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      The Republican party has ushered in a dark Christmas, indeed. We deserve better | Hamilton Nolan

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      Santa will not be pleased. Not to mention Jesus. That guy is gonna be pissed. When they find out what’s happened here, America is going to be in for a very dark Christmas indeed.I am not one of the unfortunates so poisoned by capitalism’s warped inhalation of the holiday season that they have grown cynical about the entire enterprise. My family takes Christmas very seriously. From a very young age I learned that this time of year was not about orgies of shopping or stewing in your contempt for your far-flung relatives, but rather about putting our dormant innate generosity into practice. The Christmas spirit is love. Our bitter cynicism should properly be oriented not at the Christmas spirit itself, but rather at those who corrupt it.Three hundred thousand Americans have died from Covid this year. Well over 200,000 of them died unnecessarily. Had our government managed this public health crisis in a mature and rational way, the deaths would be a fraction of what they are. Our government chose not to do so. Our leering and stupid leader chose to make the wearing of masks into a defining political issue – not out of necessity, or for any financial gain, or out of adherence to any philosophy, but out of aggressive stupidity, laziness and self-rationalization. Usually, the Republican party screws regular people because someone stands to get rich on it. In this case, it was only because they formed a coward’s puppet line behind an awful leader with a loud voice. In every community in America, there are people lying dead because their elected officials were scared of being tweeted at by a former reality show host.Merry Christmas, America.Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs this year through no fault of their own. Tens of thousands of small businesses, each one representing the dreams and ambitions of a human being and the employment of many others, have failed this year through no fault of their own. The money that our government appropriated to carry all of these people and businesses through this natural disaster ran out months ago, and nothing more has been forthcoming, even as we watch our friends and neighbors sink into bankruptcy and food insecurity and desperation.Many other nations have paid workers to stay home, relieving financial pressures on employers and employees alike. Republicans in Congress have refused to do this, because the stock market has stayed high, and also because they don’t care. Our incompetent and callous Republican leaders have ordered shutdowns without providing an adequate safety net, thus causing predictable public backlash against the shutdowns, which Republicans have been happy to encourage, because it directs public ire away from them and onto public health professionals. Idiocy in the White House has combined with the wealth-worshiping Republican Senate to produce the worst of both worlds: a raging preventable public health disaster and an economic catastrophe from which the very rich have been insulated.Your loved ones can die, your business can collapse, your job can evaporate, your unemployment benefits can dry up, your stimulus checks can disappear, and in return your elected leaders will offer you sneering jokes about masks and lies about who won the election. The rest, they will mostly ignore.Merry Christmas, America.Donald Trump is a vapid and pathetic man controlled in every case by his own worst impulses, but he is not the biggest villain of 2020. Without the entire superstructure of the Republican party behind him – voting for him, campaigning for him, debasing themselves before him, praising his stupid ideas and supporting him politically – he would not be in a position to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths. There is a long, straight line that runs from the wink-and-nod racist Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon through the deregulation and union-busting of Reagan and up to the deadly narcissism of Trump. When a political party is willing to tell any lie and demonize anyone in order to protect the right of the rich to have everything, it will eventually find that it has become the home of cranks and fascists. The Republican party has spent decades stoking malignant ignorance in service of greed, and it has now been devoured by it. What afflicts us now is not just a virus, but a national philosophy lovingly tended by many generations of conquerors that prizes avarice and calls it individualism.We are all in this pandemic together. Sickness passes from person to person with no regard for identity. Economic decline seizes every city and state at once. Overwhelming crises like these can be catalysts for unity. Shared pain is also an opportunity for shared love. Suffering so widespread can open everyone’s eyes to the common fate of humanity, and our responsibility to support one another in good times and bad.But that is not what America is getting out of this crisis. We are getting the suffering without the sharing, and the pain without the promise of mutual support. Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, a man who told people to love their neighbors and give their wealth to the poor; it is embodied by Santa, a man who rewards generosity with more generosity, and vows to carry gifts to the homes of everyone no matter who they are. And yet the people who are loudest about Christmas – those showing off the biggest tree, carrying the most ostentatious Bible – are the same people who have chosen to allow hundreds of thousands of us to die, rather than do what needs to be done for public health, and have chosen to allow millions of us to sink into poverty, rather than do what needs to be done for public welfare. They have chosen this because they believe that this is the path that will maximize their own power. That is their present to you, and they really don’t care if you like it.Yes, Virginia, there is a “War on Christmas”. But the Republicans are the ones waging it. And the Christmas spirit, I’m sorry to say, is losing. More

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      in US Politics

      Has Donald Trump finally split the Republican party?

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      After four years of norm-shattering rule, Donald Trump appears close to doing the one thing observers have long predicted but that has not yet come to pass: splitting the Republican party.With Trump staring at the prospect of only a few more weeks in the White House, significant segments of the party are finally breaking with a president to whom they have hitherto displayed almost unwavering loyalty. Furthermore, Trump’s stoking of division in his own party has even succeeded in uniting warring factions among his opponents.Responding on Wednesday night to the president’s bombshell threat to veto the $900bn Covid relief and stimulus bill, Democratic leaders and members of the progressive House “Squad” – otherwise at each other’s throats – welcomed Trump’s demand for increased direct payments to individual Americans.“Let’s do it!” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi.“We can pass $2k checks this week,” wrote Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Somewhere on Capitol Hill, presumably, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell buried his head in his hands.‘Send me a suitable bill, or else’Predictions that Trump will wreck and split the Republican party have been rife since 2015, when he wrecked and split – and won – the race for the presidential nomination. While the party remains whole, and an official split will be a surprise, it has now descended into internecine strife, Trump loyalists fighting for the lost cause of a second term while others seek to adjust to life back in opposition.Trump maintains a strong hold on the hard-right Republican base, on a large part of the House delegation who owe their seats to that base and on influential senators. The penalty for apostasy is clear: a primary from the right or, as rumour has it in the case of the Florida senator Marco Rubio, a challenge from Trump’s own daughter.But in contrast to the zeal of the Maga-fuelled legions, in the Senate the party establishment has now rejected Trump’s increasingly wild attempts to hold on to power while negotiating the Covid deal which stoked Tuesday night’s extraordinary display of presidential petulance from the White House podium.In his video message, Trump bemoaned spending commitments in the relief deal and demanded Congress “send me a suitable bill, or else the next administration will have to deliver a Covid relief package. And maybe that administration will be me.”It won’t, even if Trump’s allies in the House and Senate go through with planned challenges to the electoral college result in Congress on 6 January. Democrats who control the House will ensure the result is certified there, while McConnell and his deputies assure passage in the Senate.But if such challenges can only be performative, they will be politically beneficial for everyone except the Republican establishment which will help to beat them down. Trump’s refusal to accept defeat, not to mention the vicious fire he and his allies have directed at McConnell since the senator recognised Joe Biden’s win, is damaging the president’s own party.A day before the electoral college result is certified, two run-off elections in Georgia will decide control of the Senate. Early voting has started. Seeking to hold on to the party’s best hope of thwarting Biden’s agenda, McConnell needs a united front. Such is Trump’s refusal to accept party discipline or political reality, that has become impossible.Georgia’s two sitting senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, have thrown in their lots with Trump. That means supporting his claim the presidential election was rigged, which the party establishment fears could suppress Republican turnout.‘A different course’On CNN last weekend, the Utah senator and 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a frequent Trump critic, was asked if he “still recognised the Republican party”.“The party has taken a different course than obviously the one that I knew as a younger person,” Romney said, adding that his Republican party stood for leading abroad while “balancing the budget” at home.“And we believed that character was essential in the leaders that we chose. We’ve strayed from that. I don’t see us returning to that for a long time.”The remark about character was pointed. Romney went on to describe a battle to succeed Trump at the top of the party that promises to be as life was to Thomas Hobbes: nasty and brutish, if long-term rather than short.“As I look at the 2024 contenders,” Romney said, “most of them are trying to become as much like Donald Trump as they can be. Although I must admit that his style and schtick, if you will, is difficult to duplicate.”Of necessity, ambitious senators such as Josh Hawley of Missouri, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ted Cruz of Texas would have taken that as a compliment – but also a warning. Trump is reportedly likely to announce his own candidacy for 2024 not long after removal from office.“I represent a very small slice of the Republican party today,” Romney continued, “but you know everybody has to stand up for what they believe. And I believe my colleagues are doing what they think is right.”For some Republicans, Trump has already proven too much.The party remains in one piece. Whether it stays so remains to be seenOutside Congress, the Never Trumpers of the Lincoln Project, the Bulwark and other groups fought for Biden while former Republican voters helped turn Georgia and Arizona blue. Inside Congress, a few have taken a stand. The common way out is to retire but two House members from Michigan, Justin Amash last year and Paul Mitchell this, found the courage to publicly leave their party.Such numbers are small. The party remains in one piece. Whether it stays so remains to be seen. In the brewing fight, those ranged against Trump are not ready to quit.Writing for the Washington Post in November, long before Trump’s refusal to concede defeat mutated into considerations of martial law, the conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin said the US effectively has “three parties now: the Democratic party, the Anti-Democracy Trump party and the Pro-Democracy Republican party.”Rubin advocated a bipartisan effort to restore balance, writing: “Once the Anti-Democracy Trump party is marginalised we might have functional government again. The Democratic party and the Pro-Democracy Republican party should put their heads together and devise a strategy to bring that about – quickly, and certainly before 2024.”Romney has disappointed Democrats before, not least over the appointment of supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett. But he seems to be up for the fight.“I think I’m more effective in the Republican party, continuing to battle for the things I believe in,” he said, when asked if he would leave. “I think ultimately the Republican party will return to the roots that have been formed over the last century.“Hopefully people will recognise we need to take a different course than the one we’re on right now.” More

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      Senior Republican says party’s final election challenge will ‘go down like a shot dog’

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      Donald Trump has reportedly acknowledged in private that his attempt to overturn the election result will fail, while a senior Republican in the Senate said on Monday a challenge coming in the House of Representatives will “go down like a shot dog”.But amid reports of a president unhinged – one report said: “We cannot stress enough how unnerved Trump officials are” – and while Trump continued to stoke a Republican civil war by attacking Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, a group of GOP representatives visited the White House to plan one final push to reverse the will of the American people.Congress meets to validate the electoral college result, a 306-232 win for Joe Biden, on 6 January. On Monday, Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama led a delegation of about 12 Republicans to the White House, where they discussed how their challenge to that result will proceed.“It was a back and forth concerning the planning and strategy for January the 6th,” Brooks told Politico, adding: “More and more congressmen and senators are being persuaded that the election was stolen.”There is no evidence that this is the case, and Brooks notably declined to identify any of the supposed doubters. By all the evidence, challenges to the result in the House and the Senate will not have the votes to be sustained.On Monday, No 2 Republican senator John Thune told CNN the move was “going down like a shot dog” and added: “I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense to put everybody through this when you know what the ultimate outcome is going to be.”Nonetheless, Trump continues to make baseless accusations of mass electoral fraud and reportedly to rage against aides he deems insufficiently zealous in his defence. According to the news site Axios, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and chief of staff Mark Meadows are prominent among such hapless targets.So is McConnell, whom Trump claims to have saved in his re-election fight this year, the president sending a slide to Republicans in Congress which purported to show the restorative effect of a presidential tweet and robocall.“Sadly, Mitch forgot,” the slide said. “He was the first one off the ship!”The wisdom or otherwise of attacking the Republican Senate leader two weeks before run-off elections in Georgia that will decide control of the chamber, and with it much of Biden’s chances of legislative success, seems lost on the president for now.Meadows was once a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus in the House, and his former allies were among those visiting the White House on Monday. Mike Pence, who will preside over the joint session of Congress on 6 January, also attended the meeting.Trump is even reported to have soured on the vice-president, his loyal lieutenant since joining the ticket in 2016. The president is reported to believe Pence is “backing away” from him – notably, a claim advanced in a recent ad by the Lincoln Project, a group of dissident Republicans.“When Mike Pence is running away from you,” the ad says, “you know it’s over.”Among representatives reported to have been at the conspiratorial huddle at the White House was Jim Jordan of Ohio, a renowned attack dog so loyal to Trump that he has claimed never to have heard the president lie. (The Washington Post’s count of Trump’s lies in office stands at 26,000.) Also there was Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, an open supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory preparing to take a seat in Congress.Brooks said the Republicans were “trying to make sure that we understand what [Pence’s] view of the procedural requirements are, so we can comply with them. Pence will have a tremendous amount of discretion, though I think the rulings he will make will be pretty cut and dry.“It’s still somewhat fluid, since this does not happen very often.”Trump remains actively engaged in the fundamentally anti-democratic campaign. He is said to have spent an hour poring over the details of the 6 January session with the group from Congress.The closer the president gets to removal from office, the more volatile he becomes, and the more wild his invective grows. According to Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine, since election day White House aides have been “outright avoiding the president out of concern he might end up using any nearby staffer as a human stress ball”.In a meeting at the White House last Friday, Trump is reported to have floated the idea of the arch-conspiracy theorist and lawyer Sidney Powell being appointed a special counsel to investigate voter fraud during the election.According to the New York Times, Trump asked advisers at that gathering about whether the military could be mobilised to “rerun” the election. The idea was the brainchild of Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser pardoned by Trump for lying to the FBI, who was present at the Friday meeting.As Trump digs himself ever further into his “stolen election” rabbit hole, other key figures in his administration are gently but firmly moving in the other direction. William Barr, the US attorney general who has been willing to accommodate many of Trump’s whims, has distanced himself.On Monday Barr bluntly squashed the idea of a special counsel.“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool, I would name one, but I haven’t and I’m not going to,” he said. More

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      The Trump White House has entered its final stage: complete meltdown | Richard Wolffe

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      The last days of the Trump presidency increasingly resemble the fictional presidency in the movie Monsters vs Aliens.In case you missed this 2009 animated masterpiece, President Hathaway (voiced by Stephen Colbert) responds to an alien invasion with a team of unlikely heroes, among them a giant-sized TV reporter from Modesto, a cockroach-turned-mad-scientist, and an enormous blob of Jell-O.One of the running gags is that the president has installed two red buttons in his situation room. One is to make his morning latte, the other to launch all his nuclear weapons. He can never remember which is which.In the final month of Donald Trump’s time in the Oval Office, he has at last assembled his own team of outsized odds and ends, self-aggrandizing wingnuts, and brainless lumps of gelatin. You can decide for yourself if this latest incarnation of his “elite strike force” of advisers is more likely to launch all the nuclear weapons or make a fresh cup of coffee.At the center of the team to save Planet Trump are the unhinged characters of Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, who reportedly met with the soon-to-be-ex-president in the White House over several hours on Friday.Both Powell and Flynn have previously been fired by the reality TV star turned president – who, after all, built a public persona around firing people on The Apprentice. But on Planet Trump, firings are not as final as they appear to be, which surely means it’s not too late for the Mooch to extend his 10-day record of service to the nation.Powell was ejected from the elite strike force of lawyers just one month ago for her outlandish claims that Joe Biden won the presidential election with mysterious “communist money” and the support of the long-deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.But that was so November. Now, as the New York Times first reported, Powell’s outlandish claims are the basis for Trump’s desire to name her as special counsel to investigate the Venezuelan plot.Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, told reporters on Monday that he saw no need to name a special counsel to investigate either the election or Biden’s son Hunter.But it is only a matter of time before Powell disinters the Chavismo corpse once more. Specifically, a couple of days: Barr leaves his office on Wednesday, mysteriously a few weeks before everyone else in the Trump administration.Friday’s surreal bull session included Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, who has the distinct honor of having been fired by both Obama and Trump – a rare point of agreement between the yin and yang of the American presidency. Flynn lied to Mike Pence and the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, pleading guilty to the felony as part of the Mueller investigation.Newly pardoned by the man who fired him, Flynn is now reportedly advocating for Trump to invoke martial law to re-run the election. This would normally be key to executing a Chavista coup, but is obviously now the victim of a Chavista coup.One of the ringleaders of this madcap gang is Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock, who left the online retailer last year claiming that he had romanced a Russian agent on behalf of “the Men in Black”. Good luck making sense of that, or Byrne’s latest venture: what he calls “a team of hackers and cybersleuths and other people with odd skills”. For Trump’s favorite news channel, OAN, this constitutes an “elite cybersecurity team”.It’s quite possible that “elite” means something else on Planet Trump. It’s also possible there are giant-sized TV reporters in Modesto.This is the self-defeating, nonsensical house that Trump builtByrne, who tweeted that he was part of the long White House session with Flynn and Powell, says that Trump is being lied to by his own advisers and that his buddy can still win the election he so clearly lost.“It is 100% winnable. No martial law required,” he tweeted. “Sydney [sic] and Flynn presented a course that I estimate has 50%-75% chance of victory. His staff just try to convince him to do nothing but accept it. As a CEO, my heart broke to see what he is going through. He is betrayed from within.”It must have been heartbreaking to sit in the bunker, watching reason and the constitution push their way into the conversation, while our brave reality TV star battled against his own disloyal lackeys.Sadly the sickness is not confined to the Oval Office and will outlive its current occupant. Back on Earth, there is no chance of Trump successfully ordering the military to intervene in the election, and no chance of Congress overturning the electoral college. But these pesky facts won’t stop the Trumpista movement that is now the Republican party.Take Clay Higgins, the duly elected representative for Louisiana’s third district. Higgins is a reserve law enforcement officer with a strained relationship to reality, having made his name videoing outlandish Crime Stoppers messages that his own sheriff told him to stop.“If Biden is inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States on January 20th, it will mark the final hour of conspiracy to dismantle the American election process, and the first hour of conspiracy to dismantle America,” Higgins tweeted on Sunday. Normal presidents treat their final weeks in office like a presidential marshmallow test. While they may want, desperately, to opine about everything the president-elect is doing, they delay their gratification for their memoirs.They may be hoping for a post-presidential mission or at least some post-presidential reassessment of their place in history. But they maintain a dignified silence to buy themselves a little dignity after leaving office.That’s clearly not the Trump plan. There are no post-presidential missions, or historical reassessments. There are only more outrageous threats and tweets to cap a brief political career overflowing with outrageous threats and tweets.This is the self-defeating, nonsensical house that Trump built.“What idiot designed this?” President Hathaway asks his advisers about the twin red buttons in Monsters vs Aliens.“You did, sir,” says a general.“OK. Then go fire someone,” the president shoots back.Soon, there will be nobody left to fire. Or rehire. There will just be a Donald Trump, surrounded by a room full of wackadoodle theories with no staff to pretend to take them seriously. More

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      Trump attempt to overturn election is 'nutty and loopy', Romney says

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      Donald Trump’s flirtation with declaring martial law in battleground states and appointing a conspiracy theorist as special counsel to help his attempt to overturn defeat by Joe Biden are “really sad” and “nutty and loopy”, Mitt Romney said on Sunday.“He’s leaving Washington with a whole series of conspiracy theories and things that are so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their head wondering what in the world has gotten into this man,” the Utah Republican senator said.Joe Biden won the 3 November election by 306-232 in the electoral college and by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote. Nonetheless, Trump is entertaining outlandish schemes to remain in office, egged on by allies like former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who Trump pardoned for lying to the FBI, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney.During a Friday meeting at the White House first reported by the New York Times, Trump discussed security clearance for Sidney Powell, a conspiracy-spouting attorney who was cut from Trump’s campaign legal team.It is unclear if Trump will actually attempt to install Powell as a special counsel, a position which the US attorney general, not the president, appoints. Numerous Republicans, from outgoing attorney general William Barr to governors and state officials, have said repeatedly there is no evidence of the mass voter fraud Trump baselessly alleges.“It’s not going to happen,” Romney told CNN. “That’s going nowhere. And I understand the president is casting about trying to find some way to have a different result than the one that was delivered by the American people, but it’s really sad in a lot of respects and embarrassing.“Because the president could right now be writing the last chapter of this administration, with a victory lap with regards to the [Covid-19] vaccine. After all he pushed aggressively to get the vaccine developed and distributed, that’s happening on a quick timeframe. He could be going out and championing this extraordinary success.“Instead … this last chapter suggests what he is going to be known for.”Trump’s campaign and allies have filed around 50 lawsuits alleging voting fraud – almost all have been dismissed. Trump has lost before judges of both parties, including some he appointed, and some of the strongest rebukes have come from conservative Republicans. The supreme court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority and three Trump appointees, has refused to take up cases.Trump has been fuming and peppering allies for options. During the Friday meeting, Giuliani pushed Trump to seize voting machines. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) made clear that it had no authority to do so. It is unclear what such a move could accomplish.Barr told the Associated Press this month the Department of Justice and DHS had looked into claims voting machines “were programmed essentially to skew the election results … and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that”. Paper ballots have been used to verify results, including in Georgia, which performed two audits of its vote tally, confirming Biden’s victory.Flynn went yet further, suggesting Trump could impose martial law and use the military to re-run the election. Chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone voiced objections, people familiar with the meeting told news outlets. Trump, who spent much of Saturday tweeting and retweeting electoral fraud claims, responded on Twitter.“Martial law = Fake News,” he wrote. “Just more knowingly bad reporting!”Trump’s grip on the Republican party remains secure, suggesting members in Congress will dutifully raise objections to the electoral college results on 6 January. Such objections will be for political ends and will not in all likelihood succeed in overturning the election. Democrats hold the House and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he will knock down objections in the Senate.On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Romney, who did better at the polls in his 2012 defeat by Barack Obama than Trump did in 2016 and 2020, was asked if his party could ever escape Trump’s grip.“I believe the Republican party has changed pretty dramatically,” he said. “And by that, I mean that the people who consider themselves Republican and voted for President Trump I think is a different cohort than the cohort that voted for me.“…You look at those that are thinking about running in 2024, [they are] trying to see who can be the most like President Trump. And that suggests that the party doesn’t want to take a different direction.”Josh Hawley of Missouri, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ted Cruz of Texas are among senators thought likely to run to succeed Trump in the White House, and therefore likely to object to the electoral college results.“I don’t think anyone who’s looking at running in 2024 has the kind of style and shtick that President Trump has,” Romney said. “He has a unique and capable politician … But I think the direction you’re seeing is one that he set out.“I’d like to see a different version of the Republican party. But my side is very small these days … I think we recognise that character actually does count.” More

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      Biden and McConnell have a long history – but can they really work together now?

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      When they were both in the Senate, Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, maintained a strong working relationship that survived some of the most partisan legislative fights in decades.That relationship will now face a new test when Biden is sworn in as president of the United States and McConnell will be the highest-ranking Republican in the country.It’s a setup familiar to Biden: when he was vice-president, Barack Obama had to battle with an adversarial McConnell, who at one point said the top priority of Senate Republicans was to make Obama a “one-term president”.The difference between the beginning of that matchup – between a Democratic president who spent a just few years in the Senate and a Republican minority leader – and now is significant. McConnell, unlike at the beginning of the Obama administration, may command a slim Republican majority in his chamber when Biden takes office.Last week, McConnell finally gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he congratulated Biden on becoming president-elect, effectively putting another nail in the coffin of Donald Trump’s repeated baseless claims of widespread fraud and attempts to overturn the results. Later that day Biden publicly said he had spoken with McConnell by phone.“I had a great conversation with Mitch McConnell today,” Biden said on Tuesday. “I called him to thank him for the congratulations. I told him that while we disagree on a lot of things there are things we can work together on. We agreed to get together sooner than later. And I’m looking forward to working with him.”More significantly, the two have a history of working together through their decades in Congress. Biden was first elected as a senator for Delaware in 1972; McConnell was first elected to the Senate for Kentucky in 1984.Since then, they have been co-sponsors on 318 bills, according to a Guardian tally. During a contentious debt limit fight in 2011, Biden was the preferred Obama administration liaison for McConnell. Biden has long prided himself about his deep bipartisan ties in the Senate.“I on a number of occasions couldn’t get things done on my own and that’s when I would call in Joe Biden,” Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate leader, said in an interview with the Guardian. “The reason that I would call upon Joe Biden in a time of my personal crisis because I couldn’t get things done on my own was he was trusted very much by Republicans, that was the way it was with all my Senate colleagues. Joe Biden had been there a long long time. He’d built up a lot of chits with a lot of people.”Biden and McConnell appear to be polar opposites. Biden is known for his effusive friendliness and loquacious public demeanor. McConnell is more reserved and careful with his words. Yet the two will both either say they can work together or say nothing at all.They’re not going to call each other names because they’ve known each other so long“They’re both civil,” the former senator Max Baucus of Montana said in an interview. “They’re not going to call each other names because they’ve known each other so long and if you’ve known someone that long you tend not to want to call them names.”McConnell and Biden made a joint appearance at the eponymously named McConnell Center at the University of Louisville in 2011. In introducing Biden, then vice president, the Senate Republican said “Now that he’s moved to the other end of Pennsylvania avenue I’m happy to say that our working relationship is still strong.”Biden at that same event described McConnell as someone he understood and a good example of the then vice-president’s deep connections in the Senate.“The relationship between Senator McConnell and President-elect Biden has been professional, enabling them (and, importantly, their staffs) to negotiate in good faith,” said Jon Kyl, a former senator from Arizona who served in Republican Senate leadership. “In any government, certain things must get done; as professionals, these two know how to achieve necessary results.”McConnell was also the single Republican senator to attend the funeral of Beau Biden, the president-elect’s son, in 2015.Run-inThere’s a residual level of mutual bitterness between McConnell and his community of former and current staffers and that of Obama and his former staff. In Obama’s recent book he recounts and interaction between Biden and McConnell.“Joe told me of one run-in he’d had on the Senate floor after the Republican leader blocked a bill Joe was sponsoring; when Joe tried to explain the bill’s merits, McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, ‘You must be under the mistaken impression that I care,’” Obama wrote. “But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness – all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.”But less so when it comes to Biden and McConnell. That may partially be because McConnell and Biden will have to deal with each other going forward. The two have been in something of a detente. McConnell hasn’t spoken particularly ill of Biden and vice versa.Baucus said if Biden sets out with some kind of initiative attractive to Republicans, that could extend a honeymoon phase between him and McConnell.“If Joe proposes and starts off with an infrastructure bill that’ll help because that’s bipartisan,” Baucus said.Baucus added that McConnell “will want to work with Joe as best he can because they know each other”. But the former Montana senator also noted that McConnell’s motivations include staying majority leader and protecting his caucus, interests that don’t naturally align with a Democratic president.That silence can only last so long. In either the case where the Senate is split 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote or where Republicans have a small majority the president and Republican Senate leader will have to work with each other.Asked if Biden and McConnell will be able to work together in harmony, Reid said: “I think we’re going to know pretty quickly because President-elect Biden, when he becomes president he’s going to have to move on certain things very quickly.“He has a portfolio that’s loaded with stuff that he has to do and he’s going to have to pick and choose what he has to move on and I would hope that there are enough Republicans to help,” Reid added.Asked about their different personalities and whether they will be able to work together, Kyl said in an email: “Yes, they are very different personalities, but have found they can trust each other. And, again, much of it depends on their staffs also working with each other. If they don’t have the same kind of staff they did, say in 2010-12, it would not work as well.” More

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      in US Politics

      From A Very Stable Genius to After Trump: 2020 in US politics books

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      A long time ago, in 1883, a future president (Woodrow Wilson, a subject of this year’s reckonings) studied political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a classroom in which was inscribed the slogan “History is Past Politics, Politics is Present History”, attributed to Sir John Seeley, a Cambridge professor.That was before the era of the made-for-campaign book.Politics books in this election year fell into three broad categories. The ordinary, ranging from “meeting-and-tells” to campaign biographies that outlived their relevance. The interesting, those which made tentative starts at history or contained some important revelations. And the significant, those few whose value should live past this year because they actually changed the narrative – or are simply good or important reads.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the books also fell in descending categories numerically. Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post read 150 books on Donald Trump and the Trump era for his own book, What Were We Thinking. Virtually all readers, however, will be content with simply a “non-zero” number, to quote a Trump campaign lawyer.First, the ephemera and the expected offerings of any election year. Scandals in and out of government; tales of the extended Trump family; attempts at self-justification; books, some entertaining, by correspondents; how-to guides to politics meant to be read and applied before November.The permutations and penumbras of the 2016 campaign continued to produce new books: Peter Strozk’s Compromised is the story of the origin of the investigation into the Trump campaign from one FBI agent’s perspective, strong stuff and persuasive though omitting facts inconvenient to him. Rick Gates’ Wicked Game contains some new inside scoop, but the real stuff presumably went to the Mueller investigation of which Strzok was briefly a part. Donald Trump Jr’s Liberal Privilege had a double mission: to encourage votes for the father in 2020 and perhaps for the son in 2024. American Crisis, New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s early book on the coronavirus outbreak, highlighted his programmatic vision rather than soaring prose, a choice appropriate for the year but quickly forgotten as the pandemic rages on.Second come those books that made one sit up a bit to pay attention: a new insight, important facts revealed; “worth a detour”, in the language of the Michelin guides. Psychologist and presidential niece Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough explained the pain of the Trump family over two generations and how that pain has influenced our national life for ill. David Frum was among the first to predict Trump’s authoritarian dangers. This year, Trumpocalpyse, well-written and insightful as always, focused on the attacks on the rule of law and “white ethnic chauvinism” as hallmarks of Trumpism, whether its supporters are poor or elite. Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Pulitzer-winning Post reporters, chronicled Trump more deeply and successfully than most in A Very Stable Genius. Trump’s anger at the book showed they hit their target.Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie takes Republican history back a few decades in a punchy mea culpa whose themes will be important in the debate over the future of the GOP. Among the Democrats, a rare good work by a politician, Stacey Abrams’ Our Time Is Now, as well as her triumph in political organizing in Georgia, marks her as an important force.For quality in financial journalism and the importance of its topic, not least to current and future investigations of Trump and the Trump Organization, Dark Towers by David Enrich on Deutsche Bank offers as full an analysis of the bank and its relation to Trump as is likely to be public absent a further court case in New York.Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor with the Mueller investigation, wrote Where Law Ends, a strongly-written account in which he regrets his boss not having pursued further, notably in not issuing a subpoena to Trump and then in not making a formal determination as to whether the president would be charged with obstruction of justice. Weissmann’s frustration is understandable, but readers may judge for themselves how fair or not he is to the pressures and formal restrictions on Mueller himself.There is a subcategory here, of books on foreign and security policy. HR McMaster’s Battlegrounds attempts to explain his working theories (“strategic empathy”) modified for current realities and arguing against American retrenchment and isolation. In The Room Where It Happened, former national security adviser John Bolton told of Trump begging for China’s assistance and wrote that Trump was not “fit for office” – the tale would have been better told to the House impeachment committee. David Rohde’s In Deep demolished the theory of the “deep state”. Barry Gewen delivered a new biography of Henry Kissinger’s life and work. Traitor, by David Rothkopf, sought to chronicle the Trump administration while seeking to reverse its effects and giving a history of American traitors.Finally, the significant – those few books that contributed importantly to the year’s narrative, or that deserve a reading next year.There was another Bob Woodward book, Rage – with tapes. The big news was that Trump was aware of the dangers of Covid-19 yet chose not to publicize them and that Dan Coats, then director of national intelligence, thought Putin had something on Trump. Woodward got the stories others chased. Michael Schmidt’s Donald Trump v the United States is another serious book, with a strong argument of how deeply the attacks on the rule of law by the Trump administration, notably by Trump himself, threaten democracy. Schmidt’s recounting of efforts to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey are sobering, and his revelations on how the Mueller investigation was narrowed to focus on criminality rather than Russian influence in 2016 form a useful corrective to Weissmann.Politics meets history in a few volumes, notably Thomas Frank’s plea against populism, The People, No, contrasting Trump unfavorably with FDR. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser teamed for a masterpiece biography of former secretary of state James Baker, The Man Who Ran Washington, that reminds us what (and whom) the Republican party used to call leadership. It’s a serious book that recalls Baker, Gerald Ford’s campaign manager in 1976, did not challenge the election result because Ford lost the popular vote. It also shows the truth in Seeley’s aphorism about the relation of politics and history, with many insights into one of the best recent practitioners of politics, fondly remembered for his statesmanship at the end of the cold war.Molly Ball’s well-researched and enjoyable biography of Nancy Pelosi makes sense of the most powerful woman in American history. Thomas Rid’s Active Measures, on disinformation and political warfare – Clausewitz for the cyber era – finds fresh urgency in light of recent revelations about major cyberattacks on the US government.Two books merit a final mention. As the Trump administration comes to a close, Ruth Ben-Ghiat analysed Trump’s actions and personality from the comparative perspective of fascist leaders since Mussolini and chillingly noted not only the actions that pointed to authoritarianism, but how deep the danger of going down that path.Strongmen is a vital book and a warning. Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.” Dehumanizing rhetoric and actions against immigrants (and even members of Congress) and appointments of people whose motivation was loyalty rather than law has real cost to a political system whose fragility at points is evident. It takes both individual action and courageous will to preserve democracy.On a happier note, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith in After Trump offer a legal, sometimes quite technical roadmap to reform of many norms of government that have been eroded. Some are obvious, others will prove controversial, but let this urgent discussion begin with Congress and the Biden administration.Of which, this year also saw the publication of A Promised Land, the first volume of memoirs from Barack Obama, whom the new president served as vice-president. Well-written despite being policy heavy, at times deeply moving, at others not as detailed as many readers might wish (despite its length), Obama is reflective both about the nature of power and about himself. More, his book serves once again to remind the world of the contrast between him and his successor. He is rightly proud to have written it – and to have written it by hand, to encourage his own deep thoughts about his presidency and the country he was honored, and sometimes troubled, to lead.To learn more about the president to come, Evan Osnos’ Joe Biden: American Dreamer is an excellent place to start: his political skills, life tragedies and conviviality are here in equal measure. Osnos ends with a Biden speech about dispelling America’s “season of darkness” – a fervent hope for the new year ahead. More