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      Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policy

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      Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policyBarak Ravid has written a fascinating account of four chaotic years in which some progress was nonetheless made Trump’s Peace is a blockbuster of a book. Barak Ravid captures the 45th president saying “Fuck him” to Benjamin Netanyahu and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures. Imagine the Republican reaction if Barack Obama had done that. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham would plotz. But Trump? Crickets.The State of Israel vs The Jews review: fierce indictment of a rightward lurch Read moreRavid also delivers a mesmerizing tick-tock of the making of the Abraham Accords, the normalization of Israel’s relations with four non-neighboring Arab states.Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Yousef al-Otaiba – the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the US – and members of Israel’s government took the time to talk. Ravid footnotes the receipts.The result is a well-paced and engrossing read, if in Hebrew only for now. Israel-born and based, Ravid writes for Axios and Walla, an Israeli website. He knows his subject. Netanyahu is caught telling Avi Berkowitz, Kushner’s deputy and a US negotiator, not to leak to the author. Instead, Berkowitz talked on the record.Technically, the Abraham Accords are a joint declaration signed by the US, Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. Practically, the agreements represent the first major breakthrough in Middle East peace since the October 1994 treaty between Israel and Jordan. Unlike the Hashemite kingdom, the UAE and Bahrain do not border Israel, are graced with petroleum reserves, and stare at Iran across the Persian Gulf.According to Ravid, the nuclear threat posed by Tehran and the unrest that followed the Arab Spring reshaped policies and thinking towards normalizing relations with Israel. The Palestinians no longer occupied center stage.Ravid reports that Netanyahu backtracked on a commitment to annex part of the West Bank after being subjected to US pressure. Apparently, the Trump administration made clear it would continue to shield Israel in the United Nations security council but would not at the International Criminal Court. Netanyahu got the message. It came down to a UAE ultimatum: settlements or peace. Netanyahu blinked.Ravid regards Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, also known as MBZ, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, as an unsung hero. He compares MBZ to Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who made peace with Israel then paid with his life.By the numbers, the Abraham Accords are yielding dividends. The UAE has announced a $10bn investment fund in key Israeli economic sectors and envisions more than $1tn in trade over a decade. Saudi Arabia looks to Bahrain as a conduit for investment in Israel and the Biden administration is “leaning” into the accords, after first hesitating.Ravid portrays Trump and Netanyahu as divisive leaders who threatened their countries’ democratic moorings. He recounts the 6 January insurrection in the US and Netanyahu’s resort to incitement. And yet, Ravid argues, fairness demands that both receive credit for this particular accomplishment.Understandably, Ravid is more ambivalent toward the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, a legacy of the Obama administration hated by Netanyahu and Trump. In Trump’s telling, his decision to pull out was not the result of Israeli urging. Rather, the deal was flawed and deserved to be scrapped.That verdict is not unanimous. Ravid quotes Udi Lavie, former deputy chief of the Mossad, who says the US withdrawal did not benefit Israel but hurt it. At the same time, Ravid observes that Netanyahu and Yossi Cohen, a former head of the Mossad, harbor no such regrets.Negotiations with the Iranian regime continue, with no tangible signs of progress. As Israel girds for possible conflict, its message is conflicted.A recent New York Times headline blared: Israeli Defense Officials Cast Doubt on Threat to Attack Iran. On the other hand, Amos Yadlin, a former air force general, told the paper his country has the capability for a successful strike.“Can the American air force can do it better? Definitely. But they don’t have the will.”Or necessarily the same strategic interests. Trump’s ascendance in 2016 was directly related to the Iraq war and its casualty count.Ravid also offers his take on Trumpworld. He stresses that Kushner was neither ideologue nor idealist. At heart he was a businessman, sympathetic to Israel but not seeing annexation as a personal cause. Nor, Ravid says, was Kushner driven by religious sentiment – as was Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state. The Messiah could wait.Nor, unlike Condi Rice, George W Bush’s secretary of state, did Kushner regard Palestinians stuck at Israeli check-points as – in Ravid’s words – “the reincarnation of Rosa Parks on a bus in Alabama”.In contrast to Kushner, David Friedman, Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and ambassador to Israel, viewed the two-state solution as an “illusion”. Before he took office, he derided Jews on the left as “worse than Kapos”. His nomination narrowly cleared the Senate.‘We are family’: the Israelis sharing life and hope with PalestiniansRead moreAs ambassador, Friedman was close to Netanyahu, sitting in on Israeli government meetings until he was tossed out by cabinet members. Ravid describes Friedman as “flesh of the settlers’ flesh”. Friedman has taken issue with portions of Ravid’s reporting – and has a book due in February.Earlier this year, Friedman told the Times he would not rule out becoming a US-Israeli dual national, but not until Trump’s plans for 2024 were known.“I’m going to stay American-only for at least four years,” he said. “I want to give myself every opportunity to return to government.”Maybe, maybe not. Trump remains on the stage, ready to kneecap any competitor for the Republican nomination. Netanyahu is standing trial on bribery and corruption charges while leading the opposition bloc in Israel’s Knesset.Paradoxically, his efforts to cling to power may be the best insurance policy for the current coalition government. One thing is certain: the two men created facts on the ground that will outlast them both.
      Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East is published in Israel by Yedioth Ahronoth Books
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      Why Trump appears deeply unnerved as Capitol attack investigation closes in

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      Why Trump appears deeply unnerved as Capitol attack investigation closes in Flurry of recent revelations raises the specter that the committee is swiftly heading towards an incriminating conclusion

      6 January panel will say if Trump committed crime – Kinzinger
      Donald Trump is increasingly agitated by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, according to sources familiar with the matter, and appears anxious he might be implicated in the sprawling inquiry into the insurrection even as he protests his innocence.Republicans are shamelessly working to subvert democracy. Are Democrats paying attention? Read moreThe former president in recent weeks has complained more about the investigation, demanding why his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, shared so much material about 6 January with the select committee, and why dozens of other aides have also cooperated.Trump has also been perturbed by aides invoking the Fifth Amendment in depositions – it makes them look weak and complicit in a crime, he has told associates – and considers them foolish for not following the lead of his former strategist Steve Bannon in simply ignoring the subpoenas.When Trump sees new developments in the Capitol attack investigation on television, he has started swearing about the negative coverage and bemoaned that the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was too incompetent to put Republicans on the committee to defend him.The former president’s anger largely mirrors the kind of expletives he once directed at the Russia inquiry and the special counsel investigation when he occupied the White House. But the rapidly accelerating investigation into whether Trump and top aides unlawfully conspired to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory at the 6 January joint session appears to be unnerving him deeply. The portrait that emerges from interviews with multiple sources close to Trump, including current and former aides, suggest a former president unmoored and backed into a corner by the rapid escalation in intensity of the committee’s investigation.A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.But as Trump struggles to shield himself from the select committee, with public hearings next year and the justice department said to be tracking the investigation, the path ahead is only likely to be more treacherous.The former president is especially attuned to his potential for legal exposure, even as he maintains he did nothing wrong in conferring about ways to overturn the 2020 election and encouraging supporters to march on the Capitol. He has expressed alarm to associates about repeated defeats in court as he seeks to stop the select committee obtaining some of the most sensitive of White House documents about 6 January from the National Archives, on grounds of executive privilege.The reality is that with each passing day, the committee seems to be gathering new evidence about Trump’s culpability around the Capitol attack that might culminate with recommendations for new election laws – but also for prosecutions.“I think that the justice department will keep a keen eye on what evidence the committee has accumulated, as well as looking out for witnesses for a potential case,” said Ryan Goodman, a former special counsel at the Department of Defense now a law professor at New York University.“One of the outcomes of the committee’s work and the public hearings will be to demonstrate individuals who might be wanting to come forward as witnesses and that’s got to be very important to justice department prosecutors,” Goodman said.House investigators are expected to soon surpass more than 300 interviews with Trump administration officials and Trump political operatives as part of a process that has yielded 30,000 documents and 250 tips via the select committee’s tip line.The flurry of recent revelations – such as the disclosure of Meadows’s connection to a powerpoint outlining how Trump could stage a coup, as first reported by the Guardian – raises the specter that the select committee is swiftly heading towards an incriminating conclusion.Trump’s associates insist they are not worried, at least for the moment, since the select committee has yet to obtain materials covered by executive privilege either through Meadows or the National Archives that could ensnare Trump personally.The former president’s defenders are correct in that respect – the committee does not have messages that show Trump directing an attack on the Capitol, one source said – and Trump has vowed to appeal the National Archives case to the supreme court.House panel gathers mountain of evidence in Capitol attack investigationRead moreBut no one outside the select committee, which is quietly making progress from a glass office on Capitol Hill with boarded-up windows and electronically secured doors, knows exactly what it has uncovered and whether the inquiry ends with a criminal referral.The material Meadows turned over alone depicts an alarming strategy to stop Biden’s certification on 6 January, involving nearly the entire federal government and lieutenants operating from the Willard hotel in Washington.One member on the select committee described the events around 6 January as showing a coalescence of multiple strategies: “There was a DoJ strategy, a state legislative strategy, a state election official strategy, the vice-president strategy. And there was the insurrection strategy.”The text messages Meadows received on his personal phone implicate Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr, and Republican members of Congress. Texts Meadows turned over to the committee might also be used by an enterprising prosecutor as evidence of criminal obstruction to stop a congressional proceeding if the White House knew election fraud claims to be lies but still used them to stop Biden’s certification.While Meadows never testified about the communications, a cadre of top Trump officials, from former acting national security adviser Keith Kellogg to Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short, have moved to cooperate with House investigators.The trouble for Trump – and part of the source of his frustration, the sources said – is his inability, out of office, to wield the far-reaching power of the executive branch to affect the course of the inquiry.The limited success of strategies he hoped would stymie the committee – ordering aides to defy subpoenas or launching legal challenges to slow-walk the release White House records – has been jarring for Trump.“I think what he’s finding is that as the ex-president, he has a lot less authority than he did as president. But his playbook doesn’t work if he’s not president,” said Daniel Goldman, former lead counsel in the first House impeachment inquiry into Trump.In a reflection of dwindling legal avenues available to undercut the investigation, Trump has returned to launching attacks-by-emailed-statement on the select committee, stewing over his predicament and what he considers an investigation designed only to hurt him politically.“The Unselect Committee itself is Rigged, stacked with Never Trumpers, Republican enemies, and two disgraced RINOs, Cheney and Kinzinger, who couldn’t get elected ‘dog catcher’ in their districts,” Trump vented last month.Trump tested positive for Covid few days before Biden debate, chief of staff says in new bookRead moreIn private, Trump is said to have reserved the brunt of his scorn for Meadows, furious with his former White House chief of staff for sharing sensitive communications on top of all the unflattering details about Trump included in his book this month.Trump’s associates, however, have focused more on questioning the legitimacy of the select committee and its composition, arguing the fact that the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, appointed both Republican members reduces the investigation to a partisan political endeavor.They also argue that none of the revelations to date – like the Guardian’s reporting on Trump’s call to the Willard hotel, during which he pressed operatives to stop Biden’s certification from taking place entirely – amounts to criminal wrongdoing.But in the meantime, Trump is left with little choice but to wait for the committee’s report.“The justice department seems to be more reactive than proactive,” Goodman said. “They might be waiting for the committee to wrap up its work to make criminal referrals.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      Capitol attack panel will determine if Trump committed crime – Republican

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      Capitol attack panel will determine if Trump committed crime – Republican
      Kinzinger promises to determine if criminal statute violated
      ‘He’s not a king. Former presidents, they aren’t former kings’
      Robert Reich: Beware the big lie, big anger and big money
      Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the deadly 6 January Capitol attack incited by Donald Trump, said on Sunday he was not “yet” ready to declare the former president guilty of a crime – but that the panel was investigating the likelihood that he is.Mark Meadows was at the center of the storm on 6 January. But only Trump could call it offRead more“Nobody is above the law,” the Illinois congressman told CNN’s State of the Union. “And if the president knowingly allowed what happened on 6 January to happen, and, in fact, was giddy about it, and that violates a criminal statute, he needs to be held accountable for that.”The committee has been picking up pace in recent weeks with dozens of subpoenas issued, some to close Trump aides. The waters lapped at the doors of Trump’s Oval Office this week when his fourth and final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, became a focus of the investigation over tweets he received on and around the day of the insurrection.The committee voted unanimously to refer Meadows for criminal prosecution for contempt of Congress, after he withdrew his cooperation.Kinzinger, who alongside fellow Republican Liz Cheney has drawn the ire of Trump allies for serving on the committee, said he had no qualms about scrutinising how Trump incited supporters to try to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, which he says was the result of massive electoral fraud, which it was not.“He’s not a king,” Kinzinger said, “Former presidents, they aren’t former kings.”Kinzinger added that he feared the events of 6 January were “trial run” for Trump and his allies to attempt another coup.“We will get every bit of detail that we can possibly get on that, so that’s important for the president’s role,” he said. “I want to hold the people guilty accountable but I want to make sure this never happens again.“Otherwise, 6 January will have been, yes, a failed trial run, but, sometimes, a failed trial run is the best practice to get one that succeeds, a coup that would succeed in toppling our government.”Kinzinger’s comments are the strongest to date about the depth of the inquiry into Trump’s role.At a “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House on 6 January, the then-president urged supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell [or] you’re not going to have a country any more”.He was impeached a second time for inciting the insurrection that followed, but though Kinzinger, and nine other House Republicans and seven GOP senators voted with Democrats, Trump was acquitted in his Senate trial and remains free to run for office again.Pressed on whether he thought Trump was guilty of a crime, Kinzinger said: “I don’t want to go there yet, to say, ‘Do I believe he has’. But I sure tell you I have a lot of questions about what the president was up to.”Earlier this month at a sentencing hearing for one of the rioters, a district court judge, Amy Berman Jackson, said she believed Trump stoked the riot and should be held accountable. Jackson was one of a growing number of federal judges to speak out.Trump is also in legal jeopardy from investigations of his business affairs, with authorities in New York looking at tax issues in particular.Trump spoke to Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures but was not asked about the 6 January inquiry, instead riffing on subjects including the Taliban’s hatred of dogs and how Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, struggles to pitch a baseball. Bob’s Burgers bans actor over alleged involvement in Capitol attack – reportRead moreTrump also weighed in on a conspiracy theory popular on Fox News which says Biden is not running the country, based on an apparent gaffe in which he called his vice-president, Kamala Harris, “president” in a university commencement speech this week.On CNN, Kinzinger acknowledged the 6 January committee was working to complete its work before next year’s midterm elections, in which Republicans are likely to take back control and thereby kill the investigation.The Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, a Trump loyalist whose text messages were included in those released this week, was one of the Republicans rejected by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, for a place on the 6 January panel.Regardless, Jordan has been tipped as a possible judiciary committee chair – who would therefore act to close the investigation of the Capitol attack.“He could not credibly head the [judiciary] committee,” Kinzinger said. “But he certainly could head the committee.”TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS elections 2020Donald TrumpTrump administrationRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesnewsReuse this content More

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      How a reboot of Trump’s Remain in Mexico plan isn’t the solution migrants are hoping for

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      How a reboot of Trump’s Remain in Mexico plan isn’t the solution migrants are hoping for Advocates are critical of the immigration policy’s reinstatement, while asylum seekers see the plan as better than nothing from the USEvery day feels like a bad dream to Timoty Correas. He spent five months in a jam-packed tent camp before moving weeks ago to a roach-infested hotel full of migrant families in a neighborhood, blocks from the US border where, he said, during the night local crime cartels would load crowds of smuggled people in and out of houses used as hiding places.Like thousands of other people here, Correas and his eight-year-old son are stranded at the US border, always hoping that hardline pandemic-related restrictions will cease and the processing of asylum seekers by the US will resume.Correas, a vegetable seller, fled Honduras to try to find his parents in Houston, Texas, after gang members took over his house with death threats in May. He planned to seek asylum in the US.‘People with no names’: the drowned migrants buried in pauper’s gravesRead moreCorreas traveled a month with smugglers through Mexico alongside a tide of other northbound migrants and reached Reynosa, across from Hidalgo, Texas, towards the eastern end of the US-Mexico border, in June.But he and his son found the border essentially closed to asylum seekers.Then, when he recently heard on TV news that the US would begin processing asylum cases through a reboot of former president Donald Trump’s controversial Remain in Mexico program, known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), he was hopeful.Although the program would promise a further six-month wait, it was the best news he’d gotten since the summer.“As I understand it, MPP will apply to families,” he said. “They’ll give us an opportunity to speak with a judge. It feels like a big help, a big step toward entering the US legally.”Immigration advocates, however, are fiercely critical of the court-ordered reinstatement this month of the immigration policy that Joe Biden campaigned to repeal, after Trump forced migrants to wait in Mexico, typically in squalor and danger, while their cases wound interminably through a dysfunctional US system.It was one of the final chapters of Trump’s harsh approach throughout, leaving migrants in limbo and greater numbers risking – and losing – their lives to cross anyway via border desert or river.But for thousands of asylum seekers stranded for months on the border with no end in sight, MPP feels like a sign of movement and better than nothing from the US government, which has been expelling migrants under a rule known as Title 42 and blocking most asylum claims under public health grounds since March of 2020.The latest iteration of MPP has kicked off slowly, enrolling 80 people in its first six days in El Paso, Texas, according to the publication Border Report.The US plans to eventually offer MPP at seven ports of entry across the south-west border, although authorities haven’t given a firm timeline.At a muddy tent camp in Reynosa, aid workers said it remained unclear exactly who would qualify for MPP, how many people it would eventually process or how strictly the government would adhere to humanitarian guidelines it set for itself.“Everyone is real excited about it,” said Felicia Rangel, co-director of the Sidewalk School, an aid organization founded when migrant populations first began to accumulate in this area in 2019. “But it’s not a good thing.”Until Trump brought in MPP in 2019, having already tried to block many asylum claims, those fleeing violence who hoped for political asylum were granted refuge in the US and allowed to join relatives in the country, who act as their sponsors, while their cases were heard.Biden repealed MPP upon taking office but continued Title 42, summarily expelling migrants without a chance to make their case.Up to 2,000 such people are living in a camp six blocks from Reynosa’s city center. An additional 1,150 are in tents in a shelter space supervised by the Pathway of Life church and hundreds more are in other shelters, crowded nearby houses or rooms rented by local charities.“Ninety percent or more don’t plan to return to their country,” said Isaac Castellanos, pastor of the Shaddai Ministry church, which offered to host 125 people in tents on its property in late October as the local migrant population began to overwhelm the city.“The option they are waiting for is through MPP.”He said the city has been discussing a large, federally funded shelter for months, but without progress, forcing small private charities to assume support for the humanitarian debacle.At the camp in Reynosa’s plaza, 35-year-old Belen Dubon keeps an “information desk” at a bench on the road to the bridge to Texas, where new arrivals come daily, expelled from the US after crossing the Rio Grande.Dubon, a nurse from Guatemala City who has lived in this camp for almost six months, said newcomers are easy to recognize because US authorities remove their shoelaces before expelling them and because they are covered in dust.Every day more than 100 people arrive, she said, escorted across the nearby bridge by US border patrol, then released on Mexican soil.Dubon helps them find food at community kitchens in the camp and space on the crowded ground to sleep for their first night. But this camp and surrounding shelters are full, so many people seek a place elsewhere.“Their guides who brought them come back and pick them up,” she said, referring to human smugglers. “I don’t know where they go.”Most people here see no option to give up on waiting, she said, because they spent thousands of dollars of mostly borrowed money to pay smugglers to get them here.Others, like Correas and his son, can’t return home because their houses were taken over by gang members. Others have sent their children across the border unaccompanied, in hope they would be able to apply there to stay, despite the prospect of being detained.Some of those children’s parents in Reynosa told the Guardian they’ll wait as long as they must to reunite.Parents such as Iris Betancourt, 36, who fled Honduras with her husband and three children in August after a local gang boss tried to make her 13-year-old daughter his wife and wound up at the camp in Reynosa.Dangerous and unsanitary conditions kept the three kids mostly penned up in the tent, she said, while Betancourt’s sister in Houston encouraged her to send them to live safely with her.On 31 October, Betancourt and her husband took the kids out for ice-cream, hugged them close all night then paid smugglers $500 per child the next morning to sneak them into the US, where they expected to be apprehended, and would give authorities the contact information for their aunt in Houston.The kids spent a month and seven days in a secure New York City shelter under the US Office of Refugee Resettlement, then arrived in Houston this month, Betancourt said.“I don’t know when I’ll see them again. I don’t know if I’ll wait here for years,” she said, crying. “I wonder every day, will I get in or not? Will the wait be worth the sacrifice?”Aid workers say thousands of children have been similarly sent over by parents in recent months. Figures from US Health and Human Services show more than 13,000 unaccompanied children in government custody as of 10 December, with roughly 500 discharged each day to sponsors across the country. Yet the parents who stay behind at the border face a slim chance of achieving legal entry into the US.Under Trump, MPP had a less-than-1% acceptance rate for asylum cases.Although Biden’s reboot lists new protections for enrolled migrants, it still isn’t clear exactly how the program will operate, said Alex Norman, a former paralegal who helps process emergency immigration parole cases at the camp in Reynosa.“They aren’t going to have the capacity to process thousands of people who are here now,” said Norman, who sits in on calls between DHS officials and local aid organizations.“Or the thousands who are on their way now that they hear there are asylum possibilities.”Eleanor Acer of advocacy group Human Rights First told NPR that MPP was a “humanitarian fiasco” under Trump and would be so under Biden, too.Yet migrants such as Correas, think any sort of shift in US policy is the best news he’s gotten after six months of limbo.His parents fled Honduras in the 1990s when he was a child and his dream of bringing his own son to be with them in a safe city motivates him now to wait indefinitely.“To be with my mom and dad, it will be the greatest gift of my life,” he said. “If I have to wait six or seven months like MPP says, then I’ll have to learn to adapt.”TopicsUS-Mexico borderUS immigrationBiden administrationTrump administrationUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animals

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      From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animals 2021 provided a glut of memoirs, deep dives and tell-alls about American politics in an age of Covid and attacks on democracy itself. Which were the best – and most alarming?If in recent years American politics books have been noted mainly for ephemera, in 2021 the winds of history began to blow open the doors – occasionally to devastating effect. The advent of a new administration loosened tongues and made documents more readily available as some sought redemption, justification or simply fame.March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican readsRead moreSuch books illustrate the truth that one cannot keep a thing hidden and generally share certain characteristics that convey the ring of truth. They report bitterly angry outbursts by Donald Trump, staff reeling from dysfunction, chaos and the pressures of a campaign in a pandemic. They frequently recount interviews with Trump himself. They contain sufficient profanity to make sailors blush.And, happily, this paper celebrated its bicentennial in part by scooping many of them, with real consequences in the case of Mark Meadows, who published The Chief’s Chief this month. Some – the former White House chief of staff in particular – may wish they had not written books. But some books are essential to understand the danger in which the country finds itself.The former FBI director James Comey opened the year with Saving Justice, a second book defending the rule of law. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes followed with Lucky, a quick but full postmortem of the 2020 campaign, noting: “Luck, it has been said, is the residue of design. It was for Joe Biden, and for the republic.”The heart of the year was a series of blockbusters from prominent reporters, each containing significant new information on aspects of the chaos that was 2020. Michael Bender led off with Frankly, We Did Win This Election, in which Trump’s words, on the record, are unsurprising but nonetheless shocking.In Landslide, Michael Wolff completed his Trump trilogy with a focus on the campaign – including Chris Christie, in debate preparation (as a result of which he tested positive for Covid), earning Trump’s ire for asking hard but predictable questions on Covid response and family scandals – and on a post-election dominated by Trump’s anger as the levers of power, including the supreme court of which he chose three members, failed to overturn his defeat.Wolff is keenly analytic: as he writes, Trump “knew nothing of government, [his supporters] knew nothing about government, so the context of government itself became beside the point”. Instead, Trump was “the star – never forget that – and the base was his audience”. This self-referential and adulatory mode of governing failed in a divided country facing a pandemic and rising international challenges. Landslide is a fine book, though as new evidence from the 6 January committee emerges, Wolff’s conclusion limiting Trump’s own knowledge of and responsibility for the events of that day may come to seem premature.Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker followed with I Alone Can Fix It, in which Gen Mark Milley said the US was in a “Reichstag moment” on 2 January, four days before the insurrection, and referred to “the gospel of the Führer” poisoning American democracy. Trump’s anger at his pollster, Tony Fabrizio, for being the bearer of bad news on Covid and the electorate is telling too: “They’re tired? They’re fatigued?” Politics as empathy was not the campaign’s theme.Bob Woodward, writing with Robert Costa, likewise completed his Trump series with Peril, whose title sums up its conclusion. The book, notable for revealing Gen Milley’s attempts to reassure the Chinese military in the waning days of the presidency, quotes Trump’s apparent view that “real power [is] fear” and asks, “Were there any limits to what he and his supporters might do to put him back in power?”Adam Schiff’s Midnight in Washington brings a former prosecutor’s eye and perspective of a House intelligence committee chairman to issues surrounding Trump and Russia. His book is both history and warning.Among Trump loyalists, former trade czar Peter Navarro released In Trump Time, in which he criticized Meadows and anyone else he deemed insufficiently loyal. The book’s most memorable line calls Vice-President Mike Pence “Brutus” to Trump’s “American Caesar” – all without irony or, one hopes, knowledge of Roman history.Not all notable books were tell-alls. Some contained real policy insights. Josh Rogin’s Chaos Under Heaven looks at US-China relations from a strategic as well as pandemic perspective, noting US conflicts of both interest and policy as well as Trump’s inability to develop a workable strategy. Rival books on antitrust policy by two very different senators, Amy Klobuchar and Josh Hawley, illustrate Congress’ increased focus on large technology companies. Evan Osnos’ Wildland chronicles the lives and fortunes of billionaires and the growth of the Washington machine – and the effects, including rightward political shifts, on those at the bottom. On a related theme, in Misfire Tim Mak delivers a shocking history of the National Rifle Association and its former leaders.Several books will serve as first drafts of history. Madam Speaker, Susan Page’s biography of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, describes how she “took on the boys club and won” through mastery of legislation and her caucus. Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue compiles the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinions, speeches and other documents, with Amanda Tyler as co-author.Uncontrolled Spread review: Trump’s first FDA chief on the Covid disasterRead moreUnsurprisingly in the second year of a pandemic, healthcare featured prominently. In The Ten-Year War, Jonathan Cohn recounts the 10-year history of Obamacare. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain tells the sad and painful story of the promotion of opioids in America. On the pandemic, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta in Nightmare Scenario focus on the Trump administration’s response. Leaving responsibility mostly to the states had deleterious consequences, as did chaos, turf wars and giving priority to “the demands of Trump and his base” as he sought reelection rather than an effective response.Scott Gottlieb, a well-regarded former FDA commissioner, takes a broader, more philosophical view in Uncontrolled Spread. Absence of leadership and a “sizeable enterprise devoted to manufacturing skepticism” about the virus and public health solutions meant the US failed the bar of “delay[ing] its onset and reduc[ing] its scope and severity”. But the Operation Warp Speed vaccine effort “proved what government could accomplish when it functions well” and makes one keenly regret the absence of leadership elsewhere as confirmed US deaths, so many among the unvaccinated, surpass 800,000.The pandemic’s broader impact is equally profound. In Gottlieb’s words, “Covid normalized the breakdowns in a global order that it was presumed, perhaps naively, would protect us, just as Covid pierced our own perception of domestic resiliency, cooperation, and fortitude.” Vaccine hesitancy in the face of clear science is only one pandemic effect.‘Pence was disloyal at exactly the right time’: author Jonathan Karl on the Capitol attackRead moreWith honorable mentions for Wolff, Leonnig and Rucker, Woodward and Costa, and Gottlieb, ABC’s Jonathan Karl produced arguably the year’s most significant book in Betrayal, in which Trump cabinet members “paint a portrait of a wrath-filled president, untethered from reality, bent on revenge”. The attorney general, Bill Barr, decries election-related conspiracies; the acting defense secretary, Chris Miller, seeks to dissuade Trump from attacking Iran by taking (and faking) an extreme position in favour:
      Oftentimes, with provocative people, if you get more provocative than them, they then have to dial it down.
      Such was government in the Trump era.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Nobel Lecture that “one word of truth shall outweigh the whole world”. The amount of newly uncovered truth is already outweighing a fair number of the more than 4,000 exoplanets Nasa has recorded.Yet the vital question remains: what will Americans, in particular Republican officials and independent voters, do with this information? As Karl wrote, “The continued survival of our republic may depend, in part, on the willingness of those who promoted Trump’s lies and those who remained silent to acknowledge they were wrong.”Is it to be Solzhenitsyn’s hope – or his fear that “when we are told again the old truth, we shall not even remember that we once possessed it”?TopicsBooksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationBiden administrationJoe BidenRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      House panel gathers mountain of evidence in Capitol attack investigation

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      House panel gathers mountain of evidence in Capitol attack investigationPanel on track to interview more than 300 witnesses, chair says, with more than 30,000 documents already turned over The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack has amassed a huge trove of evidence as it seeks to connect the Trump White House to the 6 January insurrection, three months after it issued its first subpoenas to the former president’s most senior administration officials.The select committee revealed on Monday that members had reviewed thousands of documents turned over by Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, which showed the White House played a far more substantial role in overturning the 2020 election than previously known.Trump Jr and Fox News hosts begged Meadows to help stop Capitol attack, texts showRead moreBut those communications and other documents that Meadows turned over represent just a small sample of evidence potentially incriminating the Trump White House collected since September.The committee expects this week to depose more top aides, including the Trump justice department official Jeffrey Clark, from whom they hope to learn more about Trump’s efforts to reinstall himself as president – even if Clark invokes his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination.That hope stems from the fact that Clark agreed to appear for a deposition just moments before the select committee would have recommended his prosecution for defying a subpoena – a circumstance that members believe means he will cooperate.Bennie Thompson, the panel chair, said on Monday that after depositions this week, the panel was on track to interview more than 300 witnesses and add to the more than 30,000 documents already turned over.The select committee also obtained about 6,000 documents from Meadows as part of a delicate cooperation agreement requiring the production of non-privileged material, before Meadows abruptly broke off the deal last week.Part of the reason Meadows ended the cooperation deal was that he had learned from his personal cellphone carrier – believed to be Verizon – that the committee had started pursuing his call detail records, his attorney George Terwilliger said in a letter.The select committee has in recent weeks issued subpoenas for the call detail records of several hundred phone numbers, which typically reveal the date, time, duration and target numbers of calls, according to a source close to the investigation.Such records are expected to prove a boon for the inquiry, the source said, since it enables House investigators to map a pattern of which phone numbers were being dialed, and to connect key phone numbers to others on 6 January and the days and weeks before.The release of Meadows’ cellphone records could come around the same time the committee potentially gains access to the several hundred pages of documents from the Trump White House held by the National Archives.The select committee is on track to obtain those records, which Trump has claimed are subject to executive privilege and cannot be given to Congress, after the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia last week upheld a lower court ruling approving their release.In a unanimous decision, the federal appeals court denied Trump’s request for an injunction, saying in a blunt ruling that in a dispute between a current and former president over whether to release White House records, the sitting president’s view must prevail.Those records, so aggressively defended by Trump, the select committee believes, might help members make the case that the former president interfered with Biden’s certification with corrupt intent, a potential crime, the source said.In the cache of communications Meadows furnished, the select committee said, were text messages he received from Republican members of Congress, in the days before the Capitol attack and on 6 January, from Fox News hosts and Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr.Among the messages to Meadows that the committee disclosed was one from an unidentified Republican lawmaker, who apologized to Meadows after the Capitol attack for not succeeding in stopping Joe Biden from being pronounced president.“Yesterday was a terrible day,” the text message from the Republican lawmaker read, referring to the Capitol attack, before saying of the attempt to prevent Biden’s certification: “We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked.”TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesMark MeadowsnewsReuse this content More

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      Mark Meadows: House votes to recommend criminal contempt charges against Trump ex-chief of staff

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      Mark Meadows: House votes to recommend criminal contempt charges against Trump ex-chief of staffMove comes after senior Trump figure ceased cooperating with panel investigating Capitol attack The US House of Representatives has approved a measure recommending criminal contempt charges against Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff to Donald Trump, a week after he ended his cooperation with the chamber’s committee investigating the Capitol insurrection.The approval marks the first time the House has voted to hold a former member in contempt since the 1830s, according to the chamber’s records.It is the latest show of force by the 6 January panel, which is leaving no angle unexplored as it investigates the worst attack on the Capitol in more than 200 years. Lawmakers are determined to get answers quickly, and in so doing reassert the congressional authority that Trump eroded while in office.“History will be written about these times, about the work this committee has undertaken,” said Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman. Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, left in March 2020 to join Trump’s administration. Before he left Congress, Meadows “continually insisted that people and high-ranking government officials respect the authority of Congress to do its job, and investigative powers are implicit in and intertwined with our powers to legislate this”, said Jamie Raskin, a member of the committee.Raskin began Tuesday’s debate by reading from newly released, frantic texts from the day of the attack revealing members of Congress, Fox News anchors and even Trump’s son urging Meadows to persuade the outgoing president to act quickly to stop the three-hour assault by his supporters.Tuesday’s vote followed a recommendation by the committee that Meadows be charged. The matter now heads to the justice department, which will decide whether to prosecute.Republicans on Tuesday called the action against Meadows a distraction from the House’s work, with one member calling it “evil” and “un-American”. Trump has also defended Meadows in an interview, calling him “an honorable man”. The committee’s leaders have vowed to punish anyone who doesn’t comply with their investigation, and the justice department has already indicted Trump’s longtime ally Steve Bannon on two counts of contempt after he defied his subpoena. If convicted, Bannon and Meadows could face up to one year behind bars on each charge.However, in a Tuesday statement, Meadows’ attorney George Terwilliger said the former chief of staff had never stopped cooperating but maintained he could not be compelled to appear for an interview. The attorney said Meadows had “fully cooperated” with respect to documents that are in his possession and are not privileged.Meadows himself has sued the panel, asking a court to invalidate two subpoenas that he says are “overly broad and unduly burdensome”.Members of the committee said the text messages sent to Meadows on the day of the insurrection raised fresh questions about what was happening at the White House, and what Trump himself was doing, as the attack was under way. The committee had planned to question Meadows about the communications, including 6,600 pages of records taken from personal email accounts and about 2,000 text messages. The panel has not released any of the communications in full.The Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the panel’s vice chairwoman, said at the committee’s Monday evening meeting that an important issue raised by the texts was whether Trump had sought to obstruct the congressional certification by refusing to send a strong message to the rioters to stop.“These texts leave no doubt,” Cheney said. “The White House knew exactly what was happening at the Capitol.”The investigating panel has already interviewed more than 300 witnesses, and subpoenaed more than 40 people, as it seeks to create the most comprehensive record yet of the lead-up to the insurrection and of the violent siege itself.TopicsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesMark MeadowsUS CongressUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump Jr and Fox News hosts begged Meadows to help stop Capitol attack, texts show

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      Trump Jr and Fox News hosts begged Meadows to help stop Capitol attack, texts showThree of the network’s presenters urged Meadows to push Trump to act while Trump Jr said ‘He has to lead now’ Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr and three hosts on the Fox News network begged then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to persuade the former president to stop the 6 January insurrection despite their public efforts to downplay it, newly released text messages show.The sense of panic that enveloped the former president’s inner circle during the attack on the US Capitol was revealed on Monday when Congresswoman Liz Cheney, vice-chair of a House select committee investigating the riot, read aloud texts sent to Meadows.Capitol attack panel recommends Mark Meadows for criminal prosecutionRead more“We need an Oval address,” Trump Jr wrote as his father’s supporters were storming the Capitol, sending members of Congress running for their lives and delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. “He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”Trump Jr added: “He’s got to condemn this shit asap.”In response, Meadows texted: “I’m pushing it hard. I agree.”Cheney also made public frantic messages from three Fox News presenters who became notorious as cheerleaders for the Trump administration and for fanning the flames of his lies about voter fraud. Crossing a line from journalists to informal advisers, they urged Meadows to push Trump to act quickly to stop the siege by his supporters.Laura Ingraham, the host of The Ingraham Angle, wrote: “Hey Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”Yet later that night Ingraham went on air baselessly shifting blame from Trump’s supporters to the anti-fascist movement antifa. She told viewers: “From a chaotic Washington tonight, earlier today the Capitol was under siege by people who can only be described as antithetical to the Maga [Make America Great Again] movement. Now, they were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that antifa sympathisers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.”Brian Kilmeade, co-host of the morning show Fox & Friends, on which Trump appeared regularly, wrote to the chief of staff on 6 January: “Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished.”And Sean Hannity, a prime time host who once appeared onstage with Trump at a campaign rally, texted Meadows: “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”But later, on his broadcast, Hannity said: “Our election, frankly, was a train wreck. Eighty-three per cent, according to Gallup, of Republicans, and millions of others, do not have faith in these election results. You can’t just snap your finger and hope that goes away.”Trump has been widely condemned for his casual response to insurrection, which had been raging for three hours before he finally released a video urging the mob: “Go home. We love you. You’re very special.” A few hours later he tweeted: “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”Since then the ex-president, Trump Jr and rightwing media have spent months seeking to minimise the events of 6 January, which resulted in five deaths and more than 500 arrests. Trump has claimed that rioters were “hugging and kissing” police.Last month another Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, produced a three-part documentary, Patriot Purge, for the Fox Nation streaming platform that pushed the lie that the insurrection was a “false flag” operation designed to hurt Trump’s supporters. “January 6 is being used as a pretext to strip millions of Americans – disfavoured Americans – of their core constitutional rights,” he insisted.But Monday’s fresh insight into the symbiotic relationship between the Trump White House and Fox News show that those close to the president realised the gravity of what was unfolding and how damaging it could be.Cheney said the texts show Trump’s “supreme dereliction” as he refused to strongly condemn the violence of his supporters. “These texts leave no doubt,” Cheney said. “The White House knew exactly what was happening at the Capitol.”Amanda Carpenter, a former communications director to Senator Ted Cruz, wrote on the Bulwark website: “These texts prove something essential. No matter what they say now, Trump’s loyalists knew at the time that what was happening at the Capitol was not a peaceful protest.“They knew that it was a dangerous attack on American democracy. And they knew that Trump was responsible for it. That’s why they sent the texts pleading with him, through his staff, to make it stop.”The texts were among almost 9,000 documents that Meadows turned over to the committee before he ceased cooperation. Cheney disclosed only a tiny fraction, raising the prospect of further embarrassments to come for Trump’s allies.The committee voted 9-0 to recommend that Meadows, himself a former members of the House, be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena. The full House is set to vote on Tuesday to refer the charges to the justice department.The hearing was not broadcast on Fox News but Meadows appeared on the network soon after the vote. There was no mention of the revelatory texts. He told Hannity: “This is about Donald Trump and about actually going after him once again.”Two longtime Fox News contributors, Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned last month in protest at Carlson’s Patriot Purge programme. Chris Wallace, host of the network’s flagship Sunday politics programme, resigned on Sunday after 18 years to join CNN’s new streaming platform.TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpDonald Trump JrFox NewsTrump administrationUS politicsMark MeadowsnewsReuse this content More