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    ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?’ Joe McCarthy and the road to Trump

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    On 9 June 1954, in a Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill, Joseph Nye Welch made American history. With one question, the lawyer prompted the downfall of Joe McCarthy, the Republican Wisconsin senator who for years had run amok, his persecution of supposed communist subversives ruining countless lives.“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch said, as millions watched on TV, as he defended Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in McCarthy’s sights.“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”As Clay Risen writes in his new history, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America: “McCarthy, it seemed, did not.”The public listened. McCarthy was abandoned by those in power. McCarthyism had become McCarthywasm, President Dwight D Eisenhower joked. The senator died three years later, aged just 48, firmly in disgrace.Risen published his book last week, to glowing reviews, smack in the middle of another dramatic Washington moment, full of drama, replete with disgrace, in which many have compared McCarthy and Donald Trump, a Republican president pursuing his own purges and persecutions.Government workers are in Trump’s sights. So are protesting students and anyone or anything he deems representative of progressive values – of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. Trump’s political enemies are best defined as anyone he thinks wronged him in his first term, his defeat in 2020, his four criminal cases and in the election last year.“McCarthy was not a lone wolf,” Risen said, “but he was willing to go and say things. No one knew what he was going to say. There was something Trumpian in that regard.”Asking historians to discuss their subjects in light of modern figures and events is a journalistic cliche. But it seems fair when talking to Risen. He has addressed the question, writing for his employer, the New York Times, about the Trumpist “New Right” in a piece illustrated with a picture of McCarthy in a red Maga cap.Given McCarthy was finally brought down by a simple appeal to decency, could that possibly happen, one day, to Trump?View image in fullscreen“I think that’s been the question since 2015,” Risen said. “I remember when he went crossways with [the Arizona senator] John McCain, and everyone said, ‘Well, that’s the end, because you say something like that about a war hero … ’ But remember, Trump said right around the same time, ‘Look, I go walk out into Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and my supporters will still be with me.’ And it’s funny: so many things he’s been wrong about, or incoherent about, but in that he was right.”Reading Red Scare, it seems inconceivable such hysteria could have lasted so long, stoked by postwar paranoia about agents of the emerging Russian enemy, reaching sulfurous heights in years shot through with nuclear panic. It seems inconceivable ordinary Americans could have allowed it. To Risen, it’s not inconceivable at all.“The way I always explain it is, ‘Look, America is a big place, and most Americans don’t pay any attention to politics. They have no idea. Most of their interpretation at least of national politics is strictly economic.’”The 1950s were boom years. Now, since Trump’s return to the White House, the economy is shaky but the president has not shouldered the blame.“There are ancillary things,” Risen said. “Immigration as an economic issue. Occasionally a cultural element comes in. Abortion is obviously part of that. But most people, when they think about ‘What does the federal government mean to me?’, they think in economic terms.”As the red scare raged, most Americans simply did not care. Now, Risen said, many persist in thinking: “Well, shouldn’t we have a businessman running the country?”“So that raises the question: now the economy’s tanking, or the markets are tanking, and we may find ourselves in recession, do those people move away from Trump? Or do people go with it?”At long last, sir, have you no currency?Could happen.Risen is 48. He worked at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and the New Republic, then at the Times he edited opinion and politics before switching to writing obituaries. Somehow he has written nine books, five on American whiskey and four histories: of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr; of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; of Teddy Roosevelt at war; and now Red Scare.“Postwar American politics and political culture is sort of my lodestone. The red scare seemed a natural fit.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRisen spoke from the Times newsroom in midtown Manhattan. Further uptown, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, protesters rallied for Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student with a green card and an American wife, arrested for his role in anti-Israel protests. Spirited to Louisiana, Khalil was charged with no crime. Instead, he was held under an obscure law – from 1952, the heart of the red scare – that allows for the deportation of anyone deemed a threat to US foreign policy.Many fear Khalil is a test case for purges to come.Risen said: “The way they have gone after him, even the tools they’re using, are one and the same with the way they tried to get Harry Bridges, who was an Australian-born labor leader of the west coast longshoremen” in the early 1950s. “Personally, I think Bridges is a hero … He was detained without cause at the start of the Korean war because he was considered a threat to national security. His case went to the supreme court, he won, and he lived a long time.“Obviously there are some differences but it’s hard not to see the same stories playing out now. The Department of Education recently announced a tip line where if you’re a parent and you think some teacher or some librarian is, I don’t want to use the verb, ‘DEI’ … Essentially, it’s: ‘If you just have a complaint about a teacher, in this vein, let us know.’“The same thing existed during during the red scare. The FBI had the Responsibilities Program, where they would take input from grassroots organizations, veterans groups, concerned parents groups, and then they would share information with PTAs, with local school boards. You know: ‘This teacher has a background that’s kind of suspect,’ ‘Here’s a list of books that you want to remove from your library.’ It’s just the same playbook. It’s terrifying to see it play out. And in fact, in some ways, I think it’s much scarier now.”View image in fullscreenAfter the red scare, Republicans marched ever further to the right. There was Richard Nixon, who cut his teeth questioning suspected communists as a congressman in the 50s, scenes retold in Risen’s book. There was Ronald Reagan, who testified before the House un-American activities committee and flirted with extremists. There was Pat Buchanan, who challenged the establishment from the far right, and there was Newt Gingrich, who polarized and radicalized Congress.But, Risen said, “despite everything, there were safeguards” that had ultimately withstood the red scare.“We had a center-right establishment of the Republican party that tolerated but ultimately moved on from the red scare. We had a fairly established media that was credulous and made a lot of mistakes but ultimately was not taken in by the red scare and was willing to call some of the worst red scarers to account. One of the things that came out of the red scare was a stronger awareness of the importance of defending civil liberties. The ACLU and the American Bar Association did not cover themselves in glory during the red scare. But ever since then, groups like that have been much more present and aggressive in terms of defending civil liberties, and so we see that today.“Hopefully it’s enough. I think a lot remains to be seen whether what we’re going through now will be worse than the red scare, but I’m not at all hopeful.”In that fateful hearing in 1954, Joe McCarthy’s own counsel sat at his side. It was Roy Cohn, a ruthless New York lawyer who later became mentor to a young Trump. Risen sees plenty of other parallels between McCarthy and Trump.View image in fullscreen“I spent a lot of time looking at the encomiums to McCarthy when he died, and letters his friends were sharing, and so much of it was the sentiment that McCarthy was the ultimate victim, because McCarthy was the guy who was willing to say the truth, and he was destroyed for it.”Trump also presents himself as both victim and avenger, promising revenge and retribution.“There was around [McCarthy] this idea that it wasn’t enough just to replace the leaders. It wasn’t enough just to control spending. Reform was not enough. The fundamental core of the New Deal” – Franklin Roosevelt’s vast modernization of the US state, from the 1930s – “needed to be thrown in the garbage, and anybody ever connected to any of that needed to be banished.”In the 1950s, that effort failed. In the 2020s, Trump and his mega-donor and aide Elon Musk are trying again – it seems with more success.Risen said: “When you look at not so much Trump but at some of the more systematic thinkers around him, like JD Vance and his circle, like Kevin Roberts, Stephen Miller, I think some of these guys do have a sense of history.”“I don’t think Elon Musk does, necessarily, but he is saying those same things about ‘We need to go in and dismantle, essentially, the New Deal architecture.’ And it’s not just because it’s expensive, it’s because it’s [seen as] un-American and a rot on society. In the 1940s and 50s, the name for this was ‘communism’. In that sense, communism was a red herring. It wasn’t really about communism. It was about progressivism. It was about the New Deal. It’s about this culture in America that was more tolerant, pluralistic, in favor of labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights. That was the target.”During the red scare, in what came to be called “the lavender scare”, gay men were ensnared and ruthlessly ruined.Risen said: “Today, it’s DEI or woke or whatever. But it’s the same thing. It’s not that they’re getting rid of DEI programs, whatever that might mean. They’re mainly getting rid of fundamental civil rights protections or offices that protect civil rights, that are nothing about what they charge.“That is the real game, at heart. It’s what was going on in the red scare.”

    Red Scare is published in the US by Scribner More

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      Presidents at War: how battle has shaped American leaders

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      In his new book, Presidents at War, Steven M Gillon considers how the second world war shaped a generation of presidents, a span that takes in eight men – but not all of them served in uniform between 1941 and 1945.Gillon likes to “ask people, ‘There are seven men who served in uniform in world war two and who went on to be president: who are they?’ And most people think Jimmy Carter did, and they forget Ronald Reagan.”Carter was born in 1924 and came of age in wartime. But the submariner turned peanut farmer turned politician, who died aged 100 in December, graduated the US Naval Academy in 1946, the year after the war. Reagan, meanwhile, joined the Army Reserve in the 1930s and spent the war years enlisted – but stayed at home in Hollywood, where he made his name as an actor, narrating films and joining fundraising drives.“Reagan was the most fascinating for me,” says Gillon, emeritus professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and scholar-in-residence at the History Channel. “I once bought the story about: ‘Oh, he wanted to go and fight but his eyes were too bad.’ In fact, there’s all these machinations going on behind the scenes that keep him from going overseas, to make sure he stays in California so he can make movies, while at the same time creating this public image of a guy who has been off to war, and he comes home to his wife [Jane Wyman], and there’s a picture of him in his uniform, kissing his wife – who in fact he slept with every night during the war.”Gillon focuses on how the war affected men who led their country through the cold war with Russia, into the quagmire of Vietnam, and eventually into the first Iraq war. To Gillon, “those presidents who came closest to combat were the ones who were most restrained in their use of force afterwards,” meaning Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded Allied forces in Europe, and John F Kennedy and George HW Bush, who flirted with death in the Pacific, JFK as a torpedo boat captain, Bush as a navy flier.“Reagan is the exception of so many of these things,” Gillon says. “Reagan never sees war. He thinks he saw the Holocaust camps, but he didn’t. He just makes stuff up, and he thinks it’s true. But what I did not know was how he came out of the war with the real fear of nuclear weapons, and he belonged to an organization for international control of atomic weapons, largely a liberal organization, as he was involved in other liberal organizations like Americans for Democratic Action.“While he shed all the other liberal ties, he never shed that fear of nuclear weapons. And despite all his bombastic language, he was very restrained in the use of force. I mean, the only thing he did was create a phony war in Grenada [in which 19 Americans died] and see 241 Americans killed in Lebanon [both in 1983], and that was a peacekeeping mission.”View image in fullscreenIn response to the Beirut embassy bombing, Reagan launched limited strikes. He also bombed Libya, in 1986, and funded and fueled conflicts elsewhere, his efforts in Nicaragua creating the Iran-Contra scandal. But on the global scene, Gillon “was surprised at how restrained Reagan was. And then his fear of nuclear weapons made him open to [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s overtures” for detente and arms control “during his second term … this was where Reagan followed his own instincts and in this case his instincts were right, and he was the right person to do it because he had such strong anti-communist credentials. So that was a twist I had not appreciated before.”Gillon’s book contains more twists. Many involve Lyndon Baines Johnson, like Reagan no stranger to distorting facts for political gain. A congressman when the US entered the war, LBJ got himself into uniform for a Pacific fact-finding tour. Hitching a ride on a bomber, he survived an attack by Japanese fighters.“There’s controversy over whether that took place the way he described it,” Gillon says. “There was an article written by some aviation historians who said it never could have happened. And then, years later, the Japanese pilot who had actually led the attack against the American planes said he remembered Johnson’s plane. He remembered crippling it, and he said the plane was so wounded that he knew it wasn’t going to do any damage, so he broke off and went back into the main attack.”Johnson’s plane made it back to base, leaving him alive to tell tales of his own bravery on the campaign trail. Gillon shows how those tales grew more shameless but thinks the basic story “is definitely true”, including how a bathroom break meant Johnson lost a spot on a plane which was shot down, killing all onboard.“Yeah, Johnson was just cool as a cucumber. And I’m sure he was thrilled when he landed.”Gillon was born in working class Philadelphia in 1956, in the shadow of the war. Too young for the Vietnam draft, fascinated by the presidency, he graduated from Widener and Brown and then taught at Yale and Oxford. Recent books include America’s Reluctant Prince, about his late friend John F Kennedy Jr, and The Pact, about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, a Democratic president and a Republican House speaker whose relationship resonates loudly today.With his latest book, Gillon focuses on the major lessons of the second world war, particularly the cost of appeasement, Hitler’s triumph at Munich in 1938 a constant ghost at the feast. Such lessons, he says, “some forgot, like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, while others, like Kennedy and Bush, those who really saw battle and the horrors of war, you see them thinking about world war two all the time when they’re making big decisions, whether it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis for Kennedy or it’s the invasion of Iraq with George Bush”.View image in fullscreenLooking to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Gillon describes how both served but did not see battle. Both were in the navy. Ford’s closest brush with action involved a fire aboard his ship during a Pacific typhoon. Nixon was posted to tropical islands, working logistics and supply, failing to reach the front line.Vietnam dominates Gillon’s book. US involvement began under Eisenhower, accelerated under Kennedy, swirled into nightmare under Johnson and finally ended under Nixon – though he had lengthened the horror by thwarting peace talks for his own political gain. Gillon retells the extraordinary Anna Chennault affair, in which a Washington socialite acted as a go-between with the government of South Vietnam, relaying Nixon’s urge to boycott talks till the 1968 election was done. When Johnson learned of it, he told a senior Republican: “This is treason.” The senator agreed. Johnson called Nixon, who denied it. Gillon writes: “According to some reports, after hanging up, Nixon collapsed with laughter.”In 1968, Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. The war did not end until 1973. Reading Presidents at War, it is striking to realize that no future president who was of an age to serve in Vietnam did so.Bill Clinton opposed the war, studied abroad and denied accusations of dodging the draft. Joe Biden secured student deferments then was exempted on account of teenage asthma. George W Bush, the son of a war hero, went into the Texas Air national guard, which, Gillon notes, “is a place notoriously where rich, powerful people put their kids during war”. Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain did go to Vietnam – but lost presidential elections.As so often, Donald Trump is a whole other matter. He obtained student draft deferments but also found a doctor to say “bone spurs” in his heels rendered him unfit for service. He has also said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating in New York was his “personal Vietnam”, making him feel like “a great and very brave soldier”. It’s not a line to endear him to Gillon, who says he cast his first vote for a Republican president, Ford, but whose epilogue to Presidents at War makes clear his distaste for Trump, his view of military matters and his reported negative comments about those who serve.“I have my political point of view but when I write history, I try to be really fair-minded,” Gillon says. “And I can’t be fair-minded toward Trump. I just dislike him so much that I don’t think I could write a book about him. I wrote a book about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, and what made me happy was that both Clinton and Gingrich liked it. I take great pride in being fair of mind towards someone like Newt Gingrich, who I have no political affinity for, but I just can’t get to that point mentally with Trump. I can’t write a book that I feel I can’t be fair.”

      Presidents at War is out now More

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      ‘Stand up for what’s right’: Melville House co-founder on publishing Jack Smith and Tulsa reports

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      A US publishing house has decided to publish official reports into sensitive matters in US politics and history against the backdrop of a new Donald Trump administration committed to a radical rightwing agenda of reshaping American government and fiercely aggressive against its opponents, especially in the media.The publisher, Melville House, will on Tuesday release The Jack Smith Report, a print and ebook edition of the special counsel’s summation of his investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Later in February, the company will then publish another report the Department of Justice issued shortly before Trump returned to power, concerning the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.Dennis Johnson, co-founder of Melville House with his wife, Valerie Merians, said The Jack Smith Report would be published with no frills: “It is just a report, and we’re just reprinting it. We’re not doing anything to it. We’re not adding anything in the front or back. We’re not getting star introductions or anything. We just wanted it to speak for itself.”But he also described an urgent need to put out physical copies, in light of Trump’s push to revenge himself on prosecutors who worked for Smith and FBI agents who investigated the January 6 attack on Congress.Johnson said the same for the Tulsa report, amid a drive to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion policies which has resulted in the disappearances of official online resources related to the history of racism and civil rights.Johnson has published federal reports before, achieving notable sales for the CIA Torture Report (2014) and the Mueller Report (2019), the latter concerning Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.Melville House has always been “mission-driven”, Johnson said, describing a company “founded as a minor but sincere attempt to stand up to the [election] of George Bush”.Nonetheless, after Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in November, Johnson and his staff found themselves “just stumped. We had no ideas … we just felt totally defeated … and then there was this murmuring about the Jack Smith report coming. And when we heard that, after two or three months of being in a bunk and a daze, we just immediately thought we should do that.”Smith was appointed in November 2022, under the Biden administration. He investigated “whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election”, as well as Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving power.Ultimately, Smith filed four criminal charges relating to election subversion and 40 concerning retention of classified records. Trump pleaded not guilty but his lawyers and a compliant Florida judge secured delays, meaning neither case reached trial before November.After Trump’s election win, Smith closed his cases. Before Trump returned to power, the Department of Justice released part one of Smith’s report, covering his work on Trump’s election subversion. Part two, on Trump’s retention of classified information, remains under wraps.Melville House has moved fast. Johnson said such “crash publishing” required hard work and help from printers, retailers and more. But the Jack Smith Report, he said, would “launch into a very different book culture than the last time we were in this predicament, in 2016. People are very afraid.“We did the Mueller Report and there were two other significant publications. There was Simon and Schuster, they’re one of the biggest publishers in the world, and there was Skyhorse, which is independent but much bigger than us … and yet we got our book on the bestseller list.“We knew that wasn’t going to happen this time, because the big houses, we’re guessing, are intimidated – don’t want any hard feelings with the White House. Trump has already informed Penguin he’s going to sue them about a critical biography they published last year [Lucky Loser, by Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.] And the publisher with Skyhorse [Tony Lyons] actually worked on the presidential campaign of Robert F Kennedy Jr [now Trump’s nominee for health secretary] so we knew he wasn’t going to put [the Smith report] out. So we’d have the field to ourselves, which is good.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think there’s a world of independent booksellers who are eager to be supporting something that speaks to the moment, that somehow stands up for what’s right.”It took the Department of Justice more than 100 years to stand up a proper investigation of the Tulsa Race Massacre – one of the most unjustly obscure episodes in US history, in which hundreds were killed when Greenwood, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black neighborhood, was destroyed by a white mob.No charges were brought. Under Joe Biden, a new investigation was carried out by a cold case unit of the justice department civil rights division named for Emmett Till, a Black teen murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955. The Tulsa report was released on 10 January. Ten days later, Trump returned to power – and announced sweeping changes at the civil rights division.Calling the new Tulsa report “nauseating and gripping”, Johnson said: “We went to the Library of Congress and found a lot of the photos which might have been part of the initial report when the massacre happened, that the predecessor of the FBI did, the investigation this report criticizes. They supplement the information but it only takes a few pictures to make the point. They’re just aerial shots of devastation. It’s like Munich in world war two. Hiroshima. Total devastation.”Johnson hopes his editions of the Jack Smith and Tulsa reports will find places in “libraries and classrooms” as well as homes. When he was a boy, he said, adults he knew “had the Pentagon Papers paperback in their home, they might have had the Warren Commission and later the Starr Report. I want people to feel these reports are part of the American historic record.”

      The Jack Smith Report is published in the US on Tuesday More

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      Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan review – a lacerating exposé

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      “Ask not,” said President Kennedy as he rallied young Americans to volunteer for national service in his inaugural address, “what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Kennedy had a stricter rule for the women in his life, as journalist Maureen Callahan reveals in her lacerating exposé: asking nothing in return, they were expected to do what their commander-in-chief required, which meant supplying him with sex whenever and wherever he fancied.As a senator, JFK tried out his priapic power by impregnating a 15-year-old babysitter and positioning an aide beneath his desk to fellate him while he multitasked in his office. As president, he ushered White House secretaries upstairs after work for brief, brusque sessions of copulation and rewarded them with a post-coital snack of cheese puffs; at one lunchtime frolic in the basement swimming pool he instructed a young woman to orally relieve the tensions of a male crony and looked on in approval as she obeyed. His wife, Jackie, whom he infected with a smattering of venereal ailments, lamented that his assassination deprived her of the chance to vent her rage at him. Nevertheless, she embraced his naked body before it was placed in a casket at the Dallas hospital, bestowing a final, perhaps frosty kiss on his penis.JFK’s conduct mimicked the tom-catting of his father, Joseph, who kept his wife, Rose, permanently pregnant while he took up with movie stars such as Gloria Swanson – whom he raped without bothering to introduce himself at their first meeting – and Marlene Dietrich. Not to be outdone, JFK shared Marilyn Monroe with his brother Bobby, his attorney general. Appointed ambassador to the UK in 1938, Joe declared democracy to be defunct and hailed Hitler’s new world order. He particularly admired Nazi eugenics, which weeded out human specimens he found “disgusting”, and he applied the sanitary theory to his own family. His daughter Rosemary seemed emotionally volatile and looked too chubby to appear in press photographs; deeming her a “defective product”, he had her lobotomised, which left her “functionally a two-year-old”. His wife was not consulted about the operation.View image in fullscreenA “negative life force”, Callahan suggests, was passed down from Joe to his descendants. The promiscuous Kennedy men had scant liking for women; with no time for pleasure, they practised what Callahan calls “technical sex”, short-fused but excitingly risky because this was their way of both defying and flirting with death. During the showdown with Russia over Cuban missiles, JFK installed a nubile minion in his absent wife’s bedroom for amusement while he diced with “nuclear oblivion – a catastrophe of his own making”.The same sense of existential danger elated JFK’s son John, a playboy princeling who loved to show off his genitalia after showering at the gym. Callahan argues that for John Jr “dying was a high”, an orgasmic thrill that he insisted on sharing with a female partner. “What a way to go,” he marvelled after almost killing a girlfriend when their kayak capsized. In 1999, he bullied his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister into flying with him on a private plane he had not qualified to pilot; in bad weather he was baffled by the instrument panel, and all three died when the tiny Piper Saratoga spiralled into the ocean. The accident, in Callahan’s view, was “a murder-suicide”.View image in fullscreenAn angry sympathy for the women “broken, tormented, raped, murdered or left for dead” by the Kennedys inflames and sometimes envenoms Callahan’s writing. Her account of Rosemary’s unanaesthetised lobotomy left me reeling. It’s equally painful to read about the agony of Mary Jo Kopechne, who drowned in Ted Kennedy’s overturned car at Chappaquiddick in 1969 while he wandered off to arrange for a fixer to finesse press accounts of the calamity: upside down, she contorted her body for hours to gasp at a dwindling pocket of air. Carolyn Bessette tormented herself to qualify as a blond Kennedy consort, enduring a makeover that left her scalp scorched by bleach. In case cosmetic scars seem trivial, Callahan adds a terse allusion to the state of Bessette’s corpse, severed at the waist by her seatbelt in the plane that John Jr so air-headedly crashed.After all this carnage, the book tries to conclude with a quietly triumphal coda. Liberated by the death of her second husband, Jackie Onassis took a low-paid job with a Manhattan publisher, which allows Callahan to imagine her anonymously merging with the crowd on her way to work, “just another New York woman on the go”. That, however, is not quite the end of the dynastic story. Jackie’s nephew Robert Kennedy Jr is a candidate for president in this November’s election, despite possessing a brain that he believes was partly eaten by a worm, a body that houses the so-called “lust demons” he inherited from his grandfather, and a marital history that gruesomely varies the family paradigm: the second of his three wives, in despair after reading a diary in which he tabulated his adulterous flings and awarded them points for performance, killed herself in 2012.View image in fullscreenBut the longest shadow is cast by Ted, promoted as the family’s presidential heir apparent in 1980 even though he was “the runt of the litter, kicked out of Harvard for cheating” and a flush-faced alcoholic into the bargain. A psychiatric assessment quoted by Callahan discerns in sloppy, greedy Ted a “narcissistic intemperance, a huge, babyish ego that must constantly be fed”. Sound familiar? That diagnosis makes Trump an honorary Kennedy, with Boris Johnson as a kissing cousin. I sniffed a further connection when Callahan describes Ted arriving drunk at a royal dinner in Brussels with an equally plastered sex worker as his date; the pair appalled the company with their intimate antics, which at one point included urinating on an antique sofa. Could this episode have been reimagined in Christopher Steele’s debunked 2016 dossier where, without evidence, Trump is said to have watched sex workers in a Moscow hotel defile a bed in which the Obamas had slept by drenching it in a golden shower?Invented or not, such tales are fables about the pathology of politics. Forget the pretence of public service that these damaged men spout as they tout for votes. They seek electoral office because it licenses them to act out their fantasies – to randomly grab pussies or shoot passersby on Fifth Avenue with utter impunity. Having power over others makes up for their own quaking impotence, and all of us, not only those betrayed wives and disposable lovers, are their abused and casually obliterated victims. More

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      US Declaration of Independence document bore arms of English king

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      It is a founding document of the United States and inspired the Declaration of Independence and the purge of English power from the American colonies.But, ironically, George Mason’s seminal Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 was written on paper watermarked with the arms of the king of England, a British expert has discovered.As one of the most significant documents in American history, the Virginia declaration is held in a secure vault at the Library of Congress (LoC) in Washington, DC. Dr Ian Christie-Miller, a former visiting research fellow at London University and a specialist in paper analysis, has discovered a watermark that shows the Hanover crown and the emblem of King George III, under whose rule the American colonies were lost.He told the Observer: “The value of watermark research has been widely known but ignored for years. The evidence has been sitting there unnoticed until now.”Christie-Miller made the discovery while researching his forthcoming philosophy book, Conscience – The Restoration. “It is ironic that paper bearing the arms of the king was used by George Mason for his first draft declaration, which was to lead to the overthrow of English power in the American colonies. Apparently he had few qualms of conscience in using that watermarked paper.”View image in fullscreenThe US war of independence led to Britain’s 13 American colonies throwing off British rule to establish the sovereign United States of America.British attempts to impose unpopular taxes had contributed to growing tensions between the Crown and colonists, who resorted to armed rebellion. The king opposed their bid for independence, although he was not directly responsible for policies such as the Stamp Act of 1765, which was passed by the British parliament.Mason drafted his call for American independence from Britain in 1776. It was amended by Thomas Ludwell Lee, and the Virginia Convention and Thomas Jefferson drew heavily on it for the Declaration of Independence.Dr Peter Thompson, associate professor of American history at Oxford University, said: “The paper may have had to be compliant with the Stamp Act – which deepens the irony.View image in fullscreen“I wonder, if Mason had had a choice and there had been some alternative supply of paper, whether he would still have chosen stamped paper, so as to make a point of complying with the law, even though he didn’t agree with it.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe LoC catalogue description notes: “This uniquely influential document was also used by James Madison in drawing up the Bill of Rights, 1789, and the Marquis de Lafayette in drafting the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789.”Mason wrote: “All men are born equally free and independant [sic], and have certain inherent natural rights … among which are the Enjoyment of Life and Liberty, with the Means of acquiring and possessing Property, and pursueing [sic] and obtaining Happiness and Safety.”These beliefs did not extend to enslaved people, however, as Mason owned more than 100 enslaved people at the time, despite condemning slavery as “disgraceful to mankind”.The LoC said: “We’re always happy to help scholars with their research, but … we can’t comment on their finished work.” More

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      The Year of Living Constitutionally: a man, a political plan … and a musket

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      Would you fly the Jolly Roger for Uncle Sam? AJ Jacobs tried to. For 12 months, the author and journalist became what he calls “the original originalist”, seeking to live the way the founders envisioned life under the US constitution.That life included the right to piracy on behalf of the US government. It sprang from a tradition predating the constitution, when the Continental Congress granted letters of marque and reprisal, allowing seamen to capture British ships. Noting this precedent, Jacobs brought an unconventional offer to Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, when the two met in a hotel lobby.“I said, ‘I’m following the constitution and would like to be granted a letter of marque and reprisal,’” Jacobs recalls. “He said, ‘Great, let’s make it happen.’ I explained to him what it was: basically legalized piracy. I would fight our enemies on my friend’s water-ski boat.”After that, Khanna “was a little more like, ‘Maybe this is not going to happen.’”Jacobs didn’t get his Captain Jack Sparrow moment. But he did get a book out of the experience, The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning, which has received multiple votes of approval – including from Khanna.“He did like the idea of the book: trying to explain the origins of the constitution, what it really means, what it says.”In 2007, Jacobs published the results of a similar project, The Year of Living Biblically.“They have a similar status in our society,” he says, of the Bible and the constitution. “Some people see them as sacred and try to follow them in the original meaning as it was written.”Others look to adapt the texts for a modern era. For the constitution, this has evolved into a debate between originalists and living constitutionalists. Jacobs interviewed scholars across the spectrum.View image in fullscreen“This was my favorite part. They were super-generous with me.” Some were “people who were the most liberal and progressive and saw the constitution as having no intrinsic meaning, it could be molded like Play-Doh”. Others felt that “whatever the constitution meant then is what it means now. One guy refused to capitalize the S in ‘supreme court’. In the constitution” – as in the Guardian style guide – “the S is not capitalized … It was a wide range.”The originalists have been getting the better of things lately, including on the supreme court. And it was originalism – and the Guardian – that helped nudge Jacobs toward his book idea.After the 2022 supreme court decision Dobbs v Jackson, which overturned Roe v Wade, removing the federal right to abortion, a Guardian editor asked Jacobs to cover an unexpected trend. It related not to abortion, which was suddenly up to the states, but to vasectomies, which a surprising number of American men were choosing to have.“I am the type of journalist who tries things out myself and writes about the effort,” Jacobs says. “I did not feel like getting a vasectomy. I did not know if I was the right person for that interesting storyline.”What he did feel like was exploring the originalist mindset. He came across a startling statistic: at least 60% of Americans, including himself at the time, had not read the constitution from beginning to end, despite it running just four to six pages. It was time to delve into “what it really says, what it really means, instead of getting it filtered from whatever media you happen to be partial to. Let’s read what it actually says.”When it came to the right to piracy, although Jacobs couldn’t sail the high seas he did receive an email from a Khanna staffer addressing him as “Captain Jacobs”. Then there was petitioning the government. Instead of the online approach, Jacobs brought a scroll somewhere near 200ft long into the office of Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon. Hundreds had signed the scroll. When Jacobs took some notes using his quill pen, it left ink on Wyden’s carpet. Jacobs added $50 to his taxes to foot the bill. (The subject of his petition was “Let’s have co-presidents”, a cause advocated by some founders, with Benjamin Franklin recommending 12 chief executives at once.)State laws came into the picture too. Free-speech advocates might be surprised by how much states policed what Americans said in the early republic. New York fined those who blasphemed or cursed 37 and a half cents. Jacobs did the same with his three sons, though they declined to come up with a half-cent.“It was not an easy year,” he says. “It was about as hard as The Year of Living Biblically.” That said, there were some differences. With the Bible, Jacobs “grew a huge beard. This did not involve as much facial hair.” But his appearance and lifestyle changed in other ways. He wore a tricorn hat, carried a musket, consumed an unusual amount of cloves, wrote with a quill, and woke up at the hour recommended by Franklin: 5am.View image in fullscreen“I tried to express second amendment rights the old-fashioned way,” he says. “I got a musket off ye olde internet and carried it around the Upper West Side where I live. A lot of people were crossing the street. People gave me a scowl.” When he brought it into a coffeeshop, a customer invited Jacobs to go ahead of him in line.“It’s sort of a good example of how this year went. At times, it was very strange, bizarre and awkward. But it was also, at the same time, incredibly enlightening and fascinating. I do think it gave real insight into how we should interpret the constitution.”He was particularly pleased with one custom: election cakes, meant to spur civic participation. Jacobs got volunteers representing all 50 states to bake election cakes last year. He plans to do it again.Although Jacobs appreciated the chance to adopt an 18th-century detachment from the near-constant news of today, he appreciates the progress America has made, saying: “It was terribly sexist and racist towards women, Black people and Indigenous people. I don’t want to go back to that.“Women’s rights were very constrained, especially married women, who were treated like children. They could not sign contracts. My wife owns a business. She signs several contracts a day.”Jacobs’s wife, Julie, let him take over contract-signing – then fired him after an hour.Jacobs also examined how 19th-century abolitionists saw the constitution. William Lloyd Garrison was so outraged by its stance on slavery that he advocated burning it – and did so. Frederick Douglass, who was formerly enslaved, had the same view but changed his mind and recommended Americans view the constitution as a promissory note.“Douglass says, ‘Let’s work to make America live up to the principles in the constitution.’ It becomes a very powerful way of looking at the constitution. Martin Luther King Jr talks about the constitution as a promissory note. Barack Obama gave a great speech that said the seeds of freedom were planted in the constitution … The solutions to the problems of the constitution are in the constitution itself.”
      The Year of Living Constitutionally is published in the US by Crown More

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      in US Politics

      Wide Awakes: the young Americans who marched the north to civil war

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      History is really the only thing I can do,” Jon Grinspan says, smiling. “I worked in restaurant kitchens, I did other things, but really history is it. If I ever have to stop, I don’t know what I could do. I got straight As in history and straight Ds and Fs and every other topic. It’s like I’m a one-use tool.”He’s being modest. But he definitely does history. A Philadelphia native who studied at Sarah Lawrence in New York and got his PhD from the University of Virginia, Grinspan is now a curator of political history at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.He’s also the author of a new book, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War, which casts a bright torchlight on to a fascinating if brief episode in 1860s America with strong echoes in the divided nation of today.The Wide Awakes were a political movement, begun in Hartford, Connecticut, around the elections of 1860, growing spontaneously and nationally as a way for young men to publicly support Republican anti-slavery candidates, most prominently Abraham Lincoln. Members wore capes, often bearing a painted eye, carried flaming torches and wore military hats and approximations of uniform as they marched in opposition to the slave-holding south.In his small Smithsonian office, after a trip to the museum stores to see a Wide Awake torch, the last coffee cup used by Abraham Lincoln and other precious relics, Grinspan describes how he found his way to the Wide Awakes.“I always looked down on the civil war as a teenager, because it seemed so cookie-cutter and kind of hokey, very un-human and dry. And then in college we started reading Eric Foner” – the dean of civil war-era scholars – “and he made the factions in 19th-century America look human, kind of tribal. I got into it from there.”As a curator, Grinspan is responsible for telling the story of US democracy – hence the giant cardboard pencil in the corner, emblazoned with the words “Write In Ralph Nader”. As it happens, the evocation of the third-party candidate who maybe cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000 points to one of Grinspan’s driving interests: turnout.When he learned how many Americans voted in 19th-century elections, particularly around the civil war, “that made me want to find more. Turnout over 80%? What’s the story behind it? And that kind of guided me into trying to find the human stories, and from there it just seemed so exciting.View image in fullscreen“Also, growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, politics seemed so dry and tame in America. Turnout was lower in the 90s than at any time since the 1920s. So looking back to the 19th century, when democracy seems so much more vibrant and engaging and conflicted, I got into this world that was completely different. And then over the last 20 years, our world has come to look much more heated, for mostly negative reasons, so it feels like I got into something really niche that has become somehow relevant.”‘Guys with torches in the night’Grinspan found the Wide Awakes “at grad school, in need of an idea for my thesis. I got so into it I essentially failed all my classes the first year. They threatened to throw me out, but I just felt the Wide Awake story wasn’t being told and I wanted to tell it.“So I got pretty fixated on it and I submitted a piece to the Journal of American History. And then, right when I was on the cusp of being kicked out, the Journal said, ‘We’re gonna run this in our Lincoln Bicentennial, which is 2009.’ From there, I had some great professors who said, ‘Just be ruthless in doing the work you want to do.’ And, pat myself on the back, it turned into a career, right?”Right. The Wide Awakes are known but they flourished briefly, before a civil war in which most were subsumed by the Union army. Grinspan has room to move.“There’s a little scene in the preface of this book where a professor turns to his computer, goes on a newspaper database, plugs in ‘Wide Awake’ and gets 15,000 hits for 1860,” Grinspan says. “And yet the group had been so neglected.“It usually gets a paragraph in good books on 1860. They’ll describe Wide Awake marches somewhere, maybe around the Chicago Republican convention in May. They’re outside. But then you’ll get 35 pages on the fight for the Republican nomination and you’ll get a biography of Edward Bates [Lincoln’s attorney general] at 15 pages. But you have this mass movement, hundreds of thousands of people? And I’m gonna get a paragraph?”Grinspan thinks some neglect of the Wide Awakes comes from “a little bit of elitism”, history focused on great leaders. But “the Wide Awakes aren’t entirely a pretty story. And after the war, it’s much easier to valorise Lincoln than to focus on the guys with torches in the night.”After the war, and Lincoln’s assassination, the Reconstruction years saw Ulysses S Grant, the general who became president, face down the Ku Klux Klan, torch-bearing night-raiders who terrorised Black people in the southern states.But the Wide Awakes had a dark side of their own. Like the Republican party, they emerged from a primordial soup of anti-immigrant feeling.“These white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republicans were pretty hostile to the Irish Democrats and specifically Catholics,” Grinspan says. “The Wide Awakes in the 1850s are a nativist club. They are in nativist fights in Brooklyn, in Boston. You see accounts from Irish immigrants saying, ‘We stayed away from that group over there wearing the white hats.’ Because a ‘wide awake’ hat was the symbol of the group. And then the Wide Awakes in 1860, they take the same name just four or five years later. If you had started a movement called the Tea Party in 2015, people would have had associations. It’s a lot of the same people. They’re cheered on by the same newspapers like the Hartford Courant, which is massively anti-Irish.“But they grow out of it. I think they find a better conspiracy to fight.”By 1860, the southern grip on Washington was strong. The slave-owning states resisted change through an unrepresentative Congress and a supreme court tilted their way. The parallels with Washington today are strong, though labels have changed and it is Republicans who now pursue minority rule.“You look at the behavior of the slave-owning elites and they are doing everything they can to control Congress and control the supreme court, to determine the future of the nation,” Grinspan says. “It’s kind of funny that we hate conspiracy theories, but every once in a while one is accurate.”Another feature of Grinspan’s book that echoes strongly today concerns southern reactions to the Wide Awakes, which ranged from dismissive to angry to frightened. Particularly scarifying was the presence – remarkable enough in the segregated north – of Black men among the torch-bearing marchers.“John Mercer Langston was as far as I know the first Black Wide Awake. He starts the club in Oberlin, Ohio, then later becomes a Reconstruction congressman, a really prominent figure. I knew when I started work on the Wide Awakes there were Black men involved, but I didn’t realise how compelling this story was.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“A lot were fugitives from slavery. They connect the dots to underground abolitionists in Boston, who were fighting slave catchers in the 1850s. They come out publicly with the Wide Awakes, marching in uniform, 144 African Americans with 10,000 white Wide Awakes. They’re not just claiming public space or claiming partisan identity: they’re in military uniforms, a tiny minority in a sea of white people. It’s a bold move.“And those same guys, when the war breaks out, they organise the home guard and then they organise the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the most prominent African American fighting force in the war. I see the Wide Awakes at a turning point there.“And in the south and the Democratic north, people go crazy when they learn about Black Wide Awakes. They start posting disinformation broadsides for Black Wide Awake events, real events in Pittsburgh and Chicago where we know there were no African Americans, just to gin up anger and get people to vote Democratic.”It all sounds familiar, evocative of rightwing fear and anger in summer 2020, when protests for racial justice spread and Trumpists insisted shadowy, black-clad anti-fascists, “Antifa”, threatened chaos and bloodshed.Rightly, Grinspan is wary of pat journalistic comparisons. Generously, he says the Wide Awakes were alarming to many.“After the 1850s, when there’s so much chaos in America, so much street fighting and Bleeding Kansas and the Know Nothing gangs, people marching in order, in silence, sends a political message. It’s saying, ‘We actually are the people in this republic right now who can organise things. The Democrats can’t even stay together as a party and we have matching uniforms.’ They’re not armed but it’s not a big jump from torches to muskets, as they always say.”View image in fullscreenLincoln’s victory in 1860 was followed by civil war but it also caused the Wide Awakes to fade from the scene. Members wanted to escort the new president to Washington but despite knowing of threats to his life, Lincoln turned down the offer.“If he brings a bodyguard to Washington,” Grinspan says, “if he has 5,000 or 100,000 Republicans in uniform come with him, he drives away Democrats, he drives away Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, slave-owning border states.”Prompted, Grinspan makes an apt comparison.“I mean, January 6, you can see how you can rile up your supporters,” he says, of the day in 2021 when Donald Trump sent supporters, most in what passed for Maga uniform, some in tactical gear, to attack Congress itself.“When Mussolini marches on Rome, he brings his blackshirts with him. There are so many examples of a leader mobilising people this way. And Lincoln has the self-restraint not to do that. He puts it out through John Hay, his young secretary, to the young Wide Awakes in Springfield, Illinois: ‘Go to Washington as individuals. Don’t come as a company. If you want to come to the inauguration, that’s fine.’“But there are still secret Wide Awakes in the crowd and they have the uniforms on.”‘People keep finding objects’Grinspan has ideas for his next book – which will be his fourth – and will continue to engage the public at the Smithsonian. Nonetheless, the publication of Wide Awake is a culmination, of sorts, of 17 years of consuming work.“At first I felt I discovered something no one else knew about,” he says. “And then I thought, ‘I’m done.’ But people kept coming to me with more Wide Awakes stuff. I wouldn’t have written this book five or 10 years ago but people keep finding objects. I still find references in diaries I read. And there was a sort of neo-Wide Awake movement in 2020,” around protests for racial justice.It seems Grinspan will never truly let go of the Wide Awakes. They’re part of his job, after all. Downstairs, in the conservation department, we approach another relic, spread out to be viewed with care.View image in fullscreenIt is a Wide Awake cape, owned and used by George P Holt of New Hampshire then stored in an attic for 100 years or more. Originally bright white with violet lettering, it has faded and frayed with time. But the painted eye, arranged to stare from the wearer’s breast, is as piercing as on the day it was made.
      Wide Awake is published in the US and in the UK by Bloomsbury More

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      in US Politics

      US historians file brief with supreme court rejecting Trump’s immunity claim

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      Fifteen prominent historians filed an amicus brief with the US supreme court, rejecting Donald Trump’s claim in his federal election subversion case that he is immune to criminal prosecution for acts committed as president.Authorities cited in the document include the founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Adams, in addition to the historians’ own work.Trump, the historians said, “asserts that a doctrine of permanent immunity from criminal liability for a president’s official acts, while not expressly provided by the constitution, must be inferred. To justify this radical assertion, he contends that the original meaning of the constitution demands it. But no plausible historical case supports his claim.”Trump faces four federal election subversion charges, arising from his attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, fueled by his lie about electoral fraud and culminating in the deadly attack on Congress of 6 January 2021.He also faces 10 election subversion charges in Georgia, 34 charges over hush-money payments in New York, 40 federal charges for retaining classified information, and multimillion-dollar penalties in civil cases over tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Despite such unprecedented legal jeopardy, Trump strolled to the Republican nomination to face Biden in November and is seeking to delay all cases until after that election, so that he might dismiss them if he returns to power. His first criminal trial, in the New York hush-money case, is scheduled to begin next Monday.Despite widespread legal and historical opinion that Trump’s immunity claim is groundless, the US supreme court, to which Trump appointed three justices, will consider the claim.Oral arguments are scheduled for 25 April. The court recently dismissed attempts, supported by leading historians, to remove Trump from ballots under the 14th amendment, passed after the civil war to bar insurrectionists from office.In a filing on Monday, the special counsel Jack Smith urged the justices to reject Trump’s immunity claim as “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government”.Seven of the 15 historians who filed the amicus brief are members of the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive policy institute at New York University law school.Holly Brewer, a professor of American cultural and intellectual history at the University of Maryland, said: “When designing the presidency, the founders wanted no part of the immunity from criminal prosecution claimed by English kings.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That immunity was at the heart of what they saw as a flawed system. On both the state and national level, they wrote constitutions that held all leaders, including presidents, accountable to the laws of the country. St George Tucker, one of the most prominent judges in the new nation, laid out the principle clearly: everyone is equally bound by the law, from ‘beggars in the streets’ to presidents.”Other signatories to the brief included Jill Lepore of Harvard, author of These Truths, a history of the US; Alan Taylor of the University of Virginia, author of books including American Revolutions, about the years of independence; and Joanne Freeman of Yale, author of The Field of Blood, an influential study of political violence before the civil war.Thomas Wolf, co-counsel on the brief and director of democracy initiatives at the Brennan Center, called Trump’s immunity claim “deeply un-American”, adding: “From the birth of the country through President Clinton’s acceptance of a plea bargain in 2001 [avoiding indictment over the Monica Lewinsky affair], it has been understood that presidents can be prosecuted.“The supreme court must not delay in passing down a ruling in this case.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Pretty bad’: NBC condemned by top US historian over role for Ronna McDaniel

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      The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “tried to disassemble our democracy” by supporting Donald Trump’s electoral fraud lies and should not be given such a media role, a leading historian said amid uproar over the appointment.“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny, told MSNBC, part of the network now employing McDaniel.On Friday, NBC announced it had hired the former RNC chair and the network’s senior vice-president for politics, Carrie Budoff Brown, said that McDaniel would contribute her analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system,” Synder said.“And so … what NBC is doing is saying, ‘Well, [it] could be that in ‘24 our entire system will break down. Could be we’ll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we’ve made this adjustment in advance because we’ve brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down.’“So, yeah, I think this is pretty bad.”On Sunday, days after joining the network, McDaniel said on the Meet the Press that Biden won “fair and square” and said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”.But McDaniel also claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [elections in battleground states] in 2020” and said she had supported Trump’s election fraud lies as a way of “taking one for the whole team” .That stoked an on-air protest from Chuck Todd, a former Meet the Press host. On Monday, MSNBC hosts including Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Nicole Wallace, to whom Snyder spoke, also condemned the McDaniel hire. The day also saw a protest from a union group representing NBC News staff.McDaniel and NBC did not comment.Snyder, who has written for the Guardian, said: “If you are going to be on American media, you should be somebody who believes there is something called truth, there are things called facts and you can pursue them. You shouldn’t be someone who has over and over and over again pushed the idea of fake news, educated Americans away from the facts, away from belief in the facts.”Describing such work by McDaniel, the anti-Trump conservative ex-congresswoman Liz Cheney said that as RNC chair, McDaniel “facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel became RNC chair in January 2017. In that role, she defended Trump through his scandal-ridden presidency; his refusal to accept his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress; and through his surge to another presidential nomination despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties and regularly admitting to authoritarian ambitions.Despite such support, Trump last month pushed McDaniel out of the RNC, to be replaced by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.Snyder said: “If we’re going to be putting people on the news who have participated in an attempt to overthrow the system, then we have to ask at the very beginning, ‘Why did you do that? Why is that legitimate?’ And we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that we are taking this step to bring people into the middle of our discussion?’“So my two red lines are, you should be somebody who’s at least trying for the facts, and you shouldn’t be somebody who has taken part in an attempt to undo the system, which is what we’re talking about here. We shouldn’t mince words about it.” More