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BooksMelania Trump like Marie Antoinette, says former aide in hotly awaited bookStephanie Grisham says former first lady refused to condemn Capitol attackers and believed husband’s lie about election fraud Martin Pengelly in New York@ More
US Capitol attackTrump’s White House chief of staff is target of Capitol attack records requestHouse select committee investigating 6 January wants telecom and social media companies to preserve records on Mark Meadows Hugo Lowell in WashingtonMon 13 Sep 2021 05.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 13 Sep 2021 05.02 EDTThe House select committee investigating the 6 January attack on the Capitol has instructed telecom and social media companies last week to preserve records of Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to a source familiar with the matter.The move positions the select committee on the doorstep of the Oval Office as it pursues a far-reaching inquiry into whether Trump and his White House helped plan or had advance knowledge of the insurrection perpetrated by the former president’s supporters.Republicans in crosshairs of 6 January panel begin campaign of intimidationRead moreHouse select committee investigators signaled their intention to examine potential involvement by the Trump White House and House Republicans when they last week made a series of records demands and records preservation requests for Trump officials connected to the Capitol attack.In the records preservation requests, the select committee instructed 35 telecom and social media companies to avoid destroying communications logs of several hundred people, including the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and 10 House Republicans, in case it later issues subpoenas.But the previously unreported inclusion of Meadows on the list of people whose records the select committee wants preserved suggests the panel will seek more information on the most senior aide in the Trump administration and could upturn every inch of the West Wing in its inquiry.The former chief of staff is among several top White House officials who may hold the key to unlock inside information pertaining to the extent of the former president’s involvement in the Capitol attack that left five dead and nearly 140 injured.Meadows remained at Trump’s side in the weeks before 6 January as well as on the day itself, as the White House strategized ways to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and ensure the then vice-president, Mike Pence, would not certify Joe Biden’s victory.The White House chief of staff started the day of the insurrection with Trump in the Oval Office, before attending the “Save America” rally that preceded the Capitol attack, according to a Trump administration official familiar with his movements.Meadows then accompanied Trump back to the White House with a coterie of aides and advisers, from where the former president told the Republican senator Ben Sasse that he was “delighted” at the images of his supporters and domestic violent extremists storming the Capitol in his name.He then also spoke to Marc Short, the chief of staff to Pence, as well as Kash Patel, the chief of staff to the then defense secretary, Christopher Miller, the official said.Such proximity to Trump and the chiefs of staff to two key Trump cabinet members closely connected to the Capitol attack suggests Meadows is likely to be a prime witness for the inquiry, insofar as he can shed light on Trump’s private thoughts as the violence unfolded.A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment on the preservation request for Meadows. But the chair of the House select committee, Bennie Thompson, previously told the Guardian that any conversations with Trump would be investigated by the select committee.The inclusion of Meadows on the list, alongside McCarthy and 10 other far-right House Republicans, nonetheless provides a clearer picture of the sharpening contours of the investigation and its overall direction as the select committee ramps up its work.It also echoes congressional investigations of eras past: Richard Nixon’s White House chief of staff, HR Haldeman, came under scrutiny from the Senate select committee into the Watergate scandal and was forced to testify about the extent of Nixon’s involvement.But it was not immediately clear which companies had received a records preservation request for Meadows from the select committee. Some telecom and social media companies – such as the online forum 8kun popular with QAnon conspiracy theorists – did not even receive a list of names, counsel for the forum said.House select committee investigators are still in the evidence-gathering phase, but the committee is likely to schedule its second hearing before the end of the month, according to a source familiar with the matter.The select committee said on Friday that investigators had received thousands of pages of documents, and that they understood the National Archives had started the process required by law for the review of presidential records.Meadows’s communications, meanwhile, may be of interest to the select committee in other aspects of the inquiry into the origins of 6 January, an area that falls under the panel’s purview after it took charge of all congressional investigations into the Capitol attack.The select committee subsumed several inquiries into the Trump administration’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, including one by the House oversight committee that was examining how Meadows pressured the justice department to investigate baseless allegations of election fraud.Top Republicans under scrutiny have embarked on a campaign of threats and intimidation in an attempt to thwart the inquiry.The Republican House minority leader, McCarthy, last week lashed out at the select committee’s records preservation requests and warned that the GOP would retaliate against companies that complied when his party retakes the House majority.McCarthy argued, without citing any specific law, that it would be illegal for telecom and social media companies to comply with the records requests – even though congressional investigators have obtained phone and communications records without issue in the past.TopicsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesTrump administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More
Donald TrumpTrump White House tried to play down US injuries in attack by Iran, says ex-officialAlyssa Farah says she was pressured to delay reporting of injuries to more than 100 US troops in Iraq from attack avenging Qassem Suleimani Julian Borger in WashingtonThu 9 Sep 2021 00.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 9 Sep 2021 00.22 EDTDonald Trump’s White House asked the Pentagon to play down and delay reports of brain injuries suffered by US troops from an Iranian missile attack on Iraq last year, according to a former defense spokeswoman.Alyssa Farah said she fended off the pressure from the White House, which came after Trump had first claimed there had been no casualties and then dismissed the injuries as “headaches” and “not very serious”.More than 100 US troops were ultimately diagnosed as having suffered traumatic brain injuries in the missile attack on two bases in Iraq housing US troops on 8 January 2020, launched by Tehran in retaliation for the US drone killing of Revolutionary Guard general Qassem Suleimani five days earlier.Roughly 80% of the American casualties from the missile attack were able to return to duty within days, but dozens had to be evacuated to Germany and then the US for treatment.Iran steps up nuclear plans as tensions rise on anniversary of Suleimani’s killingRead moreFarah described the attack as the “heaviest several hours of my life” in an interview with a new podcast, One Decision, hosted by former CNN journalist Michelle Kosinski and the former head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency, Sir Richard Dearlove.Farah, who went on to work in the White House, said that when Trump claimed there had been no casualties in the wake of the attack it was “true at the time that we gave those facts to the president”.But she added: “I think where things got shaky was there was an effort from the White House to want to say, this was not successful – the Iranians were not successful in harming our targets in response. And I think that went too far.“And I think that it ended up glossing over what ended up being very significant injuries on US troops after the fact,” Farah told the podcast, due to air on Thursday.She said it was Pentagon policy to release the facts as they arrived and were verified, and as a result the total reported number of casualties climbed throughout January 2020, irritating the White House.“We did get pushback from the White House of, ‘Can you guys report this differently? Can it be every 10 days or two weeks, or we do a wrap-up after the fact?’” Farah said. “The White House would prefer if we did not give regular updates on it. It was this drip, drip of quote unquote bad news.”Farah said she did not give in to the pressure, saying: “My feeling was, if my experience had taught me anything, transparency is always going to be your best friend in that field.”The killing of Suleimani, as his car was leaving Baghdad airport on his arrival in Iraq on 3 January 2020, was highly controversial. The UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings at the time, Agnes Callamard, deemed it an “unlawful killing” because Washington had not provided sufficient evidence of an imminent threat from Suleimani.Four days before the air strike a mob of Shia militiamen and their supporters breached the compound of the US embassy in Baghdad before being persuaded to withdraw. After Suleimani was killed the then US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, claimed there was evidence Suleimani was planning an “imminent” attack against US embassies and bases, and Trump said later there was a plot “to blow up our embassy”. But members of Congress said there was no such claim in their intelligence briefing on the drone strike. Pompeo later said the strike was aimed at “deterrence”.Farah insisted there was “extremely credible, thoroughly planned potential to harm US and coalition partners”.“The ‘imminence’ is really the word that I think folks would get hung up on how immediate it was,” she added. Farah said she advised the top officials at the Pentagon not to base the justification solely on the claim of imminent attacks but because “we had a terrorist on the battlefield in Iraq and an extremely bold thing for this leader to be doing, watching the Green Zone be attacked from the ground in Iraq”.US legal opinion is divided on the Suleimani strike. Some scholars said it was justified by the Iranian general’s role across the region of orchestrating attacks on the US and its allies. Others argue that does not provide sufficient cause under international law, because there was no declared state of war between the US and Iran.“I believe that it was in violation of international law because we were not at war with Iran,” said Gary Solis, a retired marine, former adjunct professor at West Point military academy, and author of 2006 book the Law of Armed Conflict. “Not only were we not at war with Iran, but where we killed him was in a state with which we are not at war. So what authority did we have to kill him?”TopicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsIrannewsReuse this content More
BooksThe Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post used freedom of information to produce the definitive US version of the warJulian BorgerSun 5 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 5 Sep 2021 02.02 EDTIn the summer of 2009, the latest in a long line of US military commanders in Afghanistan commissioned the latest in a long line of strategic reviews, in the perennial hope it would make enough of a difference to allow the Americans to go home.‘The intensity has not changed’: Jason Kander on the fall of Afghanistan – and trying to get friends outRead moreThere was some excitement in Washington about the author, Gen Stanley McChrystal, a special forces soldier who cultivated the image of a warrior-monk while hunting down insurgents in Iraq.Hired by Barack Obama, McChrystal produced a 66-page rethink of the Afghan campaign, calling for a “properly resourced” counter-insurgency with a lot more money and troops.It quickly became clear there were two significant problems. Al-Qaida, the original justification for the Afghan invasion, was not even mentioned in McChrystal’s first draft. And the US could not agree with its Nato allies on whether to call it a war or a peacekeeping or training mission, an issue with important legal implications.In the second draft, al-Qaida was included and the conflict was hazily defined as “not a war in the conventional sense”. But no amount of editing could disguise the fact that after eight years of bloody struggle, the US and its allies were unclear on what they were doing and who they were fighting.The story is one of many gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities uncovered by Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post. His book is based on documents obtained through freedom of information requests, most from “lessons learned” interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a watchdog mandated by Congress to keep tabs on the hundreds of billions flowing into Afghanistan.In the Sigar files, and other interviews carried out by military institutes and research centres, Whitlock found that soldiers of all ranks and their civilian counterparts were “more open about their experiences than they likely would have been with a journalist working on a news story”.Blunt appraisals were left unvarnished because they were never intended for publication. The contrast with the upbeat version of events presented to the public at the same time, often by the very same people, is breathtaking.The Afghanistan Papers is a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years. The title and the contents echo the Pentagon Papers, the leaked inside story of the Vietnam war in which the long road to defeat was paved with brittle happy talk.“With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict,” Whitlock writes. “Instead, they chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”As Whitlock vividly demonstrates, the lack of clarity, the deception, ignorance and hubris were baked in from the beginning. When he went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, George Bush promised a carefully defined mission. In fact, at the time the first bombs were being dropped, guidance from the Pentagon was hazy.It was unclear, for example, whether the Taliban were to be ousted or punished.“We received some general guidance like, ‘Hey, we want to go fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan,’” a special forces operations planner recalled. Regime change was only decided to be a war aim nine days after the shooting started.The US was also hazy about whom they were fighting, which Whitlock calls “a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover”.Most importantly, the invaders lumped the Taliban in with al-Qaida, despite the fact the former was a homegrown group with largely local preoccupations while the latter was primarily an Arab network with global ambitions.That perception, combined with unexpectedly easy victories in the first months, led Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to believe the Taliban could be ignored. Despite offers from some leaders that they were ready to negotiate a surrender, they were excluded from talks in December 2001 on the country’s future. It was a decision the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, called the “original sin” of the war.Rumsfeld declared there was no point negotiating.“The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them,” he said in March 2002. “And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone.”Not even Rumsfeld believed that. In one of his famous “snowflake” memos, at about the same time, he wrote: “I am getting concerned that it is drifting.”In a subsequent snowflake, two years after the war started, he admitted: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”’The Taliban had not disappeared, though much of the leadership had retreated to Pakistan. The fighters had gone home, if necessary to await the next fighting season. Their harsh brand of Islam had grown in remote, impoverished villages, honed by the brutalities of Soviet occupation and civil war. The Taliban did not represent anything like a majority of Afghans, but as their resilience and eventual victory have shown, they are an indelible part of Afghanistan.Bruised Biden tries to turn the page after US debacle in AfghanistanRead moreWhitlock’s book is rooted in a database most journalists and historians could only dream of, but it is far more than the sum of its sources. You never feel the weight of the underlying documents because they are so deftly handed. Whitlock uses them as raw material to weave anecdotes into a compelling narrative.He does not tell the full story of the Afghan war. He does not claim to do so. That has to be told primarily by Afghans, who lived through the realities submerged by official narratives, at the receiving end of each new strategy and initiative.This is a definitive version of the war seen through American eyes, told by Americans unaware their words would appear in public. It is a cautionary tale of how a war can go on for years, long after it stops making any kind of sense.TopicsBooksAfghanistanSouth and Central AsiaUS militaryUS foreign policyUS national securityGeorge BushreviewsReuse this content More
US politicsGiuliani associate Igor Fruman expected to plead guilty in campaign finance caseFruman, who helped Giuliani try to uncover dirt on Joe Biden, to change plea in court hearing scheduled for Wednesday A More
BooksOur Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after TrumpTom Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln – on how American democracy can only be brought down from within Lloyd GreenSun 22 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 22 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTLiberal democracy is under attack from within. Institutional trust erodes. Fewer than one in six Americans believe democracy is working well, nearly half think democracy isn’t functioning properly, and 38% say democracy is simply doing meh. Atomization, bowling alone and nihilism have converged at the ballot box.The Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s traumaRead moreRepublicans are hellbent on shoving the events of 6 January, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol, down a deep memory hole. GOP governors in Florida, Mississippi and Texas remain sanguine as Covid-19 dispatches children to intensive care. Seven months into his presidency, Joe Biden looks to some like Jimmy Carter redux, competence and judgment seriously doubted, allies strained and divided. FDR, he’s definitely not.Into this morass parachutes Tom Nichols, with a meditation on the state of American democracy. Nichols grew up in a working-class home in Massachusetts and is now a professor at the US Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School. He is also a Never Trump conservative.In his eighth book, Nichols is pessimistic. “Decades of constant complaint,” he writes, “regularly aired in the midst of continual improvements in living standards, have finally taken their toll.”The enemy, Nichols asserts, is “us”. Citizens of democracies, he writes, “must now live with the undeniable knowledge that they are capable of embracing illiberal movements and attacking their own liberties”.As if to prove his point, Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, recently made light of Trump’s attempts to have the Department of Justice subvert the election result. Even with Trump out of office, Senator Lindsay Graham continues to play first golf buddy, Renfield to Trump’s Count Dracula. A majority of congressional Republicans voted against certifying the 2020 election.In 2016, Nichols urged conservatives to vote for Hillary Clinton because Trump was “too mentally unstable” – far from the “very stable genius” he would later claim to be.In Our Own Worst Enemy, Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln on how threats to American democracy always come from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” Nichols sees the internet and the “revolution in communications” as the means by which we reached this dark point.Public life has become ever more about dopamine hits, instant reaction and heightened animus. Our fellow citizens double as our enemies. Electronic proximity breeds contempt, not introspection. Social media and cable television provide a community for those who lack a three-dimensional version.Nichols looks to ancient Greece for a reminder that nothing lasts forever. Admiringly, he quotes Pericles, the Athenian general and orator – but observes that Pericles was not around when his city state collapsed. He died two years earlier, behind “the besieged walls of Athens – from a plague”.History can repeat itself.In September 2016, writing in the Claremont Journal of Books under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Michael Anton declared the contest between Trump and Clinton the “Flight 93 Election”: a reference to the plane that came down in Pennsylvania on 9/11 when passengers attacked their hijackers. Clinton, he argued, simply had to be stopped. First principles of conservatism could therefore be jettisoned.“Charge the cockpit or you die,” Anton thundered. “You may die anyway … There are no guarantees.”What, he asked, must be done “against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality and corruption?” To Anton, for the right, respect for “democratic and constitutional niceties” was ultimately a sucker’s game. Culture was stacked against them.After a stint as a Rudy Giuliani speechwriter, and other stops along the way, Anton joined Trump’s national security council.Later this year the Claremont Institute will honor Ron DeSantis. At a press conference earlier this month, the Florida governor asked: “Would I rather have 5,000 [Covid-19] cases among 20-year-olds or 500 cases among seniors? I would rather have the younger.”A few weeks later, the Sunshine State is getting the worst of both worlds.Simple decency, it seems, is for losers. Amid the last presidential campaign, comparisons between the US and the Weimar Republic were rife. The January insurrection was seen as our “Reichstag fire”. The attackers came from the right.Nichols absorbs and abhors it all. Not surprisingly, he takes particular aim at the populist right, which he says has been the “main threat” to liberal democracy over the past two decades. That is subject to debate, which Nichols acknowledges. Regardless, he writes that the populist right “is a movement rooted in nostalgia and social revenge”.As if to make Nichols’ point, Lauren Boebert, the hard-right, QAnon-adjacent Republican congresswoman from Colorado, recently trashed Biden for having left America’s friends in Afghanistan in the lurch – after voting last month against granting 8,000 immigration visas to Afghans who assisted the US military.‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisisRead moreOther GOP diehards who opposed the legislation include Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mo Brooks and Paul Gosar. Greene and Gosar were charter members of the de facto white nationalist America First caucus. After a bomb threat on the Capitol this week, Brooks tweeted: “I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society.”Considering what ails America, Nichols offers limited prescriptions. He supports bridging the gap between civilian and military life. The progeny of the coastal elites opt for Ivy League colleges over the service academies, reinstatement of the draft isn’t likely and notions of national service all too frequently amount to “little more” than a paid internship, he writes.Concurrently, rightwing “Spartanism” breeds the unsustainable notion that “‘citizens’ and ‘soldiers’ are not the same people”.Nichols urges America’s youth to spend a summer in uniform, exposed to military life and skills. Most won’t join the army, he thinks, but will come away with a better knowledge of the soldier’s life. Right now, he laments, “there is no longer any common experience related to national defense”.Indeed. America has become one nation separated by a common language.
Our Own Worst Enemy is published in the US by Oxford University Press
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US immigrationParents of 337 children separated at border under Trump still not foundActivists and Biden officials have helped reunite 861 children with their parents but 337 remain in limbo Maya YangThu 12 Aug 2021 12.06 EDTLast modified on Thu 12 Aug 2021 15.03 EDTUS officials still cannot find the parents of 337 children separated at the Mexico-border by the Trump administration.According to a new court filing released on Wednesday by the justice department and the American Civil Liberties Union, attorneys, activists and Biden officials have helped reunite 861 children with their parents but 337 remain in limbo.In February, the Biden administration launched the Family Reunification Task Force as part of its efforts to undo the Trump administration’s controversial “zero-tolerance” policy that called for the criminal prosecution of adults crossing the border. The policy resulted in thousands of families being separated and received severe backlash from human rights organizations and immigration advocacy groups. Forty-five separated children have been reunited with their families since the creation of FRTF.According to the filing, the 337 children fall into three groups. The first group consists of 250 children whose parents are believed to have been removed from the US after being separated from their children. The second group consists of approximately 75 children whose parents are believed to be in the US. The last group includes 12 children for whom the government has not provided a phone number for the parent, child, sponsor or attorney.In addition to attempts to reach parents, sponsors and attorneys by telephone, the taskforce has also engaged in on-the-ground searches for the parents, which have been largely focused in the countries of origin of the parents who were removed from the US after their separation from their children.Despite the government’s efforts to overhaul Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, Biden has warned migrants not to enter the US. In an interview with ABC in March, Biden said his message to migrants was: “Don’t come over. Don’t leave your town or city or community.”According to Customs and Border Protection, the number of migrants that reached the southern border in July was more than 200,000, a figure that had not been seen in 20 years.Among the 200,000 migrants was a “record” 19,000 unaccompanied minors, according to David Shahoulian, assistant secretary for border and immigration policy.TopicsUS immigrationTrump administrationBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More
BooksReign of Terror review: from 9/11 to Trump by way of Snowden and IraqSpencer Ackerman, once of the Guardian, displays a masterful command of the facts but sometimes lets his prejudice show Lloyd GreenSun 8 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 8 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTThis 11 September will be the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93. Two wars have left 6,700 Americans dead and more than 53,000 wounded. After the Trump presidency, America roils in a cold civil war. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is on the move again. Saddam Hussein is dead and gone but Iraq remains “not free”.‘A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell usRead moreIn other words, the war on terror has produced little for the US to brag about. In an April Pew poll, two-thirds of respondents rated international terror as a “big” problem, albeit one that trailed healthcare, Covid, unemployment and 10 more.Against this bleak backdrop, Spencer Ackerman delivers his first book under the subtitle “How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump”. It is part-chronicle, part-polemic. The author’s anger is understandable, to a point.Ackerman displays a masterful command of facts. No surprise. In 2014, he was part of the Guardian team that won a Pulitzer for reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency.Ackerman stuck with the topic. A contributing editor at the Daily Beast, he has also been its senior national security writer. Ackerman is fluent in discussing the so-called security state, and how it is a creature of both political parties.In the face of Snowden’s revelations, congressional leaders came out for the status quo. According to Harry Reid, then the Democratic Senate majority leader, senators who complained about being left in the dark about the NSA had only themselves to blame. All other Americans were to sit down and shut up.Nancy Pelosi, then House minority leader and a persistent critic of the Patriot Act, a chief vehicle for surveillance powers, declined to criticize Barack Obama or high-tech intrusion in general. Instead, she called for Snowden’s prosecution. He made Russia his home.Ackerman notes that the American Civil Liberties Union and Rand Paul, Kentucky’s junior senator, were notable exceptions to the rule. At the time, Paul remarked: “When you collect it from a billion phone calls a day, even if you say you’re going to keep the name private, the possibility for abuse is enormous.”Ackerman also shines a light on how the far right played an outsized role in domestic terrorism before and after 9/11, reminding us of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, teasing out McVeigh’s ties to other white nationalists.The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January this year is one more chapter in the story. Trump falsely claimed Antifa, leftwing radicals, were the real culprits. The roster of those under indictment reveals a very different story.In congressional testimony in April, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, described “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” as the greatest domestic threat. Garland also singled out “those who advocate for the superiority of the white race”.Chad Wolf, Trump’s acting homeland security chief, made a similar point last fall. Of course, his boss wasn’t listening.Ackerman delves meticulously into the blowback resulting from the war on terror. Unfortunately, he downplays how the grudges and enmities of the old country have been magnified by key social forces, immigration chief among them.Joe Biden, then vice-president, condemned the Boston Marathon bombers as “knock-off jihadists”. But Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev had received asylum. The immigrant population stands near a record high and the US fertility rate is in retrograde. On the right, that is a combustible combination. When Tucker Carlson is in Hungary, singing the praises of Viktor Orbán, the past is never too far away.In his effort to draw as straight a line as possible between the war on terror and the rise of Trump, Ackerman can overplay his hand. Racism, nativism and disdain for the other were not the sole drivers of Trump’s win, much as Islamophobia was not the sole cause of the Iraq war, a conflict Ackerman acknowledges he initially supported.Trump’s victory was also about an uneven economic recovery and, when it came to America’s wars, who did the fighting and dying. Overwhelmingly, it wasn’t the offspring of coastal elites. In 2016, there was a notable correlation between battlefield casualties and support for Trump.According to Douglas L Kriner of Boston University and Francis X Shen of the University of Minnesota, “Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan could very well have been winners for [Hillary] Clinton if their war casualties were lower.” Residents of red states are more than 20% more likely to join the military. Denizens of blue America punch way above their weight when it comes to going to college.Ackerman, a graduate of New York’s hyper-meritocratic Bronx High School of Science, bares his own class prejudices much in the way Clinton did at a notorious Wall Street fundraiser. Hillary dunked on the “Deplorables”. Ackerman goes after those he sees as socially undesirable.In his telling, Trump is “an amalgam of no less than four of the worst kinds of New Yorkers”. According to his taxonomy, those are “outer-borough whites”, wealth vampires, dignity-free media strivers and landlords.I Alone Can Fix It: Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker on their Trump bestsellerRead moreThis year, many of those “outer-borough whites” voted for a Black candidate, Eric Adams, in the Democratic mayoral primary. Adams, Brooklyn’s borough president, is a former police captain.The real estate industry is a critical part of the city economy. Strivers have been here since the Dutch came onshore. As for “wealth vampires” – come on, really?The city’s economy reels. Murder is way up. Law and order matters. Ackerman’s disdain is misdirected.Nationally, the security state is not going to just disappear. But not all is gloom and doom. In a break with Obama and Trump, the Biden White House has pledged to no longer go gunning for reporters over leaks.The US is leaving Afghanistan. Unlike Trump, Biden was not dissuaded. And last Wednesday, the Senate foreign relations committee voted to end the 1991 and 2002 authorizations of use of military force in Iraq. Even the leviathan can budge.TopicsBooksSeptember 11 2001Donald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsreviewsReuse this content More
