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    Here it is, the new right playbook: wreck and impoverish the country, enjoy the high life yourself | Owen Jones

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    Rightwing dogma has cost Britons dearly, but remains the ultimate meal ticket for the guilty men and women. While Tory rule saw workers face the most protracted squeeze in wages since the defeat of Napoleon, the politicians to blame have shamelessly monetised this failure of historic proportions.Boris Johnson – turfed out of No 10 in disgrace after little more than three years in charge – leads the pack, unsurprisingly. Within six months, he had raked in more than £5m thanks to speaker fees, hospitality and donations. A million of that was generously donated by Christopher Harborne, a tech entrepreneur based in Thailand who had mostly donated vast sums of money to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. That means Johnson certainly had the means to settle the legal bill for his defence in Partygate: alas, you and I coughed up that £265,000, with the National Audit Office condemning the government’s decision to use public money.The Rwanda scheme to deport asylum seekers was not just cruel, it was costly: about £700m of taxpayers’ dosh was frittered on needlessly catering to the basest prejudices of the British electorate. Yet its most vociferous champion, the former home secretary Suella Braverman, clearly believes she has expertise deserving of a hefty price tag.She has already made nearly £60,000 on the global speaking circuit, more than any other sitting MP, with another £14,000 from the Telegraph for articles such as one titled “Islamists are in charge of Britain now”. Then there was the all-expenses “solidarity” trip to Israel worth £27,800, paid for by the National Jewish Assembly, who clearly believed it was an investment: its chairman declared that it had paid up because Braverman “has been very influential in politics and we hope that she will again be influential in the future”.Sure, Liz Truss may have crashed the economy with unhinged rightwing policies, sending mortgages and rents soaring, contributing to 320,000 British adults being driven below the poverty line. And yes, granted, in July she was booted out of her Norfolk seat – where she had won 69% of the vote in 2019 – with the biggest swing from Tory to Labour in any UK election ever. But her bank account balance is as healthy as her shame is absent: by last September, she had made £250,000 in speaker fees since leaving office.And while Farage was never a Tory minister, few politicians have done so much to reshape the Conservative party, or deliver a Brexit which, according to the polls, just 13% of Britons believe is a success. He’s the highest earning MP, making £1.2m a year from GB News, alongside lucrative trips to the US funded by wealthy friends.That 14 years of rightwing leadership gave us a Britain with wages lower than in 2008 in two-thirds of British local authorities, stagnant growth, crumbling public services, and chronic divisions and tensions is clearly no barrier to success. All of these figures champion capitalism as a system that rewards success and punishes failure, and yet all thrive precisely because they were architects of Britain’s most calamitous era of the peacetime democratic era.What is termed “rightwing populism” is, in short, an endless money spinner. Truss is a particularly instructive case. In her youth, she was a Liberal Democrat devotee, passionately denouncing the British monarchy. Despite swerving to the right in adulthood, she campaigned for remain in 2016. Since her premiership had its fatal appointment with reality, Truss has either shifted further right or felt liberated to be her true self, or both. A cheerleader for Donald Trump, she spoke at a far-right conference in the US alongside Farage to decry “the deep state” for taking her down, and said nothing while appearing in an interview where Steve Bannon hailed Tommy Robinson as a “hero”.Other attenders at this Conservative Political Action Conference included a US senator who has refused to condemn white nationalists, and allies of the authoritarian Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán. While in the US, Truss accepted another trip worth £20,000 from a murky group called the Green Dragon Coalition, which says it is committed to “break down climate change policy” and “expose the woke mob”.What is going on here? Back in the 1970s, well funded thinktanks helped reshape the western right to embrace privatisation and regulation, slashing taxes on the rich and smashing trade unions. Today’s right is metamorphosing again, epitomised by the authoritarian demagoguery of Trump. Where there was once a cordon sanitaire between what was loosely described as the “centre right” and what lies beyond, that has long broken down.All this money is helping to reshape the international right, bringing together its leading lights to forge common bonds and a shared mission. Yes, it is nauseating to watch politicians make others pay for their failures while they are rewarded with endless pay cheques. But this is not a political project driven by results – and powerful tycoons with bottomless pockets are determined that these walking, talking disasters act as trailblazers for what comes next.

    Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      The joke’s on Truss for backing Trump | Brief letters

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      So Liz Truss thinks the lettuce joke is “puerile” but supports Donald Trump, whose unhinged rants largely comprise pitifully childish schoolyard insults (Liz Truss leaves stage over ‘I crashed the economy’ lettuce banner, 14 August). Trump and Truss are united not just in their politics but also in their absolute lack of self-awareness, sense of humour, and belief in demonstrable fact.Hilary KnightVictoria, British Columbia, Canada Banksy’s rhino is described as an “artwork”, a “mural” and an “installation” (Banksy rhino artwork in London defaced with graffiti tag, 13 August), yet the individual who added their own composition to the image is a “mindless vandal”. Double standards perhaps?Stuart HarringtonBurnham-on-Sea, Somerset Letters on accents (Letters, 15 August) reminded me of my educational ambitions in 1960s Liverpool. My Toxteth teacher learned of my aspirations for further education and counselled: “You’ll have to lose your Liverpool accent. But don’t worry, the catarrh will disappear when you move away.”Dr Ken BrayBath A while ago, I was surprised that a delicious delicacy was signed on one of the market stalls as asparagu’s, thus becoming, perhaps, a medieval mid‑European warlord (Letters, 16 August). I taught English in town for years.Ian RunnaclesBury St Edmunds, Suffolk Re “How to rein in the malign influence of Elon Musk” (Letters, 15 August). Hands up all those who own a Tesla.John PeacheyWoking, Surrey More

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      Trump fangirl Liz Truss channels Maga menace at US conservative thinktank

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      Was that Donald Truss? Or Liz Trump? A former British prime minister turned up in Washington on Monday channeling the Maga menace who once lorded it in the Oval Office and now spends his days in a dingy courtroom.Liz Truss was at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank in Washington, within sight of the US Capitol dome, to promote her grandly titled book Ten Years to Save the West. Why does she keep coming back to America? It was not hard to figure out.Far from the London literary critics sharpening their knives, Heritage offers Truss a happy place, full of gushing sycophancy with an audience hanging on her every word. In this regard the 48-year-old has gone all Trumpy: the ex-president loves to surround himself with oleaginous flatterers who dare not cross him.How divine that the politicians who whine about “groupthink” and “safe spaces” are the ones who cling to groupthink and safe spaces.To illustrate the point, Truss’s war on “the global left” establishment evidently includes the Guardian. Last Friday, this reporter received an email from Heritage about the Truss event that said: “Due to space limitations, we unfortunately must rescind your in-person invite.”Curiously, come Monday morning, Truss posted a tweet encouraging members of the public to register the event and enclosing a link. So much for space limitations. But those who did attend were informed they couldn’t get a signed copy of the book due to “supply chain issues”.Others were still able to watch a live stream on YouTube where, three hours after it ended, the event had just over 700 views. (Heritage’s biggest hit on the site is a Tucker Carlson speech that attracted a million views.)Heritage is the thinktank behind Project 2025, a sprawling plan for a second Trump presidency. Wearing a dark blue jacket and trousers, white blouse and shiny black shoes, Truss noted that when she was first invited to Heritage as environment secretary in 2015, she was warned against not to go by then British ambassador Kim Darroch.“He says to me, ‘You’ve got to be wary of this organisation. They’ve spoken out against President Obama. They’ve even been critical of Prime Minister Cameron. Are you really sure, minister, that you want to go and see them?’” Truss recalled, speaking from a wooden lectern against a backdrop of the Stars and Stripes and a blue wall dotted with Heritage Foundation logos.“And I said, yes, I’m sure because I’m a conservative and they’re a conservative thinktank in the United States of America, our closest ally. So eventually, I prevail because I am a determined person but the car from the embassy dropped me off two blocks away from the Heritage Foundation so that the British flag wouldn’t be sitting outside the building.”Making a lot of sub-Trump hand gestures with open palms, Truss proceeded to deliver her standard speech railing against left-dominated institutions, an anti-growth coalition, the IMF and Conservatives in name only. Naturally there was a swipe at wokery as “another bad neo-Marxist idea developed from Foucault and all those crazy postmodernists in the 1960s, the idea that biological sex is not a reality”.She blamed these forces for making her the shortest serving British prime minister in history (49 days that sparked mayhem on the financial markets). She reeled off a list of foes, foreign and domestic, who joined the “pile on”. Among them was Joe Biden, who had the temerity to criticise her radical mini-budget’s tax plans “from an ice cream parlour in Oregon”. There was some laughter in the auditorium. So vanilla!The Trump fangirl had some advice to impart: “I come today with a warning to the United States of America. I fear the same forces will be coming for President Donald Trump if he wins the election this November.”Truss repeated her plea from the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland for the right to grab a “a bigger bazooka” to combat the activist left with their money and “friends in high places”. She called for a “bonfire of the quangos” and, echoing Trump ally Steve Bannon, declared: “We need to dismantle the administrative state.”In her book, Truss writes that she was an early fan of the reality TV show The Apprentice and “enjoyed the Donald’s catchphrases and sassy business advice”. She also pays little heed to the convention that senior British politicians stay out of US elections.She told the audience on Monday: “I worked in cabinet whilst Donald Trump was president and while President Biden was president and I can assure you the world felt safer when Donald Trump was in office… Getting a conservative back in the White House is critical to taking on the global left.”Praise for Truss was laid on think by Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a former foreign policy researcher for Thatcher herself. He has been named one of the 50 most influential Britons in the US by the Daily Telegraph.In God we Truss; no lettuce jokes here. The baby-faced, bespectacled Gardiner proclaimed her book “an absolutely tremendous read”, “very robust”, “very gutsy”, “very courageous”, “a wonderful read”, “very powerful”, “a thrilling read”, “a tremendous book” and “a wonderful message”. He speculated that the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, might be writing memoirs in the near future but “yours are far more conservative and interesting”.Truss and Gardiner sat on plush white armchairs with glasses of water on a table between them. Truss warned that another Biden term would mean “the promotion of leftwing ideology”, girls unable to use bathrooms in privacy and no policy to deal with immigration and the southern border. “Four more years of this would be a disaster for the US internally. I think Bidenomics has been a failure.”Gardiner wondered what a second Trump term would mean for Britain. Truss said free the world needs conservative leadership. “It’s only Britain that has a conservative government. We’ve got Biden in the US, we have Trudeau in Canada, we have Macron in France, we have Scholz in Germany and it’s not working. The west is not winning.”Trump has said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any Nato country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defence. But Truss echoed Trump’s call for Europe to spend more. “There are too many countries free riding at the moment who are in serious threat. If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he won’t stop there… Donald Trump is right to say to Europe: you need to pay up.”Elise Stefanik? Kristi Noem? Marjorie Taylor Greene? Forget it. Trump-Truss 2024 would have been unstoppable. If only she had been born in Kansas. More

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      What does Liz Truss’s book tell us about her American ambitions?

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      In her new book, the former British prime minister Liz Truss directs scathing attacks and mockery at Joe Biden, president of her country’s closest ally. Biden was guilty of “utter hypocrisy and ignorance”, Truss writes, when the US leader said he “disagree[d] with the policy” of “cutting taxes on the super wealthy” in the mini-budget Truss introduced in September 2022, shortly after taking power.“I was shocked and astounded that Biden would breach protocol by commenting on UK domestic policy,” Truss adds. “We had been the United States’ staunchest allies through thick and thin.”Such harsh words between British and American leaders, in or out of office, would normally seem unusual. But Truss has scores to settle. By the time Biden spoke, in an ice-cream parlor in Portland, Oregon, Truss’s mini-budget had already caused panic over British pension funds, threatened to crash the UK economy and been withdrawn – a humiliating reversal for any prime minister, let alone one little more than a month into the job. Six days later, Truss was forced to resign.A year and a half later, offering the public her version of what went so terribly wrong, Truss still manages to thunder: “What the Biden administration, and the [European Union], and their international allies didn’t want was a country demonstrating that things can be done differently, undercutting them in the process.”Perhaps. Either way, Biden is still president while Truss is now a mere backbench MP for a constituency in rural Norfolk. But the release of her book, Ten Years to Save the West, alongside her founding of Popular Conservatism, a new pressure group, says a lot about where she sees her future.Far from taking her allowance and pursuing traditional, relatively sedate pursuits – lobbying, say, or trying to achieve peace in the Middle East – Truss wants to remain relevant on the global populist right, particularly in the US.Truss’s book is published in the US and UK on Tuesday. The American jacket carries praise from two hard-right senators, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, both vocal enemies of Biden. It also carries a different subtitle from the British edition. In the UK, Truss is said to offer “Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room”. In the US, she is “Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment”.It’s a lot to pack in between the school run – Truss has two daughters – and her duties as a Norfolk MP. But it all points to a clear ambition to carve out a presence in rightwing US media, long on plain display.In February, Truss attended the CPAC conference in Maryland, giving an address to an audience of what Politico called “bewildered conservatives” before appearing with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former campaign chair and White House adviser, a leading far-right voice who pitched Truss into controversy with remarks about the jailed far-right figure Tommy Robinson.View image in fullscreenTruss will soon be back, visiting Washington to promote her book at the Heritage Foundation, the thinktank behind Project 2025, a vast and controversial plan for a second Trump administration.Truss’s relationship with Heritage is well established. She spoke there in 2015, as trade secretary and over the objections of the British ambassador, and accepted an award named after Margaret Thatcher there last year. Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage, also blurbs the US edition of Truss’s book.The foundation is a couple of miles from the White House, but Truss is hardly likely to seek contact with Biden or his administration. That may be just as well. Elsewhere in her book, she describes meeting the president at the White House in September 2021, when she was foreign secretary under Boris Johnson.“Our Oval Office meeting lasted around an hour and a half,” Truss writes, adding that this was not a sign of favor.“The truth was it owed more to Biden’s penchant for telling extended anecdotes in response to any issue that came up. ‘Ah, that reminds me …’ he would say, as his officials looked at each other with knowing smiles. Ten minutes later, the story would end and he would move on to something else.”Biden’s age, 81, and mental capacity to be president are the source of constant media speculation and political attack – and strong White House pushback. But Truss has more to say. At the Cop 26 climate conference in Glasgow, later in 2021, she “bumped into Joe Biden again. He remembered our meeting at the White House, telling me he’d never forget ‘those blue eyes’, even though we’d both been wearing Covid masks.”It is not clear if the reader should think Biden or Truss was under the impression mouth coverings also obscure the eyes.Truss is still not done. She includes the president with the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi among US politicians deemed “unhelpful” over Northern Ireland issues, their interventions “generally on one side of the argument, doubtless egged on by the Irish embassy in Washington”.She also describes how in September 2022, as prime minister, she attended the UN general assembly in New York. There, she says, “Biden regaled me with tales of the Democrat campaign trail, including an incident in which he had fallen over. He said, ‘I can see them thinking, ‘You can’t get up, grandpa’, but I got up.’“I formed the view that he was running again in 2024,” Truss writes, before risking a self-own by writing about a faux pas at the same event, when she called out “Hi, Dr Biden!” to “a blonde lady” who turned out to be Brigitte Macron, the wife of the president of France.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I hope she didn’t hear!” Truss writes.The vignette about Biden at the UN is not the only one in Ten Years to Save the West in which Truss uses “Democrat” to refer to the Democratic party. It is a telling choice. Republicans have long used the incorrect term as a term of political abuse. Nor is it the only instance in which Truss – or her US editors – must adapt or explain her language.When writing about UK politics, as in most of the book, Truss must often offer translations or explanations for US readers. For one small but telling example, in referring to her distaste for National Insurance – a payroll tax that supports state pensions and unemployment and incapacity benefits – she calls it “a social security entitlement”. On the US right, “entitlement” is almost as dirty a word as “Democrat”.At least until the eve of publication day, Truss had shied from saying Donald Trump’s name but said she wanted a Republican in the White House in 2025. She says so in her book but abandons any pretense of subtlety when it comes to praising Trump, now the presumptive GOP nominee despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar penalties for tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Calling herself “an early fan of the TV show The Apprentice” who “enjoyed the Donald’s catchphrases and sassy business advice”, Truss says that when Trump entered politics in 2015, colleagues in parliament and “elderly ladies” in Swaffham, a town in her constituency, were united in “seem[ing] genuinely animated by the disruptive Republican candidate”. She makes a common link between support for Trump and support for Brexit – which she campaigned against before becoming its hardline champion on her way to leading her country.View image in fullscreenWhen Trump was president, Truss writes, she “chased” Boris Johnson “down a fire escape” in New York, to demand inclusion in a meeting between the British and American leaders. According to Truss, who was then trade secretary, that meeting saw Trump urge her and his own trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, to get on with talks for a UK-US trade deal – only for Johnson to try to make Trump focus on restoring the Iran nuclear agreement, a tactic that did not work.Truss never got her trade deal. In part, she blames “many in Number 10” Downing Street who “seemed to want to hold Trump at arm’s length for political reasons”.“The UK media provided universally negative coverage of Trump, and leftists in the Conservative party were keen to insult him at every opportunity,” Truss writes. “My view was that he was the leader of the free world and an important ally.”That view stands in stark comparison to her abuse of Biden, who beat Trump conclusively in an election Trump still refuses to concede. Furthermore, when it comes to the deadly fruits of that refusal – the attack on Congress Trump incited – Truss keeps her observations to a single paragraph.On 6 January 2021, Truss writes, she was “on a phone call with Bob Lighthizer”, “working on” removing a US tariff on Scottish whisky. From the Executive Office building, next to the White House, Lighthizer “remarked … in passing that the street was full of people with huge American flags walking towards Congress. Little did I realise how seismic that event would turn out to be.”Truss eventually saw the whisky tariff removed – in summer 2021, after “talks with the new Democrat administration”.“But with Joe Biden as president,” Truss writes, “it was made quite clear that a trade deal with the United Kingdom was no longer a priority. We had missed the boat.” More

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      Liz Truss says in book Queen told her to ‘pace yourself’, admits she didn’t listen

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      In a new memoir, Liz Truss recounts the advice she was given by Queen Elizabeth II when they met in September 2022 to confirm Truss as Britain’s new prime minister, the 15th and as it turned out last, to serve under Elizabeth II.“Pace yourself,” the 96-year-old queen said – a suggestion Truss admits she failed to heed after the queen died, leaving Truss unsure if she could cope.Truss later introduced radical free-market policies that crashed the British economy and saw her ejected from office just 49 days after winning an internal Conservative party vote to succeed Boris Johnson, making her the shortest-serving prime minister of all.“Maybe I should have listened” to the queen, Truss writes.Replaced in Downing Street by Rishi Sunak, Truss still sits as an MP for South West Norfolk. Just 48, she has increasingly sought to carve out a prominent position on the hard right of British politics and turned her sights on the US, in particular its rightwing thinktanks and lucrative speaking circuit.Truss’s book, Ten Years To Save The West, will be published in the US and UK next week.Though Truss writes that the book is less a memoir than a manifesto for her continuing participation in global politics, it does contain extensive descriptions of her time as an MP, a member of successive Conservative cabinets, a minister of state, foreign secretary and finally, briefly as prime minister.Of her historic meeting with the late queen at Balmoral in Scotland in September 2022, Truss says the 96-year-old monarch “seemed to have grown frailer” since she had last been in the public eye.“We spent around 20 minutes discussing politics,” Truss writes. “She was completely attuned to everything that was happening, as well as being typically sharp and witty. Towards the end of our discussion, she warned me that being prime minister is incredibly aging. She also gave me two words of advice: ‘Pace yourself.’ Maybe I should have listened.”Elsewhere, Truss often writes of struggling with the pressures of high office, including an instance in Spain when she was foreign secretary in which motorcade delays saw her “beginning to lose my rag … on account of constant travel and pressure”, causing her to try to get out of her official car to “remonstrate with police”.That episode was quelled, Truss writes, with an intervention by her staff and “a cooling off period at a sherry bar”.But when the queen died so soon after Truss had become her 15th and final prime minister, Truss writes, the news, though widely expected after the monarch’s health had deteriorated, still came “as a profound shock” to Truss, seeming “utterly unreal” and leaving her thinking: “Why me? Why now?”Insisting she had not expected to lead the UK in mourning for the death of a monarch nearly 70 years on the throne and nearly 100 years old, Truss says state ceremony and protocol were “a long way from my natural comfort zone”.Other prime ministers, she writes without naming any, may have been better able to provide “the soaring rhetoric and performative statesmanship necessary”. She herself, she writes, predominantly felt profound sadness.Truss describes carrying out duties including giving a Downing Street speech about the queen’s death and having a first audience with King Charles III. A subsequent Buckingham Palace meeting between the King and his prime minister was widely noted for its stilted nature – Charles being heard to mutter: “Back again? Dear oh dear”. But Truss says their first official meeting made her feel “a bizarre sense of camaraderie between us, with both starting out in our new roles and having to navigate unfamiliar territory”.As the UK went into mourning, so Truss watched on television with her family as the queen’s coffin was brought from Balmoral to Edinburgh. Truss describes being “suddenly overwhelmed by the emotion of it all”, and breaking down “into floods of tears on the sofa”.“Once again,” she writes, “the grief was mixed with a feeling of awe over the sheer weight of the event, and the fact that it was happening on my watch.”That watch turned out to be shorter than anyone could have expected. But after a period out of the public eye Truss has re-emerged, especially in the US where Donald Trump is seeking to return to the White House as a far-right Republican.Last April, she delivered the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. This February, in Maryland, she spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference or CPAC, telling a pro-Trump audience the Anglo-American right “need[s] a bigger bazooka” to take on its leftwing enemies.At that event, Truss stirred controversy by appearing with far-right figures, including the former Trump White House counselor Steve Bannon and allies of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.Truss announced her book in September last year, saying she would use it to “share the lessons” of her time in government, in which she claimed often to have been “the only conservative in the room”, fighting a supposedly authoritarian left.In the event, she repeatedly blames the so-called “deep state” for her failures, from being excluded from meetings with Trump when Boris Johnson was prime minister to her own short-lived spell in that role.Popular on the US right, the deep state conspiracy theory holds that a permanent government of bureaucrats and operatives exists to thwart the ambitions of populist leaders. Bannon is one of its chief propagators. He has, however, said it is “for nut cases”. More

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      Immigration, Ukraine distrust and January 6 games: Republican agenda on display at CPAC

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      A digital pinball game defending the January 6 insurrection. A panel discussion called Putting Our Heads in the Gas Stove. An eager crowd watching agent provocateur Steve Bannon interview former British prime minister Liz Truss for a tiny online audience.Every year the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, conjures a theatre of the absurd beside the Potomac River. This week something else slowly came into focus: three pillars of a Republican agenda that the party believes will provide a winning formula in the 2024 elections.First, speaker after speaker highlighted the crisis at the southern border, variously describing it as “a war zone” where “thugs, Islamic extremists and Chinese spies” are staging an “invasion”. Second, this year’s CPAC theme was “Where globalism goes to die”, a rare foregrounding of foreign policy that embraced “America first” isolationism and advocated no more funding for Ukraine.Finally, there was the contention that only Donald Trump can save American democracy. Speakers cast the Republican frontrunner as both as the underdog David, bravely battling political persecution, and a mighty Goliath tirelessly fighting for the forgotten and left behind. This was in striking contrast to Joe Biden, portrayed as both criminal mastermind and senile old man.“I’m just going to say it – Joe Biden and Kamala Harris suck,” said Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, seen as a potential Trump running mate. “And we shouldn’t look to Congress for the answers – the gridlock on Capitol Hill is not going to break in time to save America. We need a president who will. And I have always believed – and supported the fact – that our next president needs to be President Trump.”This week marked the 50th anniversary of CPAC’s inaugural gathering, when Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, urged conservatives to remain united. In 2015 the conference heard from establishment Republicans such as Jeb Bush. But since then it has marched rightward, each year proving more extreme than the one before. It has effectively become The Trump Show.It has also lost relevance. Under CPAC impresario Matt Schlapp, who faced multiple sexual assault allegations, many sessions took place in a half-empty ballroom. “Media Row”, which includes various live talk radio broadcasts, and “CPAC Central”, a marketplace for vendors, was diminished compared with past years, exposing empty and forlorn floor space. Instead of Fox News, a plethora of fringe podcasters and streamers held sway.But CPAC does provide a window to the soul of a Republican party in thrall to Trump. No issue is more central to his candidacy than immigration and resuming construction of a border wall. It was a constant talking point on the CPAC main stage.Elise Stefanik, another contender for Trump’s vice-presidential pick, said: “We had the most secure border in our nation’s history when President Trump left office … In Joe Biden’s America, every district is a border district. Every state is a border state. The southern border is being invaded.”In a session titled Trump’s Wall vs Biden’s Gaps, Thomas Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, said: “The reason I wake up pissed off every day is because this administration – Joe Biden is the first president in the history of this nation who came in office and unsecured a border on purpose.”Describing Trump as the “greatest president in my lifetime”, Homan confidently predicted that the former president would destroy drug cartels in Mexico if re-elected. “President Trump will declare them a terrorist organisation. He will send a Hellfire rocket down there and he’ll take the cartels out.”There was little acknowledgment over four days of the positive contribution immigrants have made to American society. Instead there were nods to white nationalism, the “great replacement” theory and Trump’s recent assertion that illegal immigrations “poison” the bloodstream of the nation.Senator JD Vance, a devout Trump loyalist, told the gathering: “The reason why we have a border crisis is by design. Biden is invading the country with people who he knows are going to vote disproportionally for Democrats. California has five more congressional representatives than it should.“Do you know why? They count illegal aliens for purposes of assigning apportionment in Congress. So when these guys flood the country with millions of people who shouldn’t be here they destroy the voting power of citizens in our own republic. This is by design and this is maybe the last very good chance we have to stop it.”An examination of this topic in 2020 by the Pew Research Center found that if unauthorised immigrants were excluded from the apportionment count, California, Florida and Texas would each end up with one less congressional seat than they would have been awarded based on population change alone.Vance and others were quick to draw a contrast between the border crisis and Washington’s obsession with the war in Ukraine. They questioned why taxpayer dollars should fund a conflict 6,000 miles away instead of tackling problems at home. Many were quick to add disclaimers distancing themselves from Russian president Vladimir Putin – not always convincingly.Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said: “We’re the one that forced this war because we kept forcing Nato on Ukraine and showing Russia, hey, we’re going to build military bases on your borders. And Putin said, no, no, you’re not going to do that.“I haven’t voted for any money to go to Ukraine because I know they can’t win. You hate that they’ve had 300,000 or 400,000 people killed, so – Russians also. You hate that we supported this. We’re pushing them out in front of the guns or out in front of the bus, I guess you’d speak. It’s an atrocity but they can’t win.”Tuberville added: “Donald Trump will stop it when he first gets in … He knows there’s no winning for Ukraine. He can work a deal with Putin.”View image in fullscreenThere was little support here for Congress to pass a national security bill that would provide military funding for Ukraine. In a speech headlined Burning Down the House, Matt Gaetz, a congressman from Florida, said: “What’s really left unsaid in this Ukraine aid debate is that Europe’s fecklessness is a direct result of them becoming national security welfare queens largely at your expense … America is not the world’s police force and we are not the world’s piggy bank. It is not sustainable.”In a jarring contrast from Reagan’s vision of American leadership, politicians from Britain, El Salvador, Spain and other parts of the world came to CPAC to rail against the sinister forces of “globalism”.Nigel Farage, a former leader of the Brexit party in Britain, observed that CPAC has become an international movement. “We all want the same things. We want international cooperation. We want trade. We want peace. We want common sense. We want it within the framework of the nation-state, not within the framework of the European Union or the United Nations – or the increasingly appalling World Health Organisation.”The audience erupted in cheers and applause.CPAC offered a preview of other Republican talking points for the campaign. There were plenty of references to inflation and the demonstrably false claim that Trump bequeathed a booming economy that Biden ruined. A session called No Woke Warriors nodded to culture wars and, despite recent evidence about its limited electoral potency, numerous speakers assailed transgender rights.The other common thread was a Trump worship that elevated him to the status of political martyr. Farage said the former president had been unfairly targeted by the justice system and commented: “I believe that Donald Trump is the bravest man I have ever met in my life.” Mark Robinson, lieutenant governor of North Carolina, opined: “We need warriors like President Trump, who is literally spending his golden years fighting for the survival of this nation.”And Noem put it this way: “President Trump broke politics in 2016 – he just did – and that’s a good thing. He’s real. He’s not perfect – none of us are – but he cares about you. He doesn’t think he’s better than you. Luckily, we are not going back to the old days of the Romneys and Cheneys. The Republican party is much bigger than that now. We are filled with blue collar workers, many cultures, perspectives and viewpoints.”Contrast will be key in the presidential election campaign. Biden, 81, was subjected to cheap shots and derogatory insults. At a discussion billed as Cat Fight? Michelle vs Kamala, rightwing commentator Kurt Schlichter commented: “I don’t think Joe Biden has any plans other than eating mush while watching Murder She Wrote. Two scoops. It will be tough to pry that desiccated old husk of a human being out of the White House.”Down in CPAC Central, attendees were clear about the priorities for the coming campaign. Barbara Hale, a retired property agent from Austin, Texas, who was wearing a “Trump was right” badge, said: “The most important thing is our border. If Trump would have been our president instead of Biden, the wall would have been finished.“We wouldn’t have this catastrophe that we have right now. I don’t know how anybody can vote Democrat today if you’re an American. I’m serious about that. If you love America, how can you vote to destroy America?”America has sent enough funding to Ukraine, Hale added: “Like Trump has said he was going to do it as soon as he becomes president, he’s going to go talk to Europe and say, OK, we’ve paid our share to Ukraine to help them. We want Ukraine to be free. They need to pony up some money and they need to get more serious about helping Ukraine, not just the United States of America.”Phil Cuza, 63, a saxophone player and retired police officer from New York, criticised corrupt politicians and district attorneys for “picking and choosing” who to prosecute. He added: “The southern border is extremely important because they’re undermining the whole country. It’s like having a house and you’re trying to dig underneath the house. Eventually the house will collapse if you don’t address that.”Rachel Sheley, 54, a cybersecurity practitioner from northern Kentucky, said: “We need to stop funding wars in other countries. I like Trump’s initiative to loan money to these countries if they need it but they need to be held accountable to pay the money back.“Our taxpayer money is going to these other places, some of which none of us ever travel to or get to. We don’t even know what’s going on in Ukraine. There’s no video or evidence of anything. I think it’s just a money-laundering scheme for the Democrats and the [George] Soros people.”Asked what she thought of Putin, Sheley replied bluntly: “I don’t care.”The marketplace featured everything from vibration plates to Trump glass art, from “Make America great again” shirts, hats and hammocks to a bus with a huge picture of the former president. There also a January 6-themed virtual pinball machine with the game modes “Political Prisoners”, “Have Faith”, “Babbitt Murder”, “It’s a Setup”, “Peaceful Protest”, “Fake News” and “Stop the Steal”, along with a photo of the “QAnon shaman” who stormed the Capitol and a screen showing footage from that day.It was the brainchild of software developer Jon Linowes, 65, an election denier from New Hampshire who believes a baseless conspiracy theory that Trump’s foes planned the insurrection a year in advance as a pretext for keeping him off the ballot. He said: “If Trump was in office now, Ukraine would never have happened. October 7 [in Israel] would never have happened. The border would be shut down.“All of these crises or situations that the Biden administration created were totally artificial and unnecessary and pathetic. We need someone like Trump with the strength and the fortitude to fix it if he can. If anyone can, he can. So that’s what I would expect. And I would expect him to pardon the J6 prisoners.” More

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      Ted Cruz faces new Senate challenge as Democrat attracts huge fundraising haul

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      The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz spent time last weekend hobnobbing with Liz Truss, the shortest-serving British prime minister – but news closer to home suggested he might have reason to fear for his own job security.As reported by the Dallas Morning News and the Texas Tribune, the Democratic congressman Colin Allred, Cruz’s most likely opponent for re-election next year, reported $10.9m raised since declaring his candidacy in May.That was nearly 20 times as much as Allred’s closest Democratic rival, but it was also, the papers said, almost $2m more than fundraising reported by Cruz in the same period.The hard-right Republican – who was elected to the Senate in 2012, prompted a government shutdown in 2013 and ran for president in 2016 – reportedly raised $8.8m in the same period.In an email to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Cruz contested the reported figures, pointing to a Fox News report earlier in October which said the senator “brought in $5.4m during the July-September third quarter of 2023 fundraising … up from the $4.4m he raised during the April-June second quarter of fundraising and the $1.8m he brought in during the first three months of 2023.“… The Cruz campaign says they entered October with over $6.7m cash on hand.”Either way, Allred, a former Tennessee Titans NFL linebacker elected to Congress from his native Dallas in 2018, presents a formidable figure.Revelling in the show of fundraising muscle, Allred’s campaign manager, Paige Hutchinson, told the Texas Tribune: “Texans’ enthusiasm to retire Ted Cruz – and to elect Colin Allred to the Senate – is reflected in this quarter’s amazing outpouring of grassroots support.”Allred does seem set to breeze to victory in the Democratic primary and therefore advance to challenge Cruz. His party, however, has had its hopes dashed in Texas before.In 2018, Beto O’Rourke, then a congressman, mounted a strong challenge to Cruz but fell short. O’Rourke parlayed resulting prominence in national progressive circles into a campaign for president in 2020 but that and a run for governor of Texas two years later also ended in disappointment.On Saturday, meanwhile, Cruz tweeted a photograph of himself with his wife, Heidi Cruz, and Truss.“We are so grateful for our British friends and for strong leaders on the global stage who will champion conservative principles and defend liberty,” Cruz said.Truss thanked the Cruzes for their “warm welcome in Houston” and said: “It’s vital that conservatives win the battle of ideas both in the US and UK. The time is now.”Truss was prime minister for 49 days last September and October. Historically speaking, that made her the shortest-serving PM of all. In terms of pop culture, as promoted by the Daily Star, a tabloid newspaper, she lasted less time than a lettuce. More

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      Liz Truss’s elevation and downfall mirrors the American right | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      Liz Truss’s elevation and downfall mirrors the American right Andrew GawthorpeThe British conservative party has lost touch with reality in ways that are reminiscent of how Trump transformed Republican politics in the US After serving for a mere 45 days, Liz Truss has become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. George Canning, the previous holder of this record, was forced from office because he died of tuberculosis. Truss, by contrast, is entirely the author of her own demise. But even though her short premiership has no doubt left her own political talents utterly discredited, it would be a mistake to stop apportioning blame there. In fact, Truss’s elevation and downfall show how the British Conservative party has lost touch with reality over the past decade in ways which mirror the descent of the American right.Republicans always choose radicalization to energize their electoral base | Thomas ZimmerRead moreTruss was forced from office after unveiling a budget that was profoundly out of touch with the realities of modern Britain. A diehard libertarian, she announced steep tax cuts for the rich, including removing an immensely popular cap on bankers’ annual bonuses. Much like the Trump tax cuts of 2017, these moves were supposed to be paid for by generating trickle-down economic growth – and when that failed to happen, as it inevitably does, public service and welfare cuts would follow. This kamikaze libertarianism was combined with sheer nastiness towards the poor, such as when the chair of the Conservative party told voters worried about rising energy bills to either go and get a better-paid job or “freeze”.So dire were Truss’s plans that even the markets rejected them, causing a financial crisis and ultimately her unceremonious ejection from office. But just getting rid of Truss is not going to solve the Conservative party’s problems. Instead, it must face up to ideological blinders and delusions of grandeur which led it to put Britain in this situation to begin with.The first entry on the charge sheet is the party’s long-running flirtation with an extreme variant of libertarian economics. Far from being some bizarre outlier, Truss was comfortably elected in a party leadership race this summer despite making no secret of her plans. She was also enthusiastically embraced by rightwing talking heads and thinktanks who have long advocated for precisely the measures in Truss’s budget. Truss was not on a lone ideological bender but was seeking to implement the orthodoxy of a key set of conservative elites – precisely the reason they promoted her into a job she was manifestly unfit for in the first place.But a much larger issue is the way that Brexit transformed British political discourse, introducing a fetish for anti-intellectualism and bold, ill-thought-through action which is reminiscent of how Trump transformed Republican politics in the United States. The party has become addicted to elevating cranks who promise an impossible return to Britain’s former heyday and to sneering at the policy and economics experts who point out the reasons why this is impossible. For a party that has long cast its critics as unpatriotic and over-educated, it was a small step from the fairytale of Brexit to the fairytale of Truss’s economic program.Another way in which the party is culpable is its refusal to face up to the contradictions of Brexit, which was always animated by two very different impulses. The first, most important to the average Brexit voter, was to reduce immigration and embrace the culture wars which went along with that goal. The second, embraced mostly by Tory party elites, was to turn Britain into a libertarian economic paradise, which by contrast would require liberal immigration policies to replace the workers shut out by Brexit.Much like their counterparts in the modern Republican party, Tory elites failed to realize how successful their cynical turn against immigration and towards the culture wars would be. What they originally saw as an electoral strategy to get them into office and allow them to move onto their libertarian agenda eventually became the defining characteristic of their whole movement. In America, this process produced Donald Trump. In the UK, it produced Boris Johnson, who pledged to deport unauthorized immigrants – even those fleeing Ukraine – to Rwanda. Truss seems to have entirely failed to notice this change in conservative politics and tried simply to ignore it, setting up a collision with a large chunk of her own party.So completely did Truss’s premiership embody the policies and tendencies of a certain set of Conservative party elites that its implosion seems to herald the final destruction of their project. This might seem like something to celebrate, but it will in fact probably lead to the further Trumpification of her party. Facing the direct repudiation of their libertarian program and unable due to their own ideological blinders to consider realigning with the EU, Conservatives are likely to see only one way forward: rushing into the culture wars and trying to smuggle whatever parts of their plutocratic agenda they can along with them.For America and the rest of the world, this means a Britain that will continue to become more insular, smaller in its ambitions, and weaker in its capabilities. Conservative elites will continue to find many people to blame for this rather than looking in the mirror. But if they really want to repair the damage to their house, they have to begin by looking at the rotting foundations that they themselves laid.
      Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States and host of the podcast America Explained
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      Joe Biden calls Liz Truss tax cuts a ‘mistake’ as political fallout continues

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      Joe Biden calls Liz Truss tax cuts a ‘mistake’ as political fallout continuesUS president rejects ‘cutting taxes on the super-wealthy’ and says he is not the only world leader critical of abandoned plan00:39Joe Biden has called Liz Truss’s abandoned economic plan that sent financial markets into chaos and caused a sharp drop in the value of the pound a “mistake” as criticism of her approach continued.The US president hinted that other world leaders felt the same way about her disastrous mini-budget, saying he “wasn’t the only one” who had concerns over the lack of “sound policy” in other countries.Biden said it was “predictable” that the new British prime minister was forced on Friday to backtrack on plans to aggressively cut taxes without saying how they would be paid for, after Truss’s proposal caused turmoil in global financial markets.His comments on Sunday to reporters at an ice-cream parlour in Oregon marked a highly unusual intervention by a US president into the domestic policy decisions of one of its closest allies.“I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,” Biden said. “I think that the idea of cutting taxes on the super-wealthy at a time when … I disagree with the policy, but it’s up to Britain to make that judgment, not me.”Labour leapt on the US president’s remarks. The shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, said: “As well as crashing the economy, Liz Truss’s humiliating U-turns have made Britain’s economy an international punchline.“President Biden knows the dangerous folly of trickle-down economics. His comments confirm the hit our reputation has taken thanks to the Conservatives.”Biden has repeatedly poured scorn on so-called trickle-down economics and before his first bilateral talks with Truss in New York last month tweeted that he was “sick and tired” of the approach, which he claimed had never worked.Mini-budget went ‘too far, too fast’, says Jeremy HuntRead moreBiden’s comments came after weeks of White House officials declining to criticise Truss’s plans, though they emphasised they were monitoring the economic fallout closely.The US president was speaking during an unannounced campaign stop for the Democratic candidate for governor, Tina Kotek. Democrats face a tough US political environment amid Republican criticism of their handling of the economy.Biden said he was not concerned about the strength of the dollar – it set a new record against sterling in recent weeks, which benefits imports but makes US exports more expensive to the rest of the world.He claimed the US economy was “strong as hell” but added: “I’m concerned about the rest of the world. The problem is the lack of economic growth and sound policy in other countries. It’s worldwide inflation, that’s consequential.”Truss’s own new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has said Truss and his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget went “too far, too fast” as he effectively signalled the demise of the prime minister’s economic vision.“We have to be honest with people and we are going to have to take some very difficult decisions both on spending and on tax to get debt falling, but at the top of our minds when making these decisions will be how to protect and help struggling families, businesses and people.”Hunt is expected to announce that plans to reduce the basic rate of income tax next April will be pushed back by a year. The cut to 19% will now take effect at the time previously proposed by Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor who was Truss’s main leadership rival.TopicsUS foreign policyJoe BidenLiz TrussEconomic policyUS politicsConservativesnewsReuse this content More