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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

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      Pulitzer-winning author Anne Applebaum: ‘Often, for autocrats, the second time in power is worse’

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      A couple of years ago, in the Atlantic magazine, journalist Anne Applebaum wrote an era-defining cover story called “The Bad Guys Are Winning”. Her argument was not only that democratic institutions were in decline across the world, but that there was a new version of old threats to them: rogue states and dictatorships were increasingly linked not by ideology, as in the cold war, but by powerful currents of criminal and mercenary interest, often enabled by western corporations and technology.“Nowadays,” Applebaum wrote, “autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources – the troll farms… [that] pound home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.”The article took as examples the relationships between Russia and Belarus and between China and Turkey, ad hoc alliances created specifically to preserve their leaders’ authoritarian power and vast illicit personal wealth, and to undermine the chief threats to it: transparency, human rights, any pretence of international law. Three years on, with wars in Ukraine and Gaza further fomenting those forces, with the real prospect of a second Trump presidency, Applebaum has published a book-length version of her thesis: Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It is a necessary, if anxiety-inducing read.Applebaum, long a scourge of repressive regimes, is the author of Gulag, the definitive history of the Soviet Union’s forced labour camps. She divides her time between her homes in Washington DC and Poland – where her husband, Radek Sikorski, has recently returned to frontline politics as foreign minister (they tend to discover each other’s whereabouts in the world, she says, through Instagram posts). I met her in London for lunch a couple of weeks ago to talk about her book. She arrived making apologies about jet lag, ordered briskly, and shifted gear seamlessly into foreign affairs. The subsequent fortnight has, of course, proved a very long time in geopolitics. The UK has finally elected a grownup government; France has perhaps temporarily averted the prospect of a far-right administration; and Trump has dodged that bullet and raced ahead in the polls. Having Applebaum’s book closely in mind through all those events is vividly to sense the underlying precariousness of our world, the perils immediately ahead.In many ways, Applebaum is the consummate witness of this new world order, in that she moves comfortably in rarefied political worlds and maintains a robust view from the ground (she has spent a lot of time of late reporting from Ukraine, for example). She grew up in the US, daughter of a prominent anti-trust lawyer and an art gallery director, in a family with Republican roots in the south. “The elder George Bush would have been my father’s idea of a president,” she says. “Statesmanlike, committed to alliances and stability.”After studying Russian at Yale and in St Petersburg, she got her political education on the frontline of the “end of history”, seeing first-hand the collapse of Soviet communism in eastern Europe as a correspondent for the Economist and the Spectator. Having married Sikorski in 1992 – he had been a student leader in the Solidarity movement and for a while lived in flamboyant exile in Oxford (he was a member of the Bullingdon Club with Boris Johnson) – she literally cemented the optimism of the era by helping him restore an old manor house in western Poland. The building became a potent symbol of liberal and democratic rebirth not only in Poland but across Europe. (It was, for example, the first place that David Lammy visited earlier this month on becoming foreign secretary.)The house – Sikorski wrote a book, The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland, about what it stood for – was the venue of a famous new year party on the eve of the millennium, attended by the couple’s many political friends, mostly on the centre right in Europe and the US. Applebaum’s last book, Twilight of Democracy, looked back at that event, and offered a highly personal, insider’s account of the way in which so many of those friends had been seduced by the siren voices of authoritarian populism and the far right in subsequent years. How Polish friends had sought favour in the thuggish Law and Justice party that gained power in 2005; how British allies – including Johnson – became self-serving Brexiters; and how American Republicans shamelessly fell in behind Trump.As ever, Applebaum’s analysis unpicked difficult truths: notably that significant groups in every society will always support corruption and authoritarianism because they believe they can directly profit from it. That the arc of history does not naturally bend toward democracy.Sikorski and Applebaum had dreamed of a new world order with their country manor somewhere near its centre. “On this patch of land it will seem as if communism had never existed,” Sikorski wrote. “We have won the clash of ideas. It’s now time to stop wagging our tongues and get down to work.” In Applebaum’s case that involved researching and writing her monumental Pulitzer prize-winning book Gulag, drawn from newly opened archives in Russia and first-hand experience of survivors. She watched on, appalled, as that history and those archives were shut down again by Vladimir Putin soon afterwards.View image in fullscreenThe Russian president, a focus of Applebaum’s journalism for 25 years, is the most obvious example of the new-style autocrat she identifies. “The motivation is only power and wealth,” she says. “And towards that end, they think it’s important to weaken democracy and the rule of law. And it’s pretty explicit. I mean, in the case of Russia and China, that’s literally their public doctrine. The Chinese have a document that was published in 2013, which has this marvellous name of Document Number Nine, which lists seven perils threatening the Chinese Communist party. Number one is western constitutionalism. Putin has been talking about this since 2005.”One difference with the cold war, she says, is that by weaponising social media, these states – she also includes Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, North Korea and others – have been able to exploit and deepen divisions in countries in which free speech exists. Applebaum and her husband have been targets of all kinds of threats and abuse as defenders of those apparently “elite” interests: an independent judiciary and functioning democratic institutions.“At first,” she says, “I didn’t understand it at all. You are suddenly in this world of unbelievable hatred, all this vitriol focused on you. Some of it was Russian, some of it was Polish, some from the American right, and they all feed off each other. They all use the same bad English.” The attacks were fuelled by a series of magazine stories in Poland and Russia, that suggested, as she writes, that she “was … the clandestine Jewish co-ordinator of the international press and the secret director of its negative coverage of Poland” or that she was in the pay of the Ukrainian government. “To begin with, you think,” she says, “who do I sue? But then you just have to learn to get used to it.”That campaign was backed in Poland by harassment from the ruling Law and Justice party. “It had got to the point where they were investigating everybody,” she says. “For example, the equivalent of the tax service demands all of your stuff, papers and information, and you have to get lawyers. We were targeted, of course, and my fear was that if they won again this time, then they would move towards really prosecuting people and putting them in prison.” As it was, the pro-European liberal democrat Donald Tusk unexpectedly prevailed in last year’s election and appointed Sikorski to his cabinet. “You think,” she says, “OK, so now we’re not going to jail. Instead, the foreign ministry.”Applebaum had already been redoubling her efforts to fight for democracy. In her book she writes of a new network, a democratic forum, that had its first meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2021. The group is imagined as a countervailing force to her autocracies and involves activists and exiles from the women’s movement in Iran, from among Hong Kong’s umbrella protesters, and former political prisoners from Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Turkey and beyond. “There’s an international network of dictators,” she says, “so why shouldn’t there be an international network of democrats? They helped me frame this subject – really, the idea comes from them.”View image in fullscreenThere is an understandable urgency about this work, not least because of the threats posed by Donald Trump to existing multilateral cooperation. “Trump has a vision for how the US should work, which involves him being in direct charge of the military and them fighting not to uphold the constitution but for his personal interests.”She fears that a second administration will be more effective in overcoming constitutional checks and balances. “It’s also often the case for these figures that the second time it is worse. Chávez [in Venezuela] made one coup attempt, and then he went to jail. The second time, when he was released, he knew how to do it differently, take revenge. The same thing with Orbán in Hungary. He was prime minister for one term, and then he lost. When he came back, he seemed determined to make sure he never lost again.”Did it surprise her that the 6 January insurrection didn’t help former Republican friends to come to their senses? “It did. There was a moment – had the Senate agreed to impeach Trump – that would have been the end of it. The fact that they were too partisan to do that meant he survived. And then Trump was incredibly successful at doing something that is a common feature of autocracies, which was seeding a conspiracy theory, convincing something like a third of Americans that the 2020 election had been stolen.”Her book examines some of the ways that Silicon Valley billionaires have become effectively complicit in enabling autocracies to thrive, agreeing to censorship on their platforms, following the money. She has been prominent among those writers shining a light on the ways that coordinated propaganda strategies in autocracies are fuelling division in the west.“Of course, I don’t think either Trumpism or the Brexit campaign were foreign ideas,” she says. “I mean, because I worked at the Spectator in the 1990s I knew many people who were anti-EU then and who had grassroots deep in the English countryside. But as we know, what the Russians do, and now others, they don’t invent political movements – they amplify existing groups.”In the case of Trump, she suggests, “he is clearly somebody who they cultivated for a long time. Not as a spy or anything. But they were offering him opportunities, you know, he was trying to do [property] deals there [in Moscow]. And he’s been anti-Nato since the 80s. He’s openly scorned American allies all of his life. In one of his books, he talks about what a mistake it was for the US to be fighting the second world war. So of course, the Russians would want someone like that, because their aim is to break up Nato. And if they can help get an American president who doesn’t like Nato in office, that’s a huge achievement. It’s a lot cheaper than fighting wars.”Applebaum despairs at the way anything can now become a binary which-side-are-you-on? culture war. “Taylor Swift!” she says, as a case in point. “Taylor Swift is a blond, blue-eyed country and western singer, who lives in Nashville. And whose boyfriend is a football player in the midwest. And yet you’re going to make her into some kind of symbol of leftwing degeneracy?”View image in fullscreenShe fears that the horrific war in Gaza has become a similar kind of simplistic “wedge issue”. Her book was mostly written before the Hamas attack on 7 October. “I was able to make some adjustments to it later on,” she says. “But it was not conceived as a book about the Middle East.”The nature of the rhetoric around the war emphasised that for her. “The fact that the [commentary] became so toxic online so fast, when I saw that happening, I thought: ‘OK, I’m staying out of this,’” she says. “I’m not an expert in the region. I’m not there. I’m certainly not going to talk about it on Twitter. I mean, do people have completely settled views about what’s happening in Sudan, say? That’s another huge crisis.”In the terms of her book, she suggests to me that “clearly, Hamas, which is connected to Iran, is a part of that autocratic world. And clearly, Netanyahu has designs on Israeli democracy. I wouldn’t say he’s a dictator. But he clearly is willing to preside over a decline in Israeli democracy.“As journalists,” she adds, “our role is to try to collect information as accurately as possible and analyse it. If the interpretation leads to describing Israeli war crimes in Gaza or whether it leads in the direction of describing Hamas atrocities in Israel, that’s what it should do. But I think, for example, that it’s a great mistake for universities to announce what their ‘policy’ is on the war…”In this regard, I ask, have our governments been cowardly or naive in not confronting the implications of the great shift in information in our times, the unaccountable algorithms of social media?“We have been very cowardly about that,” she says. “Anonymity online is a big problem. If someone walked into the room right now with a mask over his face and stood in the centre of the room and started shouting his opinions, we would all say: ‘Who’s that crazy person? Why should we listen to him?’ And yet online that is what happens.”Given the prognosis of her book, does she never despair, I wonder, about the implications?“There are always other stories,” she says. “For example, people really misunderstood the recent European election. The French story – the rise of Le Pen – was obviously dominant. But actually everywhere else the far right underperformed: in Germany the big victor was the Christian Democrats, in Hungary Orbán’s party won fewer seats than in previous elections.”And here in the UK, too, she suggests, though Farage hasn’t gone away, the re-emergence of the liberal-left is the real story.“I think the actual transformation of the Labour party – they’re not getting enough credit for that,” she says. “Because they were fighting two kinds of populism, both on the right and from Corbyn. What impresses me about Starmer is that he had a whole career as a human rights lawyer before he went into politics. It’s pretty rare these days to have somebody come from a different walk of life and be at the top of that world. He understands how institutions work and how government works.”So real grounds for hope?“Well,” she says, “I also feel like, here we are sitting in this nice restaurant in London. Do we have any right to be pessimistic? To just say everything’s terrible, and it’s all going to get worse? We just can’t say that to our children, and we can’t say it, for example, to Ukrainians. What right do we have to be pessimistic? We have to do better than that.” More

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

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

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      ‘They always got away with it’: new book reveals Kennedys’ shocking treatment of women

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      “The whole lot of Kennedys were lady-killers, and they always got away with it,” baseball star Joe DiMaggio, who blamed the political dynasty for the death of his ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe, told his biographer. “They’ll be getting away with it a hundred years from now.”Death by air crash. Death by water. Death by suicide. These are just some of the fates of women who have associated with the Kennedys, as chronicled by investigative journalist Maureen Callahan in Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, a book published on Tuesday that explores the “real Kennedy Curse” and reads like a grisly soap opera.Just as America’s founders have recently undergone a reckoning over race, Callahan argues that the family often treated as political royalty should face a reckoning over gender. In her account, misogyny runs through the Kennedys like a stick of rock with physical and psychological abuse spanning generations. And Camelot uses its power and wealth to ruthlessly control the narrative.Callahan writes: “When a life-size bronze statue of JFK was unveiled in DC in 2021, not one bit of news coverage addressed his treatment of women. Not one journalist, essayist, political writer, or cultural critic asked whether this was a man deserving, in our new era, of such a memorial. Not one asked what kind of message his continued celebration sends to women and girls, now and in the future. Ask not, indeed.”Most topically, the book features John F Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, currently running as an independent candidate for president with a female running mate, Nicole Shanahan. It questions why he has been criticised for his anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and antisemitic statements “but not for his lifelong mistreatment of women”.Ask Not tells how Mary Richardson, a talented architect with looks evocative of Jackie Kennedy, married Robert in 1994 and had four children with him. She loved the idea of being a Kennedy but found her husband rarely present: his job did not require travel but he travelled all the time.“Gaslit. That’s how Mary felt,” Callahan writes. “The more pain she was in, the worse Bobby treated her. Some days he wanted a divorce; others, he wanted to bring another woman into their bed, an idea that left her humiliated. She rejected him outright.View image in fullscreen“One day Mary had a female friend over and Bobby sauntered in, right out of the shower, and dropped the towel around his waist, exposing himself. Mary had long suspected he was cheating on her, but he would always deny it. He’d tell her she was crazy, that she was the one destroying their marriage and driving him away. Was it any wonder he never wanted to be home?”Mary found Robert’s diaries. In the back pages were lists of women with whom Robert had had flings. The book elaborates: “He ranked them from one to ten, as if he were a teenager. Ten, Mary knew, was for full-on intercourse. ‘My lust demons,’ he wrote, were his greatest failing.“He used the word ‘mugged’ a lot – women who, he wrote, just came up to him on the street and said, How about it? If they had sex, he considered himself mugged, a passive victim of aggressive women.“There were so many – astronomical numbers, Mary said, and she knew a lot of them: The celebrated actress who came to their house and went on vacations with her family. The older model who was always around. The socialite whose husband was one of Bobby’s good friends. A gorgeous royal. The wife of a very famous man. A lawyer. A doctor. An environmental activist. All these beautiful, accomplished women. How could Mary compete?”Mary became distraught, weeping and drinking and struggling to get out of bed, the book says. Robert tried to forcibly hospitalise her, telling her that she would be “better off dead”. Callahan interviewed Mary’s therapist, Sheenah Hankin. When Robert asked for Mary to be diagnosed as mentally ill, Hankin refused, telling him: “Your wife isn’t mentally ill. She is angry and depressed, but she is not ill.”Robert began dating the actor Cheryl Hines, who played Larry David’s wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He cut off Mary’s credit card and access to cash. Broke, she had to ask other mothers for an extra $20 so she could buy petrol and groceries.Finally, she hanged herself at home. The book recounts: “Mary put on her yoga clothes and sandals, walked out to her barn, stacked three metal crates atop each other, then used a metal ladder to tie a hangman’s knot around the rafter. When she was found that afternoon, Mary’s fingers were stuck inside the rope around her neck. She had changed her mind. She had tried to save herself.”Mary’s siblings insisted that her depression had been a direct result of her husband’s cheating and neglect, his threats to take the children and leave her with nothing, “bringing the full weight of the Kennedy family to bear against her”.Robert, however, portrayed Mary to the world as a disconsolate alcoholic. In his eulogy, he took no responsibility for the anguish that his adultery had caused her. He said: “I know I did everything I could to help her.”Against her family’s wishes, Mary was buried in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts near Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of John F Kennedy. But, Callahan writes, “one week later, in the middle of the night, without telling Mary’s siblings or obtaining the required legal permitting, Bobby Kennedy Jr had Mary’s coffin dug up and moved seven hundred feet away … Mary was left to face traffic, no headstone marking her grave, buried alone”.The title of Ask Not is a nod to the most celebrated line from John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” America’s 35th president is shown in an unflattering light as a philanderer who exploited his position to prey on young women.View image in fullscreenMimi Beardsley was 19 and working in the White House press office when John took her to a bedroom in the private residence, pushed her on to Jackie Kennedy’s bed and took her virginity. It was the first encounter of many, Callahan writes: “Mimi would be welcomed upstairs only when the First Lady was away, and it was her job to remind him of simple pleasures: small talk, shared bubble baths, and sex, hasty though it always was.”Callahan notes that, when Beardsley published a memoir, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F Kennedy and Its Aftermath, it was pilloried by the media but became a New York Times No 1 bestseller. Robert Dallek, a Kennedy biographer, described Beardsley as “entirely credible” and told the Washington Post: “You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle anymore. This has become part of the public discourse.”John’s son, John Kennedy Jr, also features in the narrative as a serial risk-taker. With film star looks and charm, he was billed as the world’s most eligible bachelor. He began a relationship with Carolyn Bessette, director of publicity for Calvin Klein, but there were jarring ups and downs. “She was underweight and anxious all the time, using antidepressants and cocaine,” according to the book.Carolyn observed John Jr’s arrogance, thoughtlessness and reckless driving up close. “There was the time Carolyn and John got pulled over on the Massachusetts Turnpike, the car reeking with the smell of pot, a starstruck cop letting them go without even a warning.“‘There’s an unwritten rule in Massachusetts,’ John told her, ‘whereby members of my family can commit murder and mayhem’ – after all, decades earlier his uncle Ted had left a young woman to die in three feet of water – ‘and nobody bats an eye.’”Nevertheless, the couple married in 1996 after a rehearsal dinner where, the book recounts, Carolyn’s mother rose and made a stunning toast. “I don’t know if this marriage is good for my daughter,” she said. “I don’t know if John is right for her.”Three rocky years later, John Jr wanted Carolyn to accompany him to a family wedding on Cape Cod. Against her better judgment, she agreed to fly with him in the small plane he was still learning to pilot. “Carolyn said this to family members, friends, the waitress at their favorite restaurant in Martha’s Vineyard. She didn’t think her husband had the patience, the diligence, the attention span, and, really, the humility to be a good pilot.”View image in fullscreenShe was tragically vindicated. John Jr did not file a flight plan and cut off all communication with air traffic control. An American Airlines flight had to divert to avoid a midair collision. John Jr kept climbing and could soon not tell up from down.“The plane went into a graveyard spiral, falling 900 feet per minute. Carolyn and [her 34-year-old sister] Lauren would have known they were going to die. The sheer force of gravity and speed would have been terrifying as they spun at 200 miles per hour, nose first, into the ocean.”Once again, Callahan writes, the myth-making Camelot machine ensured that, in the 25 years since the crash, Carolyn has been cast as a “drug-addled harridan who made the last days of America’s prince so miserable.“And, so goes the implication: if John Jr hadn’t been so miserable he wouldn’t have been so distracted, and if he hadn’t been so distracted he wouldn’t have crashed the plane. This has become conventional wisdom, accepted as fact, and it’s left Carolyn’s sister Lauren a footnote – still more collateral damage.”One of the family’s darkest chapters unfolded in 1969 when Senator Edward Kennedy accidentally drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, an island in Massachusetts. His car flipped upside down into a pond he swam to safety. His passenger, a 28-year-old aide named Mary Jo Kopechne, died inside the water-filled car. Kennedy did not seek help at the nearest house nor report the incident to authorities for 10 hours.“At the inquest,” Callahan notes, “John Farrar, the diver who recovered Mary Jo’s body the next afternoon, testified that Mary Jo had not drowned but had suffocated to death. He said she had been alive for at least an hour in the water, maybe longer.”Kopechne could have been saved. Yet, the author argues, that criminal act was successfully transformed into “Ted’s tragedy”, a terrible accident that unfairly denied him the presidency. He became revered as the “lion of the Senate” instead. She adds: “Ted Kennedy served out the rest of his life in Congress and was given a statesman’s funeral with wall-to-wall news coverage, while Kopechne’s name was barely mentioned.”Drawing on archives, interviews with surviving family members and friends, and biographies, memoirs and contemporaneous news reports, Callahan details the stories of several more women whose lives were upended by the Kennedys. Some were involved in notorious affairs and scandals that made lurid headlines; others became tragedies that were marginalised and mostly forgotten.The New York-based author observes: “Any victims who dare to fight back will find themselves confronting the awesome power of the Kennedy machine, one that recasts any woman, no matter how wealthy or famous or powerful, as crazy, spiteful, vengeful; a drug addict, a viper, a seductress.“Whatever grievous harm a Kennedy man may have done to her, the message remains clear: She was asking for it. It was her fault. Thus Camelot, that fairy tale of Kennedy greatness and noble men, still stands.”
      Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed is out now More

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

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

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      The Darkness Has Not Overcome: limp pro-Trump piety for a second coming

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      The Darkness Has Not Overcome is a far cry from Team of Vipers, Cliff Sims’s kiss-and-tell from 2019. Under the subtitle My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, that book sold well and spawned a brief legal spat with Donald Trump himself. But in a somewhat less stirring second outing, the Alabama son of two generations of Baptist ministers who became a reporter then a White House aide pays greatest attention to the lessons he takes from scripture and faith.Back in the Trumpian fold, this viper’s venom is distinctly diluted.Sims was cast out of Trumpworld in 2018 but returned to work as a speechwriter for Trump family members at the Republican convention in 2020. Then he landed a slot as a deputy to John Ratcliffe, a congressman turned director of national intelligence.Donald Trump Jr offers his praise for Sims’s new book, calling Sims “his friend”. The younger Trump – not noted for public displays of piety, let’s say – also laments that “American Christians are under attack every day by leftwing activists, mainstream media and liberal politicians”.Sims aches to land a punch for the team, but is reduced to trading on old glories. In his prologue, he rehashes near-verbatim a Team of Vipers story involving Trump and Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, then chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.Richmond purportedly praised the president to his face in a closed meeting, then intimated he was a bigot when the cameras rolled.“Congressman Richmond had been so sincere and complimentary of him behind closed doors, I thought he might at least be willing to say he didn’t personally believe Trump was racist. But he didn’t,” Sims writes – in both Team of Vipers and The Darkness Has Not Overcome.“‘You’d have to talk to the people who made those allegations and ask them what they would say about it,’ [Richmond told reporters]. ‘I will tell you that he’s the 45th president of the United States …’”If it had not been offered before, in greater detail – there’s no Omarosa Manigault this time – the anecdote might add a pinch of zest to a bland book. After all, Richmond now co-chairs Biden’s re-election campaign.Elsewhere, under a new, less fun subtitle – “Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power” – Sims decides to examine the legacy of Adolf Hitler, the “big lie” and the nature of tyranny. Those of a naive disposition, look away: Sims proves oddly unwilling to consider Trump’s affections for and frequent rhetorical echoes of Hitler, and his yearning to be an American strongman.“A psychological analysis of Hitler commissioned by the [Office of Strategic Services] during world war two described his obsession with lying as a way to manipulate the masses,” Sims writes.“Hitler’s policy of lies propelled him into power and ultimately played a significant role in his ability to perpetrate mass genocide. The truth matters a lot more than you might think.”So how does Trump, the man Sims backs to return to the White House and who lies as he breathes, think about Hitler?Trump reportedly kept a collection of the Führer’s speeches at his bedside.Jeremy Peters of the New York Times has captured Steve Bannon, a close Trump ally, giving this judgment of Trump’s history-making escalator ride in spring 2015, to enter the Republican race: “That’s Hitler, Bannon thought.”Jim Sciutto of CNN has quoted John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, on Trump’s fondness for Hitler.Trump: “Well, but Hitler did some good things.”Kelly: “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”In the White House, relations between Sims and Kelly were sulfurous. “In the past 40 years, I don’t think I’ve ever had a subordinate whose reputation is worse than yours,” Sims quotes Kelly as saying in Team of Vipers.Now, Sims also avoids discussion of Trump’s stated intention to act as a dictator for at least a day if re-elected, and his own big lie: that the 2020 election went to Joe Biden because of electoral fraud.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust last weekend, Trump compared the Biden administration to Hitler’s Gestapo. Can you say, “projection”?Sims still has scores to settle. He luxuriates in the downfall of Robert Bentley, an Alabama governor whose affair with a campaign consultant went public. Oddly demure, Sims omits Bentley’s name while describing obtaining a damning recording from a source at midnight at a gas station, carrying a gun just in case.“The episode felt like a dramatic scene out of a spy movie … Ruger nine-millimeter pistol tucked in my waistband,” Sims writes. “I plugged the drive into my computer, opened the file and within a few minutes knew indeed that it would change the course of Alabama’s political history.”Bentley, a church deacon, resigned in the face of impeachment. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, for misuse of state funds.After reveling in the details of Bentley’s descent, Sims delivers a killer coda: he called Bentley to let him know he “had been praying for his family”.You can’t make such stuff up. But it doesn’t end there: Sims spikes the football.“Even after he had lost everything, including the powerful office to which he had violently clung, he returned to his dermatology practice and hired as his office manager, believe it or not, his former political advisor and mistress.”Bentley never mounted an insurrection or claimed immunity from prosecution. Sims, of course, doesn’t even mention January 6.He also stays mum about Trump’s alleged hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, an adult film star and a Playboy model who claimed affairs. The adjudicated sexual assault of E Jean Carroll? Nothing.The Darkness Has Not Overcome is an audition for a return trip to the White House. In that, Sims is not alone. Heck, even Ivanka wants in.
      The Darkness Has Not Overcome is published in the US by Hachette More

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      French government says Kristi Noem lied about cancelling meeting with Macron

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      The French government has joined the chorus of detractors taking aim at South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s political autobiography No Going Back, which many now see as having eliminated her chances of being Donald Trump’s vice-presidential selection.Days after Noem removed a passage claiming she had met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, officials at the Élysée Palace in Paris are questioning a passage that describes a cancelled meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron.According to NBC News, Noem claims in her book that she cancelled a planned meeting between her and Macron in November after she accused him of making “pro-Hamas” comments.“While in Paris, I was slated to meet with French president Emmanuel Macron,” Noem wrote. “However, the day before we were to meet, he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So I decided to cancel.”Yet a French official told the outlet there is no record of a scheduled meeting with Noem – nor had they invited her.“Following his anti-Israel comments, she chose to cancel,” Noem spokesperson Ian Fury told NBC. Fury added that “the governor was invited to sit in President Macron’s box for the Armistice Day parade at Arc de Triomphe” – a ceremony that took place on 16 November.Fury said that Macron had not attended, though Associated Press news video suggests he did. Noem had been in Paris in November 2023 to speak at the Worldwide Freedom Initiative conference.While Noem does not describe what Macron’s comments were that she objected to, her office pointed to his remarks urging Israel to stop bombing Gaza while also acknowledging “the right of Israel to protect itself and react”.The Guardian has reached out to Noem’s office for clarification.Last week, Noem acknowledged that she “should not have put [an] anecdote in the book” in which she described meeting Kim Jong-un – and feeling underestimated by him – because that purported encounter with the North Korean dictator never happened.Nonetheless, she later insisted she had “met with many, many world leaders” and had “travelled around the world”.An excerpt from the book lists a number of world leaders whom Noem had met with while serving in Congress, including Chinese president Xi Jinping, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former UK prime minister Boris Johnson.Damaging embellishments are hardly unusual to the political class. Hillary Clinton came out on the wrong side of a fact-checking drama in 2008 when she was unsuccessfully running for the Democratic presidential nomination and claimed she arrived in Bosnia “under sniper fire” and had to run with her head down.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Noem may have done more damage to her standing by repeating a 20-year-old story about shooting dead a working dog on her ranch. She explained that the 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, Cricket, did not point out game on animal hunts, killed a neighbor’s chickens, and acted aggressively toward her family.Noem also described shooting dead the family’s billy goat, which the governor said “loved to chase” her children and would “knock them down and butt them”, leaving them “terrified”.It took Noem two shots to kill off the goat, which also had a “wretched smell”, Noem wrote.Criticism has been heaped on Noem from both sides of the political spectrum over the dog, but less so the goat.It was reported last weekend that Noem left a political fundraiser lunch at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort early last weekend as the former president offered on-stage introductions of various contenders to be his running mate in November’s rematch with Joe Biden, who is seeking re-election.“She had a rough couple of days,” Trump told Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin last week. “I will say that.” More