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      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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      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

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      To keep the Democratic coalition together, Biden will have to be the Great Balancer | Geoffrey Kabaservice

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      It may just be a function of the circles I travel in, but very few people I know are happy with the election results. Republicans are unhappy that Donald Trump has lost his reelection battle with Joe Biden and will become a one-term president. Democrats are unhappy that the predicted blue wave did not materialize, which means that Republicans will likely maintain control of the Senate and Mitch McConnell can thwart any ambitious Democratic legislation. And my Never-Trump friends are unhappy that the outcome did not deliver the complete repudiation of Trumpism, and the subsequent reformation of a chastened Republican party, that they had hoped for.Like many people, I am guilty of having placed too much trust in the pollsters. But I really didn’t think a progressive tsunami was about to crash over the national landscape. The last time there was a genuine Democratic wave election, in 2008, its enabling condition was deep Republican demoralization over the George W Bush administration’s economic and foreign policy failures. Trump’s supporters, by contrast, are more fired-up than ever, despite his administration’s inability to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic and its accompanying economic dislocations.One lesson to be drawn from this election is that US politics nowadays is more about tribal, identity-based divisions than policy disagreements. But it’s hard to know what other definitive lessons to draw, because in a narrowly decided election all explanations are plausible.My own belief, for what it’s worth, is that Trump would have won re-election handily if not for the pandemic and his botched response to it. He had the advantages of incumbency that helped his three presidential predecessors win second terms. His base considers him infallible and enough voters outside his base were sufficiently satisfied with the pre-coronavirus economy that they tolerated all the ways in which he was unfit for the presidency. But character is destiny, and the same qualities that allowed Trump to win the presidency – his rejection of advice and experts, his unerring preference for personal advantage over the national good – ensured that he would lose it through his mishandling of the pandemic.And while the Democrats clearly are the majoritarian party, now that they have won the popular vote for an unprecedented seven of the past eight presidential elections, the country on some basic level continues to reject progressivism.I don’t for a second buy the leftwing argument that if Senator Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee, he would have won a smashing victory against Trump and swept in a Senate majority. Given the Senate results and the fact that nearly half of the electorate voted for Trump, I find it hard to credit the argument that the country as a whole yearned for the kind of radical change that didn’t even command a majority in the Democratic party.It’s true that the Republicans’ entire election strategy was based on the expectation that Trump would run against Sanders. When that didn’t happen, they had to fall back on the charge that Biden, despite his decades-long reputation as a centrist, was somehow the puppet of those who would impose terrifying socialist tyranny upon the land.The implausibility of this claim allowed Biden to flip the Midwestern states that had decided the election in 2016, mobilizing more Black voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 while peeling away just enough working-class whites and conservative suburbanites to win narrow majorities. Sanders, who didn’t win a single primary victory in the Midwest, could not have built such a coalition.One lesson to be drawn from this election is that US politics nowadays is more about tribal, identity-based divisions than policy disagreementsThe more economically populist and libertarian-ish aspects of progressivism have considerable electoral appeal, as was evident in the states (including some red states) that passed ballot measures liberalizing drug laws and, in Florida, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. But in California, perhaps the leading progressive state, voters rejected initiatives to reinstate affirmative action, impose rent controls, and classify rideshare and delivery workers as employees.But while Republicans’ dire warnings of an impending socialist dystopia didn’t work against Biden, this line of attack succeeded in allowing them to retake many of the House seats the Democrats flipped in 2018. Republicans tied these most moderate and vulnerable Democrats to far-left ideas such as the Green New Deal, free college, Medicare for All, and defunding the police. Angry centrist Democrats blamed their progressive colleagues, during a private post-election conference call, for costing the party critical seats and reducing the Democrats’ House majority to a thread. The Washington Post reported that moderate representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat from Virginia, heatedly insisted that “we need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again”, or else “we will get fucking torn apart in 2022”.The claim that the Democratic party has become a Trojan Horse for socialism also seems to have resounded with large numbers of Hispanics, particularly in states such as Florida and Texas where the Biden campaign performed much worse with these voters than Clinton did in 2016. Republican ads warning that Democrats would turn America into a socialist country may have succeeded in scaring Hispanics whose families fled dictators such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.More generally, it’s becoming clear that while most minorities vote Democratic, many don’t share white progressives’ views on issues like the need to cut police spending, the desirability of open immigration, and the nature of systemic racism. The writer Matthew Yglesias notes that progressives’ preferred term to refer to people of Latino origin – Latinx – is used by only 3% of US Hispanics, and that this divergence is symptomatic of white progressives’ “tendency to privilege academic concepts and linguistic innovations in addressing social justice concerns.” White progressive researchers also are shocked to find that minorities often support Trump’s racist rhetoric or policies – particularly when directed against other minority groups whom they also dislike.Then again, there are a host of other reasons why at least some fraction of Hispanics and other minorities may be breaking away from the Democratic coalition. These could include the appeal of Trump’s brand of swaggering masculinity, immigrants’ attraction to conservative ideas of individualism and upward mobility, and the growing tendency of non-college-educated minorities to see the world in similar terms as Trump’s base of non-college-educated whites. Or it could mainly be that, under the unique circumstances of this pandemic-year election, Republicans did a better job of engaging with minority voters, while the Democrats’ choice to suspend door-to-door canvassing, rallies, and other in-person means of voter mobilization was a critical error.A Biden presidency is likely to operate under both the external constraint of the Republican Senate majority and the internal constraint of the need to balance between its moderate and progressive wings. While this all but rules out big, ambitious reforms, it is possible that a Biden administration might succeed in passing more pragmatic measures like an economic stimulus, increased state aid for Covid-19 relief, and incremental criminal justice reforms. It’s even possible that there may be bipartisan action to combat climate change; two-thirds of Americans think the federal government should do more on climate, with particularly high levels of concern among coastal residents. But will progressives revolt against what they will see as too little, too late?If the Democratic party succeeds in realigning the college-educated, suburban middle class away from the Republican party while still holding onto its minority supporters and at least some fraction of the white working class, we might finally enter the long-predicted era of Democratic dominance. But the 2020 election showed that these constituencies, as well as the party’s moderate and progressive factions, have interests and priorities that are in high tension with each other. If a President Biden can keep the party together, history may remember him as the Great Balancer.Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: the Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party More