Politics books

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump told Sarah Sanders to 'take one for the team' after Kim Jong-un wink

      by

      Donald Trump told Sarah Sanders she would have to “go to North Korea and take one for the team”, after Kim Jong-un winked at the then White House press secretary during a summit in Singapore in June 2018.“Kim Jong-un hit on you!” a delighted Trump joked, according to Sanders’ new memoir. “He did! He fucking hit on you!”Speaking for Myself will be released next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Rather than a tell-all by a former staffer or a burn-all by a hostile family member, the book is a paean to the president by a loyal follower with the subtitle Faith, Freedom and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House.Sanders is from a notable Republican family – her father is Mike Huckabee, a candidate for the presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016 – and reportedly has her eye on a run for governor in Arkansas.However, somewhat in the manner of leaked sections that took aim at the former national security adviser John Bolton after he turned on Trump, Sanders does describe boorish or misogynistic behavior by the president and senior aides that may make campaign aides wince, particularly as Trump trails Joe Biden among women.Of the incident with Kim, whom Trump courted assiduously in the first two years of his presidency, Sanders describes a session at the Singapore talks in which the dictator “reluctantly” accepted a Tic Tac from Trump, who “dramatically blew into the air to reassure Kim it was just a breath mint” and not a capsule of poison.The two men also talked about sports, including women’s soccer. Then, Sanders writes, she looked up “to notice Kim staring at me. We made direct eye contact and Kim nodded and appeared to wink at me. I was stunned. I quickly looked down and continued taking notes.“… All I could think was, ‘What just happened? Surely Kim Jong-un did not just mark me!?’”Later, in the presidential “Beast” limousine on the way to the airport, Sanders relayed the incident to Trump and his then chief of staff, John Kelly.“Kim Jong-un hit on you!” Trump said. “He did! He fucking hit on you!”Sanders, a devout Christian who discusses her faith throughout her book, does not spell out the presidential expletive. But she does write that she told Trump that was not what she meant, and said: “Sir, please stop.”Kelly backed up the president and Trump joked: “Well, Sarah, that settles it. You’re going to North Korea and taking one for the team! Your husband and kids will miss you, but you’ll be a hero to your country!”Trump and Kelly, Sanders writes, “howled with laughter” as the car drove on.Trump has met Kim three times – in Singapore, in Hanoi and in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. He has not convinced Kim to give up his nuclear weapons, which Sanders says would take a “miracle”.In fact, observers say, Pyongyang has increased its arsenal significantly. Trump’s critics also say his mercurial approaches to Kim have damaged relations with key allies, including Seoul.In his own memoir of the Trump administration, Bolton does not mention the Singapore incident Sanders describes, though he does say Trump talked sports with Kim and “handed out mints”. Bolton also says aides did not want to leave Trump alone with Kim, lest he make damaging concessions.Sanders describes other aspects of Trump’s North Korea policy, including interactions with Dennis Rodman, the former NBA star who has established a unique relationship with Kim, and the release in May 2018 of three Americans formerly held by Pyongyang.She does not mention Otto Warmbier, a student from Ohio held in the North before being returned to the US in June 2017, in a coma and showing evidence of torture. The 22-year-old died soon after.Warmbier’s parents have said they hold “Kim and his evil regime … responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity. No excuses or lavish praise can change that.”Though Trump admitted in Hanoi that “some really bad things happened to Otto”, he also said: “Kim tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.” More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump v the United States review: how democracy came under assault

      by

      Now disgraced, Jerry Falwell Jr once announced that Donald Trump was entitled to an extra two years on the job as “reparations” for a “failed coup”, meaning the Mueller investigation. Joe Biden has gone so far as to predict the president will try to steal the election.Trump and his backers openly speak of four terms in office. “If you really want to drive them crazy, say 12 more years,” the president cackles, despite express constitutional strictures to the contrary.Even as doubts surrounding its legitimacy grow, the election assumes ever greater significance. Michael Schmidt’s first book is aptly subtitled: “Inside the Struggle to Stop a President.”The Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter chronicles what he has seen from his “front-row seat”. It was Schmidt who broke news of Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email while secretary of state, and of James Comey authoring a memo that detailed the president ordering him to end the FBI investigation of Gen Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.Hindering Trump is one thing, stopping him something elseSchmidt argues persuasively that the Trump presidency has highlighted the fragility of American democracy, and that Trump views the rule of law as something for others. More precisely, the president believes prison is meant for his political adversaries but not so much for his convicted cronies and for himself, never. Schmidt documents how Trump sought to prosecute Clinton and Comey: literally and seriously.A central premise of Donald Trump v the United States is that those who have sought to thwart the president have failed. Comey is no longer FBI director, Gen John Kelly is no longer White House chief of staff. Donald McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, is back in private practice.Trump usually gets what he wants. Jared Kushner, for example, holds a “top secret” security clearance despite persistent objections from senior White House staff and the intelligence community. After all others refused, Trump personally granted his son-in-law his clearance. Hindering Trump is one thing, stopping him something else. Over on Capitol Hill, according to Schmidt, Trump has “routinely outflanked the Democratic lawmakers investigating him”, while Republican leaders have emerged as “Trump’s public defenders”. Career civil servants, including those at the Food and Drug Administration, are “maligned” as part of a ‘Deep State’.” So what if a pandemic rages?Similarly, Trump targets journalists as “fake news” and as “enemies of the people”, a term popularized by Joseph Stalin. As one administration insider has said, it’s all a “bit” reminiscent of the “late” Weimar Republic.Schmidt frames his book as a four-act play, Comey and McGahn the central actors, a quote from King Lear as prelude. Chapters weave context with drama, even as they inform.The reader is continuously reminded of how many days remained before a particular event, such as “Donald Trump is sworn in as president”, “the appointment of special counsel Robert S Mueller III” or the “release of the Mueller Report”. It difficult to forget what came next. Donald Trump v the United States is laden with direct quotes and attribution. It is credible and intriguing. Beyond that, it is also unsettling.Schmidt details McGahn’s cooperation with the special counsel. Here, he recalls a conversation for the ages, with McGahn while he was still White House counsel and Mueller’s investigation was months away from its end.“You did a lot of damage to the president,” Schmidt tells McGahn, minutes before a thunderstorm over the White House. “I understand that. You understand that. But [Trump] doesn’t understand that.”McGahn replies: “I damaged the office of the president. I damaged the office.”Schmidt parries: “That’s not it. You damaged him, and he doesn’t understand that.”Ultimately, McGahn responds: “This is the last time we ever talk.”On cue, the rain begins to fall.Equally vivid are exchanges between Comey and his wife, Patrice, she of a keener sense of peril. As he moved toward announcing the FBI’s determination surrounding Clinton’s emails, in late June 2016, she presciently warned: “This is going to be bad for you.”According to Schmidt, Patrice Comey also pleaded, “You’re going to get shot … you’re going to get slammed.” Months later, her husband would tell the Senate judiciary committee it made him “mildly nauseous to think we might have had some impact on the election”.The book also clears up the mystery of what happened to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation, which if concluded would likely have examined Trump’s broader ties with Moscow. One day it was there, the next day it had vanished.Specifically, the special counsel’s report addressed conspiracy and obstruction of justice but did not discuss related counterintelligence issues. Schmidt reveals that we can blame that on Rod Rosenstein, then deputy attorney general.According to Schmidt, in the hand-off of the FBI investigation to Mueller, in the aftermath of the firing of Comey, Rosenstein deliberately narrowed the special counsel’s remit. The deputy attorney general directed Mueller to concentrate on criminality. Whether Trump was a Russian agent was not on the special counsel’s plate.According to Schmidt, Rosenstein “had foreclosed any deeper inquiry before investigation even began”. This is the same Rosenstein who in spring 2017 suggested he secretly record the president, and that the cabinet consider removing him from office.“The president had bent Washington to his will,” Schmidt writes.The question now is whether the electorate follows. America goes to the polls in little more than nine weeks. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      The People, No review: elites, anti-populism and how progressive promise is squandered

      by

      Thomas Frank has a simple thesis: populism has been mischaracterized by its enemies, since its birth at the end of the 19th century, as a “one-word evocation of the logic of the mob”.In our own time, it has been skewered as “the secret weapon” behind the wildly unlikely selection of Donald Trump as president.The Guardian contributor and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? points out that Trump’s triumph was only made possible by an “anti-populist instrument from long ago”, the electoral college. “But that irony quickly receded into the background.”As a president whose policies have almost exclusively benefitted the top 1%, with vast tax cuts for the rich and – at the moment – not one more cent from Trump’s Senate allies for the economic victims of the pandemic, our benighted leader is actually the pure opposite of a true populist.Frank writes that populism has been continuously misidentified by elites, so much so that the liberal Center for American Progress made an extremely unusual alliance with the rightwing American Enterprise Institute to co-author a report denouncing “authoritarian populism”.True populists advanced the rights and needs, the interests and welfare of the peopleTrue populists, Frank writes, the adherents of the People’s Party who adopted the word in 1891, were those who supported “a specific list of reforms designed to take power away from ‘the plutocrats’” while advancing the “rights and needs, the interests and welfare of the people”.They were protesting “unbearable debt, monopoly and corruption … forcing the country to acknowledge that ordinary Americans who were just as worthy as bankers or railroad barons were being ruined by an economic system that in fact answered to no moral laws.”Which of course is a perfect description of the version of American capitalism which reigns unfettered today.Frank bows to no one in his determination to highlight “racist, rightwing demagogues and figuring out what can be done to defeat them”. Opponents of the right, he writes, “should be claiming the high ground of populism, not ceding it to guys like Donald Trump”. He proclaims himself “flabbergasted anew every time I see the word abused in this way. How does it help reformers … to deliberately devalue the coinage of the American reform tradition?”Denunciations of populism come “from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation”, a “tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn” that has “allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly”. Anti-populism’s “most toxic ingredient”, Frank writes, is “a highbrow contempt for ordinary Americans”.He has particular contempt for experts, including most of the academic establishment. “Millions of foundation dollars have been invested”, he writes, to promote the canard that populism is a “threat to liberal democracy … Your daily paper, if your town still has one, almost certainly throws he word ‘populist’ at racist demagogue and pro-labor liberals alike”.“Populism,” he adds, “was about mass enlightenment, not the empowerment of a clique of foundation favorites or Ivy League grads.”These are the people he holds responsible for failing to prosecute any bankers after the housing bubble fiasco, negotiating “disastrous trade agreements” and “prosecuting stupid wars”.The best argument Frank makes for populism lies in the record of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who he correctly identifies as “the most consequential president of the 20th century”, a leader who didn’t “merely talk in a populist way”, but delivered.“FDR bailed out farmers and homeowners, he protected unions, he pulled the teeth of the Wall Street wolves, he smashed oligopolies, he took America off the gold standard and … he was roundly condemned by the nation’s respectables as the most dangerous demagogue of them all, a sort of one man mob-rule.”For modern progressives, Roosevelt’s attacks against Wall Street have the greatest resonance. In 1936 he declared: “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”According to Frank, “painful though it may be for liberals to acknowledge nowadays, it was Roosevelt’s willingness to disregard elites” that revived America after the Great Depression.Frank also offers a strong section on Martin Luther King Jr’s understanding of the populism of the 1890s and how Southern plutocrats helped to destroy it, enacting laws “that made it a crime for negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level”. The poor white man was given “a psychological bird that told him no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow.” More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      It Was All a Lie review: Trump as symptom not cause of Republican decline

      by

      Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie is a sustained attack, both jeremiad and confession, on the Republican party he served for 40 years. His is the hand at Belshazzar’s political feast: “All of these immutable truths turned out to be marketing slogans. None of it meant anything. I was the guy working for Bernie Madoff who actually thought we were really smart and just crushing the market.”Stevens, a consultant, is refreshingly frank about his role and responsibility. “Blame me,” he writes, adding: “I had been lying to myself for decades.” He seeks a new leaf on a “crazy idea that a return to personal responsibility begins with personal responsibility”.Unsurprisingly, he starts with race, “the original Republican sin … the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of southern politics was played.” Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Republicans have had difficulty appealing to African American voters. Stevens is not surprised.“What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating non-white voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters.” How, for instance, does a black person hear an “avowed hatred of government”?The policy effects are shocking; the electoral effects only recently came into focus as demographics change. Yet the strategy “was so obvious that even the Russians adopted it, attempting to instigate tensions among black voters to help Trump win”.You can always say no. I so wish Republican leaders would try itStuart StevensThis self-deception extends to other areas, notably foreign policy, in which “the Republican party has gone from ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall’ to a Republican president who responds to Vladimir Putin like a stray dog, eager to follow him home”. All without much protest from those who know better.Stevens believes Donald Trump “just removes the necessity of pretending” Republicans care about social issues. Instead, it’s all about “attacking and defining Democrats”. The idea that “character counts”, so prominent in earlier decades, is forgotten.In short, stripped “of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy”. The first casualty is the truth. “Large elements of the Republican party have made a collective decision that there is no objective truth” and that a cause or simple access to power is more important.Rather than saying the sky is green, the new strategy is “to build a world in which the sky is in fact green. Then everyone who says it is blue is clearly a liar.” Sadly, it has worked. Stevens notes that once “there is no challenge to the craziest of ideas that have no basis in fact, it is easy for Trump to take one small bit of truth and spin it into an elaborate fantasy.”He rightly calls this fear and cowardice: “To willingly follow a coward against your own values and to put your own power above the good of the nation is to become a coward.” People know better – including Republican members of Congress – but will not speak. Yet Stevens recalls that the “story of Faust is not just that Mephistopheles takes your soul, he also doesn’t deliver on what he promised.”The remedy is simple. “You can always say no. I so wish Republican leaders would try it”.What was Trump’s role in all this? Both enabler and someone who took a shaky foundation and crushed it. Trump “brought it all into clarity and made the pretending impossible”. For Stevens, the GOP “rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power.”Stevens has high praise for two former clients, George W Bush and Mitt Romney, “decent men who tried to live their lives by a set of values that represented the best of our society”. Yet neither could win today. He quotes George HW Bush’s impassioned resignation letter from the National Rifle Association after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and realizes few would do so now.Stevens is deeply concerned about the future of American democracy, comparing some tests in the study How Democracies Die with actions under the Trump administration.With one party having failed its “circuit-breaker” role, he cites the “urgent need for a center-right party to argue for a different vision and governing philosophy” as Democrats drift left. Though moderate Republican governors remain popular, he is distinctly pessimistic today’s Republicans can be that party, as they have “legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle for a political party in a country with a unique role in the world”.Stevens has little hope the GOP will save itself from Trump or rise to the challenge of adapting to an increasingly non-white America. Losing, badly, is his only hope for concentrating Republican minds to the new reality of American demographics. Absent that, his prescription is definitive: “Burn it to the ground and start over.”The former may happen. The latter is less predictable. More