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      Trump aide concealed work for PR firm and misled court to dodge child support

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      A top aide to Donald Trump was secretly re-engaged by a leading political strategy firm after being forced to step down after a social media scandal, the Guardian can reveal. The company, Washington-based Teneo, wanted access to top Republicans in the then president’s inner circle, and to conceal his ongoing work.Jason Miller – who remains close to Trump, and who today serves as a senior adviser to the former president – also later appears to have misled a Florida court about this employment status, asserting in a sworn statement that he could no longer comply with a court order requiring him to pay child-support payments because of an alleged “major financial setback” and was effectively out of work.Miller cited his termination as a reason he could not meet court-mandated payments – even though he had secretly agreed to a new contract with Teneo that meant doing the same work for the same fee.Miller resigned as a managing editor of Teneo, the powerhouse corporate advisory firm, on 21 June 2019, after posting a series of obscenity-laced tweets about Democratic congressman Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House judiciary committee.“I have parted ways with Teneo by mutual consent and look forward to … my next move,” Miller said in a statement he provided to the New York Times and other news outlets.But Miller’s departure from Teneo was a sham. Previously undisclosed confidential records from inside Teneo show that on the same day Miller signed a formal “separation agreement and general release” from Teneo, he signed a new contract with the firm, whereby Teneo agreed to secretly engage Miller as a consultant, through a hastily formed LLC, at the very same base compensation of nearly $500,000 doing the very same work.The maneuver adroitly allowed Teneo to let Miller continue working for them, during a time when the largely Democratic firm was eager to develop closer relations with the Trump White House – while also not having to pay the reputational and public relations costs of openly associating with Miller and others in the administration.Only three days after his resignation and the signing of his new employment agreement with Teneo for the same base pay, according to state court records in Miami-Dade county, Florida, Miller asked the court to “abate and modify” his support payments and swore he could no longer make his child support payments because the “petitioner’s unemployment is public knowledge”.In 2016, when Miller, who was married, was the Trump presidential campaign’s chief spokesperson, he engaged in an extramarital affair with AJ Delgado, a fellow adviser to the campaign, resulting in the two of them having a child together.The Florida court records show that Miller made other misleading or false statements under oath in the case of his faux firing in multiple instances. He not only falsely portrayed himself as unemployed, but asserted under oath that he could no longer afford to travel to Florida to attend court hearings related to the case, and asked a trial in the matter be postponed until he could find work. As evidence of his supposed “major financial setback” Miller cited newspaper articles reporting his resignation from the firm.Miller’s claims of pecuniary misfortune were effectively fiction – he had never really lost his job or any of his income. In fact, transitioning from one position to the other for Miller arguably created a financial windfall for him. Miller received $90,000 in severance pay from his first position as he transitioned to his new one, the confidential Teneo records indicate, while also not missing a single paycheck from his Teneo work because his new engagement began on the very next day.Under Miller’s new agreement, which the Guardian was able to review, Teneo agreed to pay Miller’s wholly-owned LLC close to $500,000 a year for his services, the same base salary he had been receiving as a managing partner of Teneo. To facilitate his ability to be paid, Miller, with Teneo’s approval, agreed to set up his own firm, a Delaware corporation or LLC, named SHW partners, according to Delaware state records.In fact, Delaware state records show that Miller’s new LLC was not officially formed until more than a full month after Miller signed the new contract.In a statement Miller said: “When my employee/employer relationship with Teneo was severed, I faced the loss of … income due to lost bonuses and benefits. This financial setback greatly reduced my income.”He also denied he had misled the Florida court or ever attempted to shirk his responsibilities to take care of his son: “I take my parental responsibilities seriously.” He further asserted that he had paid “over $100,000 in total temporary child support, which supports the entire household, even though I am not required to support his mother”.Teneo declined to comment when approached multiple times by the Guardian.The new disclosures arise at a time when Miller, who was a senior political strategist in Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, has come to play an increasing role in Trump’s post-presidency life, and frequently acts as spokesperson for Trump.In the midst of the 2020 presidential campaign, in late June last year, the political reporter Mike Allen of Axios described Miller as “Trump whisperer” who was adept at reading “Trump’s verbal cues, and knows how to use gossip and news to get Trump’s thinking about different issues” before translating “Trump-speak into campaign action”.While the vast majority of advisers to Trump during his presidency have moved on – some because Trump is no longer president and now has a threadbare staff, and others because they want to distance themselves from Trump after his incitement of the insurrection at the Capitol – Miller has exploited that void to position himself even closer to Trump.Miller, who is intensely loyal to Trump, has had harsh words for former colleagues who have publicly repudiated Trump after the insurrection.“They’re bottom-feeders who are showing their true colors,” Miller said. “The Democrats are still going to hate them, [and] the Trump base is going to hate them for being a rat jumping ship.”It was the same sort of loyalty to Trump that led to his faux firing from Teneo in June 2019. Mistakenly believing that Nadler had disrespected then White House communications director Hope Hicks, Miller, in a Twitter tirade, called Nadler, among other things, “fat and nasty”, “gross”, “Mr Muffin Top” and a “scumbag”. The tweets were laced with obscenities.Teneo’s senior officials thought the spat was detrimental to its public image, leading to the firm’s feigned severing ties with Miller.Teneo is best known for its ties to the Democratic establishment. It was largely the creation of Doug Band, who became a top aide to former president Bill Clinton after leaving the White House. Bill and Hillary Clinton later severed their ties with Band, alleging Band and Teneo had exploited Band’s previously close relationship with both of them for his personal gain.With the election of Trump, Teneo found itself without anyone at the firm with close ties to Trump or his administration – hence the value it put on retaining Miller’s services, including after his fight with Nadler.For Miller, his new position as a managing director for Teneo was a lucrative default: after Trump was elected president, Miller was named to be White House communications director. But after disclosures of the extramarital affair with Delgado, Miller withdrew his name to serve in the new administration.Subsequently, Miller also admitted numerous other sexual encounters with escorts and prostitutes in the course of a failed libel action against the website Gizmodo. He also admitted in that failed suit an affair with an adviser to Republican senator Ted Cruz, whose presidential campaign Miller had earlier worked on.Miller told the Guardian that he regrets such past conduct and is now working to be a better man: “Every day I work to make myself a better husband and father, and by God’s grace I have been given another opportunity to make my family proud again.But Miller’s agreement to keep his new status at Teneo hidden quickly ran into legal problems from his private life.On 27 June, only three days after Miller signed his new contract with Teneo, Miller filed a sworn statement in the court that he “has had a substantial change in financial circumstances. At the time, the petitioner (Miller) was in a much better financial position than he is today.”They’re bottom-feeders who are showing their true colorsAs a result of this, Miller sought from a court a reduction in the amount he had to pay in child support. He told the court: “Since temporary support is subject to modification … [Miller] is requesting that the child support he currently is paying be abated and the amount of his child support obligation be substantially modified.”Miller signed the statement directly below a line which read: “Under penalties of perjury, I declare that I have read the foregoing verified motion to abate and modify temporary child support and the facts stated in it are true.”At the time, Miller was also scheduled to fly to Miami to give a deposition in the case that 2 July. Miller now claimed that he could not afford to do so: “Unfortunately, the petitioner has just sustained a major financial setback that has caused a major setback in his professional and personal life.”On 15 July 2019, Miller filed another motion in court, in which he asserted under oath he “does not have the financial ability to meet [his] child support”.Citing his purported unemployment, Miller also sought to have the trial scheduled to hear the case be postponed, claiming that “he does not have the financial wherewithal to proceed”.And in yet another motion filed that same day, Miller claimed he no longer had the “financial ability” to pay Delgaldo’s legal bills, as he had been required by the court to pay.To demonstrate that he was out of work, Miller cited news articles falsely reporting he had resigned from Teneo. “The petitioner’s unemployment is public knowledge,” Miller wrote in one filing. Left unsaid was that these news reports were the result of reporters having been misled by Miller. More

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      Former Covid official Deborah Birx joins company behind hazardous air-cleaners banned in California

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      The former top White House coronavirus adviser under President Donald Trump, Dr Deborah Birx, has joined an air-cleaning company that built its business, in part, on technology that is now banned in California due to health hazards.The company is one of many in a footrace to capture some of the $193bn in federal funding to schools.Birx is now chief medical and science adviser of ActivePure Technology, a company that counts 50 million customers since its 1924 start as the Electrolux vacuum company and does nearly $500m annually in sales. Its marketing includes photos of outer space, a nod to a 1990s breakthrough with technology to remove a gas from Nasa spaceships.The company’s own studies show that, in its effort to create the “healthiest indoor environments in North America”, it leveraged something less impressive: the disinfecting power of ozone – a molecule considered hazardous and linked to the onset and worsening of asthma.In an interview with KHN, CEO Joe Urso acknowledged that its air cleaners that emit ozone account for 5% of sales, even though its marketing repeatedly claims “no chemicals or ozone”.Conflicts between the science and marketing claims of an air purification company are nothing new to academic air quality experts. They warn that the industry – which sells to dental offices, businesses and gyms – is laser-focused on school officials, who are desperate to convince parents and teachers their buildings are safe. Children can be particularly susceptible to the chemical exposure some of these devices potentially create, experts say.“The concerns you have raised are legitimate” when it comes to other companies’ products, Birx said, noting that as a grandmother she shared concerns about health. But she added that she had full confidence in ActivePure after reviewing records for the Food and Drug Administration’s clearance of a company device.Schools are getting an infusion of roughly $180bn in federal money to spend on personal protective equipment, physical barriers, air-cleaning systems and other infrastructure improvements. Previously, they could have used $13bn of Cares Act funding. Democrats are pushing for $100bn more that could also be used for school improvements, including air cleaners.Putting unregulated devices in classrooms is “a giant uncontrolled experiment”, said Jeffrey Siegel, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto and a member of its Building Engineering Research Group.Researchers and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) say the broader industry advertises products that alter molecules in the air to kill germs, without noting that the reactions can form other harmful substances, such as the carcinogen formaldehyde.Marwa Zaatari, an indoor air quality consultant and a member of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers’ epidemic taskforce, said she has counted more than 125 schools or districts that have already bought air cleaner models the EPA has linked to “potentially harmful byproducts” such as ozone or formaldehyde. She estimated at least $60m was spent.Instead, air quality experts say, the best solutions come down to basics: adding more outdoor air, buying portable HEPA filters and installing MERV 13 filters within heating systems. But school boards are often lured by aggressive claims of 99.9% efficiency – based on a test of a filter inside a small cabinet and not a classroom. “Every dollar you use for this equipment is a dollar you remove from doing the right solution,” Zaatari said.Urso, of ActivePure Technology, said “other companies that I think are making wrongful claims” have brought scrutiny to the industry. But he said his firm’s technology has steadily improved and now emits “gaseous hydrogen peroxide” and other molecules that seek out and destroy viruses, mold and bacteria. He described the technology as active – in contrast to the more passive technology of air filters. A company website says it makes the “safest, fastest and most powerful surface and air-purification technology available”.Urso added: “I have a great technology that is truthful and it does what I say it does.”The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns specifically against technologies that release hydrogen peroxide that are “being heavily marketed”. The agency says the technology is “emerging” and “consumers are encouraged to exercise caution”.During a Zoom interview, Birx deferred to ActivePure Medical’s president, Daniel Marsh, and Urso on the science. She focused instead on the need for products that will increase people’s confidence about going maskless indoors.“Imagine decreasing the number of sick days of your workforce because your air is less contaminated,” Birx said. “There are uses of this technology that transcend the current pandemic.”Birx was a controversial figure on Trump’s Covid response team. She was criticized for standing by quietly as Trump suggested that people could ingest disinfectant to rid themselves of the virus. She has recently spoken out about her discomfort with such statements – while endorsing ActivePure Technology.Birx said she was attracted to ActivePure because of its commitment to “hard science” in getting its Medical Guardian cleared by the FDA. The process required the company to prove the device was substantially equivalent to an existing device. Records the company submitted to the FDA describe the Medical Guardian as an “ion generator” and “photocatalytic oxidizer” that showed “a high efficacy against … a broad range of viable bioaerosol”.Birx said she uses a hospital-grade HEPA filter in her home but noted that was only because she wasn’t aware of the ActivePure technology when she bought it.When ActivePure Technology, formerly known as Aerus, tells its story, it’s one of seamless progress. Yet its 2009 purchase of the air cleaner company EcoQuest saddled the company with two problematic technologies: one that intentionally generated ozone to clean the air and another that did so incidentally, studies from the subsidiary company show.The ActivePure companies and subsidiaries made the best of it, though, marketing the technology’s purification powers on the basis of a Kansas State University study of how well the devices disinfected the surface of meat compared with chlorine, which is widely used by meatpackers to kill bacteria.Meanwhile, California lawmakers were outlawing consumer use of air cleaners that emit more than 50 parts per billion of ozone. They got momentum to regulate the industry with a survey that showed that a small percentage of state residents who used such devices at home had children – considered particularly sensitive to ozone. According to the California legislation, ozone can “permanently damage lung tissue and reduce a person’s breathing ability”.The CDC also reviewed the ActivePure technology in 2009. At the time, Birx, who served in the agency under three presidents, was directing its global Aids response.Agency scientists were evaluating the potential of air cleaners to help clear formaldehyde from Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) trailers deployed after Hurricane Katrina. They knew the devices could potentially swap one hazard – ozone formed by some air cleaners – for the one they were trying to eliminate. So they tested and found that a device from ActiveTek – an Aerus subsidiary – with ActivePure technology emitted 116 parts per billion of ozone. The scientists deemed that level too high for cleaning the trailers.Birx said the older ozone-emitting devices were first-generation devices. The newer ActivePure devices are third-generation and one is now validated by FDA clearance. That is not the same as FDA approval, which requires proof the device is safe and effective.Urso said the company’s devices that emit ozone are mostly for commercial use. Although marketing for ActivePure says “no chemicals or ozone”, Urso acknowledged that it still sells a Pure & Clean Plus device that emits ozone and cannot be sold in California.“It is very confusing,” Urso said, “and it’s confusing because we also match it with [the] ActivePure” logo. The company did not answer questions about five other devices listed for sale on its website, which says they can’t be sold in California.While current ActivePure marketing also says the technology produces no byproducts, Urso said that reflects results from lab studies, not studies from the environment where they might be used. That includes hundreds of schools that have trusted their technology, the company’s website says. There, experts say, chemicals that could react with air cleaner technology include car exhaust, spray cleaners, paint and glue.The company markets to preschools as well. Brent Stephens, an indoor air quality expert who leads the civil, architectural and environmental engineering department at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was asked by the director of his own children’s preschool about the Aerus Hydroxyl Blaster.Aerus had sent the director a sample to test in her home. But Stephens advised against buying one for the preschool, saying that, while the claims of similar machines may sound good, the studies to back them up often were not.“It’s wild out there,” he wrote in an email. “Consumers need to know how these things perform and if they are subject to unforeseen consequences like generating byproducts from use.”Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a non-profit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente More

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      Ex-Trump aide tweets 'executive orders' after Google lists him as president

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      Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence turned potential Republican candidate for governor of California, gleefully seized on an error by Google on Saturday, promising “a plethora of executive orders” after the search giant listed him as “President of the United States since 2021”.The former Trump aide also took a low shot at the actual president, Joe Biden, tweeting: “I will run up the stairs without tripping.”Biden stumbled dramatically on Friday, as he climbed the stairs to Air Force One. On Saturday, before noticing his accidental promotion by Google, Grenell complained about media coverage of Biden’s fall including criticism of Donald Trump Jr’s decision to tweet a gif showing his father knocking Biden over with a golf ball.“Washington DC types are killing humour and laughter,” Grenell claimed.Few Democrats or Washington officials found much to laugh about in Grenell’s time as acting director of national intelligence.In February last year, one unnamed former official told Vanity Fair his appointment “clearly, unambiguously” represented “the politicisation of intelligence” and said the former ambassador to Germany was Trump’s “guardian against fact”.In the event, Grenell filled the role for three months before being replaced by John Ratcliffe, a former congressman many observers thought similarly unqualified and inappropriately partisan.On Saturday, Grenell’s first tweeted “executive orders” as the Google-anointed president, if not the actual one, included the demand that a liquid natural gas terminal “be built ASAP on the west coast of the United States (preferably in California)” and that “multiple desalinisation plants [and] new nuclear power plants be built in California”.“Oh,” he added, “and Eric Swalwell hereby loses his security clearance.”Swalwell, a California Democrat who briefly ran for the presidential nomination in 2020, was a House manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Republicans have sought unsuccessfully to remove him from the House intelligence committee, over reports of links to a suspected Chinese spy.By lunchtime on the east coast on Saturday, Google had fixed its mistake.Grenell seems more likely to run for state than national office. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, is the subject of a recall attempt. In February, Grenell was reported to have discussed a run with Trump.Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, Grenell said: “And of course, if a public official is still failing to deliver on their promises, and if you can’t limit their term or recall them in time, there’s always one other option. You can run against them yourself.” More

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      'Blindsided': Biden faces tough test in reversing Trump's cruel border legacy

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      Lauded for his human touch, Joe Biden is facing an early political and moral test over how his government treats thousands of migrant children who make the dangerous journey to America alone.

      Officials say the number of people caught attempting to cross the US-Mexico border is on pace to hit its highest number for 20 years. Single adults and families are being expelled under coronavirus safety rules inherited from Donald Trump.
      But a growing number of children, some as young as six years old, from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are arriving at the southern border without parents or guardians. These minors are brought to border patrol facilities – where many languish in cramped, prison-like conditions for days on end.
      The fast-developing humanitarian emergency shows how Biden’s determination to break from Trump’s harsh, nativist crackdown in favour of a more compassionate approach has collided with the reality of finite resources and a broken system.
      “I do think that they were blindsided by this surge,” said María Teresa Kumar, founding president of the grassroots political organisation Voto Latino. “As someone that monitored this a lot, I didn’t see that coming and I don’t think the community saw that coming. It took everybody by surprise.
      “It is heart-wrenching knowing that there are children that are cold and don’t have family. It’s one of these cases where there seems to be no right answers. Knowing the people inside the administration are very much on the side of immigrants speaks to me that there are real moral dilemmas happening right now and I would not want to be in that position.”

      Democrats have called the situation a “challenge” and “problem” and blamed Trump’s legacy. Republicans have rushed to brand it the first “crisis” and “disaster” of Biden’s presidency. The battle is proof that border access remains one of the most complex, emotive and radioactive issues in American politics.
      Trump launched his campaign for the presidency by promising to build a wall, routinely vilified migrants and, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, spoke often of an “invasion”. Biden stopped construction of the wall and promised to unwind Trump’s zero-tolerance policies.
      The number of “encounters” between migrants and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has increased every month since April 2020. But when 100,441 migrants were reported attempting to cross the border last month, it was the highest level since March 2019 and included a particular rise in unaccompanied children.
      Many such children head to the US to reunite with family members or escape poverty, crime and violence. Central America has been hit by hurricanes and the economic fallout of Covid-19. In an ABC interview this week, Biden denied that more migrants were coming because he is “a nice guy”, insisting: “They come because their circumstance is so bad.”
      Under Trump, unaccompanied children were sent straight back to Mexico. Biden decided they should go to a border patrol facility and, within 72 hours, be transferred to the health department with a view to being placed with a family member or sponsor.
      However, it has quickly become clear the system is not fit for purpose, leaving about 4,500 children stuck in facilities designed for adult men. Lawyers who visited one facility in Texas described seeing children sleeping on the floor or on metal benches and being allowed outside for a few minutes every few days.
      The administration is scrambling to find more capacity, opening emergency shelters and using a convention centre in Dallas to house up to 3,000 teenage boys. It also deployed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which typically responds to floods, storms and other disasters, to help shelter and transport children at least until early June.
      Republicans seized on that move as evidence a disaster is unfolding. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, led a delegation of a dozen Republicans to El Paso, Texas, and spoke of “the Biden border crisis”, adding: “It’s more than a crisis. This is human heartbreak.”
      The message has resounded through a conservative media that finds Biden an elusive target. Trump made wildly exaggerated claims in a Fox News interview: “They’re destroying our country. People are coming in by the hundreds of thousands, And, frankly, our country can’t handle it. It is a crisis like we have rarely had and, certainly, we have never had on the border.”
      For Republicans, reeling from election defeat, internal divisions and failure to block Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the border offers a political lifeline.
      Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “If the numbers go down next month this isn’t a crisis, but I think what they are expecting is that they’re not going to go down and that this is going to be something that will be an enduring and endemic problem.
      “It’s something that energises and unites the Trump voting coalition and could easily be seen as a failure on behalf of the administration by just enough of the people who voted for him but aren’t hardcore Democrats. So I think it’s a very smart move by Republicans to play this out and Biden needs to figure out how you can be compassionate while not being naively welcoming. He has not yet figured out how to do that.”

      Others, however, regard the Republican response as predictable ploy by a party obsessed with demonising migrants. Kumar said: “They’re phonies and it is coldly calculated because they know they have problems with suburban white women voters, and they are trying to make a case for it for the midterms.
      “It’s cynical and gross because when children were literally dying at the border, when they had a president that was teargassing refugees, not one of them stood up. It’s callous and cold political expediency and it’s shameful.”
      The White House has pointed out that the Trump administration forcibly separated nearly 3,000 children from parents, with no system in place to reunite them. Alejandro Mayorkas, the first migrant and first Latino in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress: “A crisis is when a nation is willing to rip a nine-year-old child out of the hands of his or her parent and separate that family to deter future migration. That, to me, is a humanitarian crisis.”
      Mayorkas argues that Trump’s decision to cut staffing, bed capacity and other resources was reckless given the likelihood that the number of migrants would rise again as the pandemic waned.
      “The system was gutted,” he said, “facilities were closed and they cruelly expelled young children into the hands of traffickers. We have had to rebuild the entire system, including the policies and procedures required to administer the asylum laws that Congress passed long ago.” More

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      Chaos Under Heaven: Trump as raging bull in a China policy shop

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      Covid-19 has left more than 530,000 Americans dead and China’s standing with the US at a historic low. Only Iran and North Korea fare worse. US opinion is no outlier. China’s reputation has taken a beating in Australia, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany. Images of tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square in summer 1989 have been supplanted by Beijing stonewalling on the origins of the plague.In Chaos Under Heaven, the Washington Post reporter Josh Rogin reminds us that under Xi Jinping, China halted the export of personal protective equipment made by US companies, sent defective PPE to the Netherlands and barred Australian beef exports after Canberra called for an inquiry into the genesis of Covid-19. In Rogin’s telling, China’s “mask diplomacy” was a blunt instrument, designed to still criticism abroad and sow fear at home.Rogin delivers a needed modicum of clarity. Under the subtitle Trump, Xi and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century, he lays out what the US and its allies got wrong about China over decades, strife within the Trump administration and personal financial conflicts that affected US policy. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump feature heavily. But Hunter and James Biden bear watching too.McConnell’s wealth is tethered to his wife’s family interest in Chinese shipping. Angela Chao, his sister-in-law, is chief executive of the business and sits on the board of the Bank of China. Most recently, the US transportation department inspector general reported that Elaine Chao, McConnell’s wife and Trump’s transportation secretary, escaped criminal investigation after the justice department weighed in.If the Chinese were to invade Taiwan, Trump said, ‘there isn’t a fucking thing we can do’. So much for US policyIn fall 2019, McConnell and Trump thwarted progress on the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy bill, which had cleared the Senate foreign relations committee, then controlled by Republicans. Back in 1992, McConnell backed legislation enacted in connection with the autonomy of Hong Kong. As late as summer 2019, he wrote an op-ed in support. Time – and perhaps marriage – can change perspective.Rogin has longtime interests in human rights and the far east. He spent the early days of his career at the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese daily, and more recently rubbed shoulders with an informal group of opponents to the Chinese regime, which he calls the “Bingo Club”. One member was Peter Mattis, a former CIA analyst and nephew of James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary. During the 2016 Republican convention, Rogin broke the story of the Trump campaign “gutting” the GOP’s anti-Russia platform on Ukraine.Chaos Under Heaven moves quickly, is well-written and draws the reader in. Rogin makes clear that tension between Beijing and Washington will probably remain for the foreseeable future. China’s economy and military continue to grow, America’s social chasms remain on display. Under Xi, don’t expect the Middle Kingdom to back down.One of Rogin’s central points is that Trump correctly identified the threat and challenge posed by China yet proved incapable of formulating a coherent strategy and sticking with it. Much of the time, he conflated personal relationships with the national interest. As his approach to North Korea showed, not everyone was buying what he was selling. His effort to draw China into that quagmire was a bust. The art of the deal is way harder than Trump trumpeted.On the ground, the food fights of 2016 carried over to the White House. The West Wing was riven with factions. Wall Street transplants, military veterans and diehard Maga-ites exchanged verbal blows. The former reality show host zigged and zagged, blowing hot and cold as TV and his moods took him.During the 2016 transition, Trump accepted a congratulatory phone call from Tsai Ing-wen, president of Taiwan. Not surprisingly, China was angered – it regards the island as its own. Ambiguity toward Taiwan was central to US rapprochement with China in the 1970s. Trump walked his words back, invited Xi to Mar-a-Lago and treated him to the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen”.As for Trump’s take on Taiwan, he told a senator it was “like two feet from China” and the US was “8,000 miles away”. Trump chillingly added that if the Chinese were to invade, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it”. So much for US policy.Trump’s inability to forge working alliances hampered US responses. Confronting China required playing well with others. Trump proved unable to set aside personal pique and drive a consensus forward. At times he caved on the technological threat China posed, for the sake of scoring an elusive trade deal.On the plus side of the ledger, the conduct of Beijing during the pandemic made governments realize “their dependence on China was a political vulnerability”. The UK reversed course and banned Huawei, the Chinese communications Goliath, from its networks.No book about Trump is complete without at least one salacious morsel. Chaos Under Heaven conveys that Trump came to believe an unfounded rumor that Gen HR McMaster, his second national security adviser, was conducting an extramarital affair. As expected, Trump could not keep the news to himself.At a crowded Oval Office staff meeting, the former president queried: “Have you heard who McMaster is fucking?” Ever the puritan, Trump warned: “He’s gonna get us all in trouble if he can’t keep his dick in his pants.” The Manhattan district attorney is still investigating all things Trump, including payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.Rogin observes that Trump was “great at flipping over the chess board but he couldn’t set the board back up again”. That said, he had “shifted the conversation about China in a way that cannot be undone”. More

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      Bidenomics beats Reaganomics and I should know – I saw Clintonomics fail | Robert Reich

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      A quarter-century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and abiding poverty. But Clinton’s political advisers warned that unless he went along, he would jeopardize his reelection.That was the end of welfare as we knew it. As Clinton boasted in his State of the Union address to Congress that year: “The era of big government is over.”Until Thursday, that is. Joe Biden signed into law the biggest expansion of government assistance since the 1960s – a guaranteed income for most families with children, raising the maximum benefit by up to 80% per child.As Biden put it in his address to the nation, as if answering Clinton: “The government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us, all of us, we the people.”As a senator, Biden supported Clinton’s 1996 welfare restrictions, as did most Americans. What happened between then and now? Three big things.First, Covid. The pandemic has been a national wake-up call on the fragility of middle-class incomes. The deep Covid recession has revealed the harsh consequences of most Americans living paycheck to paycheck.For years, Republicans used welfare to drive a wedge between the white working middle class and the poor. Ronald Reagan portrayed black, inner-city mothers as freeloaders and con artists, repeatedly referring to “a woman in Chicago” as the “welfare queen”.Trump replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud and cultural paranoiaStarting in the 1970s, women had streamed into paid work in order to prop up family incomes decimated by the decline in male factory jobs. These families were particularly susceptible to the Republican message. Why should “they” get help for not working when “we” get no help, and we work?By the time Clinton campaigned for president, “ending welfare as we knew it” had become a talisman of so-called New Democrats, even though there was little or no evidence that welfare benefits discouraged the unemployed from taking jobs. (In Britain, enlarged child benefits actually increased employment among single mothers.)Yet when Covid hit, a new reality became painfully clear: public assistance was no longer just for “them”. It was needed by all of “us”.The second big thing was Donald Trump. He exploited racism, to be sure, but also replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud and cultural paranoia stretching from Dr Seuss to Mr Potato Head.Trump obliterated concerns about government give-aways. The Cares Act, which he signed into law at the end of March 2020, gave most Americans checks of $1,200 (to which he calculatedly attached his name). When this proved enormously popular, he demanded the next round of stimulus checks be $2,000.But Trump’s biggest give-away was the GOP’s $1.9tn 2018 tax cut, under which benefits went overwhelmingly to the top 20%. Despite promises of higher wages for everyone else, nothing trickled down. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, America’s 660 billionaires – major beneficiaries of the tax cut – became $1.3tn wealthier, enough to give every American a $3,900 check and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic.The third big thing is the breadth of Biden’s plan. Under it, more than 93% of the nation’s children – 69 million – receive benefits. Incomes of Americans in the lowest quintile will increase by 20%; those in the second-lowest, 9%; those in the middle, 6%.Rather than pit the working middle class against the poor, this unites them. Some 76% of Americans supported the bill, including 63% of low-income Republicans (a quarter of all Republican voters). Younger conservatives are particularly supportive, presumably because people under 50 have felt the brunt of the four-decade slowdown in real wage growth.Given all this, it’s amazing that zero Republican members of Congress voted for it, while 278 voted for Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the rich.The political lesson is that today’s Democrats – who enjoy popular vote majorities in presidential elections (having won seven of the past eight) – can gain political majorities by raising the wages of both middle class and poor voters, while fighting Republican efforts to suppress the votes of likely Democrats.The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. For years, conservative economists argued that tax cuts for the rich create job-creating investments, while assistance to the poor creates dependency. Rubbish.Bidenomics is exactly the reverse: Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone. This is far more plausible. We’ll learn how much in coming months. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump coronavirus coordinator, Deborah Birx, takes job at air purifier business

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      Dr Deborah Birx, the former Trump White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, is taking a private sector job, joining a Texas manufacturer that says its purifiers clean Covid-19 from the air within minutes and from surfaces within hours.Birx will join Dallas-based ActivePure as chief scientific and medical adviser, she and the company said on Friday.An expert in global health, Birx came to the White House in 2020 to help lead the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.But she was criticised for not standing up to former president Donald Trump as he played down the virus, predicted it would disappear, and questioned whether ingesting bleach could help cure infected Americans.[embedded content]While her friend and former mentor, Dr Anthony Fauci, was promoted to become a top medical adviser to Joe Biden, Birx did not get a job in the new administration.“The Biden administration wanted a clean slate,” she told Reuters in an interview. “I understand that completely.”Birx left government earlier this week.She and Fauci, she said, asked themselves regularly what could have been done differently over the last year.“When you have the 100,000 people we lost over the summer, and the 300,000 people we lost over the fall-winter surge, you have to ask yourself and have to know that it didn’t go as well as it should have,” she said.“All of us are responsible for that.”The coronavirus has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than any other country.Birx said she was still processing regrets and steps she could have taken to do be more effective.“I’m trying to rank order them,” she said. “We have to be willing to step back and really analyse where we could have been and why we weren’t more effective.”Birx said she remained concerned about the level of testing in the country, but she praised the new administration for modelling mask-wearing and other behaviours that help to combat the virus.Trump, a Republican, eschewed masks.“I think the messaging has been very good, very consistent,” she said of the Biden team. “That’s really important when you’re asking people to change their behaviours.”In addition to her role at ActivePure, Birx has also joined the George W Bush Institute as a global health fellow and the biopharmaceutical company Innoviva as a board member, she said. More

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      in Elections

      US Capitol attack: former Trump state department aide charged

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      A former state department aide in Donald Trump’s administration has been charged with participating in the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January and assaulting officers who were trying to guard the building, court papers show.It is the first known case to be brought against a Trump appointee in connection with the Capitol attack, which led to Trump’s historic second impeachment.Federico Klein, who also worked for Trump’s 2016 election campaign, was seen wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat amid the throng of people in a tunnel trying to force their way into the Capitol on the day, the papers say.Klein pushed his way toward the doors, where, authorities say, “he physically and verbally engaged” with officers trying to keep the mob back.Klein was seen on camera violently shoving a riot shield into an officer and inciting the crowd as it tried to storm past the police line, shouting: “We need fresh people, we need fresh people,” according to the charging documents.As the mob struggled with police in the tunnel, Klein pushed the riot shield, which had been stolen from an officer, in between the Capitol doors, preventing police from closing them, authorities say.Eventually, an officer used chemical spray, forcing Klein to move somewhere else, officials say.Klein was arrested on Thursday in Virginia and faces charges including obstructing Congress and assaulting officers using a dangerous weapon.He was in custody on Friday and could not be reached for comment.It was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney who could comment on his behalf. A Trump spokesman said the former president had no comment.More than 300 people have been charged with federal crimes relating to the deadly riots that day.Klein became a staff assistant in the state department shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, according to a financial disclosure report.He held a top secret security clearance that was renewed in 2019, according to the court papers.He resigned from his position on 19 January 2021.Klein reportedly worked in the office of Brazilian and Southern Cone affairs, according to the court papers. More