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      Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot review – a head of state lost without a script

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      As we’re reminded every four years, the US, while purporting to be a republic, is more like an elective monarchy. Presidents campaign as partisans, but once inaugurated they’re expected to transcend politics; draped in the flag, their task is to exemplify the national character. Although nowadays the country is too fractious to be personified by any individual, in less schismatic times Ronald Reagan managed the feat – as American author Max Boot argues in his generous yet sharply perceptive biography – because he was “a mainstream, generic, nonhyphenated American, Midwestern born”. “Mr Norm is my alias,” Reagan said. “Average will do it.”But was Reagan amiably bland or somehow blank? Boot finds him to be incapable of introspection, so emotionally withdrawn that he remained unknowable to everyone but his second wife Nancy, whom he called “Mommy”. While preaching “family values” Reagan neglected his offspring, and when his daughter complained he insisted: “We were happy, just look at the home movies,” relying on the camera to vouch for his parental affection. Although he was benevolent enough – as a teenage lifeguard at a lake in Illinois he saved 77 swimmers from drowning, and as governor of California he often sent personal cheques to citizens who wrote to him about their problems – Boot thinks that he had no real comprehension of other people. This limited his range as an actor; affable and superficial, in his Hollywood films he could only play versions of himself. It also explains what Boot regards as the most shaming failure of his presidency, which was his prudish refusal to confront the Aids epidemic.View image in fullscreenReagan grew up as a New Deal Democrat but acquired a horror of the welfare state during a few dreary weeks he spent filming in London in 1948. Socialism, so far as he understood it, consisted of drab, underlit shop windows and watery meals; complaining that the English “do to food what we did to the American Indian”, he exempted himself from rationed austerity by having steaks flown in from New York to be cooked at the Savoy. Otherwise, Boot suspects that he lacked ideological convictions, and his earlier careers as a radio announcer and a Hollywood contract player dictated his conduct after he graduated to politics. When he ran for re-election as president in 1984, he appointed his campaign manager as his director and compliantly recited whatever the Teleprompter told him to say.Reagan performed with aplomb as head of state; he had little interest in serving as the nation’s chief executive, and relied on aides whom he called his “fellas” to articulate policies and implement them. Boot pays more attention to Washington intrigues than Reagan ever did, but his book is best when he looks away from backroom plotting. The account of John Hinckley’s assassination attempt in 1981 is alarming and also moving. Nearer to death than was disclosed at the time, Reagan put the panicked surgeons at their ease by making jokes; during his recovery in hospital he got down on his knees to clean up a mess in the bathroom, reluctant to delegate the dirty work to a nurse.Boot gives crises an edge of wry amusement. Nuclear summits with the Russians were envenomed by Nancy Reagan’s reaction to the immaculately styled, intellectually haughty Raisa Gorbachev. “Who,” fumed the outclassed first lady, “does that dame think she is?” In an episode that threatened to topple Reagan, the gung-ho Colonel Oliver North was put in charge of illegally selling arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages, and travelled to Tehran with a chocolate cake as a token of his government’s goodwill. The bearded revolutionary guards, amused by American naivety, wolfed down the cake but released no captives.View image in fullscreenBoot, a lapsed conservative, is disgusted by the current horde of Maga Republicans. Even so, he admits that Trump’s most blustery slogan originated with Reagan, who led his own crusade to “make America great again”. A pair of Trump’s eventual fixers lurked on the fringes of Reagan’s first presidential campaign: Roy Cohn and Roger Stone arranged for an endorsement that enabled Reagan to win the usually left-leaning state of New York. But the candidate himself always denied knowledge of such deals, and when Boot catches Reagan twisting the facts – for instance by reminiscing about his military valour during a war that he actually spent in Hollywood – he treats him as a self-deceived fabulist, not a liar.For Trump, making America great means aggrandising and enriching himself. Reagan, to his credit, had no such mad, greedy conceit, and in 1994, in a handwritten note informing his “fellow Americans” that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he touchingly excluded himself from the “bright new dawn” that he predicted for the country. Later, unsure of who he was or what he had been, he wondered at the reaction of passersby when he was taken for supervised walks near his home in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. “How do they know me?” he asked his minders. The erstwhile celebrity had declined into nonentity; Mr Norm was at last truly anonymous, at least to himself.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot is published by WW Norton (£35). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      Melania Trump’s abortion views baffle both sides: ‘Hard to follow the logic’

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      The revelation on Wednesday evening that Melania Trump’s forthcoming memoir includes a full-throated defense of abortion rights, an issue her husband Donald Trump has repeatedly flip-flopped on during his presidential campaign, left people on both sides of the issue less than impressed.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body,” Melania Trump wrote in her memoir. “I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump also defended the right to abortion later on in pregnancy – a procedure that her husband has repeatedly demonized. (Less than 1% of abortions occur at or past 21 weeks of gestation.)“Sadly for the women across America, Mrs. Trump’s husband firmly disagrees with her and is the reason that more than one in three American women live under a Trump abortion ban that threatens their health, their freedom and their lives,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in an email. “Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear: If he wins in November, he will ban abortion nationwide, punish women and restrict women’s access to reproductive health care.”Melania Trump’s remarks also took anti-abortion activists by surprise.“It’s hard to follow the logic of putting out the former First Lady’s book right before the election undercutting President Trump’s message to pro-life voters,” Kristan Hawkins, president of the powerful Students for Life of America, posted on Twitter/X on Wednesday night. “What a waste of momentum.”Over the last several weeks, anti-abortion activists have grown increasingly fed up with the former president, who has struggled, alongside the rest of the Republican party, to redefine his messaging on abortion rights amid outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade.Earlier in his campaign, Trump bragged about appointing three of the US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe, branded himself the “most pro-life president ever”. After Kamala Harris became the presidential nominee, however, Trump has pledged that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights” as well as vowed not to sign a national abortion ban – just weeks after refusing to say that he would veto one.Melania Trump’s comments may feel like a further insult to the anti-abortion voters who feel abandoned by Trump, said Republican campaign strategist Liz Mair, adding anti-abortion advocates run potent get-out-the-vote operations. Those advocates were key to Trump’s 2016 victory.“This might be just another thing that piles on to make pro-lifers think: ‘I just can’t with this guy.’ A lot of them were single-issue voters anyway,” Mair said. “He’s not really giving them much of an incentive to show up and do anything to his benefit.”When Tresa Undem, a pollster who has surveyed people about abortion for more than two decades, heard the comments, she immediately thought: “Wow”. Then she thought: “It’s a campaign move.”However, Undem is not sure who, exactly, the move is for – especially given the Trumps’ sometimes frosty relationship in public. Melania Trump has rarely aired her political views and has largely vanished from Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.The odds of Melania Trump’s comments comforting moderate or conservative voters who support abortion rights are “fairly slim”, Undem said.“These strong feelings – they did not suddenly appear this year, right? So she clearly has had no influence on him when it comes to policy related to abortion,” Undem said. “I don’t think she’s ever been positioned, or voters ever think of her, as having any kind of policy position or weight or influence on Trump.” More

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      Melania Trump passionately defends abortion rights in upcoming memoir

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      Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump has rarely expressed political views in public. The book, which reveals the former first lady to be so firmly out of step with most of her own party, Melania, will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.View image in fullscreenHer decision to include a full-throated expression of support for abortion rights is remarkable not just given her proximity to a Republican candidate running on an anti-abortion platform, but also given the severe deterioration of women’s reproductive rights under Donald Trump and the GOP.In 2022, in the supreme court case Dobbs v Jackson, three justices installed when Donald Trump was president voted to strike down Roe v Wade, the ruling which had protected federal abortion rights since 1973. Republican-run states have since instituted draconian abortion bans.Donald Trump has tried to both take credit for the Dobbs decision – long the central aim of evangelical and conservative Catholic donors and voters – and avoid the fury it has stoked, saying abortion rights should be decided by the states.But Democrats have scored a succession of election wins by campaigning on the issue, even in conservative states, and threats to reproductive rights, among them threats to fertility treatments including IVF, are proving problematic for Republicans up and down this year’s ticket.Amid a blizzard of statements opponents deem misogynistic and regressive, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, has indicated he would support a national abortion ban – a move it seems his boss’s wife would be against.Donald Trump himself recently got into a tangle over whether he would vote in November to protect abortion rights in Florida, a ballot his wife will also cast given their residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He eventually said he would vote no. Judging by her own words, Melania Trump appears likely to vote yes.Her memoir is slim, long on descriptions of her youth in Slovenia, life as a model in New York and love for the man whose third wife she became, correspondingly short on policy discussion. But Donald Trump provides a blurb, praising his wife’s “commitment to excellence … insightful perspective … [and] entrepreneurial achievements”.Before discussing abortion, Melania Trump says she disagreed with her husband on some aspects of immigration policy, not least as an immigrant herself.“Occasional political disagreements between me and my husband,” she says, are “part of our relationship, but I believed in addressing them privately rather than publicly challenging him.”And yet, later in her book, she states views on abortion and reproductive rights diametrically opposed to those of her husband and his party.“I have always believed it is critical for people to take care of themselves first,” Melania Trump writes of her support for abortion rights. “It’s a very straightforward concept; in fact, we are all born with a set of fundamental rights, including the right to enjoy our lives. We are all entitled to maintain a gratifying and dignified existence.“This common-sense approach applies to a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health.”Melania Trump says her beliefs about abortion rights spring from “a core set of principles”, at the heart of which sits “individual liberty” and “personal freedom”, on which there is “no room for negotiation”.After outlining her support on such grounds for abortion rights, she details “legitimate reasons for a woman to choose to have an abortion”, including danger to the life of the mother, rape or incest, often exceptions under state bans, and also “a congenital birth defect, plus severe medical conditions”.Saying “timing matters”, Melania Trump also defends the right to abortion later in pregnancy.She writes: “It is important to note that historically, most abortions conducted during the later stages of pregnancy were the result of severe fetal abnormalities that probably would have led to the death or stillbirth of the child. Perhaps even the death of the mother. These cases were extremely rare and typically occurred after several consultations between the woman and her doctor. As a community, we should embrace these common-sense standards. Again, timing matters.”More than 90% of US abortions occur at or before 13 weeks of gestation, according to data from the CDC. Less than 1% of abortions take place at or after 21 weeks.On the campaign trail, Republicans have blatantly mischaracterized Democrats’ positions on abortion. Last month, debating Kamala Harris, Donald Trump falsely said his Democratic opponent’s “vice-presidential pick … says that abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. [Tim Walz] also says: ‘Execution after birth’ – execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born – is OK.”He was factchecked: it is not legal in any state to kill a baby after birth.On the page, Melania Trump issues a distinctly un-Trumpian appeal for empathy.“Many women opt for abortions due to personal medical concerns,” she writes. “These situations with significant moral implications weigh heavily on the woman and her family and deserve our empathy. Consider, for example, the complexity inherent in the decision of whether the mother should risk her own life to give birth.”Recent reporting has highlighted cases of women who have died in states where abortion has been banned.She goes on to appeal for compassion.“When confronted with an unexpected pregnancy, young women frequently experience feelings of isolation and significant stress. I, like most Americans, am in favor of the requirement that juveniles obtain parental consent before undergoing an abortion. I realize this may not always be possible. Our next generation must be provided with knowledge, security, safety, and solace, and the cultural stigma associated with abortion must be lifted,” writes the former first lady.Finally, Melania Trump offers an expression of solidarity with protesters for reproductive rights.“The slogan ‘My Body, My Choice’ is typically associated with women activists and those who align with the pro-choice side of the debate,” she writes. “But if you really think about it, ‘My Body, My Choice’ applies to both sides – a woman’s right to make an independent decision involving her own body, including the right to choose life. Personal freedom.” More

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      Memoir contradicts Republican Senate candidate’s ‘below the poverty line’ tale

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      At a recent campaign event in Whitehall, Montana, the Republican US Senate candidate Tim Sheehy told voters that a decade ago, when he set up the aerial firefighting company through which he made his fortune, he and his wife were living “below the poverty line”.“My wife and I homeschool our kids,” Sheehy said. “We made that decision several years ago. She’s a Marine, naval academy graduate, she could have a great job and even when our company was tiny, and we … were below the poverty line and making no money, we said: ‘No … the most important job in the world is being a mother.’ And she’s doing that every day.”A little more than a month from election day, in a race that could decide control of the Senate, such hardscrabble tales are helping Sheehy lead the Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, a longtime Montana farmer. The two men are due to debate in Missoula on Monday night.But Sheehy’s claim about living in poverty while building his company, Bridger Aerospace, is contradicted by his own memoir.In that book, Mudslingers, published last year, the former navy Seal writes that when he and his wife contemplated leaving the military, in 2013, they “weren’t wealthy, but … did have resources”.This, he writes, was in part thanks to having “lived quite frugally during our time in the military, spending a lot of time deployed, accumulating savings, taking advantage of base housing and meals, and of course spending almost nothing while on deployment.“So, we had amassed a nest egg of close to $300,000. I also had some money that my parents had been putting away for me since I was a kid. All told, we had roughly $400,000 to allocate toward building a business and establishing a new life.”In 2014, as Sheehy got his company going, the US health department defined the poverty guideline for a family of three in Montana as $19,790. The poverty threshold, as defined by the US Census Bureau, was $19,055.By his own account, Sheehy set out to build Bridger Aerospace with 20 times that – a sum he calls “not exactly chump change”.Sheehy has also regularly claimed to have “bootstrapped” his company, a term the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance”.Yet in his book, Sheehy describes both receiving the $100,000 his parents had saved for him and asking his father and brother to help him pay $500,000 to buy necessary planes. His father, he writes, “backed me, financially and emotionally, without expecting anything in return”, while his brother was given an “equity stake in the business”.Sheehy also describes how in 2017 his brother helped secure investment from Blackstone Group, the New York private equity behemoth led by Stephen Schwartzman, a top Republican donor, in order to pull off a $200m aircraft order.Sheehy grew up in Minnesota and attended the US Naval Academy in Maryland. Describing his early days in Montana, he has often told of how he, his wife and their first child started out living in a tent. That might boost his claim of living below the poverty line, but Sheehy has also described how living under canvas was a choice.Having purchased “60 undeveloped acres”, Sheehy writes in his book, “the simple and probably sane thing to do would have been to rent an apartment in town while we got the business off the ground”. But they chose to build a house, and to camp while the structure went up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSheehy’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. News of Sheehy’s book contradicting his own claim about living in poverty, however, follows similar reporting regarding his claims about his background.The Montana Free Press was among outlets to report that though Sheehy has said he grew up in “rural Minnesota … surrounded by farmland”, he in fact “grew up in a multimillion-dollar lake house, learned to fly under the tutelage of a neighbour, [and] attended a private high school”.In May, the Daily Beast reported that Sheehy’s campaign trail claims about how he left the US military do not match those in his book. Sheehy’s campaign responded angrily, claiming an attack on his patriotism and service. Then, this month, the Guardian reported documents seemingly showing Sheehy did not follow Department of Defense protocol for clearing sections of Mudslingers that deal with military subjects, including deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The campaign did not respond.Regardless, Sheehy seems well-placed to secure a Senate seat, holding seven- and eight-point leads over Tester, a three-term moderate Democrat.Federal figures regarding poverty in Montana in 2014 do back up one claim in Sheehy’s book. Describing how he hired his first employees, he says he paid just $1,500 a month, amounting to $18,000 a year, to his first chief pilot, Tim Cherwin.Cherwin brought with him “the chain-smoking desert rat Steve Taylor, who would become our director of maintenance”. Sheehy, who says he started the business with $400,000, says both men were “earning wages below the poverty line”. More

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      Lucky Loser review – how Donald Trump squandered his wealth

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      Donald Trump started his career at the end of the 1970s, financed by his father Fred Trump. Over the years this transfer of wealth added up to around $500m in today’s money in gifts. My rough calculations say that, had he simply taken the money, leveraged it not imprudently, and passively invested it in Manhattan real estate – gone to parties, womanised, played golf, collected his rent cheques and reinvested them – his fortune could have amounted to more than $80bn by the time he ascended to the presidency in 2017.And yet Trump was not worth $80bn in 2017. Instead, Forbes pegged him at $2.5bn – which, given the difficulties of valuing and accounting for real estate, is really anything between $5bn (£4bn) and zero (or less). It is in this sense that Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig call Trump a “loser”. He is indeed one of the world’s biggest losers. By trying to run a business, rather than just kicking back and letting the rising tide of his chosen sector lift his wealth beyond the moon, he managed to destroy the vast majority of his potential net worth.How he did that is what Buettner and Craig chronicle in a book dense with facts and figures, but punctuated with moments of irony and dark humour – particularly when contrasting Trump’s public bravado with the often pathetic reality of his money management. The combination turns what might have been a rather boring tome, of interest only to trained financial professionals like me, into something of a page turner. Buettner and Craig paint a picture of Trump’s businesses as “mirage[s], built on inherited wealth, shady deals, and a relentless pursuit of appearances over substance”. And yet, Road Runner-like, he runs off the edge of the cliff, looks down, shrugs – and keeps going until his feet touch the ground again on the other side.Buettner and Craig delve more deeply into this story than anyone I have encountered. They have done their interview and newspaper-morgue homework, checked it against tax information and business records spanning three decades, and so gained an unprecedented look into the real workings of Trump’s financial empire. They uncover, I think as much as we can get at it, the truth behind the narrative of his wealth and its indispensable support: the myth of a genius businessman that he has spun and that, deplorably, much of the press and his supporters have bought, hook, line and sinker. Their conclusion? He was always exaggerating how rich he was, and always skating remarkably close to the edge of financial disaster.But though he squandered a great deal, it’s also true that he was extremely lucky. First, and most importantly, he was a beneficiary of the absolutely spectacular Manhattan real-estate boom. Second, he had things break his way at many crucial junctures that ought to have sunk him into total and irrevocable bankruptcy. Third, he was able to use his celebrity developer-mogul image to attract new business partners after his old ones had washed their hands of him. He was also lucky in the complacency of many of them with respect to his shenanigans: their willingness to play along and not find a judge to pull the plug.What sort of psychology produces this kind of behaviour? Buettner and Craig psychoanalyse Trump as unable to take the hit of recognising his relative incompetence. A deep need for public validation as the master of the Art of the Deal led him, over and over again, to make increasingly risky decisions. The illusion of success had to be maintained at all costs, which meant that a loss had to be followed by an even bigger bet.And so there Trump was at the start of 2017, in spite of everything, stunningly successful. Buettner and Craig call this an “illusion”. I profoundly disagree. To repeatedly save yourself from bankruptcy – to somehow manage to hand responsibility off to the people you do business with while you hotfoot it out of the picture – demonstrates considerable skill and ingenuity of some sort. Trump has exhibited great (if low) cunning and resilience when faced with what often appeared to be near-certain financial, entrepreneurial and business doom. It is, Buettner and Craig say, a combination of “bravado [and] branding” that allowed him to always “walk away with something – usually at the expense of others”.Many of us hope that Trump’s story will end with a proper comeuppance, restoring the appropriate and just moral order of the universe, in which his galaxy-scale hubris does indeed ultimately call forth a satisfying nemesis. Until then, we must regard him as a remarkable success – although few philosophers would judge Trump’s brand of success as the kind worth having.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion More

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      US still unprepared for Russian election interference, Robert Mueller says

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      The US is still not prepared for inevitable Russian attacks on its elections, the former special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated Russian interference in 2016 and links between Donald Trump and Moscow, warns in a new book.“It is … evident that Americans have not learned the lessons of Russia’s attack on our democracy in 2016,” Mueller writes in a preface to Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia and the Mueller Investigation by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein, prosecutors who worked for Mueller from 2017 to 2019.Mueller continues: “As we detailed in our report, the evidence was clear that the Russian government engaged in multiple, systematic attacks designed to undermine our democracy and favor one candidate over the other.”That candidate was Trump, the Republican who beat the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, for the White House.“We were not prepared then,” Mueller writes, “and, despite many efforts of dedicated people across the government, we are not prepared now. This threat deserves the attention of every American. Russia attacked us before and will do so again.”Interference will be published in the US next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein tell the story of the Mueller investigation, from its beginnings in May 2017 after Trump fired the FBI director, James Comey, to its conclusion in March 2019 with moves by William Barr, Trump’s second attorney general, to obscure and dismiss Mueller’s findings.Mueller did not establish collusion between Trump and Moscow but did initiate criminal proceedings against three Russian entities and 34 people, with those convicted including a Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who was jailed. Mueller also laid out 10 instances of possible obstruction of justice by Trump. Though he did not indict Trump, citing justice department policy regarding sitting presidents, Mueller said he was not clearing him either.Mueller now says Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein “care deeply about the rule of law and know the importance of making decisions with integrity and humility”, adding: “These qualities matter most when some refuse to play by the rules, and others are urging you to respond in kind.”View image in fullscreenThe FBI director from 2001 to 2013, Mueller was 72 and widely admired for his rectitude when he was made special counsel. His former prosecutors describe a White House meeting preceding that appointment. In an atmosphere of high tension, Mueller made his entry “via a warren of passages beneath the Eisenhower Executive Office Building”, thereby avoiding the press. Trump, who wanted Mueller to return as FBI director, “did most of the talking” but though he praised Mueller richly, Mueller declined the offer. As the authors write, Trump “would later claim that Bob came to the meeting asking to be FBI director”, and that Trump “turned him down”.“This was false,” the prosecutors write.Soon after the White House interview, the New York Times reported memos kept by Comey about Trump’s request to shut down an investigation of Michael Flynn, the national security adviser who resigned after lying about contacts with the Russian ambassador. Soon after that, Mueller was appointed special counsel.Trump escaped punishment arising from Mueller’s work but did lose the White House in 2020, when he was beaten by Joe Biden. Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein’s book arrives as another election looms, with Trump in a tight race with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and shortly after US authorities outlined how pro-Trump influencers were paid large sums by Russia. On Tuesday, a new threat intelligence report from Microsoft said Russia was accelerating covert influence efforts against Harris.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUS presidential elections are often the subject of “October surprises”, late-breaking scandals which can tilt a race. In 2016, October brought both Trump’s Access Hollywood scandal, in which he was recorded bragging about sexual assault, and the release by WikiLeaks of Democratic emails hacked by Russia.In Interference, Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein tell how the Mueller team came to its conclusion that Russia boosted Trump in 2016. They also detail attempts to interview Trump that were blocked by his attorneys, Rudy Giuliani among them. Describing how the former New York mayor betrayed a promise to keep an April 2018 meeting confidential, speaking openly if inaccurately to the press, the authors say Mueller “decided he would never again meet or speak with Giuliani – and he never did. For Bob it was a matter of trust.”More than six years on, Giuliani faces criminal charges arising from his work to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat, as well as costly civil proceedings. Trump also faces civil penalties and criminal charges, having been convicted on 34 counts in New York over hush-money payments made before the 2016 election.Though Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein focus on the Russia investigation, in doing so they voice dismay regarding the US supreme court, to which Trump appointed three rightwing justices and which has this year twice cast his criminal cases into doubt.The authors describe how Mueller’s team decided not to subpoena Trump for in-person testimony, given delays one Trump attorney said would result from inevitable “war” on the matter. Looking ahead, the authors consider new supreme court opinions that will shape such face-offs in future.Fischer v United States, the authors say, narrows the scope of the obstruction of justice statute “that was the focus of volume II of our report”. More dramatically, in Trump v United States, the court held “that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution when carrying out ‘core’ constitutional functions … and has ‘presumptive’ immunity for all ‘official actions’”.Though the court ruled a president was not immune for “unofficial actions”, Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein warn that it nonetheless “sharply limited the areas of presidential conduct that can be subject to criminal investigation – permitting a president to use his or her power in wholly corrupt ways without the possibility of prosecution”. More

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      David Brock on Clarence Thomas and supreme court hijack: ‘The original sin’

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      Thirty years ago, David Brock made his name as a reporter with The Real Anita Hill, a book attacking the woman who accused Clarence Thomas, George HW Bush’s second supreme court nominee, of sexual harassment. After tempestuous hearings, Thomas was confirmed. Brock – who memorably characterized Hill, a law professor, in sexist terms as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” – was launched as a rightwing media star.Thirty years on, Thomas still sits on the court, the longest-serving hardliner on a bench tilted 6-3 to the right by three confirmations under Donald Trump. But Brock switched sides long ago, disillusioned by rightwing lies. He apologized for smearing Hill and eventually became a prominent Democratic operative, close to Bill and Hillary Clinton.He founded watchdogs and Super Pacs and kept on writing books. He dealt with his political conversion 20 years ago in Blinded by the Right: the Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. Now, with Stench: The Making of the Thomas Court and the Unmaking of America, he has returned to what he calls “the original sin” of the modern supreme court: “Thomas’s perjury to get on the court” and his allegedly untruthful answers to questions about his treatment of Hill and other women.“That’s my starting point,” Brock says. “And then I show over time that other justices misled the public in their Senate confirmation hearings based on their denial of the fact that they were opposed to Roe all along – which sort of came out in the wash with the Dobbs decision.”Dobbs v Jackson, which overturned Roe v Wade, removing the federal right to abortion, came in June 2022. The way it went down helped give Brock his subtitle. John Roberts, the conservative chief justice, sought to uphold Roe but Dobbs was decided 5-4 anyway, Roberts unable to sway any other rightwinger. As Brock sees it, Thomas now owns the court.View image in fullscreen“That was a tipping point,” Brock says, pointing to major rulings on guns, affirmative action, environmental regulation, corporate bribery, presidential immunity and more, all rightwing wins. “But the other thing about about Roberts is he’s let these ethical issues just sit there. They cast their own ethics code about a year ago – and it has no enforcement mechanism. He’s been a weak leader, I think.”If 2022 was the year of Dobbs, 2023 and 2024 have been the years of gifts and grift: a parade of reports, Pulitzer prize-winning in ProPublica’s case, about how Thomas did not declare lavish gifts from mega-donors with business before the court, prominent among them Harlan Crow, a billionaire with a penchant for Nazi collectibles.For Brock, “all the revelations about Clarence Thomas and the gifts put another layer on top of the book I was writing about the crisis of legitimacy at the court, as a result of the fact Dobbs was so unpopular. You had that ethical crisis as well.”Thomas denies wrongdoing. So do Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, other hardliners with reported ties to rightwing money. Roberts refuses to testify on the issue in Congress. The result, as Brock says, is “a situation where polls show the supreme court is held in very low regard”.Brock holds Thomas in low regard too. On the page, he calls the justice “a scrapper and a battler”, a “supreme court justice turned showman”, and a “Bork without the brains” – a stinging reference to Robert Bork, the hardliner whose nomination failed in 1987, fueling rightwing determination to dominate at all costs.Brock says: “We went for a number of years when Thomas didn’t really speak from the bench at all [but] he’s been much more active in these last few years, and I think he’s a bit emboldened by the fact that he has now at least four colleagues who on many of these cases are going to agree with him.”Another driver of the court’s sharp rightward turn is Leonard Leo, the dark money impresario Thomas once called “the number three most powerful person in the world”. Brock could have used “the Leo Court” for a subtitle too, given Leo was “clearly was responsible for the three Trump justices”, via “an unprecedented move by Trump during the 2016 campaign, to provide lists to the Federal Society [which Leo co-chairs] of who he would nominate, as a way of bolstering his credibility with the evangelical right, which was skeptical of his personal behavior”.Leo also provided ballast for Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, as he ruthlessly blocked Barack Obama’s last pick for the court, Merrick Garland, “and so Trump was able to campaign on there being an open seat, and so … the McConnell strategy and the Leo strategy came together, and that is basically how Trump got elected”.In such terms, Brock has written a broad history of the court’s rightward shift from Nixon to Trump and after. But he has also written an old-fashioned broadside, a 300-page call for political action. Regarding Thomas, Brock wants impeachment.Identifying “eight specific areas of wrongdoing that require further investigation by Congress”, Brock says Thomas should first face scrutiny for his “bald-faced lie” in his confirmation hearings, when he categorically denied “any sexual discussion within the workplace”, a statement challenged by numerous witnesses.Brock’s other counts are linked to Ginni Thomas, the justice’s wife and a prominent far-right activist, and include failure to recuse in cases connected to her lobbying work and involvement in Trump’s election subversion; failure to disclose her earnings from the rightwing Heritage Foundation; and failure to disclose his own gifts from Crow, Leo and others.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBrock is not the first to call for Thomas to be impeached. In July, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez launched her own attempt in Congress. Like the New York Democrat, Brock is a realist: he knows that even should Democrats retake the House and impeach Thomas, a closely divided Senate would be extremely unlikely to convict and remove. But that is no reason not to try.“Sometimes I play this thought experiment with myself about how the Republicans would exploit an opportunity to take advantage of their opponents’ vulnerabilities. I have no doubt that if the shoe were on the other foot and you had a Democratic Clarence Thomas, you’d have hearing after hearing, and I think you probably would have an impeachment inquiry.“And so what I argue is that even if you only get an impeachment hearing or investigation in the House, it would still shine light on all of this, and it’s still worth doing, even though we know we wouldn’t have the votes required to remove him. I think it would be a good experience for the public to air all this out.”Brock also says impeachment “would help make the case for supreme court reform”, yearned for by the left, in the face of staunch rightwing opposition.Another good idea for Democrats in election season, Brock says, is to keep a spotlight on Ginni Thomas. That spotlight may soon grow brighter. Citing two anonymous sources, Brock reports that Liz Cheney, the anti-Trump Republican, was responsible for blocking serious scrutiny of the Thomases by the January 6 committee, even as it uncovered evidence of close involvement in Trump’s 2020 election subversion.It’s an explosive claim – particularly as Cheney recently endorsed Kamala Harris for president. To Brock, it’s simply indicative of the damage the Thomases have done.“I think increasingly people are becoming aware that there’s something rotten at the core of the fact that Thomas refuses to recuse himself from these cases where his wife is actively involved 100% … she’s been a longtime, but very behind the scenes, influential operative.”So of course has Brock. Once, he was on the same side as Clarence Thomas’s most prominent supporters, among them Mark Paoletta, a lawyer and former Trump administration official Brock says “knew the truth of the Anita Hill accusations” but worked to instal Thomas on the court regardless.Strikingly, Brock also once moved in the same circles as Brett Kavanaugh, then a Republican aide and attack dog, now another member of the far-right bloc that dominates the supreme court, his own controversial confirmation, also beset by allegations of sexual misconduct, also part of American history.Such close connections to his subject help make Brock’s book a fascinating read. Asked how he will respond to attacks from former comrades, whether they read the book or not, he says: “Those will come with the territory.”

      Stench is published in the US by Knopf More

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      Erwin Chemerinsky on the need for a new US constitution: ‘Our democracy is at grave risk’

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      Among progressive scholars of the US constitution, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, is widely considered pre-eminent. Now 71, he studied at Northwestern and Harvard and has also taught at DePaul, USC, Duke and UC Irvine. He has argued several cases at the US supreme court and written extensively about it.His last book, Worse Than Nothing, was a broadside against originalism, the doctrine touted by rightwing justices as they take an axe to hard-won rights. In his new book, Chemerinsky goes to the root of the problem with a still starker title: No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.Less than a hundred days from a presidential election which could see the return of Donald Trump, a candidate widely held to threaten cherished freedoms, Chemerinsky says: “I see an American government that is increasingly dysfunctional and that has lost the confidence of the people, in a society that is increasingly politically polarised. I worry greatly for the future of American democracy.View image in fullscreen“I wrote the book to explain how much of the problem stems from the constitution and suggest how it can be fixed.”In conversation, Chemerinsky patiently outlines the problem. It boils down to this: the US constitution is not fit for purpose.It was created in 1787 by a small group of white men who hashed out a deal in their own interests, chief among them protecting smaller states and owners of enslaved people. Those framers made foundation stones of economic and racial inequality and also erected enduring barriers to political equality including an electoral college that makes minority victory possible in presidential elections and two senators for each state regardless of population.The constitution has been changed, significantly in 1791, with the 10 amendments of the Bill of Rights, and between 1865 and 1870, after the civil war, with amendments to abolish slavery, expand the citizenry and give Black men the vote. There have been other major changes, not least the 19th amendment, which gave women the vote in 1920. A century later, though, change seems harder than ever.Consider the plight of the Equal Rights Amendment, which simply says “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” and which, as Chemerinsky describes it, “was passed overwhelmingly by Congress in 1972” as “a simple and un-objectionable statement”, but “even though 38 states at some point ratified it … is still not part of the constitution”.The ERA is stymied by pure politics. Pure politics – as practised by Republicans who benefit most from the enshrinement of minority control, as found in the stubborn persistence of Senate rules such as the filibuster that exist to block change – is of course eternal. And so as another election year grinds on, Democrats hoping to fend off Trump, Republicans seeking to tighten their grip on the levers of power, there the constitution sits, physically in the National Archives in Washington, theoretically near-impossible to change.Chemerinsky offers pointers to how change might be achieved – mostly by Democrats winning majorities in statehouses and Congress and working to sway public opinion towards the need for radical change, via a new constitutional convention. But he concludes with striking pessimism.“Our government is broken and our democracy is at grave risk, but I don’t see any easy solutions,” he writes. “A book that describes problems ideally should offer realistic fixes, but none are apparent … I desperately want to be wrong, either about my premise (that American democracy faces a serious crisis), or my conclusion (that fixing the problems will be hugely difficult or even impossible).”In conversation, Chemerinsky strikes a more hopeful note.“The constitution is revered,” he says, referring not just to the document itself but to rhetoric, teaching and even popular entertainment that has made demigods of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and other framers. “That reverence has a cost in that it has kept us from focusing on its flaws and how much they contribute to our crisis of democracy.“I have argued that there should be a progressive interpretation of the constitution. But I also think it is time to begin considering a new constitution. I think people could ratify a new constitution even though this mechanism is not provided for in the constitution.”In short, as in most aspects of politics, it’s all a matter of will.On the page, Chemerinsky also devotes space to the question of free speech, a right guaranteed by the first amendment but forever contested. Among progressives, such contests now rage regarding protests against US support for Israel in its war in Gaza. Last April, that debate burst into Chemerinsky’s backyard – literally. A traditional dinner for students, given with his wife, the law professor Catherine Fisk, was interrupted by protesters.As Chemerinsky wrote, for the Atlantic, he was “stunned to see the leader of Law Students for Justice in Palestine … stand up with a microphone that she had brought … and begin reading a speech about the plight of the Palestinians”.Chemerinsky and Fisk “immediately approached her and asked her to stop speaking and leave the premises. The protester continued. At one point, [Fisk] attempted to take away her microphone. Repeatedly, we said to her: ‘You are a guest in our home. Please leave.’“The student insisted that she had free-speech rights. But our home is not a forum for free speech; it is our own property, and the first amendment – which constrains the government’s power to encroach on speech on public property – does not apply at all to guests in private backyards.”It was one dramatic and traumatic event in an episode that has turned the left against itself. Understandably, Chemerinsky is guarded about what happened in his backyard in April and its implications. But he is happy to explain his approach to free speech issues.“Absolutism rarely makes sense,” he says. “Free speech cannot be absolute. Perjury is speech, but it can be punished. An employer who says to an employee, ‘Sleep with me or you’re fired,’ is engaged in speech, but can be held liable. No one suggests gun rights can be absolute. No one believes that there is a right to have guns in courthouses or airports.”No one in normal society, perhaps. In the age of Trump, extreme beliefs surge.Chemerinsky also grapples with the specter of secession, amid increasing debate over the idea that in an age of deep division, states either right or left, red or blue, might decide to start out anew, perhaps prompting a new civil war.To Chemerinsky, secession by progressive states is just as possible as a rightwing move to secede, particularly if Trump wins the White House and Republicans take full control of Congress.“I do not think secession is likely,” he says, “and I certainly don’t think it is desirable. But I think it is a possible path we could be discussing more in the years ahead if there are not changes.”

      No Democracy Lasts Forever is published in the US by Liveright More