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      Both/And review: Huma Abedin on Clinton, Weiner and a political life

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      BooksBoth/And review: Huma Abedin on Clinton, Weiner and a political lifeThe close aide to Hillary Clinton has written a tale spliced with pain but blind to her boss’s weak spots

      Abedin: Kiss from unnamed senator was not sexual assault
      Lloyd GreenSun 7 Nov 2021 02.00 ESTLast modified on Sun 7 Nov 2021 02.02 ESTIn 2015, Hillary Clinton’s brains trust deliberately elevated the stature of the “extreme” Republican contenders, the “pied pipers”, Donald Trump included. On election night in 2016, Clintonworld stared into the abyss.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read more“It was sheer disbelief,” Huma Abedin writes in her new memoir. “More like shock.”Clinton, Abedin as campaign vice-chair and other aides failed to grasp that Trump was spearheading a movement, his mien his message. Clinton branded half of his supporters “deplorables”.Not surprisingly, in her memoir Abedin shows a blind spot to Clinton family shortcomings. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, for example, “it seemed very likely” to her that it “was untrue”. Somehow, an intern who rose to become one of Hillary’s closest confidantes forgot that even before Lewinsky, Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct had almost throttled his White House ambitions. Bill and Hillary even appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes to salvage his viability.“I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” Hillary said.Not surprisingly, as Hillary’s so-called “second daughter”, Abedin has a problem coming to grips with an immovable likability deficit that cost her boss both times she ran for president.“Why was HRC not likeable?” Abedin asks. “This was particularly difficult to understand for those who knew her, since as far as we were concerned that was a quality she had in abundance.”Others have plumbed such waters – and found Clinton wanting. Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, for example, a Pulitzer Prize winner, portrayed Hillary sporting a “foul mouth” and being loathed by the agents who protected her. After members of her Secret Service detail overheard Chelsea Clinton calling them “pigs”, Leonnig wrote, the first daughter was reminded that their job was to “stand between you, your family and a bullet”.Chelsea reportedly responded: “Well, that’s what my mother and father call you.”Abedin does not discuss how, out of office, Hillary scooped up windfalls in the commodities market and easy millions in Wall Street speaking fees, all while doing her best impersonation of Mother Teresa.Clinton’s second run for president tarnished her image. In December 2017, a Gallup poll pegged her favorability at 37%. But unlike Mandy Grunwald, an adviser to both Clintons, Abedin refuses to admit that Hillary has foibles.According to Grunwald, Clinton could sound like she “DOESN’T think the game is rigged” against normal Americans, mustering only recognition that the “public thinks so”. Said differently, Clinton conveyed obliviousness to the Great Recession of 2008-09, its casualties and anxieties.In April 2015, nearly half of the US self-identified as working- or lower-class. Between November 2007 and late 2016, white Americans in that bracket lost more than 700,000 jobs.Abedin describes sitting with Clinton in Iowa, watching Trump “ramble incoherently about himself”. She captures Clinton saying: “I just don’t get it.” Similarly, Abedin mocks Bernie Sanders’ call for a “revolution” and glosses over the fact that Clinton only beat the Vermont senator to clinch the nomination in early June 2016, more than a week after Trump wrapped up the Republican nod.“With each contest, she methodically racked up the number of delegates she needed to secure the nomination,” Abedin writes. That’s pure spin. It was supposed to be a coronation. They didn’t plan on winning the Iowa caucuses by a razor-thin margin or getting walloped in New Hampshire, where Clinton won on her first go-round.A youth-driven movement helped propel Sanders’ rise. Aspiration and grievance counted. The bankers had gotten their bailouts. Sanders supporters were staring at a future bleaker than their parents had known. Clinton had gone from the “beer track” candidate of 2008 to the pick of the wine drinkers, the coastal establishment. And yet, according to Abedin, defeat by Trump still came as a bolt from the blue.Both/And lets the reader play voyeur and counselor too. Abedin delivers the skinny on her courtship by, marriage to and traumatic estrangement from the former congressman Anthony Weiner. She shares that they attended couples’ therapy, and that he possessed darker secrets than she first thought.She also describes how an unnamed senator shoved his tongue down her throat and pinned her against a couch while the pair were in his apartment for late-night coffee. Abedin writes that she repressed memories of the event until they came rushing back amid Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, when the supreme court nominee was accused of, and denied, sexual assault.Asked by CBS if the senator had committed a sexual assault, Abedin paused.“Did I feel like he was assaulting me in that moment?” she told Nora O’Donnell. “I didn’t, it didn’t feel that way. I was in an uncomfortable situation with a senator and I didn’t know how to deal with it.”‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyRead moreThis does not appear to be the final word. Members of the Senate worry about who else the unnamed senator may have abused. Philippe Reines, a former Clinton aide, says it is up to Abedin “alone to decide what to share, with whom, how and when”.Abedin’s eye for style asserts itself throughout her memoir – even as she deals with how her husband made damaging headlines. In May 2011, she woke up in Buckingham Palace and surveyed the room. Her “long, fitted gown for the evening’s white-tie dinner hung on the bathroom door”. An “elegant chestnut-brown writing desk” stood at the “foot of the bed”. The same weekend, Weiner alerted his pregnant wife to his sexting habits. Weiner went to prison but he and Abedin are not completely estranged.Both/And is also a story of Abedin’s life before and outside politics. She tells of being born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of spending most of her youth in Saudi Arabia, a father and mother who held doctorates, of family ties in the Middle East, the subcontinent and the US. It is the strongest part of the book, a tale of an immigrant, of an upward arc.
      Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds is published in the US by Scribner
      TopicsBooksHuma AbedinHillary ClintonUS politicsAnthony WeinerPolitics booksDemocratsreviewsReuse this content More

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      Misfire review: a bullseye from Tim Mak – but the NRA isn’t beaten yet

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      BooksMisfire review: a bullseye from Tim Mak – but the NRA isn’t beaten yet The NPR reporter has written an important book about the moral bankruptcy which put the powerful and merciless gun group on the back footCharles KaiserSat 6 Nov 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 6 Nov 2021 02.02 EDTTim Mak has written a sprawling tale of the greed, incompetence and narcissism which has dominated the National Rifle Association throughout Wayne LaPierre’s 30 years as its leader. Abetted by his wife, Susan, LaPierre has allegedly used his members’ dues to fund a billionaire’s lifestyle.‘We have to break through that wall’: inside America’s battle for gun controlRead moreThe LaPierres’ wedding in 1998 was a near miss: he almost ran from the altar, until she and the priest changed his mind. Mak calls this “emblematic” of “a man driven by fear and anxiety over all other forces … his reaction to these emotions is usually to flee and hide”.These qualities, Mak writes, have made LaPierre “prey” to an endless series of conmen, throughout his leadership of America’s most-feared lobbying group.“Pushed and prodded” by his wife to discover “money’s alluring glow”, Mak writes, LaPierre saw his salary balloon from $200,000 in the mid-1990s to $2.2m in 2018. According to the investigation of the New York attorney general, which has done the most to expose serial excesses at the NRA, between 2013 and 2017 the black cars, private jets and hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive clothing led to $1.2m in reimbursed expenses.Between 2013 and 2018, companies used to book the LaPierres’ private planes received an astonishing $13.5m. There were trips to Lake Como, Budapest and the Bahamas. Just the hired cars for trips to Italy and Hungary cost $18,000. LaPierre spent $275,000 on suits at a single Beverly Hills emporium, including $39,000 on one day in 2015. To disguise such excesses, the bills were sent to an outside vendor which the NRA reimbursed.Mak also does a good job of describing how every mass shooting has pushed the NRA ever further right, transforming it from advocacy group for gun rights into a fully fledged player in the culture war, especially after the massacre of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012.Mak offers a particularly depressing account of how the NRA chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, was personally involved in negotiations over the Manchin-Toomey bill, a Senate measure which would have modestly increased background checks if, as Mak points out, not enough to have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre, since that gunman used guns legally obtained by his mother.In any case, after months of negotiation the NRA double-crossed both sponsors, made sure the bill failed to get the 60 votes it needed to pass the Senate, then dropped its A-ratings for Manchin and Toomey to D and C respectively.The NRA’s role in the Trump-Russia scandal was substantial. Maria Butina, eventually convicted as a Russian spy, used “relationships within the NRA to build an informal channel of diplomatic relations with Russia”. Her efforts included a famous public exchange with Donald Trump during his first campaign, in which he expressed his affection for Vladimir Putin and promised to improve relations as president.The NRA spent $30m to help to elect Trump, more than his own fundraising super pac. Ironically, NRA membership dues fell after Trump entered the White House. The organization lost its most lucrative fundraiser when Barack Obama left office.Power struggles and a ‘personal piggy bank’: what the NRA lawsuit allegesRead moreThe great unravelling began on 6 August 2020, when the New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed a lawsuit to dissolve the NRA entirely. She accused LaPierre of using the organization for 30 years “for his financial benefit, and the benefit of a close circle of NRA staff, board members, and vendors”.Six months later, the NRA filed for bankruptcy. But despite endless infighting, Wayne LaPierre remains in charge. And because Trump was elected, with the NRA’s help, the supreme court now includes three justices appointed by him – at least two of whom seemed eager in arguments this week to demolish most of the remaining state restrictions on carrying concealed weapons, in New York and six other states.The passions of gun owners – and the fear they have instilled in a majority of public officials – remain dominant forces in American politics despite the greed and incompetence of their leaders chronicled so thoroughly in this important book.
      Misfire is published in the US by Dutton
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      Huma Abedin says kiss from unnamed senator was not sexual assault

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      BooksHuma Abedin says kiss from unnamed senator was not sexual assaultClinton aide gives first interview for memoir Both/AndAbedin also discusses 2016 election and Anthony Weiner Martin Pengelly in New York@MartinPengellySun 31 Oct 2021 10.13 EDTFirst published on Sun 31 Oct 2021 08.11 EDTIn her first interview to promote her new book, Huma Abedin said she did not think an unnamed senator sexually assaulted her when he kissed her at his apartment, some time in the mid-2000s.Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin describes sexual assault by US senatorRead moreShe also said she would “take to her grave” her part in the emails investigation which cost Hillary Clinton dearly in the 2016 presidential election, which the candidate lost to Donald Trump, though she knew it was not all her fault.Abedin describes the incident with the senator in Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, which will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy and reported Abedin’s description of the kiss.After making coffee, Abedin writes, the senator sat next to her on the couch, “put his left arm around my shoulder, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa.“I was so utterly shocked, I pushed him away. All I wanted was for the last 10 seconds to be erased.”Abedin does not give clues to the senator’s identity.She also writes that memories of the kiss came back in 2018, during Brett Kavanaugh’s supreme court confirmation hearings, when the judge was accused of sexual assault. In Abedin’s description, Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, was accused of “conveniently remembering” details. Kavanaugh denied the accusations and was confirmed to the court.The pressure group Rainn (the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) defines sexual assault as “sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the victim”.Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning, Abedin said: “I did go back to a senator’s apartment, a senator who I knew and I was very comfortable with, and he kissed me in a very shocking way because it was somebody who I’d known and frankly trusted.”Her interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, asked: “Are you suggesting that senator assaulted you?”Abedin paused, and said: “I’m suggesting that I was in an uncomfortable situation with … I was in an uncomfortable situation with a senator and I didn’t know how to deal with it and I buried the whole experience.“But in my my own personal opinion, no, did I feel like he was assaulting me in that moment? I didn’t, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like I needed to extricate myself from the situation. And he also spent a lot of time apologising and making sure I was OK and we were actually able to rebalance our relationship.”Earlier this week, Business Insider reported that senators from both parties expressed concern that the unnamed senator may have assaulted others.On CBS, Abedin was also asked what she thought Clinton most valued about her.“I think she would say her loyalty,” she said. “And I would say the same about her. I have tested that. Not intentionally, but I have tested it … I’ve made her life difficult with things that have happened in my personal life.”Abedin is estranged from her husband, the former congressman and New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, who served time in prison for sending explicit text messages to a teenage girl.A laptop belonging to Weiner and Abedin became part of Clinton’s 2016 presidential election defeat, when the FBI seized it as part of investigations into Clinton’s use of private email while secretary of state.“I think I’m going to take it to my grave,” Abedin told CBS. “It took me a while to reconcile that it was not all my fault.”She added: “I have reconciled – and it took me a while to reconcile – that it was not all my fault. I lived with that. I did. I don’t believe that anymore.“It’s more a sense of an ache in the heart, that it didn’t have to be. And also, my belief that [Clinton] would have been an extraordinary president, that she really would have, and what it meant for women and girls, not just in this country but around the world.”Asked why she wrote her book, Abedin said: “I think for most of my adult life, certainly in the last 25 years that I’ve been in public service or in the public eye, I have been the invisible person behind the primary people in my life. But what I realise is that if you don’t tell your story, somebody else is writing your history.”She also discussed Weiner and how she discovered his various infidelities. She and her husband, she said, were “just two severely broken, traumatised people”.Asked how their relationship was now, she said: “We’re good. He is my co-parent. And I learned the full truth, I processed it and moved on. I wish him well. He, I hope, wishes me well. I think he does.”Asked if she was still angry with Weiner, Abedin said: “I can’t live in that space anymore. I tried that. It almost killed me.”TopicsBooksHuma AbedinHillary ClintonAnthony WeinerUS politicsDemocratsUS SenatenewsReuse this content More

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      Master of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neither

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      BooksMaster of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neitherMartin Indyk’s well-woven biography is sympathetic to the preacher of realpolitik condemned by many as a war criminal Lloyd GreenSun 31 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 31 Oct 2021 02.02 EDTAs secretary of state, Henry Kissinger nursed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war to a close. The disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel ultimately yielded a peace treaty. The Syrian border remains tensely quiet. Unlike Vietnam, in the Middle East Kissinger’s handiwork holds.Friendly Fire review: Israeli warrior Ami Ayalon makes his plea for peaceRead moreThe Sunni Arab world has gradually come to terms with the existence of the Jewish state. Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan have diplomatic ties with Jerusalem. Relations with Saudi Arabia are possible.For Kissinger, student and preacher of realpolitik, peace was seldom an end in itself. His pivot to China was about boxing in the USSR. To him, the cold war and existing nation states were what mattered most. The Viet Cong earned a seat at the table because US troops were bogged down. The Palestinians were not so high on Kissinger’s agenda.Now comes Martin Indyk with a 688-page, well-woven history fittingly subtitled “Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy”. The book reflects the author’s admiration for and access to his subject.Kissinger last granted Indyk an interview at the age of 97. Now he’s 98. Indyk’s wife, Gahl Burt, once worked on Kissinger’s staff. Indyk himself is a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations. His gigs included ambassador to Israel and Middle East envoy. A former Australian national, he volunteered on a kibbutz. He checks many boxes.Master of the Game does convey a sense that Indyk wishes his own attainments equaled those of his subject. The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1998 Wye River Memorandum between the Israelis and Palestinians quickly degenerated into the second intifada, flareups in Gaza and Hamas vying with the Palestinian Authority for power on the ground.In the Obama years, Israel emerged as a partisan flashpoint in the US, like abortion and taxes, to the chagrin of the Democratic establishment and Israel’s diplomatic corps but to the delight of the Republicans and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s now former prime minister.In Master of the Game, Indyk lays out the run-up to the October war of 1973, the responses of the US and the USSR, and Kissinger’s nearly two-year hopscotch between Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus.Indyk confirms what is widely known, that while Kissinger did not explicitly give Egypt the green light to attack Israeli-occupied Sinai, he was pleased with the outcome. The war and its aftermath presented the US with the opportunity to lure Egypt out of the Soviet orbit, even if Israel had to pay a price.The war Kissinger “had not expected at the moment”, writes Indyk, “would provide him with the opportunity to manipulate antagonisms”. Those, in turn, would help “begin the construction of what he intended to be a new, more stable American-led order in the Middle East”.Israeli combat deaths topped 2,600 – reportedly more than 1,000 in the war’s first five days. At the time, Kissinger noted that the latter figure would be proportionally equal to twice the number of US deaths in eight years in Vietnam. As a result, Kissinger coldly “assumed that when he needed Israel to accept a ceasefire it would have no choice but to do so”.Kissinger saw that a ceasefire would yield territorial concessions. He got that right but the pace was not necessarily to his liking. Disengagement arrived too quickly and then too slowly for him.In spring 1975, Gerald Ford announced the reassessment of America’s relationship with Israel. Months later, in early September, Egypt and Israel entered a second disengagement agreement, a precursor to the 1978 Camp David Accords hashed out by Jimmy Carter.While “Start-up Nation” has emerged as durable military power, Indyk yearns for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.After noting the Abraham Accords, agreements between Israel and Gulf states, Indyk contends that the “Trump administration actually made matters worse” by proposing a Palestinian entity “as a heavily circumscribed enclave within Israeli territory”. He also acknowledges that the accords took Israeli annexation of the West Bank off the table.As a Talmudic dictum goes, “avar zemano, batel korbano”. Loosely translated, the train has left the station. What applies to a sacrificial rite may pertain to politics. Even the peace process came with a sell-by date. Indyk admits that “the three presidents who succeeded Clinton” tried but failed to reach a lasting agreement, but while Jared Kushner failed to snag the deal of the century, his diplomatic achievement is tangible.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read moreIndyk also explores the competing tugs on Kissinger, a refugee, of loyalty, religion and ethnicity. Richard Nixon told Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, Kissinger was prone to “indulge Israel’s nationalist sentiments”. On the other hand, Israeli protestors outside Kissinger’s hotel once bellowed: “Jew boy go home.” The Jackson-Vanick amendment, which linked preferred trade status for the USSR to its performance on emigration, infuriated Kissinger.Kissinger has plenty of detractors. Against the backdrop of Nixon’s Vietnam policy, the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, genocide in Bangladesh and East Timor and a coup and invasion in Cyprus, he has been called a war criminal.On the right, the late Phyllis Schlafly dangled Kissinger’s otherness in the face of Ford’s bid for the nomination in 1976. She said Kissinger did not understand “typical American values” and claimed that the loyalty of the German-born and accented diplomat rested with a “supranational” order.Indyk writes: “When it came to managing violent middle eastern passions and preserving peace, history’s judgment should surely be that Henry Kissinger did well.”Reasonable people will freely differ.
      Master of the Game is published in the US by Knopf
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      In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024

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      BooksIn Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024 Mike Pence and Marco Rubio are among presidential alternatives examined by a writer with knowledge and accessLloyd GreenSun 24 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 02.01 EDTDonald Trump is a defeated one-term president who cost the Republican party both houses of Congress. Yet three-quarters of Republicans want him to again run in 2024, polling that has other aspirants keeping their heads well down.‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyRead moreJoe Biden is politically vulnerable, his job approval underwater, his coalition fraying. He could meet the same fate as Trump – sans residual enthusiasm.The next Republican nominee could easily be the next president. Against this backdrop, David Drucker’s Baedeker to the current crop of wannabes is a perfectly timed and well-informed contribution.As senior political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, a conservative paper, he knows of whom and what he writes. Better yet, he has access. In Trump’s Shadow is chock-full of tidbits and trivia, the stuff on which political junkies and journalists thrive.Drucker names an array of Republican presidential hopefuls, among them long-shots such as the Texas governor, Greg Abbott; the Nebraska senator Ben Sasse; and Trump’s last national security adviser, Robert O’Brien.Drucker delivers deeper dives on former vice-president Mike Pence; the Florida senator Marco Rubio and governor, Ron DeSantis; Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations; the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton; and the governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan. In doing so, he covers the Republican ideological spectrum.Drucker also reports on an interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort and retreat. Not surprisingly, Trump has kind words for Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state; contempt for Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader; and disdain for Liz Cheney, the congresswoman from Wyoming and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney who turned against Trump over the Capitol riot.“She’s a psycho,” says the very stable genius.Trump has, however, had time to grow appreciative of “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, the Texas senator whose father and wife Trump attacked viciously during the primaries in 2016.Amid such Trumpian cacophony, Drucker reminds us of just who within the GOP is laying groundwork for runs for the White House, and how realistic their hopes might be. It is a tricky and contorting dance. But though Trump can dominate coverage, he cannot completely extinguish ambitions. Drucker pulls back the curtain on other figures’ schemes, dreams – and hard political infrastructure.Take Pence. Once a congressman from Indiana, then its governor, he began preparing for the top step on the ladder the moment he was elected Trump’s VP. Pence established a separate political operation within the White House and a fundraising Pac of his own, the Great America Committee. He used it to pay expenses while stumping for Republicans around and across the country.Trump was fine with that. It meant Pence would not look to his boss to pay his travel bills. The veep had a stash of his own.Since leaving office, Pence has also launched Advancing American Freedom, a political non-profit which touts “conservative values and policy proposals”. More importantly, it is stocked with Trump loyalists. Kellyanne Conway, the mother of “alternative facts”. Larry Kudlow, chief White House economic adviser. Newt Gingrich, once speaker of the House, a colleague on the right. All are there.Drucker also sheds light on Pence’s defiance of Trump and service to the republic, in the aftermath of a defeat by Biden which Trump sought to overturn with lies about electoral fraud. As a traditional conservative, Drucker writes, Pence was skeptical of the power of the vice-president to unilaterally steal an election. Before he certified results, he sought a legal opinion, which debunked Trump’s false claim that he could.When Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, on 6 January, some chanted “Hang Mike Pence”. Others erected a makeshift gallows. Pence was forced to hide, but he refused to leave.Ten months on, Team Pence seems not to know what to think or say. It was “a dark day in the history of the US Capitol”, Drucker records Pence telling one crowd. But Pence later told Fox News “the media wants to distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day in January”.The political momentum is clear. Pence’s own brother, a congressman from Indiana, voted against certifying the election. This week, Greg Pence was the only no-show in the House on the vote to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for defying the 6 January committee. Two-thirds of Republicans deny that the Capitol riot was an attack on the government. The right has a new Lost Cause.Drucker also does justice to Rubio, capturing the senator’s tendency to “chase the latest shiny object”, be it immigration reform in 2013 or police reform after the murder of George Floyd. He’s “the butterfly”, according to one Republican strategist.“Marco goes to every brightly colored flower and sticks his nose right in the middle of it, [then] takes a little bit of honey and stands in front of it to see if anyone’s looking at the flower.”Rigged review: shameless – and dangerous – catnip for Trump’s baseRead moreIn 2016, Rubio won three Republican nominating contests but was battered by Trump in his home state, losing the Florida primary by nearly 20 points. Before 2024, he will face a stern Senate challenge from Val Demings, an African American ex-cop and impeachment floor manager.Demings has out-raised Rubio recently but Rubio has $3m more in the bank. This, remember, is a politician who once purportedly told a friend: “I can call up a lobbyist at four in the morning, and he’ll meet me anywhere with a bag of $40,000 in cash.”He also has a history of credit card problems. Imagine what a President Rubio might do with the national debt.If nothing else, Drucker reminds us that though Trump rules Red America, like rust, ambition never sleeps. The starter’s flag on the race for the Republican nomination has yet to fall. In Trump’s Shadow is fine preparatory reading.
      In Trump’s Shadow is published in the US by Twelve
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      Rigged review: shameless – and dangerous – catnip for Trump’s base

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      BooksRigged review: shameless – and dangerous – catnip for Trump’s baseMollie Hemingway says the 2020 election ‘went terribly wrong’. In a divided America, her deeply flawed book will find readers Lloyd GreenSun 17 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 02.01 EDTThe state of the union is sulfurous. Donald Trump’s defeat did not change that.More than 80% of Trump and Biden voters think elected officials from the other party “present a clear and present danger to American democracy”. Half of Trump supporters and two-fifths for Biden think secession would be a good idea.Into the fray leaps Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway with Rigged, 488 pages on “How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections”. Hemingway’s is an immovable feast. It’s about owning the libs.“If you believe things went terribly wrong in the 2020 election, well, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone,” she writes. “But most of all, you’re not wrong.”In 2015, Hemingway branded Trump a “demagogue with no real solutions”. Now, like so many Republicans, she’s a fan. She discounts Charlottesville, where in August 2017 far-right marchers earned kind words from the president, as a “hoax”. She castigates those who denounce the events of 6 January this year, when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol.“People who call the few-hour riot at the Capitol by unarmed protesters an ‘insurrection’ are bad people who are harming the country,” she tweeted in July.The riot was an attempt to overturn the election. Five people died, a police officer among them. Rigged is catnip for Trump’s base.“They used Covid to rig an election,” Trump whines, in an interview. “There was nothing I could do.” He has been singing that song since May 2020. And then there is reality: the administration’s performative nonchalance in the face of Covid undermined Trump’s chances of reelection.That was understood by his campaign as early as spring 2020. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post, in April Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, warned that Covid could cost the boss re-election.“We have seen the enemy and it is us,” Fabrizio wrote. “It isn’t [Trump’s] policies that cause the biggest problem, it is voters’ reactions to his temperament and behavior.”Hemingway looks in other directions, pointing a finger at Democratic lawyers and voters for supposedly gaming the system amid a pandemic, berating Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for pursuing the wrong legal strategies, and ignoring comments by Bill Barr, who she interviews but who as attorney general let Trump know he had not “seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election”.It’s true that Trump might have mounted more of a fight. His campaign and the GOP had real lawyers on the payroll and Republicans were secretary of state in Arizona and Georgia. But the party had squandered the advantages of incumbency. Trump and Hemingway both go at Silicon Valley with a vengeance, reserving a special place in hell for Mark Zuckerberg.“Big tech got meaner, bigger, stronger, and they were crazed,” Trump says. As for Zuckerberg, he “should be in jail”. One suspects many Americans might agree.Hemingway criticizes the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) for funding election operations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. She contends that such private-public partnerships undermine the public’s faith in electoral integrity. For the record, courts repeatedly denied pre-election efforts to block CTCL funding. One federal judge, William C Griesbach, a George W Bush appointee, acknowledged the “receipt of private funds for public elections may give an appearance of impropriety” – but dismissed the lawsuit. Hemingway does not examine Team Trump’s own relationship with Facebook and Zuckerberg. In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct company part-owned by the Mercer family, Trump benefactors, used Facebook to illegally harvest personal data. Steve Bannon, who would become Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, was a board member and officer. He denies personal culpability.There’s more that Hemingway leaves untouched. According to The Contrarian, a recent book by Max Chafkin of Bloomberg News, in a 2019 meeting between Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and Trump ally, Zuckerberg basically agreed to champion “state-sanctioned conservatism”. Zuckerberg has called the claim “pretty ridiculous”. Thiel, an original Facebook investor, still sits on the board.It doesn’t end there. A recent lawsuit commenced by the Rhode Island Retirement System against Facebook, Zuckerberg, Thiel and his company, Palantir, alleges “significant damage” caused by the data-harvesting scandal. The suit quotes the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, in alleging that Palantir employees “regularly worked in person, during normal business hours, at the offices of Cambridge Analytica in London”.Back on the page, it seems Hemingway cannot resist the siren song of race. In Justice on Trial, her last book, about the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, she rubbished the legal underpinnings of Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 supreme court ruling that made state-imposed school segregation unconstitutional. Such decisions, she wrote, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”.It’s a unique take, with which even Trump’s three supreme court picks would not agree. Amy Coney Barrett has called Brown a “super-precedent … unthinkable” to overrule. Kavanaugh has said the same. Neil Gorsuch concedes it was properly decided.Stephanie Grisham: Trump turncoat who may be most damaging yetRead moreUndeterred, Hemingway now takes aim at the 1964 Civil Rights Act, resurrecting Barry Goldwater’s contention that it evinced “an unconstitutional usurpation of power by the federal government”. Hemingway also derides Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights as a blatant appeal to black voters.In 1964, Senator Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide. That was the last time a Democrat accomplished that feat – or won the “white vote”, for that matter.The news remains a battleground. Ryan Williams, president of the rightwing Claremont Institute, has made it known his mission is to save western civilization.“We believe in truth and reason,” he recently told the Atlantic. “The question is whose truth and whose reason.”Williams also said “a third of the country thinks the election was given to Biden fraudulently”. Hemingway is sure to find an audience.
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      ‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracy

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      BooksInterview‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyCharles Kaiser The California Democrat’s new memoir, Midnight in Washington, examines his life before politics as well as his leading roles in impeachment and other dramas on Capitol HillSun 10 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTGreat crises in American political life often produce a new hero, someone whose courage and charisma capture the imagination of the decent half of the country.Supreme court, Facebook, Fed: three horsemen of democracy’s apocalypseRead moreIn the 1950s, when Joe McCarthy terrorized America with wild claims of communists lurking in every army barracks and state department corridor, it was an attorney, Joseph Walsh, who demanded of the Wisconsin senator: “At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?”Twenty years later, when the country was transfixed by the Watergate hearings, it was a folksy senator from North Carolina, a first world war veteran named Sam Ervin, who won hearts with sayings like: “There is nothing in the constitution that authorizes or makes it the official duty of a president to have anything to do with criminal activities.”Forty years on, after Donald Trump entered the White House mining what Adam Schiff calls “a dangerous vein of autocratic thought” in the Republican party, the then little-known California Democrat did more than anyone else to unravel and excoriate the high crimes of a charlatan destined to be the only president twice impeached.During the pandemic, Schiff used his confinement to write a memoir which offers a beguiling mix of the personal and political. The book, Midnight in Washington, is full of new details about investigations of the president’s treason and how the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic caucus decided impeachment was necessary.But the human side of the story is the most compelling part: the history of Schiff’s Jewish-immigrant ancestors, the sustenance he received from a brilliant wife and a devoted son and daughter, a career path that made him the perfect person to meet his moment in history.“I enjoyed writing the first part of the book the most,” Schiff said. “In so many ways I feel like the life I had before Trump prepared me for the national trial that was to come.“The prosecution of an FBI agent for spying for the Russians. Living in eastern Europe and watching the rise of an autocrat in Czechoslovakia literally tear the country apart. And my own family’s history in eastern Europe. All of these things seemed to prepare me without knowing it for the rise of a xenophobic autocrat in our own country.”In choppy political waters, a brilliant spouse is a great advantage – especially one who sometimes knows you better than you know yourself. When the Democratic establishment recruited him to run for Congress, after he was elected to the California senate, Schiff thought he was undecided. His wife, Eve, knew otherwise.“You’re going to do it,” she said, after he came back from meetings in Washington.“I don’t know,” he replied.“Yes, you do,” said Eve. “You’re going to do it.”She was right.Schiff’s love of bipartisanship, which ended with the Trump presidency, was inherited from his father, a “yellow dog Democrat” (a person who would vote for a yellow dog before he would vote Republican) and his Republican mother.His father offered him advice that has served him all his life: “As long as you are good at what you do, there will always be a demand for you.”“This was a very liberating idea,” Schiff writes, “that all I needed to do was focus on being good at my chosen profession and the rest would take care of itself.”Stephanie Grisham: Trump turncoat who may be most damaging yetRead moreHis work as a federal prosecutor who got the conviction of the first FBI agent accused of spying for Russia was crucial to his understanding of how thoroughly Trump was manipulated by the Russians. He understood that Michael Cohen’s efforts during the campaign to close a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow would make Trump vulnerable to blackmail if his lawyer’s calls had been recorded. And he was astonished when he realized that that kind of kompromat wouldn’t even be necessary.When Trump “did become president, there would be no need for the Kremlin to blackmail him into betraying America’s interests,” Schiff writes. “To a remarkable degree, he would prove more than willing to do that on his own.”There’s lots more in the book, from Schiff’s unsuccessful effort to convince New York Times editors to remind readers the emails they were publishing to undermine Hillary Clinton had been stolen by the Russians for that very purpose, to Schiff’s revelation that if he had known how poorly Robert Mueller would perform as a witness after he completed his stint as special counsel, he would not have demanded his testimony.“I haven’t said this before this book,” he told the Guardian. “That was one of the difficult sections of the book to write because I have such reverence for Mueller. I wanted to be respectful but accurate.”Schiff is still at the center of political events. He sits on the House select committee investigating the deadly Capitol attack – and dealing with Trump’s obstruction.On the page, he also recalls a hearing in 2017 when he asked representatives of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube if their “algorithms were having the effect of balkanizing the public and deepening the divisions in our society”.Facebook’s general counsel pretended: “The data on this is actually quite mixed.”“Maybe that was so,” Schiff writes, “but it didn’t seem very mixed to me.”Asked if he thought this week’s testimony from the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen would create enough pressure to pass new laws regulating social media platforms, Schiff said: “The answer is yes.“I think we need regulation to protect people’s private data. I think we need to narrow the scope of the safe harbor these companies enjoy if they don’t moderate their contents and continue to amplify anger and hate. I think we need to insist on a vehicle for more transparency so we understand the data better.”But then he cautioned: “If you bet against Congress, you win 90% of the time.”‘Eureka moment’On the page, Schiff records an airport exchange with a Republican stranger, who said: “You can tell me – there’s nothing to this ‘collusion stuff’, is there?”It is a conversation which should put that question permanently to rest.The silence of Donald Trump: how Twitter’s ban is cramping his styleRead moreSchiff said: “What if I was to tell you that we had evidence in black and white that the Russians approached the Clinton campaign and offered dirt on Donald Trump, then met secretly with Chelsea Clinton, John Podesta and Robby Mook in the Brooklyn headquarters of the campaign … then Hillary lied about it to cover it up. Would you call that collusion?“Now what If I also told you that after the election, former national security adviser Susan Rice secretly talked with the Russian ambassador in an effort to undermine US sanctions on Russia after they interfered to help Hillary win. Would you call that collusion?”The Republican was convinced: “You know, I probably would.”For Schiff, it was a “eureka moment”.“Now,” he thought, “if I can only speak to a couple hundred million people.”Schiff’s book should convince a few million more that everything he said about Trump was true – and that the country was exceptionally lucky to have him ready and willing to defend the tattered concept of “truth”.
      Midnight in Washington is published by Random House
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