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      I Alone Can Fix It review: Donald Trump as wannabe Führer – in another riveting read

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      BooksI Alone Can Fix It review: Donald Trump as wannabe Führer – in another riveting read Gen Mark Milley saw that the US was in a ‘Reichstag moment’ – four days before the Capitol riot. With this and much more startling reporting, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post deliver the goods once againLloyd GreenFri 16 Jul 2021 07.37 EDTLast modified on Fri 16 Jul 2021 08.24 EDTCocooned at his resorts, the Trump Organization indicted, Donald Trump has come to embrace the insurrection.Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book saysRead more“Personally, what I wanted is what they wanted,” he tells Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post.Five people died after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on 6 January, seeking to overturn the election.Last week, Trump declared: “These were peaceful people, these were great people.”So much for blaming Antifa. Think Charlottesville redux, on a larger stage. Or something even more ominous.In their second book on the Trump presidency, Leonnig and Rucker report that on 2 January 2021, two months after election day and as Trump still refused to concede defeat, Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told aides: “This is a Reichstag moment.”He was referring to the fire at the German parliament on 27 February 1933, an incident seized as a pretext by Hitler to begin arresting opponents and to consolidate his power.“The gospel of the Führer,” the authors quote Milley as saying.According to the general, the US under Trump was experiencing its own version of the late Weimar Republic, complete with modern-day “Brownshirts”. A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Milley was not alone in seeing shadows of the past slither into the daylight.Trump, Leonnig and Rucker quote a senior official as saying, is a “guy who takes fuel, throws it on the fire, and makes you scared shitless”, then says “‘I will protect you.’“That’s what Hitler did to consolidate power in 1933.”This is a blockbuster follow-up to A Very Stable Genius, in which Leonnig and Rucker chronicled the chaos of Trump’s first three years in office. I Alone Can Fix It pulls back the curtain on the handling of Covid-19, the re-election bid and its chaotic and violent aftermath.The pair are Pulitzer winners, for investigative reporting. Their book is essential reading. They have receipts, which they lay out for all to see.Of Covid, they capture Marc Short, Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, telling folks in February 2020: “It’s not that bad.” The families of more than 600,000 dead Americans would probably disagree. (Short later contracted the virus.)Feeling burned by the authors’ first book, this time Trump sat for a two-and-a-half-hour interview. At the end of it, he let it be known – with a “twinkle in his eye” – that “for some sick reason” he “enjoyed it”.Much as he claims to hate the media and the elite, Trump craves their attention. Much as he believes in his own power of persuasion, Leonnig and Rucker were not converted.Trump’s hubris shines through. But for the pandemic, he claims re-election was inevitable. It’s a salesman’s pitch but one sufficiently rooted in reality. He also claims America’s two greatest presidents could not have defeated him. That is just surreal:
      I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice-president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me.”
      Before Covid, the economy was humming. Trump had taken down Qassem Suleimani, a top general in Iran’s Quds force, and the public approved.Joe Biden lost nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. His first win was on 29 February, days after the stock market’s Covid-induced crash, assisted by James Clyburn of South Carolina, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and House majority whip.On the relationship between Covid and Trump’s defeat, Leonnig and Rucker describe Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s now former prime minister, sharing his thoughts with Tony Fabrizio, a pollster who worked for him and Trump, in early 2020.Netanyahu said: “The only thing that can beat President Trump is coronavirus.”With analytic capacity Trump could never muster and a sense of history he lacked, Netanyahu added: “If you don’t understand what a pandemic is and the mathematics behind how this will spread if we don’t contain it, it will collapse economies, and that changes the ball game tremendously.”In August, Trump reamed out Fabrizio after he warned the president the electorate was “really fatigued”. Trump bellowed: “They’re tired? They’re fatigued? They’re fucking fatigued? Well, I’m fucking fatigued, too.”The book’s rawest revelations concern 6 January. At best, Trump was blasé about Mike Pence’s plight, presiding over confirmation of Biden’s win, stuck inside the Capitol as halls and offices were plundered. Like Nero watching Rome burn, Trump fiddled in front of his TV.As for the rioters, Trump now claims he and they are one: “They showed up just to show support because I happen to believe the election was rigged at a level like nothing has ever been rigged before.”On 6 January, James Lankford of Oklahoma argued against certification, citing constituents’ concerns about voter fraud. He failed to mention it was Trump who spread that very concern.Hours later, however, the senator voted to certify. Months earlier, Tulsa was the venue for Trump’s infamous comeback rally, a flop which cost Brad Parscale his job as campaign manager and Herman Cain his life.Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarmingRead moreLiz Cheney also makes a telling appearance in Rucker and Leonnig’s story. In a 7 January call with Gen Milley, the Wyoming congresswoman unloaded on Jim Jordan, a hard-right Ohio representative and Trump favorite, as a “son of a bitch”.Stuck with Jordan during the Capitol siege, Cheney discounted his expressions of concern, saying: “Get away from me. You fucking did this.” Cheney is now a member of the House select committee charged with investigating the riot.Leonnig and Rucker also quote Doris Kearns Goodwin: “There is nothing like this other than the 1850s, when events led inevitably to the civil war.”Politicians and acolytes make pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s mecca in Palm Beach. Each dusk, Leonnig and Rucker write, he receives a standing ovation.Just the way he likes it.
      I Alone Can Fix It is published in the US by Penguin and in the UK by Bloomsbury
      TopicsBooksPolitics booksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS elections 2020US Capitol attackreviewsReuse this content More

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      Texas Republicans veer further right despite state’s demographic shifts

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      TexasTexas Republicans veer further right despite state’s demographic shiftsGovernor Greg Abbott appears to be filling out a ‘bingo card’ of rightwing policy desires, even though those proposals are not popular with Texans Alexandra Villarreal in AustinThu 15 Jul 2021 05.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 15 Jul 2021 05.01 EDTFrom restricting voter access and politicizing the US-Mexico border to targeting transgender student athletes and further rolling back abortion rights, Texas’s current legislative agenda set by its governor, Greg Abbott, reads almost like a conservative bingo card.Death toll from Texas February cold spell rises by 59 to reach 210Read moreBut in the shadow of next year’s Republican primary contest, Abbott is already facing hostile challengers in his own party who are ideologically even more extreme and are pushing the radical governor even further to the right as he seeks re-election.So it may not be a coincidence that, during recent legislative overtime in Texas, he’s heaped on enough red meat to try to foil his rivals, who claim he’s only Republican in name – to the shock of many civic society activists in the state.“We’re really seeing a race of who can throw Texans under the bus in the fastest and most cruel way, simply to score political points and to remain in power,” said Juan Benitez, the communications director for Workers Defense Action Fund.For years, Democrats have been slowly chipping away at Republicans’ ironclad grip on Texas in a belief that the state may eventually turn blue. But the state’s conservative leadership in the Republican party is now doubling down on rightwing talking points ahead of 2022, relying on hot-button, emotional issues to rile up supporters.“What they’re doing is working harder and harder and harder, in my judgment, to stimulate a shrinking base, and going so far to the right they no longer represent the consensus view of Texans,” said Mike Collier, a Democrat who plans to run for Texas lieutenant governor next year.Despite Texas’s rapidly changing demographics, so far, it has remained staunchly red in terms of who wins.That, in turn, makes the state’s primaries the real contest in most races, said Juan Carlos Huerta, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi.“I think there is a bit of a disconnect between the overall sense of what Texans want and what our elected officials do,” Huerta said. “They take care of those who vote for them.”Texas’s Republican primary voters are often rightwing Donald Trump loyalists, and statewide incumbents who want another term have little choice but to court those votes. If they succeed, they’re more than likely to prevail in the general election, regardless of how radical their platform is.So the Texas government is dominated by Republicans who have been hand-picked by their most extreme constituents, then rubber stamped by a wider electorate that is guided by party identification. Oftentimes, that means a minority’s beliefs – and not the broad will of the people – are reflected in state policy.“We are veering more and more right, without really taking a close look at the fact that democracy is just slowly and slowly getting more and more eroded,” said Benitez.The impact of this disconnect is clear in the politics of the state.A majority of Texans agree with the landmark US supreme court decision on Roe v. Wade, recognizing the constitutional right to choose an abortion. Yet earlier this year, lawmakers passed a strict new “heartbeat” bill, which restricts abortion access around six weeks into a pregnancy, and which more Texas voters oppose than support.Permitless carry will also become the law of the land come September, even though 57% of Texans are against gun owners being able to carry handguns without a license or training.And, despite most voters wanting background checks for gun purchases, the state legislature has failed to act.“Elections have consequences, all right? And the fact that Republicans win – conservative Republicans win in Texas – yes, that’s what they’re gonna advocate: conservative policies,” Huerta said.During a pandemic that has killed more than 51,000 Texans so far, far-right Republican party members chastised Abbott for instituting a statewide mask mandate and other precautions against their wishes.After critics were so peeved that they gathered in protest at the governor’s mansion, the state’s ultra-conservative politicians evidently smelled blood. Some, including the former Texas GOP chairman Allen West and one-term state senator Don Huffines, have already announced they’ll try to oust Abbott next year.“Why isn’t he here?” Huffines asked an audience at ​​the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas earlier this month. “He’s not here because he doesn’t want to face you.”But in reality, Abbott has a $55mn re-election war chest and a higher approval rating in Texas than Senator Ted Cruz, Senator John Cornyn, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and a slew of other prominent state politicians, according to the Texas Tribune.In case that’s not enough, he has started brandishing his conservative credentials ahead of the election. Some believe he’s branding himself as the standard bearer for the new GOP, not only to win in 2022 but also for a potential presidential bid.“I don’t think of him in terms of moderate or conservative. I just see him as someone who you can expect to adopt, you know, the consensus worldview, or the predominant –the dominant – worldview of the Republican party at any given time,” said Jason Lee, a strategist for Texas Right to Vote.In March, before the Covid-19 vaccine was widely available, Abbott opened Texas 100% and abandoned his mask mandate – a decision Joe Biden called “Neanderthal thinking”. Abbott has also banned government-mandated vaccine passports to avoid “treading on Texans’ personal freedoms”.He has recently made migrants and asylum seekers into political punching bags, announcing his intention to build a wall dividing Texas from Mexico. And following Trump’s endorsement, he echoed the former president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric when they met for a photo op last month, according to the Dallas Morning News.“It is time to make sure we seal this border and close it down,” Abbott said. “The people coming across the border are cartels and gangs and smugglers and human traffickers.”After Democrats walked off the state House floor to block a restrictive voting bill during the regular legislative session in May, Abbott vetoed the legislature’s funding and convened a special session to force them to address his priorities. When lawmakers thwarted him again by flying to Washington DC on Monday, he vowed to arrest them.“This special session to me is to get the bingo card filled out, to hit all the hot button issues that they identified, and basically take away any arguments from his conservative challengers that he didn’t, you know, fulfill his conservative mission,” Lee said.The session amounts to “political theater to build up to 2022”, Benitez said, and state leaders are using the opportunity to “see who can run farthest to the right”. Agenda items don’t include fixing Texas’s failing electric grid that left hundreds dead during a devastating winter storm last February.Instead, Abbott instructed the legislature to pass bills that would go after abortion medication, put up more obstacles for people trying to get out of jail and make it harder for Texans to vote.“It’s a two-step process,” Collier said. “First, frighten the base with nonsense. Second, propose so-called solutions and then try to win your primary. And what they aren’t doing is addressing the real issues.”TopicsTexasUS politicsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Biden says voting rights laws are a 'national imperative'. Reforming the filibuster must be too | David Litt

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      OpinionUS politicsBiden says voting rights laws are a ‘national imperative’. Reforming the filibuster must be tooDavid LittRepublicans’ big lie makes it all but impossible for our republic to heal itself without new laws to defend democracy Wed 14 Jul 2021 10.33 EDTLast modified on Wed 14 Jul 2021 16.38 EDTAt the risk of giving away a speechwriting secret, one time-tested way to organize a presidential address – or any piece of persuasive writing – is with something called “Monroe’s Motivated Sequence”. It’s a five-part structure: explain the context; define the problem; lay out the solution; put forward a vision of the future; issue a call to action.By this measure, on Tuesday President Biden delivered two-fifths of a major address on democracy reform. He connected the wave of Republican anti-voting laws to the 6 January attack on the Capitol and the insidious legacy of segregation and Jim Crow. He rightly referred to Republicans’ authoritarian efforts as “the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of fair and free elections in our history”.Largely absent from the president’s remarks, however, was a solution. This was probably a conscious choice on the part of Biden and his inner circle. It’s possible that the White House would rather negotiate with lawmakers behind the scenes than make demands of them in public. It’s possible that the president did not present a plan because he has not yet settled on one.But it’s also possible, and perhaps even probable, that the president went out of his way to avoid detailed solutions because he didn’t yet want to answer what will possibly be the defining question of his first term. Will Joe Biden publicly call on Senate Democrats to reform the filibuster in order to pass new voting-rights bills into law? We still don’t know. Instead, after urging Congress to send the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Act into law, Biden employed a carefully worded phrase:“Legislation is one tool, but not the only tool.”This statement is true. But it’s also a little like saying brakes are only one tool for protecting drivers. In yesterday’s remarks, the president tried to lay out the broad outlines of what safeguarding democracy sans legislation might look like. And in doing so, he made one of the strongest cases to date that while reforming the filibuster won’t be easy, it is essential if American democracy is to survive.It’s not hard to see why many democracy advocates are eager to find ways to stand up for fair and free elections without trying to pass new laws. It will be difficult to persuade all 50 Senate Democrats to embrace filibuster reform. It will also be difficult to persuade all 50 Senate Democrats to support a voting-rights law that neutralizes the threat that voter suppression and election subversion pose. To do both these things is not impossible – but one could be forgiven for hoping there’s an easier path.In Tuesday’s speech, Biden hinted at what such a path might look like. His Department of Justice will double the size of its voting rights division and sue to overturn discriminatory laws. He urged “advocates, students, faith leaders, labor leaders and business executives” to join together to raise awareness and apply public pressure. He asked Republicans in Congress to put country over party and asked pro-democracy Americans to run for local office.All these are ideas worth pursuing. It’s even possible they’ll be sufficient. If Biden and his allies can overturn voter suppression laws in court and turn out a large enough coalition of voters, they’ll win elections with supermajorities – much like Joe Biden did in 2020, when his large popular-vote margin overcame a disadvantage in the electoral college. If authoritarianism is proven to be a political loser, politicians will abandon it. Over time, our republic will repair itself.But such a scenario is highly improbable. Arguably, it’s far less likely than the Senate reforming the filibuster to pass a voting rights bill into law. Because in the wake of 6 January, and in thrall to the big lie, the Republican party has taken drastic new steps to make it more difficult than ever for our political process to self-correct.Biden himself recognized precisely this danger in his remarks. He described in great detail recent voter-suppression laws, such as the one proposed in Texas which would force voters to drive further to cast their ballots and permit partisan poll workers to intimidate them as they do. These unprecedented voter suppression measures are expressly designed to insulate politicians from backlash. It doesn’t matter how many Americans turn out to support democracy if they’re rendered unable to vote.Even if Democrats are able to overcome voter-suppression laws, and win clear majorities at the ballot box, that may not be enough to win elections. As the president put it, “It’s no longer just about who gets to vote or making it easier for eligible voters to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote, who gets to count whether or not your vote counted at all.” He rightly referred to this attempt to ignore valid vote counts as “election subversion”. But for now at least, Biden did not draw the logical conclusion: if politicians start overturning fair elections, voter education and coalition building cease to matter.Nor are elected officials the only ones making it harder for democracy to defend itself. Just two weeks ago, the six conservative supreme court justices gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, legalizing a raft of anti-voting laws that would previously have been be overturned for racial discrimination. Doubling the size of the justice department’s voting rights division is commendable. But having more lawyers filing federal lawsuits won’t do much good if the court decides those suits can’t prevail.Which brings us back to the one tool guaranteed to have an enormous, immediate impact: legislation. If Senate Democrats choose to reform the filibuster tomorrow, they can restore the Voting Rights Act, reform the way votes are counted and elections are certified and vastly expand access to the ballot – in ways even the far-right supreme court would be unlikely to overturn, and gerrymandering Republican state legislatures would be powerless to reverse. There’s no guarantee that Biden can persuade Congress to reform the filibuster. But if he means what he says about protecting democracy, he has no choice but to try.The good news is that the White House may already understand this. If passing voting rights legislation is, to use the president’s phrase, “a national imperative” and if the only way to pass that legislation is to reform the filibuster, then reforming the filibuster is a national imperative, too. Because as President Biden has now made clear, the bully pulpit, executive branch and ballot box alone are not sufficient to protect our democracy. And by the time we know for certain that new laws are necessary, it will be too late.
      David Litt is an American political speechwriter and New York Times bestselling author of Thanks Obama, and Democracy In One Book Or Less. He edits How Democracy Lives, a newsletter on democracy reform.
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionJoe BidenRepublicansUS supreme courtcommentReuse this content More