acquired such monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person,” Khrushchev stated to the stunned presidium.He spoke of “the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead, of transforming him into an infallible sage, ‘the greatest leader’, ‘sublime strategist of all times and nations’. Finally no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens. We need not give here examples of the loathsome adulation … ”Khrushchev asked his fellow Communists, “How could it be?” He blamed “those who are blinded and hopelessly hypnotized by the cult of the individual” for covering up Stalin’s crimes. “Comrades,” he announced, “in order not to repeat errors of the past, the central committee has declared itself resolutely against the cult of the individual. Comrades, we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all … ”
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More