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      Speaking for Myself review: Sarah Sanders writes one for the Trump team

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      Toward the end of Speaking for Myself, Sarah Huckabee Sanders recalls a conversation with Donald Trump in which she advises him her book will be aimed at defending his reputation.“I think you will like it,” says the president’s second press secretary. “You have been falsely attacked and misrepresented for too long and it’s time for America to know the real story.”An approving president replies: “Can’t wait. I’m sure it will be great.”Whether Sanders has succeeded is open to debate. Speaking for Myself does a better job in burnishing her brand in advance of a possible run for the Arkansas governorship in 2022. It is very much a would-be candidate’s autobiography, even as it devotes countless pages to its author’s time in the White House.Sanders shares her experiences of being the daughter of Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas and two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. She also describes her time as a student, how she met her husband and life as a working mother. Personal normalcy and faith are the dominant themes, the narrative a mixture of whitewashing and score-settling but with the emphasis on the former.Sanders describes her father’s 2008 presidential run, including his win in the Iowa caucus. She heaps praise on a campaign ad featuring the martial-arts eminence Chuck Norris, and goes out of her way to knock Mitt Romney, a rival to her father who would win the nomination in 2012, for his “flip-flops” on “nearly every major issue”.The tension between Romney and the Huckabees predates his vote this year, as a senator from Utah, to convict Trump on impeachment charges. Rather, it is tribal.Unmentioned by Sanders is her father having attacked Romney’s faith. In the run-up to Iowa, Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, declared the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a “religion”, not a “cult”. But in the next breath, he pondered whether Mormons believe “Jesus and the devil are brothers”. Evangelicals comprised three-fifths of Iowa’s Republican caucus-goers. Among them, Huckabee trounced Romney by more than 25 points.Not surprisingly, when Sanders describes her time in the Trump White House she goes full-bore at Robert Mueller, doing her best to play the victim. As is to be expected, she regurgitates the “no-collusion” party line and offers full-throated endorsements of Bill Barr, Trump’s second attorney general, and Pat Cipollone, his second White House counsel, for their defense of the president.This too is personal. In the aftermath of James Comey’s dismissal as FBI director in May 2017, Sanders did her best to trash his reputation, including falsely stating “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director”. Questioned by a reporter on her version of reality, Sanders remained unyielding: “Look, we’ve heard from countless members of the FBI.”Pressed by the special counsel, Sanders characterized those remarks as a “slip of the tongue”, made “in the heat of the moment” and “not founded on anything”.Now, time has passed, an election looms and Sanders isn’t having any of it. She accuses Mueller’s staff of “totally” misrepresenting her statements, for no purpose other than to “vilify” and “falsely” attack her. Likewise, she draws no line between her baseless accusations and prosecutors’ concerns about obstruction of justice.Sanders remains silent about the fact Mueller issued a correction of Barr’s characterization of his report. Likewise, though she denies collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the Senate intelligence committee recently cast a different light on the operative facts.In its report, the committee confirmed Trump lied to the special counsel and that Paul Manafort – the campaign manager whose departure paved the way for Steve Bannon – worked hand in glove with a Russian intelligence officer in an effort to help his candidate.Whether any of it altered the election result is a different story. From the looks of things, Comey probably had a greater impact.In an act of grace, Sanders goes easy on Cliff Sims, a former White House staffer who lashed into her in Team of Vipers, his tell-all from 2019. As press secretary, Sims wrote, Sanders “didn’t press as hard as she could have for the rock-bottom truth”. He also said her “gymnastics with the truth would tax even the nimblest of prevaricators, and Sanders was not that”.Sanders turns the other cheek, acknowledging Sims as the author of the “script” she delivered at each daily briefing and crediting him as “an excellent writer and fellow southerner”. Sims was banished from the administration and sued the president, but recently worked as a speechwriter at the Republican convention.To Sanders, Jim Acosta of CNN and the former national security adviser John Bolton are different. Extracts attacking Bolton were leaked to coincide with the release of his book, The Room Where It Happened, this summer. Acosta is accused of “grandstanding to build his media profile”, Sanders questioning his commitment to getting the “story right”.Unfortunately, Sanders can go overboard with ethnic reductionism. Or, at least, she could have used some editing.Sanders does a cultural compare-and-contrast with Josh Raffel, a former staffer who handled public relations for Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. Raffel, Sanders observes, was a “liberal, aggressive, foulmouthed Jew from New York City”. Substitute, “non-church-going Presbyterian” for “Jew” and you would have a description of the 45th president.Sanders also lets the reader know she had “grown to love Josh” and heaps praise on his sense of humor.One of few Trump aides to leave the West Wing smiling and of her free will, Sanders’ spouse and children have not spoken out. This is as candid as we are going to get. It is not an audition for another Trump-tied gig. She has her eyes on a different executive mansion – in Little Rock, Arkansas. More

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      Kamala Harris says she wouldn't trust Trump on safety of Covid vaccine before election

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      Kamala Harris said that she would not trust Donald Trump’s word on the safety of any coronavirus vaccine approved for use in America before the November election.In an interview with CNN – excerpts of which were released on Saturday – the Democratic vice-presidential nominee warned of the potential for political interference by the US president over the approval of a coronavirus vaccine in order to boost his re-election chances.Asked if she would personally take any vaccine given the green light in the US before the November poll, Harris replied: “I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about. I will not take his word for it.”There have been widespread reports of pressure being put on administration health officials to accelerate the development and approval of a vaccine that could halt or blunt the impact of a pandemic that has cost more than 185,000 American lives and wreaked havoc on the economy not seen since the Great Depression.Harris said she expected that medical experts would not be allowed to make decisions on a vaccine without interference from above.“If past is prologue that they will not, they’ll be muzzled, they’ll be suppressed, they will be sidelined,” Harris told CNN. “Because he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days and he’s grasping to get whatever he can to pretend he has been a leader on this issue when he is not.”Concerns over potential politicization of a Covid-19 treatment and vaccine began in the spring, when Trump touted anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as the cure for Covid-19 despite weak evidence that the drug was effective against the virus.The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency in charge of approving vaccines and treatments for public use, carried out an emergency use authorization (EUA) order to allow the use of the drug without the testing and trials that are usually accompanied with a drug rollout.The EUA for hydroxychloroquine was revoked in June, with the FDA saying the drug has not proven effective against Covid-19 and can have severe side effects.In late August, Trump announced another EUA for convalescent plasma, a type of blood therapy where blood plasma from a recovered Covid-19 patient who has developed antibodies is given to a patient trying to fight the illness.While one study conducted on the therapy suggested that the treatment could be helpful, public health experts, including Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said that there needs to be larger, randomized trials in order to ensure the efficacy of the treatment.Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked states to expedite approval for vaccine distribution sites by 1 November. Stephen Hahn, the head of the FDA, indicated that he would be willing to authorize a vaccine before phase three trials were complete – a controversial move that has been taken by China and Russia. Hahn insisted he would not expedite a vaccine to appease the president.Moncef Slaoui, the co-chief of the White House initiative to release a vaccine, said that it was possible but unlikely that a vaccine would be ready by 1 November. “There is a very, very low chance that the trials that are running as we speak could [be completed] by the end of October,” Slaoui told NPR.For weeks, Trump has been touting that a vaccine is right on America’s doorstep, an optimism that is not shared by public health experts. Trump told a cheering crowd at the Republican national convention last week that “we will have a safe and effective vaccine by the end of the year”.The Trump administration has dismissed accusations that its claims of confidence in a vaccine in the next few months are a way to boost Trump for election day on 3 November.“I think it’s very irresponsible how people are trying to politicize notions of delivering a vaccine to the American people,” Alex Azar, the health and human services department secretary, told CBS on Thursday.Trump himself has denied that any motivation to get a vaccine out around election day has anything to do with the election itself. “I’m optimistic that it will be around that date … It wouldn’t hurt,” he said. “I’m not doing it for the election. I want it fast because I want to save a lot of lives.” More

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      Donald Trump visits his golf club amid outrage over remarks about US war dead

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      Donald Trump visited one of his own golf courses on Saturday amid one of the worst recent scandals to his presidency in recent months and after expert warnings that up to 400,000 Americans could die of the coronavirus before the end of the year.Trump’s re-election bid is in turmoil after multiple reports of disparaging remarks he made about veterans and US soldiers that have caused widespread outrage, including calling them “suckers” and “losers”. The White House has strongly denied the allegations.Separately, a new report was published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, that forecast the US death toll from the pandemic could hit 400,000 by 1 January 2021.However, on Saturday Trump visited the Trump National Golf Club, in Virginia, passing by various roadside protesters, including one who waved a placard that read: “Elect A Clown Get A Circus”. Some supporters also held up Trump 2020 signs.CNN, which tallies Trump’s visits to golf courses, reported that this visit was the 295th trip to one of his own golf courses during his presidency.During his campaign for the White House in 2016, Trump was a harsh critic of the amount of golf Barack Obama played during his time in office. Yet once in the White House, Trump has played far more often than his predecessor. More

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      Trump orders crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it 'anti-American'

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      Donald Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ antiracism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda”.The OMB director, Russell Vought, in a letter Friday to executive branch agencies, directed them to identify spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other material that teaches or suggests that the United States or any race or ethnicity is “inherently racist or evil”.The memo comes as the nation has faced a reckoning this summer over racial injustice in policing and other spheres of American life. Trump has spent much of the summer defending the display of the Confederate battle flag and monuments of civil war rebels from protesters seeking their removal, in what he has called a “culture war” ahead of the 3 November election.Meanwhile, he has rejected comments from Democratic nominee Joe Biden and others that there is “systemic racism” in policing and American culture that must be addressed.Vought’s memo cites “press reports” as contributing to Trump’s decision, apparently referring to segments on Fox News and other outlets that have stoked conservative outrage about the federal training.Vought’s memo says additional federal guidance on training sessions is forthcoming, maintaining that “the President, and his Administration, are fully committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals in the United States”.“The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed,” he added. “The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the Federal government.” More

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      Trump says he will not cut funding to Stars and Stripes newspaper

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      Donald Trump tweeted on Friday that he “will not be cutting funding to Stars and Stripes”, a newspaper that has served US armed forces since 1861, despite a Pentagon memo obtained by USA Today saying the title would close by the end of the month.“The United States of America will NOT be cutting funding to Stars and Stripes magazine under my watch,” Trump wrote. “It will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military!”News that the venerable paper was in peril had landed as the White House reeled from a report in the Atlantic which said the president disparaged US marines killed in France in the first world war and made disrespectful remarks about both John McCain, a late political rival and Vietnam veteran, and wounded soldiers in general.Trump rubbished that report, insisting: “I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES”.In the case of McCain, observers pointed to a tweet from 2015 in which Trump called the senator and presidential nominee, who died in 2018, a “loser”.Trump also said the Atlantic, which was founded in 1857, was “dying, like most magazines”, and said its report had been refuted.Stars and Stripes traces its origins to Bloomfield, Missouri, in November 1861, when troops under the future president Ulysses S Grant took over the printing press of a Confederate sympathiser.It has traditionally provided news free of government censorship, often critical of military and civilian commanders, and is delivered daily to troops around the world, even on frontlines.According to USA Today, the Department of Defense ordered the publisher of Stars and Stripes to provide a plan to “dissolve” it by 15 September, including a “specific timeline for vacating government owned/leased space worldwide”.“The last newspaper publication (in all forms) will be 30 September 2020,” the author of the memo, Col Paul Haverstick Jr, was quoted as writing.Haverstick is director of Defense Media Activity (DMA), based at Fort Meade, Maryland. According to the Pentagon website, DMA is “a mass media and education organisation that creates and distributes Department of Defense content across a variety of platforms to audiences around the world”.Moves to close Stars and Stripes began in February, when the Pentagon announced plans to reallocate funding to projects including the Space Force, a much-maligned and satirised Trump pet project.On Wednesday, Military.com reported that a bipartisan group of senators led by the California Democrat Dianne Feinstein had written to the defense secretary, Mark Esper.“Stars and Stripes is an essential part of our nation’s freedom of the press that serves the very population charged with defending that freedom,” the 15 senators wrote. “Therefore, we respectfully request that you rescind your decision to discontinue support for Stars and Stripes and that you reinstate the funding necessary for it to continue operations.”Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq, signed the Feinstein letter. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally who was a lawyer in the US air force, wrote a letter of his own.Stars and Stripes did not immediately comment on Wednesday, but it did share a tweet from one of its writers, Steve Beynon.“I read Stars and Stripes on a mountain in Afghanistan when I was a 19-year-old aspiring journalist,” he wrote. “Now I work there. This doesn’t stop the journalism. I’m juggling three future news stories today.”Beynon shared recent stories including a report on women commanding combat units and employees alleging “ingrained racism” at the Department of Veterans Affairs.Kathy Kiely of the Missouri School of Journalism, who published news of the memo in USA Today, wrote: “Even for those of us who are all too wearily familiar with President Donald Trump’s disdain for journalists, his administration’s latest attack on the free press is a bit of a jaw-dropper.”Stars and Stripes later retweeted Trump’s promise not to close it.Before the presidential fiat by tweet, as news of the Pentagon memo echoed through the US media, one former cavalry officer who twice deployed to Iraq spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity.“Having an independent media outlet focused totally on the military and its communities,” he said, “should be a priority for the Department of Defense, to keep these communities informed and together – even while physically separated.”The same veteran expressed sadness about Trump’s reported remarks about soldiers killed in action, wounded or taken prisoner.“Anyone who is shocked or surprised at any of this simply hasn’t been paying attention,” he said. “Look at his comments about prisoners of war when talking about McCain.” More