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      Michael Lewis: ‘We were incentivised to have a bad pandemic response’

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      An event as large and devastating as the Covid pandemic was always going to attract a rush of authors seeking to uncover the story behind the decade’s biggest story. Leading the pack – not for the first time – is Michael Lewis, the man with an unerring knack for finding narrative gold in the most well-mined territories.He did it with notable success in the financial crisis of 2008, by smartly identifying the people who made money from the banking collapse, those who bet against the collateralised debt obligation bubble. That was The Big Short, a bestseller that was turned, like a previous book, Moneyball, into a successful Oscar-nominated Hollywood film.And one can imagine that the film rights will be quickly snapped up for The Premonition, Lewis’s pacy exploration of America’s response to the pandemic. There are many approaches that could be taken with such a far-reaching crisis but Lewis has opted for a similar counterintuitive approach to the one he took in The Big Short. Instead of following those whose lack of foresight has had such damaging effect on life and prosperity in America, he has focused on a group of health officials whose warnings were ignored.“The working title for most of the time I was working on it was The Ones Who Knew,” he tells me on a Zoom call from his office in Berkeley, California. He decided against that title because he was worried that it would place his subjects in a harsh spotlight, by suggesting – incorrectly – that they were negligent with their knowledge. He opted for The Premonition because, he explains, “to control a virus you have to see around corners”. What he means by that is that if you wait for sufficient evidence to establish that a pandemic is under way, it’s already too late to stop it.In the pandemic prevention business, you need to see the future before it arrives and, as it turns out, there were a number of people who had anticipated precisely where things were heading. One of them was the deputy public health officer for the state of California. A woman with the wonderful name of Charity Dean, she is such a remarkable character that it would have been a tragedy had she not found her way, at some point of her life, into a Michael Lewis book.Each December, Dean would write her new year resolutions on the back of a photograph of her grandmother. On 20 December 2019, she wrote down two things. “1) Stay sober. 2) It has started.” She had a kind of sixth sense that the viral pandemic she had long been expecting had begun. By coincidence, and rather oddly, at about the same time, Lewis put forward the idea, in a conversation with the Observer, that the only thing that could wake America up to Donald Trump’s governmental negligence was a pandemic.He now plays down his clairvoyance, explaining that he gave that example simply because it was a situation that would affect everybody. “Rich white people would be scared too,” he says. In the event, many Americans followed Trump’s lead in denying the danger of Covid-19 and the virus has remained a highly divisive and contested subject. “If it had killed twice as many people and killed kids,” says Lewis, “you wouldn’t be seeing these revolts in Oklahoma. You’d be seeing the New Deal.”As it is, the virus has killed nearly 570,000 Americans, one of the highest death rates in the world, though not quite as high as the UK’s in relative terms. The irony, as Lewis notes, is that in a pre-pandemic assessment of those nations best prepared to deal with a global contagion, the US was ranked top and the UK second.The way Lewis tells it, the US practically invented pandemic planning, after George W Bush read a book in the summer of 2005 about the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic. Written by John Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History so affected the then president that he asked a unit of the homeland security department to develop a new pandemic strategy. At the time, the only documented plans were to speed up vaccine production and stockpile antiviral drugs.Lewis details the recruitment of a group of medical mavericks, led by a couple of southern doctors, one a poet-administrator named Richard Hatchett and the other Carter Mecher, a sublimely focused problem-solver with highly evolved people skills (Tom Hanks would have to play him in a movie). They were charged with breaking away from received thinking and looking at radical ways of dealing with a pandemic.Three years earlier, a 13-year-old girl called Laura had entered a school science fair in Albuquerque with a project she’d been working on: a computer model to predict the spread of a virus. She was helped by her scientist father, Bob Glass. The senior Glass soon became obsessed by the project, long after his daughter moved on to other interests, and he tried without success to engage the attention of the academic science world with his findings. No one was interested. But eventually Hatchett and Mecher were and they used his model, first developed with his daughter, to come up with a comprehensive plan for limiting the spread of a virus: closing down schools and colleges, social distancing, mask wearing.“It’s a novella,” Lewis says of the Bob and Laura Glass story. “It could be written as fiction. I went and saw Bob Glass in Albuquerque. He reminded me of me. He’s much smarter than I am but his feelings about his daughter’s science projects are exactly the feelings I have about my daughters’ softball careers.”Drawing on Glass’s work, Hatchett, Mecher and several others were brought into the White House in the Bush years and some stayed on during the Obama administration. But when it really mattered, they found themselves outside the decision-making process, unable to get through to those in power. The book follows the pioneering strides made in federal pandemic planning and then the gradual and then abrupt dismantling of their work.For all Hatchett’s and Mecher’s painstaking efforts, perhaps the real hero or heroine of the book is Dean. As deputy public health officer of California, her warnings were ignored by her boss and the state governor’s administration. When she protested, she was frozen out of meetings and silenced. But rather than buckle, she fought back, finding any way she could to get the message out, until finally the state administration, reeling from the virus, was compelled to backtrack and adopt Dean’s plan, although without publicly recognising her input.We see her first as the public health officer for Santa Barbara, where she gained a fierce reputation for battling a tuberculosis outbreak. In a scene that must surely feature in any prospective film, Dean is forced to conduct a postmortem in a mortuary car park with a pair of garden shears because the local coroner is too scared to extract a lung that might be infected with TB.“Men like that always underestimate me,” she tells Lewis. “They think my spirit animal is a bunny. And it’s a fucking dragon.”Any author would kill for that kind of dialogue. As is often the case with Lewis’s books, I wonder how he manages to find people who speak in such gloriously vivid language. Is it a factor of America culture, steeped as it is in cinematic ways of talking, or is he just lucky?“There are two secrets,” he says. “One is I’m picking characters. They’re not randomly selected. But if you ask Charity Dean how much time I spent with her, she will say, ‘He spent more time with me than any human being in my life has ever spent’. She would say I know her better than either of her ex-husbands. I’m also culling. But having said that, all three major characters in the book were really unfiltered. They weren’t thinking, how’s this going to sound?”If Dean and Mecher are the good guys, there are no shortage of baddies. Chief among these, perhaps surprisingly, is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, better known as the CDC. It’s an American federal institution with an international reputation. As Lewis himself admits, he’d always thought of the CDC as “one of the places in the government that America can be proud of”. This, he adds, is because he didn’t know what they were doing.In the book, they are mostly not doing very much and a lot of their energy seems to go into preventing others from doing anything either. Back in the 1970s, the then head of the CDC, David Sencer, called for nationwide vaccination after a swine flu outbreak. Two hundred million doses of vaccine were ordered and 45m administered, only for the outbreak not to materialise. Sencer was blamed for overreacting and sacked. Henceforth, the CDC tended to err on the side of cautious inaction. “I think the CDC had virtues but it was not battlefield command. It had become a place where the generals had no experience fighting a war,” says Lewis.He is impressed by what the Biden administration has achieved in a short time. “I feel like there’s an intelligent entity all of a sudden,” he says. Nor is he in any doubt how ill-suited Trump was to being the man in charge during a pandemic. Yet, although he charts Trump’s incompetence, he doesn’t really target the former president as the arch-villain of the piece, partly because it’s a handy simplification that Lewis wants to avoid. “There is a national institutional desire to sort of bury what just happened and say, ‘Oh it was all Donald Trump’. And I don’t think anyone who’s close to the thing believes that,” he says.The official within the Trump administration whom he does identify as a major culprit is the former national security adviser John Bolton, who now does the media rounds as a voluble Trump critic. The day after he was appointed to the position in April 2018, Bolton sacked Tom Bossert, a veteran of the Bush administration. Bossert was the homeland security adviser who oversaw the biological threat team that was even then still influenced by the Hatchet and Mecher pandemic plan.“From that moment on,” Lewis writes, “the Trump White House lived by the tacit rule last observed by the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation states.” So ingrained was this perspective within the administration that when he finally began to acknowledge the danger that Covid presented to America, Trump could only speak of it in nationalistic or xenophobic terms, continually referring to the “China virus”. Yet Lewis believes there was an opportunity for Trump to have been seen as the saviour of the day.Bossert told Lewis that had he survived he thinks he would have been able to persuade Trump to give him a chance of implementing the pandemic plan, on the basis that if it didn’t work, he could fire and blame him and, if it did work, he could take all the credit.“Trump would have loved that,” says Lewis. “All it would have taken is a couple of months with the United States doing well in relation to other people. That could have got Trump re-elected. The fact that Bolton cut that tie – that probably cost hundreds of thousands of lives. It prevented all the knowledge that had been accumulated from ever getting into the response. There’s an alternative history there. Maybe John Bolton is the reason Donald Trump didn’t get elected.”For many observers, not only did the Trump administration fail the United States, it also vacated its long-established position as world leader. Had the US set the kind of example seen in Japan and South Korea, it’s not hard to imagine that the UK and the EU would have been more inclined to follow suit.Lewis says it’s another element of the story that reminds him of the financial crisis. “With The Big Short, I remember wandering Europe and thinking, no one will ever listen to us again on the subject of finance and banking. We were the world’s leader on this. We had a moral authority and we lost it. We’ve just embarrassed ourselves all over again. The fact that Britain has done worse than the US doesn’t excuse the American response and there’s a tendency to use that excuse here [in America].”If The Premonition is an avowedly character-driven book, it also seeks to cast a critical light on the workings of America’s mammoth industrial-medical complex. One point that repeatedly emerges is that lacking any kind of national coordination, it is fundamentally ill-prepared to deal with national crises. That said, the UK does have a national health service, but it didn’t stop us from being among the nations with the highest per capita death rate from Covid. “The existence of an actual national system is not a sufficient solution,” acknowledges Lewis, “but it’s necessary. There’s no way you can run a coordinated response without a system.”On a more profound level, the book also examines the backward priorities in health, how we are geared up to treat illness rather than to stop it from occurring. The paradox of medical science is that the better you are at avoiding a problem, the less likely that anyone will notice your efforts. And if they do, it will probably be to complain of a needless overreaction.“There is no incentive to prevent things,” he says. “If you look at what our two societies have in common, we’ve given ourselves over to markets in a way that’s pretty extreme. Which is to say, we strongly encourage things that pay and we give correspondingly less attention to things that don’t pay. Prevention does not pay. Disease pays. It pays when Covid is all over society and corporations get to make a lot of money testing for it. It doesn’t pay just to shut it down up front. And if there’s food for thought, it’s that we were essentially incentivised to have a bad pandemic response.”The lesson of the book is that there are people who spend their lives readying those in power for bad outcomes. Rather than being treated as tiresome Cassandras, simply because bad outcomes more often than not don’t occur, they ought to be involved at the centre of decision-making, not just for strategic purposes but economic ones. Most of the damage done to the economies of the US and UK was due to the fact that neither country acted early enough. Each saw themselves as the so well prepared that they had no need to worry about it. And so they didn’t.Or, as Lewis, ever the sports fan, neatly puts it: “Our players aren’t our problem. But we are what our record says we are.” The Premonition is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      Madam Speaker review: how Nancy Pelosi outwitted Bush and Trump

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      John Boehner, a Republican predecessor, concedes that Nancy Pelosi may be the most powerful House speaker in history. Pelosi provided George W Bush with the votes he needed to prevent a depression, as Republicans balked. She helped make Obamacare the law of the land.Pelosi repeatedly humbled Donald Trump. Already this year, she has outlasted his acolytes’ invasion of the Capitol and helped jam Joe Biden’s Covid relief through Congress. Hers is an “iron fist” wrapped in a “Gucci glove”, in the words of Susan Page and John Bresnahan of Politico.This latest Pelosi biography traces her trajectory from Baltimore to DC. Geographically circuitous, Pelosi’s ascent was neither plodding nor meteoric.Page delivers a worthwhile and documented read, a running interview with her subject together with quotes from friends and foes. Andy Card, chief of staff to Bush, and Newt Gingrich, a disgraced House speaker, both pay grudging tribute to the congresswoman from San Francisco.In the same spirit, Steve Bannon, Trump’s pardoned White House counselor, is caught calling Pelosi an “assassin”. He meant it as a compliment.Page is Washington bureau chief for USA Today. She has covered seven presidencies and moderated last fall’s vice-presidential debate. She also wrote Matriarch, a biography of Barbara Bush.Trump made the personal political and vice versa. Pelosi had a long memory and kept grudgesMadam Speaker makes clear that the speakership was not a job Pelosi spent a lifetime craving but it is definitely a role she wanted and, more importantly, mastered. She understood that no one relinquishes power for the asking. Rather, it must be taken.Pelosi took on the boys club and won. Ask Steny Hoyer, the No2 House Democrat. Her tire tracks cover his back. As fate would have it, their younger selves worked together in the same office for the same boss.Catholicism and the New Deal were foundational and formational. Thomas D’Alesandro Jr, Pelosi’s father, served in Congress and as mayor of Baltimore, a position later held by her brother. Pelosi is a liberal, albeit one with an eye toward the practical. Utopia can wait. AOC is not her cup of tea.As a novice congressional candidate, Pelosi was not built for the stump. She chaired the California Democratic party and the finance committee of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Her specialty was the inside game. No matter. In a spring of 1987 special election, Pelosi reached out to Bay area Republicans. They provided her margin of victory.Once in Congress, Pelosi became the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee and climbed to join the party leadership. Fundraising skills and attention to detail helped.Pelosi also made common cause with unusual suspects. Page records her friendship with the late John Murtha, a gruff ex-marine and congressman from western Pennsylvania – God and Guns country.Murtha furnished Pelosi with ammo and cover in opposing the Iraq war. He also managed her quest for the speakership. After Murtha lost to Hoyer in an intra-party contest in 2006, the Pennsylvanian announced his retirement.Among Murtha’s notes found by Page was one that read: “More liberal than I but she has ability to get things done and she’s given a tremendous service to our Congress and country.” Another one: “Able to come to a practical solution.”Page’s book chronicles Pelosi’s capacity to judge talent. She took an early shine to a young Adam Schiff, another east coast transplant, but held a dimmer view of Jerrold Nadler, a long-in-the-tooth congressman from Manhattan’s Upper West Side and chair of the judiciary committee.A former federal prosecutor, Schiff wrested his California seat from James Rogan, a Republican. Nadler could not control his own committee. After a raucous hearing in September 2019, the die was set. Schiff, not Nadler, would be riding herd in Trump’s first impeachment. Seniority and tradition took a back seat to competence.Context mattered as well. Pelosi’s relationship with Bush was fraught, yet she squashed Democratic moves to impeach him over Iraq – a move Trump actually advocated. She had witnessed Bill Clinton’s impeachment and concluded that harsh political judgments were generally best left to the electorate. Impeachment was not politics as usual. Or another tool in the kit.Trump was different. Practically speaking, draining the swamp translated into trampling norms and the law. Bill Barr, his second attorney general, had an expansive view of executive power and a disdain for truth and Democrats. His presence emboldened Trump.For more than two years, Pelosi resisted impeachment efforts by firebrands in her party. She acceded when Trump’s Ukraine gambit became public. He had frozen military aid to Russia’s embattled neighbor, seeking to prod the country into investigating Joe and Hunter Biden.Trump made the personal political and vice versa. Pelosi had a long memory and kept grudges. But this was different. After Biden’s election victory, Pelosi called Trump a “psychopathic nut”. A mother of five and grandmother to nine, she knew something about unruly children.Pelosi is not clairvoyant. She predicted a Hillary Clinton win in 2016 and Democratic triumphs down-ballot four years later. Instead, Clinton watches the Biden presidency from the sidelines, the Senate is split 50-50 and Pelosi’s margin in the House is down to a handful of votes.To her credit, Pelosi quickly internalized that Trump was a would-be authoritarian whose respect for electoral outcomes was purely situational: heads I win, tails I still win. Populism was only for the part of the populace that embraced him.Hours after the Capitol insurrection, at 3.42am on 7 January 2021, the rioters were spent, the challenges done, the election certified.“To those who strove to deter us from our responsibility,” Pelosi declared: “You have failed.”Biden sits behind the Resolute desk. Pelosi wields her gavel. More

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      Ted Cruz threatens to burn John Boehner’s book over criticisms

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      Republican senator Ted Cruz has responded to fiery criticism from John Boehner with a tactic beloved of authoritarian regimes: threatening to burn his book.In an email to supporters, the Texas politician said he also might machine-gun or chainsaw the memoir, depending on how much his supporters paid for the privilege to watch.Boehner, a Republican congressman from Ohio for 24 years and House speaker from 2011 to 2015, published his book On the House this week. It contains strong criticism of political figures from Donald Trump to Barack Obama but hits Cruz especially hard.The senator who drove a government shutdown in 2013 is “Lucifer in the flesh”, Boehner has said.On the page, he writes: “There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.”The book also contains a memorable sign-off: “PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.”But Cruz, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and may well do so again in 2024, is nothing if not a bomb-thrower himself, as well as a nimble opportunist.“John Boehner doesn’t like me much,” his fundraising email said. “That’s fine, I’m not a big fan of his either.”Calling the speaker-turned-lobbyist a “Swamp Monster” and accusing him of “an unhinged smear campaign”, the email told supporters Cruz had “put this trash right where it belonged, in my fireplace”.“But I didn’t finish it off just yet,” it added. Instead, the Texas senator announced a “72-hour drive to raise $250,000”, in which donors would “get to VOTE on whether we machine gun the book, take a chainsaw to it or burn the book to light cigars!”The email also said Cruz would livestream the evisceration or incineration.There is nothing new about American politicians shooting or eviscerating texts they don’t like in order to raise campaign dollars. Ask the Democratic senator Joe Manchin, who has both taken aim at Obamacare and fired his gun to defend it.But it could also be pointed out that Cruz’s attempt to stoke outrage – and dollars – might only succeed in bringing Boehner’s book to wider attention.As Ray Bradbury, author of the classic novel Fahrenheit 451, about a society which bans books, once said: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”On Thursday morning, On the House was the No 1 seller on Amazon. More

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      On the House review: John Boehner’s lament for pre-Trump Republicans

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      In October 2015, John Boehner abruptly vacated the speaker’s chair. Confronted by a hyper-caffeinated Freedom Caucus, the Ohio congressman announced his retirement singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. He walked before they made him run.By all indications, Boehner is happier on the outside – advising high-priced clients, pushing marijuana liberalization. The distance between Boehner’s unfiltered Camel cigarettes and Kona Gold is shorter than the chasm between the Republicans and Coca-Cola.Against the backdrop of the Trump-induced insurrection of 6 January, On the House delivers a merlot-hued indictment of Republican excesses and heaps praise on those who play the game with aplomb – regardless of party.Nancy Pelosi gets props for “gutting” the late John Dingell, a senior midwest Democrat, like a “halibut she found floating around San Francisco Bay”. Boehner posits that Pelosi may be the most powerful speaker ever.Likewise, Mitch McConnell receives a shoutout even after dressing down the author, saying: “I’ll never presume to know more about the House than you do. And trust me, you’ll never know as much about the Senate as I do.” Boehner offers no pushback.Boehner expresses contempt for Senator Ted Cruz and Mark Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman who became Donald Trump’s final chief of staff. As for Flyin’ Ted, Boehner is unsparing: “There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.”PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourselfNot surprisingly, Boehner finds the Cruz-led government shutdown of 2013 to have been senseless. On the other hand, the GOP recaptured the Senate a year later. Regardless, one audio clip of Boehner reading On the House concludes: “PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.”As for Meadows, Boehner campaigned for him, only for Meadows to oppose Boehner’s election as speaker, then offer a surprising, moist-eyed apology.“I wondered what his elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organizer on the verge of tears,” Boehner writes. “But that wasn’t my problem.”On the House also serves bits of vaguely remembered history, like Boehner’s attempt to make the late justice Antonin Scalia Bob Dole’s Republican running mate against Bill Clinton in 1996. Boehner met with Scalia. Scalia was open to the idea but Dole picked Jack Kemp, a former quarterback, congressman and cabinet officer. The senator from Kansas did Scalia a favor. Dole lost badly.More puzzling is Boehner’s continued embrace of Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president and a former Wyoming congressman. In Boehner’s words, Cheney was a “phenomenal partner” for the younger Bush and the two made a “great team”. He makes no mention of Cheney’s role in the run-up to the Iraq war, though he does detail his own deliberations on voting to authorize the Gulf war under Bush Sr.By the time George W’s time in the White House was done, his relationship with Cheney had grown distant and strained. The marriage of convenience reached its end. Perhaps Boehner knows something Cheney’s old boss doesn’t.On the House offers a clearer assessment of Newt Gingrich’s skillset and foibles. Like Boehner, Gingrich was speaker. He was also responsible for ending decades of Democratic control of the House. But Boehner crystalizes Gingrich’s inability to help run a co-equal branch of government. Politics isn’t always tethered to bomb-throwing. Governing is about the quotidian. Gingrich couldn’t be bothered.The book acknowledges the visceral hostility of the Republican base toward Barack Obama. After Boehner announced that he believed that Obama was born in the US, he caught a blizzard of grief. The GOP’s embrace of fringe theories remains.Boehner describes his attempts to reach compromises with Obama on “fiscal issues” and immigration. On the former, he acknowledges Obama’s efforts. On the latter, he contends that Obama would “phone it in” and “poison the well” for the sake of partisan advantage.Based upon the 2016 election, Obama bet wrong. Open borders are a losing proposition. On the other hand, so is opposing the Affordable Care Act amid an ongoing pandemic and the aftermath of the great recession. Specifically, Boehner claims credit for dismantling Obamacare “bit by bit”, pointing to the rollback of the medical device tax. Incredibly, he claims “there really isn’t much of Obamacare left.”Really? Boehner definitely gets this wrong.The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the number of uninsured non-elderly Americans dropped from more than 46.5 million in 2010 to under 29 million in 2019. Also, about 9 million purchase subsidized health insurance with federal premium assistance.If the theatrics of the Trump administration and the Republican challenge pending before the supreme court teach us anything, it is that Obamacare is very much alive. When it comes to government spending, the Republican donor and voting bases don’t necessarily sing from the same hymnal.Like most people, Boehner’s relationship with Trump ended worse than it began. Early on, Trump reached out. Less so with the passing of time. Boehner chalked that up to Trump getting comfortable in his job but also surmises: “He just got tired of me advising him to shut up.”Days after the insurrection but before the Biden inauguration, Boehner said Trump should consider resigning. The 45th president had “abused the loyalty of the people who voted for him” and incited a riot.Boehner admits that he was unprepared for the aftermath of Trump’s defeat. The insurrection “should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity”. It wasn’t. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the congresswoman from QAnon, has amassed a $3.2m re-election war chest. “The legislative terrorism” Boehner had witnessed helped birth “actual terrorism”.Boehner is confident about Americans, “the most versatile people God put on earth”. As for the survival of the American conservative movement, he is less optimistic. More

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      Beautiful Things review: Hunter Biden as prodigal son and the Trumpists' target

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      Robert Hunter Biden is not a rock star. Instead, the sole surviving son of Joe Biden – senator, vice-president, president – is a lawyer by training and a princeling by happenstance. Regardless, life on the edge comes with consequences.As Hunter Biden grudgingly acknowledges in his memoir, comparisons to Billy Carter, Roger Clinton or the Trump boys, appendages to power who sought to capitalize on proximity, may be apt. Indeed, Biden cops to the possibility that his name might have had something to do with his winding up on third base without hitting a triple.“I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a moment in history,” he writes, defensively, channeling the mantra of those with parents in high places: “I’ve worked for someone other than my father, rose and fell on my own.”But Biden is not content to leave well alone. Instead, he announces: “Having a Biden on Burisma’s board was a loud and unmistakable ‘fuck you’ to Putin.” He protests too much.Glossed over by Beautiful Things is that while his overseas venture may have ended up at the heart of Donald Trump’s first impeachment, it also discomforted Barack Obama’s White House. Confronted with Hunter’s foray into Ukraine and the energy business, the 44th president’s spokesman, Jay Carney, declined to express support.“Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice-president or president,” said Carney, back in 2014.Hunter possesses little filter. His craving for absolution is hardwiredBiden also portrays the relationship between his father and the Obama crowd as uneven to say the least. He points a finger at David Axelrod, an Obama counselor who played naysayer to Joe Biden’s chances in 2020, on CNN.Hunter recounts the aftermath of a conversation between his father and then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, about Afghanistan: “Goddamnit … Axelrod’s gotten in her ear!”As for Clinton, Biden elides the tension that existed between his father and the 2016 nominee. It wasn’t just about Obama encouraging Clinton. Back then, Joe Biden was scared of running against her.In Chasing Hillary, written by Amy Chozick in 2018, Joe Biden is paraphrased as saying to the press, off the record: “You guys don’t understand these people. The Clintons will try to destroy me.” Hell hath no fury like a Clinton crossed.The younger Biden’s book shows flashes of his grasp of power politics. But he also demonstrates a continuous blind spot for his own predicament. Confession should not be conflated with self-awareness.Biden recounts a conversation with Kathleen, his first wife, after the funeral in 2015 of Beau, his brother. He goes so far as to muse about running for office – despite his multiple addictions, all now detailed extensively on the page, and the ups-and-downs of his marriage.She responds: “Are you serious?”That Biden even went there is beyond puzzling. Or as he puts it, “I underestimated how much the wreckage of my past and all that I put my family through still weighed on Kathleen.”This was before Biden commenced an affair with his late brother’s wife.Hunter possesses little filter. His craving for absolution is hardwired.Describing a series of interviews he granted to the New Yorker’s Adam Entous, regarding Burisma, Ukraine and all that, he writes that he “didn’t know how cathartic the experience would be”. For good measure, he adds: “It was my opportunity to tell everyone out there, ‘This is who I am, you motherfuckers, and I ain’t changing!’”The italics are his.Through it all, Joe Biden is shown as a loving and caring father, like the dad in the story of the prodigal son. Biden depicts his father’s efforts to intervene in his personal nightmare and the times he rebuffed such entreaties. The family’s Catholicism is present throughout his book.The empathy and emotion Joe Biden conveys on television are part of who he is. His own setbacks and suffering helped elect him amid a terrible pandemic. Whatever facade exists is thin – and transparent.That said, the president’s capacity to forgive his son’s trespasses makes recent stories of his low tolerance for prior marijuana use among political appointees hard to comprehend.Beautiful Things is smoothly written and quickly paced. We know how and where the story ends. Hunter Biden appears to have found happiness in his second marriage. His father is now president.Still, the son cannot hide his bitterness in being turned into the whipping boy of the Trump campaign. The ex-president is “a vile man with a vile mission” who sank to “unprecedented depths” in his bid to retain power. The 6 January insurrection was vintage Trump. Charlottesville was prelude.Recent events offer Hunter Biden some measure of personal vindication and schadenfreude. A report by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) assessed that he and his father were targeted by Russia as part of campaign to swing the election in favor of Trump.According to the NIC, Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence” –including “some close to former President Trump and his administration” – “to push influence narratives including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden”. Rudy Giuliani looks like a Kremlin dupe.But it doesn’t end there. In December 2019, the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz belittled Hunter Biden for his substance abuse. It was a no-holds barred takedown, unleavened by Gaetz’s own history of drinking and driving.Timing is everything. Biden returns the favor in his book, calling Gaetz a “troll”. On Tuesday night, Gaetz admitted to being under justice department investigation “regarding sexual conduct with women” and allegedly trafficking a 17-year-old girl. More

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      Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue review: how Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed America

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      Two and a half years ago, at a naturalization ceremony for newly minted Americans, Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked: “What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York City’s garment district and a supreme court justice?”Her answer: “One generation … the difference between opportunities available to my mother and those afforded me.”From this new selection of Ginsburg’s arguments, speeches and opinions – the justice’s greatest hits – it is clear she deserves at least as much credit as any other American for that remarkably rapid transformation.This book is full of evidence that even in a nation like ours, where over the last 50 years the concentration of power in the hands of the top 1% has steadily worsened, a brilliant and determined individual with the right alliances can still bring about extraordinary change within her own lifetime.The book’s co-author, Amanda L Tyler, writes that Ginsburg’s work for gender equality is comparable to Justice Thurgood Marshall’s trailblazing quest to dismantle segregation.The burning determination of the gay activist Frank Kameny similarly transformed the status of LGBTQ people – and Ginsberg’s commitment to equal rights for all meant that she ended up doing just as much to expand the rights of sexual minorities as she did for the rights of women.Looking back from the third decade of the 21st century, the breadth and depth of the discrimination women of Ginsberg’s generation faced at the beginning of their careers is astonishing.Harvard Law School never allowed a woman student until 1950. When Ginsburg entered, in 1956, she was one of just nine women in a class of 500. Across America, women were routinely excluded from jury pools. Through the 1960s, the supreme court even declined to disturb a law that prohibited women from bartending “unless they did so under the auspices of a husband or father”.In 1963, when she started teaching law at Rutgers, Ginsburg was only the 19th woman professor at an American law school – and the dean proudly disobeyed the newly passed Equal Pay Act by paying her much less than her male colleagues, because she had a “husband with a well-paid job”.Ginsburg’s determination was obvious. When she was still in law school, her husband, Marty, developed a virulent form of cancer. They also had an infant daughter. But neither handicap prevented her or her husband from excelling in their studies and she actually described her child-rearing duties as an advantage in law school, because they gave her a more balanced life than most of her classmates.“Each part of my life was a respite from the other,” Ginsberg explained, six decades later. “After an intense day at the law school, I was glad to have the childcare hours. And then when Jane went to bed, I was ready to go back to the books. I think it was an appreciation that there is more to life than law school that accounts for how well I did.”In one of the first cases she litigated with her husband, in 1971, Moritz v Commissioner of Internal Revenue, they argued that Charles Moritz, a never-married man who cared for his mother, was denied a caregiver deduction a woman in his position would have received.Congress amended the law to permit all caregivers to claim the deduction going forward, but the government kept the appeal going anyway. It was then that Ginsburg received her greatest gift from her adversary: a list of every provision in the United States Code that differentiated on the basis of sex.“There it was, right in front of us,” she recalled, “all the laws that needed to be changed or eliminated … it was our road map, a pearl beyond price, that list of federal statutes.”In the 60s, excelling in law school didn’t mean a woman would be a strong candidate to be hired by any of the fanciest firms. But in retrospect Ginsberg agreed with the first woman on the supreme court, Sandra Day O’Connor, that even this kind of adversity had its advantages.Ginsburg often repeated O’Connor’s comment: “Suppose you and I had gone to law school … when there was no barrier to women in the legal profession. Where would we be now? We would be retired partners of a large law firm.” But because they had to find a different path, “both of us ended up on the US supreme court.”This book is also a reminder of the wisdom of Vincent Scully, the great Yale architectural historian, who noted just two years after Ginsburg was appointed to the court that “ours is a time which, with all its agonies, has … been marked most of all by liberation” – black liberation, women’s liberation and gay liberation.“Those movements, though they have a deep past in American history, were almost inconceivable just before they occurred,” Scully said. “Then, all of a sudden in the 1960s, they burst out together, changing us all.”Ginsberg’s energy and perspicacity gave her a singularly important role in bringing about many of those fundamental changes. More

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      This is the Fire review: Don Lemon's audacious study of racism – and love

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      Don Lemon’s new memoir is an audacious and improbable book by a remarkable man. “We must summon the courage to love people who infuriate us, because we love the world we share,” he writes, near the start.

      Relatively young, a short 20 years ago, the CNN anchor was almost unknown. How then, without seeming arrogant or pompous, does he place his life and his experience beside the best-known champions from the pantheon of Black freedom fighters? Invoking the zeal and courage of Dr King and Sojourner Truth, portraying even the proscribed accomplishments of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen in the same light of heroic survival, his is a voice as essential for our time as Ta-Nehisi Coates and as compelling as Caroline Randall Williams.
      Lemon was initially a Republican, he tells us, from a time in his Louisiana homeland when Republicans were still pro-civil rights. He has taken a circuitous route to ardent Black activism. He revealed three sensational secrets in a 2011 memoir, Transparent, and seemed destined to become a media star akin to Oprah Winfrey. But his nightly broadcasts as the only African American anchor in prime time, his Zoom chats and podcast on racism have been calculated towards his rise. Affectingly, he appeals to a growing fanbase by relating that success notwithstanding, his was a life as troubled as their own.
      For one thing, his parents hadn’t been legally wed. His mother, working for his dad as a legal secretary, was married to another man, his father to another woman. His dad died when Lemon was nine and his divorced mom remarried. His family were loving and even his relationship with his stepfather was good. But he realized he was a “double negative” – gay and Black – living in the south, undoubtedly confused by childhood sexual assaults at the hands of a friend of his mother. He overcame all of this but one media instructor later told him: “I don’t know why you’re here. You’ll never be a newscaster.”
      But he was, and he took off. And then, around 2014, he seemed to change. Out of the blue, he was hectoring Black youth on air to “pull up their pants!” Denouncing a rebel fashion which endures on account of its effectiveness at pissing off old people, particularly old white authority figures? One wondered, was he embracing Bill Cosby’s “respectability” political stand? Admonishing youth about the importance of being married before starting a family, even endorsing the value of New York’s discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing, many reasoned Lemon must be trolling for ratings from the enemy. Some denounced him as an “Uncle Tom”.
      The change of Lemon’s disappointing trajectory began before Trump. Certainly the threat the former president posed helped to radicalize someone who often seems happiest finding and presenting both sides. Trump’s recurring slur of “stupid”, alternating with, “the stupidest!”, was consistently met with good-natured laughter and ever more incisive analysis. Trump was Lemon’s trial by fire. White-hot, through it he was refined. From a mere Black pundit he was transformed into a tested, un-cowed combatant in the struggle for civil rights.
      Beginning with a cautionary letter to his nephews and nieces with his white fiance, Tim Malone, Lemon purposefully emulates his hero, James Baldwin. Explaining the killing of George Floyd, Lemon deliberately imitates a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1963. It is a preamble to a plea to learn all one can about the past. He warns of the omnipresence of patriarchal white supremacy, the west’s original sin.
      “Racism is a cancer that has been metastasizing throughout the land ever since Columbus showed up,” he states, making an excellent argument for replacing all memorials to Columbus with tributes to Frank Sinatra.
      Elucidating on the extent to which the wealth and might of America was derived from land appropriated from Native Americans and labor coerced from red, brown and especially enslaved Black Americans, he notes that even enterprises not directly involved in slavery benefited from the exploitative system. More

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      Chaos Under Heaven: Trump as raging bull in a China policy shop

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      Covid-19 has left more than 530,000 Americans dead and China’s standing with the US at a historic low. Only Iran and North Korea fare worse. US opinion is no outlier. China’s reputation has taken a beating in Australia, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany. Images of tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square in summer 1989 have been supplanted by Beijing stonewalling on the origins of the plague.In Chaos Under Heaven, the Washington Post reporter Josh Rogin reminds us that under Xi Jinping, China halted the export of personal protective equipment made by US companies, sent defective PPE to the Netherlands and barred Australian beef exports after Canberra called for an inquiry into the genesis of Covid-19. In Rogin’s telling, China’s “mask diplomacy” was a blunt instrument, designed to still criticism abroad and sow fear at home.Rogin delivers a needed modicum of clarity. Under the subtitle Trump, Xi and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century, he lays out what the US and its allies got wrong about China over decades, strife within the Trump administration and personal financial conflicts that affected US policy. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump feature heavily. But Hunter and James Biden bear watching too.McConnell’s wealth is tethered to his wife’s family interest in Chinese shipping. Angela Chao, his sister-in-law, is chief executive of the business and sits on the board of the Bank of China. Most recently, the US transportation department inspector general reported that Elaine Chao, McConnell’s wife and Trump’s transportation secretary, escaped criminal investigation after the justice department weighed in.If the Chinese were to invade Taiwan, Trump said, ‘there isn’t a fucking thing we can do’. So much for US policyIn fall 2019, McConnell and Trump thwarted progress on the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy bill, which had cleared the Senate foreign relations committee, then controlled by Republicans. Back in 1992, McConnell backed legislation enacted in connection with the autonomy of Hong Kong. As late as summer 2019, he wrote an op-ed in support. Time – and perhaps marriage – can change perspective.Rogin has longtime interests in human rights and the far east. He spent the early days of his career at the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese daily, and more recently rubbed shoulders with an informal group of opponents to the Chinese regime, which he calls the “Bingo Club”. One member was Peter Mattis, a former CIA analyst and nephew of James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary. During the 2016 Republican convention, Rogin broke the story of the Trump campaign “gutting” the GOP’s anti-Russia platform on Ukraine.Chaos Under Heaven moves quickly, is well-written and draws the reader in. Rogin makes clear that tension between Beijing and Washington will probably remain for the foreseeable future. China’s economy and military continue to grow, America’s social chasms remain on display. Under Xi, don’t expect the Middle Kingdom to back down.One of Rogin’s central points is that Trump correctly identified the threat and challenge posed by China yet proved incapable of formulating a coherent strategy and sticking with it. Much of the time, he conflated personal relationships with the national interest. As his approach to North Korea showed, not everyone was buying what he was selling. His effort to draw China into that quagmire was a bust. The art of the deal is way harder than Trump trumpeted.On the ground, the food fights of 2016 carried over to the White House. The West Wing was riven with factions. Wall Street transplants, military veterans and diehard Maga-ites exchanged verbal blows. The former reality show host zigged and zagged, blowing hot and cold as TV and his moods took him.During the 2016 transition, Trump accepted a congratulatory phone call from Tsai Ing-wen, president of Taiwan. Not surprisingly, China was angered – it regards the island as its own. Ambiguity toward Taiwan was central to US rapprochement with China in the 1970s. Trump walked his words back, invited Xi to Mar-a-Lago and treated him to the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen”.As for Trump’s take on Taiwan, he told a senator it was “like two feet from China” and the US was “8,000 miles away”. Trump chillingly added that if the Chinese were to invade, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it”. So much for US policy.Trump’s inability to forge working alliances hampered US responses. Confronting China required playing well with others. Trump proved unable to set aside personal pique and drive a consensus forward. At times he caved on the technological threat China posed, for the sake of scoring an elusive trade deal.On the plus side of the ledger, the conduct of Beijing during the pandemic made governments realize “their dependence on China was a political vulnerability”. The UK reversed course and banned Huawei, the Chinese communications Goliath, from its networks.No book about Trump is complete without at least one salacious morsel. Chaos Under Heaven conveys that Trump came to believe an unfounded rumor that Gen HR McMaster, his second national security adviser, was conducting an extramarital affair. As expected, Trump could not keep the news to himself.At a crowded Oval Office staff meeting, the former president queried: “Have you heard who McMaster is fucking?” Ever the puritan, Trump warned: “He’s gonna get us all in trouble if he can’t keep his dick in his pants.” The Manhattan district attorney is still investigating all things Trump, including payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.Rogin observes that Trump was “great at flipping over the chess board but he couldn’t set the board back up again”. That said, he had “shifted the conversation about China in a way that cannot be undone”. More