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      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate world

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      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate worldBefore he helped bring down Richard Nixon, the reporter grew up in a school of hard knocks. His memoir is a treasure Few reporters are synonymous with their craft. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post is one, his former partner, Carl Bernstein, another. Together, they broke open the Watergate scandal, helped send a president’s minions to prison and made Richard Nixon the only man to resign the office. On the big screen, Robert Redford played Woodward. Bernstein got Dustin Hoffman.These days, Bernstein is a CNN analyst and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Chasing History, his sixth book, is a warm and inviting read.Now 77, he writes with the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of self-imposed deadlines. His prose is dry and reflective even as it draws in the reader. This is his look back and valedictory, with a fitting subtitle: “A Kid in the Newsroom.”He describes life before the Post, in pages marked with politics – and haberdashery.“I needed a suit.” So the book begins. Shortly thereafter: “My mother and father, in the early 1950s, had taken me with them to join the sit-ins at Woodward & Lothrop to desegregate its tea room.”“Woodies”, a department store, closed in 1995. In the 50s, rather than testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, Bernstein’s mother invoked her right against self-incrimination. His father suffered for past membership in the Communist party. The FBI of J Edgar Hoover was an unwelcome presence in the Bernsteins’ lives.Still in high school, Bernstein worked as a part-time copy boy for the Washington Star. “Now that I’d covered the inauguration of JFK, Mr Adelman’s chemistry class interested me even less,” he confesses.He barely scraped out of high school, flunked out of the University of Maryland and lost his deferment from the Vietnam draft. He found a spot in a national guard unit, removing the possibility of deployment and combat. Chasing History also includes a copy of Bernstein’s college transcript, which advertises a sea of Fs and the capitalized notation: “ACADEMICALLY DISMISSED 1-27-65.”On the other hand, before he was old enough to vote, Bernstein had covered or reported more than most journalists do in a lifetime. The 1960 presidential election, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, desegregation and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. All were part of his remit.The integration of DC’s barber shops, a race-fueled brawl at a high school football game, the death of a newspaper vendor. In a nation in upheaval, all captured Bernstein’s attention.He is one of the last of his breed, a national reporter without a degree. Chasing History reminds us that by the mid-1960s, newsrooms were no longer dominated by working-class inflections. Carbon paper, hot lead typesetting, ink-stained fingers and smocks would also give way, to computers and digitization.The Ivy League emerged as a training ground of choice. Television would outpace print. Rough edges would be smoothed and polished, a premium placed on facts. Hard-knocks, not so much.“A big generational change was occurring in the journalism trade,” Bernstein writes. “Editors wanted college graduates now. My view was that you might be better prepared by graduating from horticultural school than from Yale or Princeton.”The kicker: “At least that way you could write the gardening column.”Emphasis on the word “might”, though. Woodward went to Yale. To this day, they count each other as friends.Chasing History is more about gratitude than grievance. For 10 pages, Bernstein recalls the names of his “young friends”, their “remarkable paths”, his intersection with those who would emerge as “historical footnotes” and his “teachers and mentors”.Lance Morrow, formerly of Time and the Wall Street Journal, makes it on to the dedication page. They were housemates and worked at the Star. Later, their careers flourished. Morrow, according to Bernstein, “occupies a unique place in the journalism of our time” and has been an “incomparable joy” in the author’s life.Likewise, Ben Stein – and his appearance as an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in 1986 – earns more than a passing shoutout. The fact Stein and his father served in the Nixon administration did not dent Bernstein’s fondness. They grew up nextdoor to each other in the DC suburbs. In junior high, the boys founded a “lox-and-bagel/Sunday New York Times delivery service”. The two see each other yearly.Bernstein also pays his respects to David Broder, the late dean of the political press corps. On 23 November 1962, as a copy boy, Bernstein took dictation from Broder, who was in Dallas that fateful Friday afternoon. Years later, Broder provided a useful tip that helped shape the path and coverage of “Woodstein’s” Watergate reporting.One mentor of particular note was George Porter, a Star bureau chief to whom Bernstein refers respectfully as Mr Porter and who regularly gave Bernstein a ride to the office. During the Democratic primaries in 1964, Porter dispatched Bernstein to cover George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor. Wallace never had a chance but his candidacy was newsworthy. Think Donald Trump, prototype.Why the US media ignored Murdoch’s brazen bid to hijack the presidency | Carl BernsteinRead moreLyndon Johnson, a Democrat, was in the White House but Wallace got nearly 30% in Indiana. When Wallace turned to Maryland, Bernstein was there on the ground.It was the first time he’d “seen a demagogue inflame the emotions of American citizens who I’d thought were familiar to me”.Wallace lost but netted 40% and a majority of white votes. In defeat, he blamed Black voters, except he chose a word that began with “N”, and an “incompetent press”, for failing to recognize his appeal. The church, labor unions, Ted Kennedy and “every other Democratic senator from the north” were also subjects of Wallace’s scorn.Chasing History is part-autobiography, part-history lesson. Amid continued turbulence, Bernstein’s memoirs are more than mere reminiscence.
      Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom is published in the US by Henry Holt & Company
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      The Steal review: stethoscope for a democracy close to cardiac arrest

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      The Steal review: stethoscope for a democracy close to cardiac arrest Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague have produced an indispensable and alarming ground-level record of how Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election played out in precincts and ballot-counting centers in key statesIn their terrific new book, the veteran reporters Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague argue that the mob that invaded the Capitol in Washington almost exactly a year ago “had no more chance of overthrowing the US government than hippies in 1967 had trying to levitate the Pentagon”.From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animalsRead moreThe “real insurrection” was the one “led by Trump and his coterie of sycophants” in Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. It “was only slightly better organized than the mob but considerably more calculated and dangerous”.That real insurrection is the subject of this timely and important volume. The authors have used a stethoscope to examine the minutia of the American election process. The result is a thrilling and suspenseful celebration of the survival of democracy.The attempted coup was led by Donald Trump. Its intended denouement, in which the vice-president, Mike Pence, would ignore the votes of the six states above plus Washington DC in order to swing the election to Trump, was outlined in an insane memo written by the lawyer John Eastman, described here as “surely the most seditious document to emerge from the White House in American history”.That final act, of course, never happened. Not even Pence, the most sycophantic vice-president of modern times, could bring himself to violate the constitution so blatantly to keep his boss in the White House.But the genuine heroes, brought to life here, were the “hundreds of obscure Americans from every walk of life, state and local officials, judges and election workers. Many of them were Republicans, some were Trump supporters. They refused to accept his slander of themselves, their communities and their workers, and they refused to betray their sworn duty to their office and their country. They were the real patriots.”Bowden and Teague – the latter a Guardian contributor – take us through six battles that lasted from the night of the election, 3 November 2020, until Joe Biden’s election was finally certified by Congress early on 7 January last year.Their book performs a vital service, demonstrating just how well our tattered democracy managed to function despite vicious partisanship and all the new challenges created by the pandemic. For the first time, I understood how brilliantly new machines used to count the votes performed, the intricacies of opening outer and inner envelopes, capturing the images of both then preserving the vital paper ballots inside, making it possible to confirm electronic results with a hand count in case of any failure in technology.In Arizona, the elections department conducted “the mandatory hand count of election day ballots from 2% of the vote centers and 1% of the early ballots as required by Arizona law and it yielded a 100% match to the results produced by the tabulation equipment”.Scott Jarrett was co-director of elections in the populous Maricopa county, and he is one of the crucial bureaucrats celebrated here: “A pale slender young man … dressed in a plain gray suit, the very picture of an earnest functionary, a man happily engaged in the actual machinery of government and quietly proud of his own unheralded importance and competence.”In a public hearing crowded with crazed conspiracy theorists, Jarrett carefully explained how only one of the two “encrypted memory cards (both with tamper-proof evidence seals)” was transported from various polling centers to the main counting location, “so that the results on one card could be double-checked against the other as well as the precinct ballot report they had generated. Backing up that memory were, of course, the actual ballots that had been run through the machines. The memory cards and the ballots were sealed and delivered by “two members of different parties”, escorted by county sheriffs.Clint Hickman, chairman of the Maricopa county board of supervisors, noted that if the eyes of some in the audience were glazing over, he just wanted “people that are watching this” to understand “we don’t glaze over”.The authors point out that Hickman was touching on a fundamental feature of The Steal, the factitious narrative concocted by Trump and his cronies: conspiracy theorists depend on ignorance.“They begin with distrust: only a sucker believes the official story. They then replace the often tedious, mundane details of an intricate process … with a simpler narrative”: theft.They invent colorful stories about a “deal struck with a late Venezuelan dictator to deliver tainted election machines, or a plot to preprint fake ballots in the dead of night”. This creates what cognitive scientists call “a community of knowledge”.The big problem that didn’t exist even 30 years ago is the speed with which such idiotic stories are spread through the internet and by the Twitter feed of a malevolent president like Trump, exploding the reach of such stories and their power to undermine democratic norms.March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican readsRead moreThe book reminds us that democracy itself depends on a modicum of trust. That is why Trump’s ability to persuade so many Americans of the truth of so many lies has had such a disastrous effect on our body politic.Bowden and Teague have performed a singular service by revealing the details that disprove Republicans’ unceasing inventions about voter fraud.The problem is that so many Republicans will continue to ignore the lessons of this book. American democracy could still be destroyed by the torrent of voter suppression laws already passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures, spurred by lies invented by Trump and amplified by insidious “journalists” like Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson, whose perfidy is brilliantly dissected in these pages.If democracy does prevail, it will survive because of the ability of authors like Teague and Bowden to make the truth even more compelling than Fox News fictions.
      The Steal is published in the US by Atlantic Monthly Press
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      Democracy Lives In Darkness review: how to take politics off the holiday dinner table

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      Democracy Lives In Darkness review: how to take politics off the holiday dinner tableEmily Van Duyn’s study of a group of liberal women in rural Texas is thought-provoking reading for the holiday period

      From Peril to Betrayal: the year in US politics books
      In 2015, Saturday Night Live spoofed the rancorous political arguments besieging American social life.‘It’s who they are’: gun-fetish photo a symbol of Republican abasement under TrumpRead moreCast members seated around a dining table to celebrate Thanksgiving passed the side dishes and threw invective. The verbal heat rose and rose until a young girl pressed play on a cassette player and the Adele song Hello washed over the room. The combatants instantly ceased fire and began lip-synching the lyrics. Their rapture escalated until they physically entered a re-creation of the music video.A Thanksgiving Miracle aired before the Trump presidency and its violent subversive conclusion. This holiday season, it’s hard to think of a song capable of transporting Americans into a state of blissful unity. Masks and vaccines have become an issue and assault weapons have cropped up as accessories on congressional Christmas cards. But there is an alternative to mutually assured bad-mouthing. Americans can meet clandestinely among the like-minded, not just to commiserate but also to plan and participate in election campaigns.Emily Van Duyn, a political communications scholar, embedded with one such group in Texas in 2017. Her book chronicles the journey of 136 liberal women living in a rural and thus predominantly conservative Texas town who, determined to resist Trump, organized themselves into what Van Duyn anonymizes as the Community Women’s Group (CWG).They were middle-aged and senior white women (save one who was Black), afraid to speak their minds and put up yard signs. The author interviewed 24 of them multiple times, attended their monthly meetings on a dozen occasions, and examined meeting minutes from November 2016, when they were in tears and shock, until December 2020, at which point their politicking had yielded higher vote totals for Democrats in the previous month’s election, though not enough to prevail anywhere on the ballot.Van Duyn also conducted a national and statewide survey in 2018, from which she concluded that more than one in five American adults felt the need to hide their politics, and just under one in 10 operated in similarly self-obscured conversational settings.The study explains how social, geographic and political causes shaped the communication practices of the CWG.“[T]he growing animosity between and within parties, the uncertainty about truth, the growing intersectional animosity around ideology, race, class, and gender, made for a political context that was not only unpleasant but risky.”Trump palpably threatened their sense of security as women. Locally, they feared ostracization, loss of business (especially the real estate agents), defacement of property and being run off the road by men in trucks with guns who noticed liberal bumper-stickers, as happened at least once and was talked about often.Van Duyn excels at detailing the evolution of CWG’s communications practices, a mix of private and public facing activities conducted through physical as well as digital channels. Many members had grown up deferring to men about matters political. But a week after Trump’s victory one of them sent an email to eight neighbors: “I would like to suggest that we get together for support and see where that takes us.”That got forwarded, and 50 showed up at the first meeting. In a remote location, with the blinds closed, they wrote a mission statement and formed committees by issue to educate themselves. That super-structure soon fell by the wayside. Their formalized confidentiality agreement held, however. Between meetings they relied on a listserv to communicate among themselves with a brief detour into a secret Facebook group.In their darkened space (the book title inverts the slogan of the Washington Post) they opened each meeting with talk about their fears. A few started sending letters to the editor of the local newspaper using their individual identity, often to register dissent with and fact-check other letter writers. Over the two years of the study, about half emerged as open Democrats. They worked on mobilizing other Democrats (even though not all were registered or comfortable with the party), leaving the heavy labor of persuasion to formal campaigns. Their work shored up the party in their county: they ran phone banks, filled district chairs, updated voter files and raised money. The group had served as a safe harbor to develop political skills and confidence.CWG falls into several political traditions, including the voluntary associations that De Tocqueville valorized, the hidden minorities who have suffered the weights of oppression and, for that matter, the collectives of oppressors and cultists.Women are a demographic majority in America, and the political positions of CWG would fit in the national mainstream. But these women were neither in the contexts of their lives. Even so, by the end of the period Van Duyn examines, their politicking mirrored that of more open demographic counterparts such as the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County, a group that helped first-time candidate Abigail Spanberger turn a central Virginia seat Democratic in 2018 – one that she now has to decamp for a newly re-drawn district.Some Republicans at holiday gatherings this year will continue to relish the opportunity to bait liberals (a practice that goes both ways). They may emulate Trump’s style of discourse, centered on a barrage of lies, exaggerations, accusations and taunts. Or they may not do any of these things; as Trump said about southern border-crossers in 2015 “some, I assume, are good people”. Indeed, some Republicans may feel intimidated by progressive majorities in workplaces and on campuses.All told, the risks of escalated, energy draining crossfire between America’s political tribes have risen and intensified. So this holiday season is no time for engaging others in political matters, for disputing the veracity of their claims and integrity of their motives. Far better to smile wanly, deflect provocations, change the subject, and then join or form a political support group. As Van Duyn’s book shows, good things can follow from going underground.
      Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret is published in the US by Oxford University Press
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      Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policy

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      Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policyBarak Ravid has written a fascinating account of four chaotic years in which some progress was nonetheless made Trump’s Peace is a blockbuster of a book. Barak Ravid captures the 45th president saying “Fuck him” to Benjamin Netanyahu and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures. Imagine the Republican reaction if Barack Obama had done that. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham would plotz. But Trump? Crickets.The State of Israel vs The Jews review: fierce indictment of a rightward lurch Read moreRavid also delivers a mesmerizing tick-tock of the making of the Abraham Accords, the normalization of Israel’s relations with four non-neighboring Arab states.Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Yousef al-Otaiba – the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the US – and members of Israel’s government took the time to talk. Ravid footnotes the receipts.The result is a well-paced and engrossing read, if in Hebrew only for now. Israel-born and based, Ravid writes for Axios and Walla, an Israeli website. He knows his subject. Netanyahu is caught telling Avi Berkowitz, Kushner’s deputy and a US negotiator, not to leak to the author. Instead, Berkowitz talked on the record.Technically, the Abraham Accords are a joint declaration signed by the US, Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. Practically, the agreements represent the first major breakthrough in Middle East peace since the October 1994 treaty between Israel and Jordan. Unlike the Hashemite kingdom, the UAE and Bahrain do not border Israel, are graced with petroleum reserves, and stare at Iran across the Persian Gulf.According to Ravid, the nuclear threat posed by Tehran and the unrest that followed the Arab Spring reshaped policies and thinking towards normalizing relations with Israel. The Palestinians no longer occupied center stage.Ravid reports that Netanyahu backtracked on a commitment to annex part of the West Bank after being subjected to US pressure. Apparently, the Trump administration made clear it would continue to shield Israel in the United Nations security council but would not at the International Criminal Court. Netanyahu got the message. It came down to a UAE ultimatum: settlements or peace. Netanyahu blinked.Ravid regards Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, also known as MBZ, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, as an unsung hero. He compares MBZ to Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who made peace with Israel then paid with his life.By the numbers, the Abraham Accords are yielding dividends. The UAE has announced a $10bn investment fund in key Israeli economic sectors and envisions more than $1tn in trade over a decade. Saudi Arabia looks to Bahrain as a conduit for investment in Israel and the Biden administration is “leaning” into the accords, after first hesitating.Ravid portrays Trump and Netanyahu as divisive leaders who threatened their countries’ democratic moorings. He recounts the 6 January insurrection in the US and Netanyahu’s resort to incitement. And yet, Ravid argues, fairness demands that both receive credit for this particular accomplishment.Understandably, Ravid is more ambivalent toward the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, a legacy of the Obama administration hated by Netanyahu and Trump. In Trump’s telling, his decision to pull out was not the result of Israeli urging. Rather, the deal was flawed and deserved to be scrapped.That verdict is not unanimous. Ravid quotes Udi Lavie, former deputy chief of the Mossad, who says the US withdrawal did not benefit Israel but hurt it. At the same time, Ravid observes that Netanyahu and Yossi Cohen, a former head of the Mossad, harbor no such regrets.Negotiations with the Iranian regime continue, with no tangible signs of progress. As Israel girds for possible conflict, its message is conflicted.A recent New York Times headline blared: Israeli Defense Officials Cast Doubt on Threat to Attack Iran. On the other hand, Amos Yadlin, a former air force general, told the paper his country has the capability for a successful strike.“Can the American air force can do it better? Definitely. But they don’t have the will.”Or necessarily the same strategic interests. Trump’s ascendance in 2016 was directly related to the Iraq war and its casualty count.Ravid also offers his take on Trumpworld. He stresses that Kushner was neither ideologue nor idealist. At heart he was a businessman, sympathetic to Israel but not seeing annexation as a personal cause. Nor, Ravid says, was Kushner driven by religious sentiment – as was Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state. The Messiah could wait.Nor, unlike Condi Rice, George W Bush’s secretary of state, did Kushner regard Palestinians stuck at Israeli check-points as – in Ravid’s words – “the reincarnation of Rosa Parks on a bus in Alabama”.In contrast to Kushner, David Friedman, Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and ambassador to Israel, viewed the two-state solution as an “illusion”. Before he took office, he derided Jews on the left as “worse than Kapos”. His nomination narrowly cleared the Senate.‘We are family’: the Israelis sharing life and hope with PalestiniansRead moreAs ambassador, Friedman was close to Netanyahu, sitting in on Israeli government meetings until he was tossed out by cabinet members. Ravid describes Friedman as “flesh of the settlers’ flesh”. Friedman has taken issue with portions of Ravid’s reporting – and has a book due in February.Earlier this year, Friedman told the Times he would not rule out becoming a US-Israeli dual national, but not until Trump’s plans for 2024 were known.“I’m going to stay American-only for at least four years,” he said. “I want to give myself every opportunity to return to government.”Maybe, maybe not. Trump remains on the stage, ready to kneecap any competitor for the Republican nomination. Netanyahu is standing trial on bribery and corruption charges while leading the opposition bloc in Israel’s Knesset.Paradoxically, his efforts to cling to power may be the best insurance policy for the current coalition government. One thing is certain: the two men created facts on the ground that will outlast them both.
      Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East is published in Israel by Yedioth Ahronoth Books
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      From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animals

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      From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animals 2021 provided a glut of memoirs, deep dives and tell-alls about American politics in an age of Covid and attacks on democracy itself. Which were the best – and most alarming?If in recent years American politics books have been noted mainly for ephemera, in 2021 the winds of history began to blow open the doors – occasionally to devastating effect. The advent of a new administration loosened tongues and made documents more readily available as some sought redemption, justification or simply fame.March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican readsRead moreSuch books illustrate the truth that one cannot keep a thing hidden and generally share certain characteristics that convey the ring of truth. They report bitterly angry outbursts by Donald Trump, staff reeling from dysfunction, chaos and the pressures of a campaign in a pandemic. They frequently recount interviews with Trump himself. They contain sufficient profanity to make sailors blush.And, happily, this paper celebrated its bicentennial in part by scooping many of them, with real consequences in the case of Mark Meadows, who published The Chief’s Chief this month. Some – the former White House chief of staff in particular – may wish they had not written books. But some books are essential to understand the danger in which the country finds itself.The former FBI director James Comey opened the year with Saving Justice, a second book defending the rule of law. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes followed with Lucky, a quick but full postmortem of the 2020 campaign, noting: “Luck, it has been said, is the residue of design. It was for Joe Biden, and for the republic.”The heart of the year was a series of blockbusters from prominent reporters, each containing significant new information on aspects of the chaos that was 2020. Michael Bender led off with Frankly, We Did Win This Election, in which Trump’s words, on the record, are unsurprising but nonetheless shocking.In Landslide, Michael Wolff completed his Trump trilogy with a focus on the campaign – including Chris Christie, in debate preparation (as a result of which he tested positive for Covid), earning Trump’s ire for asking hard but predictable questions on Covid response and family scandals – and on a post-election dominated by Trump’s anger as the levers of power, including the supreme court of which he chose three members, failed to overturn his defeat.Wolff is keenly analytic: as he writes, Trump “knew nothing of government, [his supporters] knew nothing about government, so the context of government itself became beside the point”. Instead, Trump was “the star – never forget that – and the base was his audience”. This self-referential and adulatory mode of governing failed in a divided country facing a pandemic and rising international challenges. Landslide is a fine book, though as new evidence from the 6 January committee emerges, Wolff’s conclusion limiting Trump’s own knowledge of and responsibility for the events of that day may come to seem premature.Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker followed with I Alone Can Fix It, in which Gen Mark Milley said the US was in a “Reichstag moment” on 2 January, four days before the insurrection, and referred to “the gospel of the Führer” poisoning American democracy. Trump’s anger at his pollster, Tony Fabrizio, for being the bearer of bad news on Covid and the electorate is telling too: “They’re tired? They’re fatigued?” Politics as empathy was not the campaign’s theme.Bob Woodward, writing with Robert Costa, likewise completed his Trump series with Peril, whose title sums up its conclusion. The book, notable for revealing Gen Milley’s attempts to reassure the Chinese military in the waning days of the presidency, quotes Trump’s apparent view that “real power [is] fear” and asks, “Were there any limits to what he and his supporters might do to put him back in power?”Adam Schiff’s Midnight in Washington brings a former prosecutor’s eye and perspective of a House intelligence committee chairman to issues surrounding Trump and Russia. His book is both history and warning.Among Trump loyalists, former trade czar Peter Navarro released In Trump Time, in which he criticized Meadows and anyone else he deemed insufficiently loyal. The book’s most memorable line calls Vice-President Mike Pence “Brutus” to Trump’s “American Caesar” – all without irony or, one hopes, knowledge of Roman history.Not all notable books were tell-alls. Some contained real policy insights. Josh Rogin’s Chaos Under Heaven looks at US-China relations from a strategic as well as pandemic perspective, noting US conflicts of both interest and policy as well as Trump’s inability to develop a workable strategy. Rival books on antitrust policy by two very different senators, Amy Klobuchar and Josh Hawley, illustrate Congress’ increased focus on large technology companies. Evan Osnos’ Wildland chronicles the lives and fortunes of billionaires and the growth of the Washington machine – and the effects, including rightward political shifts, on those at the bottom. On a related theme, in Misfire Tim Mak delivers a shocking history of the National Rifle Association and its former leaders.Several books will serve as first drafts of history. Madam Speaker, Susan Page’s biography of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, describes how she “took on the boys club and won” through mastery of legislation and her caucus. Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue compiles the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinions, speeches and other documents, with Amanda Tyler as co-author.Uncontrolled Spread review: Trump’s first FDA chief on the Covid disasterRead moreUnsurprisingly in the second year of a pandemic, healthcare featured prominently. In The Ten-Year War, Jonathan Cohn recounts the 10-year history of Obamacare. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain tells the sad and painful story of the promotion of opioids in America. On the pandemic, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta in Nightmare Scenario focus on the Trump administration’s response. Leaving responsibility mostly to the states had deleterious consequences, as did chaos, turf wars and giving priority to “the demands of Trump and his base” as he sought reelection rather than an effective response.Scott Gottlieb, a well-regarded former FDA commissioner, takes a broader, more philosophical view in Uncontrolled Spread. Absence of leadership and a “sizeable enterprise devoted to manufacturing skepticism” about the virus and public health solutions meant the US failed the bar of “delay[ing] its onset and reduc[ing] its scope and severity”. But the Operation Warp Speed vaccine effort “proved what government could accomplish when it functions well” and makes one keenly regret the absence of leadership elsewhere as confirmed US deaths, so many among the unvaccinated, surpass 800,000.The pandemic’s broader impact is equally profound. In Gottlieb’s words, “Covid normalized the breakdowns in a global order that it was presumed, perhaps naively, would protect us, just as Covid pierced our own perception of domestic resiliency, cooperation, and fortitude.” Vaccine hesitancy in the face of clear science is only one pandemic effect.‘Pence was disloyal at exactly the right time’: author Jonathan Karl on the Capitol attackRead moreWith honorable mentions for Wolff, Leonnig and Rucker, Woodward and Costa, and Gottlieb, ABC’s Jonathan Karl produced arguably the year’s most significant book in Betrayal, in which Trump cabinet members “paint a portrait of a wrath-filled president, untethered from reality, bent on revenge”. The attorney general, Bill Barr, decries election-related conspiracies; the acting defense secretary, Chris Miller, seeks to dissuade Trump from attacking Iran by taking (and faking) an extreme position in favour:
      Oftentimes, with provocative people, if you get more provocative than them, they then have to dial it down.
      Such was government in the Trump era.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Nobel Lecture that “one word of truth shall outweigh the whole world”. The amount of newly uncovered truth is already outweighing a fair number of the more than 4,000 exoplanets Nasa has recorded.Yet the vital question remains: what will Americans, in particular Republican officials and independent voters, do with this information? As Karl wrote, “The continued survival of our republic may depend, in part, on the willingness of those who promoted Trump’s lies and those who remained silent to acknowledge they were wrong.”Is it to be Solzhenitsyn’s hope – or his fear that “when we are told again the old truth, we shall not even remember that we once possessed it”?TopicsBooksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationBiden administrationJoe BidenRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican reads

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      March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican reads The former chief of staff has written the most consequential Trump book – if not, thanks to the revelation of the great Covid cover-up, in quite the way he planned. In contrast, McEnany, Navarro and Atlas just play fast and loose with the truthThe Chief’s Chief is the most consequential book on the Trump presidency. In his memoir, Mark Meadows confesses to possibly putting Joe Biden’s life in jeopardy and then covering it up – all in easily digested prose and an unadorned voice. If nothing else, the book has provided plenty of ammunition for Donald Trump to have concluded that Meadows “betrayed” him.Trump tested positive for Covid few days before Biden debate, chief of staff says in new bookRead moreTrump has trashed The Chief’s Chief as “fake news”, derided Meadows as “fucking stupid”, and falsely claimed that the book “confirmed” that he “did not have Covid before or during the debate”.Actually, when it comes to events in Cleveland on 29 September 2020, Meadows writes: “We’ll probably never know whether President Trump was positive that evening.” But we know he very well might have been.And to think Trump gave Meadows a blurb for his cover: “We will have a big future together”. Hopefully, Meadows received at least 30 pieces of silver as an advance.By the numbers, Trump came in contact with approximately 500 people between the time he received his first positive test, which was followed by a negative one, and his announcement that he did indeed have Covid. Not surprisingly, Trump blamed others for giving him the virus, even intimating that gold star military families did it.Last week, after the Guardian broke news of Meadows’ book, Michael Shear of the New York Times recalled: “Hours after he received the call from Meadows informing him of a positive test, Trump came to the back of AF1 without a mask and talked with reporters for about 10 minutes.”“Several days later”, Shear himself tested positive.The 45th president looks like “patient zero”, a one-man super-spreader.Switching topics, Meadows tags Biden for getting overly handsy and says Andrew Cuomo ogled Hope Hicks. Unsurprisingly, Meadows omits mention of allegations against his own boss. Just one example? E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against Trump, arising from an alleged rape in a department store dressing room.Turning to Republican politics, Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, accuses John Boehner, once House Speaker, of acting like a “Mafia Don”. Again, Meadows does not mention the boss’s behavior.As reported by Joshua Green in Devil’s Bargain, Trump once laced into Paul Manafort, his sometime campaign manager, thus: “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?”Manafort was convicted on bank and tax charges in 2018. But he stayed a loyal foot soldier and received a pardon from Trump.With Christmas just weeks away, Meadows throws in the following Trump quote as a holiday bonus: “I’m the only one who can save us.”Meadows isn’t the sole Trump administration alum doing his darnedest to portray their guy as America’s saviour. But he is the only one who lets us know Trump tested positive before he tested negative. And that makes his book one for the ages.Other would-be stocking stuffers by Trump insiders convey that they were either in the dark about that fateful Covid test or took care not to share. Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s final press secretary; Peter Navarro, an economics adviser; and Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser, are out with books of their own.Kayleigh McEnany’s book claims don’t stand up to assurances that she didn’t lieRead moreIn her non-tell-all, McEnany makes sure we know of her academic credentials and reiterates her claim that she never lied to reporters. After all, she writes, her education at “Oxford, Harvard and Georgetown” meant she always relied on “truthful, well-sourced, well-researched information”.She doesn’t mention her time at the University of Miami much. But no matter. Elite degrees say more about future earnings and marriage prospects than a penchant for truth. Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania. Boris Johnson, Oxford. Richard Nixon went to Duke and Bill Clinton is a graduate of Yale.Nixon was disbarred, Clinton’s law license suspended. Boris is Boris.McEnany thanks the deity repeatedly. Her title, For Such a Time as This, riffs off the Book of Esther. She stays on message for more than 200 pages, lauding Trump for standing for “faith, conservatism and freedom”. But that first positive Covid test, on 26 September, described by Meadows and since confirmed by Maggie Haberman and other pillars of the Washington press? Nada.McEnany writes that on 1 October 2020, two days after the Trump-Biden debate, she learned for the first time that Trump and Melania had “tested positive for Covid-19”. On 2 October, Trump was helicoptered to hospital. On 5 October, McEnany was told she had the virus too. She does not draw a line to Trump’s recklessness.“Thankfully,” she writes, “everyone in the White House made a full and complete recovery, including me.”Not true. McEnany does not mention Crede Bailey, head of the White House security office. When she was Trump’s press secretary, she did.Asked about Bailey at a briefing, McEnany said: “Our heart goes out to his family. They have asked for privacy. And he is recovering, from what I understand. We are very pleased to see that. But he and his family will be in our prayers.”On a GoFundMe page set up to help pay for Bailey’s treatment, a friend wrote: “Crede beat Covid-19 but it came at a significant cost: his big toe on his left foot as well as his right foot and lower leg had to be amputated.” Bailey also suffered long-term lung, heart, liver and kidney damage. According to his family, Trump has never publicly acknowledged Bailey’s “illness”.McEnany delivers a bouquet to Meadows.“You were a constant reminder of faith,” she gushes. “Thank you for being an inspiring leader for the entire West Wing.”Navarro would probably disagree. In fact, it’s a good bet he would concur with Trump’s new assessment of Meadows’ intelligence.In his book, In Trump Time, Navarro repeatedly takes Meadows to task for insufficient loyalty and accessibility. According to Navarro, after Trump lost to Biden, the White House chief of staff’s heart and body were too often not at the White House.“Wherever the heck” Meadows was, Navarro says, he sounded “like Napoleon after Waterloo, getting ready to be shipped out to Elba”.Navarro also blames Meadows for failing to heed a purported warning in 2019 from Cleta Mitchell, a Republican activist and lawyer, that the Democrats “were getting ready to steal the election”. When Meadows was pressed in September 2020 about his failure to act on this tip, Navarro says, all he could muster was, “It just didn’t happen.”The fact that both the House and Senate have documented Meadows’ efforts to put the squeeze on Republican election officials fails to impress Navarro.The Chief’s Chief may have also waived Meadows’ claim of executive privilege. Either way, Meadows’s latest about-face on cooperating with the House select committee investigating the events of 6 January is unlikely to alter Navarro’s impression of him.As for Mitchell, she resigned from her law firm over her role in an infamous call between Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state.On top of pushing the line that the Democrats stole the election, Navarro lambasts numerous officials for failing to confront China, Mike Pence among them. Significantly, as he goes after Trump’s star-crossed vice-president, Navarro sounds a now-familiar trope of the anti-democratic right.He brands Pence a treacherous “Brutus” who betrayed Trump, an “American Caesar”. Did Navarro forget those gallows bearing Pence’s name? Regardless, the shoutout to a murdered Roman emperor is meant as a full-throated compliment.During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. Last May, Michael Anton of the rightwing Claremont Institute pondered whether the US needed a caesar. Anton was joined on air by Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug, a self-described monarchist and pillar of the Dark Enlightenment, a take embraced by the alt-right.Navarro demands “full forensic audits” of the 2020 election and posits that the 6 January insurrection may have been “perpetrated by those who sought to provoke an attack on our Capitol as a means of derailing” a Trump electoral college win.In A Plague Upon Our House, Scott Atlas goes after Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci for grabbing headlines but ignores both Trump’s prediction that Covid, “one day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear” and his admission to Bob Woodward that Covid would be worse than he told the public.Former Trump adviser claims to ‘expose unvarnished truth’ of Covid in new bookRead moreCovid has killed nearly 800,000 Americans – and counting. The US faces another Covid winter, with more than 100,000 new cases daily and the Omicron variant looming. Vaccine resistance and Covid deaths have become red-state hallmarks.Atlas is a radiologist and a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He joined the Trump White House in August 2020 and resigned after the election.As a Covid adviser he opposed expanded testing and isolation, calling such measures “grossly misguided”. Rather, he argued that the virus could be stymied and herd immunity attained once 20% to 25% of the population contracted it. In his book, he appears to discount the impact of long Covid.Confronted by an open letter from Stanford faculty, challenging his credentials, Atlas threatened legal retaliation. Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s lawyer, demanded immediate retraction. None followed.Atlas, however, did get one big thing right: opposing school closures, which he characterized as an “egregious and inexplicable” policy failure. Closures helped cost the Democrats Virginia. Glenn Youngkin’s win in that race for governor was about more than critical race theory.Trump and Trumpism will remain a force in the Republican party in the years to come. Meadows, McEnaney, Navarro and Atlas are counting on it.Earlier this month, however, Chris Christie spoke at a dinner of DC poohbahs.“I gave Donald Trump my undying loyalty,” he said. “And as we learned this week, he definitely gave me Covid.”Just a reminder, folks.TopicsBooksRepublicansDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsPolitics booksCoronavirusfeaturesReuse this content More

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      To Rescue the Republic review: Grant, the crisis of 1876 … and a Fox News anchor reluctant to call out Trump

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      To Rescue the Republic review: Grant, the crisis of 1876 … and a Fox News anchor reluctant to call out Trump Brett Baier has an eye on unity as well as compelling history. So why not say Trump refused to face the truth as Grant did?For a group of TV anchors and reporters, the team at Fox News are keen scribblers. Often with co-writers, former host Bill O’Reilly writes of assassinations and Brian Kilmeade authors histories. Bret Baier is chief political anchor but has also written several books as a “reporter of history”. Now comes a biography of Ulysses S Grant which focuses on the grave constitutional crisis following the disputed election of 1876.A disputed election, a constitutional crisis, polarisation … welcome to 1876Read moreMagnanimous in civil war victory, Grant was elected in 1868 on the theme of “Let us have peace”. By the nation’s centennial eight years later, Americans had wearied of scandals, economic troubles and federal troops in the south, seeking to enforce to some degree the new civil rights of Black Americans, notably the vote. In 1874, Democrats took the House. Now they wanted the presidency.They nominated the New York governor, Samuel Tilden, a moderate nevertheless supported in the south. The Republicans picked Rutherford Hayes of Ohio. It was a bitter campaign, filled with threats of violence, each side playing to its base.Tilden performed surprisingly well in the north, winning his home state and four others. Hayes winning Indiana and Connecticut alone would have prevented the subsequent controversy. He did not, but he did win Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, southern states with Republican governors.Hayes needed all three states to win. “Self-appointed Democratic counters”, however, submitted results for Tilden. As Grant said: “Everything now depends on a fair count.”Tensions ran high, with rumors of southern militia marching on Washington and US troops on standby. Baier writes that Grant “had influence, and he decided to use it to expedite a fair result – even if that result required sacrificing his own achievements”.Grant knew that to be seen to be fair, the result must “appeal to [the people’s] sense of justice”. For that, both parties had to agree – and the south had to support Hayes. At Grant’s insistence, an electoral commission was formed, the deciding vote given to the supreme court justice Joseph Bradley. Bradley chose to support the states’ official electoral certifications. Hayes won. Tilden did not pursue extraordinary means to ensure victory, stopping a bribery effort in his favor.But the battle was not over. Grant believed Louisiana’s certificate was probably fraudulent, and there was bedlam in Congress. Grant favored compromise and Edward Burke of Louisiana effectively proposed a trade: Hayes for the presidency, Democrats for the disputed governorships of Louisiana and South Carolina.A separate group of Republicans – acting without Grant – then promised Democrats Hayes would withdraw troops from the south. In return, Democrats would agree that Hayes was duly elected, along with vague and worthless promises to respect Black rights. At this point, Baier writes, “the nation breathed a sigh of relief”.Baier clearly admires Grant – and there is much to admire. Though betrayed by false friends, as president Grant exercised his office with firmness where necessary and with a passionate desire to inspire Americans towards greater unity. Political inexperience cost him dearly.But what of the big issue? Did Grant really put an end to Reconstruction and consign Black Americans to nearly a century under Jim Crow?Hayes had shown a willingness to end Reconstruction. Tilden would certainly have done so. Grant strongly supported Black suffrage and kept troops in the south to ensure the rights of people increasingly threatened by armed violence. He sent troops to an area of South Carolina especially marked by Klan violence and vigorously promoted and enforced an anti-Klan act. He sent troops to Louisiana to enforce voting rights and secured passage of the 1875 Civil Rights Act.Nonetheless, the supreme court reduced Black rights, and as Baier writes, “the country no longer supported the use of federal troops”. Grant had his army but had lost his people.He promoted a compromise in 1877 not from any desire to abandon the Black community but from the painful realization that America had tired of the journey. Whether Hayes or Tilden had been elected, Reconstruction was over and a more painful era in the south was about to begin.The problem wasn’t Grant, but that America was not ready to live up to its promises.Baier begins and ends his book with the events of 6 January 2021.“What happens,” he asks, “when the fairness of an election is in doubt, when the freedom of the people is constrained, and when the divisions on the public square strangle the process?“What can we learn from the healing mission of our 18th president that might show us a path towards union?”Baier answers the second question only implicitly. He echoes the historical consensus that the “sad and inescapable truth is that there was no way of knowing the right verdict”.True in 1877. Clearly not in 2021.After Appomattox, the Confederate general James Longstreet, a friend of Grant, asked “Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?”Liberty is Sweet review: an American revolution for the many not the fewRead moreThe answer frequently involves failures of political leadership. Baier writes that Grant “knew that in times of great national conflict there are only two choices – to stand for division or to stand for peace”.Grant used his power for good, to promote national unity. Donald Trump did not say the words or take the actions that Grant did during an equally if not more severe challenge to democracy. Baier misses an opportunity for Grant-like firmness in not asking why Trump failed to call on his supporters to accept the result. Rather than simply speaking of America’s strength and resilience, why not point out directly the contrast with a president who stood for division?In 2021, the national sigh of relief did not come until after noon on inauguration day, as President Biden took the oath.The danger persists, and not every president is Gen Grant.
      To Rescue the Republic is published in the US by Custom House
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      Former Trump adviser claims to ‘expose unvarnished truth’ of Covid in new book

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      Former Trump adviser claims to ‘expose unvarnished truth’ of Covid in new bookScott Atlas resigned after four months but blames Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx for ‘headline-dominating debacles’ In a new book, former Trump adviser Scott Atlas blames Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci for “headline-dominating debacles” about quack cures for Covid-19 – but omits to mention the chief proponent of snake-oil treatments, including hydroxychloroquine and disinfectant, was the US president he loyally served.US hospitals prepare for influx of Covid patients as millions travel for ThanksgivingRead moreAtlas, a radiologist, is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California, specializing in healthcare policy. He became a special adviser to Donald Trump in August 2020, five months into the pandemic, but resigned less than four months later after a controversial spell in the role.His book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop Covid from Destroying America, will be published on 7 December. Its publisher is Bombardier Books, an imprint of PostHill Press, a conservative outlet that will also publish a memoir by Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s fourth press secretary.Speaking to Fox News, Atlas promised to “expose the unvarnished truth” about Trump’s Covid taskforce, including “a shocking lack of critical thinking about the science … a reckless abuse of public health and a moral failure in what should be expected from public health leaders”.Birx, an army physician, is a longtime leader in the fight against Aids. Fauci has served seven presidents as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Both were senior members of Trump’s Covid taskforce. Atlas’s book is replete with attacks on both.Describing the fight against Covid before he came to the White House, Atlas accidentally sideswipes Trump when he writes: “Birx and Fauci stood alongside the president during headline-dominating debacles in the Brady Press Room about using hydroxychloroquine, drinking disinfectant, ingesting bleach and using UV light to cure the virus. They were there as the sole medical input into the taskforce, generating the entire advisory output to the states.”Hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial, was touted as a Covid treatment by non-governmental voices including two billionaires, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.Fauci said repeatedly such claims should be treated with caution. But Trump himself proved an enthusiastic advocate, disagreeing with his senior scientist and asking the public: “What do you have to lose?”Trump even took the drug himself, before the Food and Drug Administration revoked emergency use authorization, citing concerns about side effects including “serious heart rhythm problems” and death.Atlas’s reference to “drinking disinfectant, ingesting bleach and using UV light” is to the events of a memorable White House briefing when again it was Trump’s pronouncements that went wildly awry – not those of his officials.On Thursday 23 April 2020, William Bryan, undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security, discussed a study of effects on the coronavirus from sun exposure and cleaning agents – as applied to surfaces, not the human body.Trump said: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.“So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”As the Guardian reported, Birx “remained silent. But social media erupted in outrage.”Trump asked if sunlight might work, saying: “Deborah, have you ever heard of that? The heat and the light relative to certain viruses, yes, but relative to this virus?”Birx said: “Not as a treatment. I mean, certainly fever is a good thing. When you have a fever, it helps your body respond. But, I’ve not seen heat or light as a –”Trump interrupted: “I think that’s a great thing to look at. OK?”The president subsequently claimed to have been “sarcastic”.01:58In his book, Atlas treats Birx and Fauci’s work for a taskforce he says Trump “never once” met or spoke to with sarcasm, criticism and disdain.Seven doctors contract Covid after attending Florida anti-vaccine summitRead moreHe accuses Birx of “volatile behavior” and “interrupting all who challenged her” but says vice-president Mike Pence decided removing her was “simply not worth the risk to the upcoming election”.Among criticisms of Fauci, Atlas echoes Trump in complaining about his profile.“Dr Fauci kept on interviewing, of course,” Atlas writes, “positing the ever-present, potentially negative turn of events that never happened.”A year after Atlas’s resignation, more than 772,000 Americans have died of Covid-19.TopicsCoronavirusDonald TrumpAnthony FauciUS politicsPolitics booksRepublicansTrump administrationnewsReuse this content More