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      Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain's spaniel became Trump's poodle

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      Opinion

      US Senate

      Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodle

      Sidney Blumenthal

      On Monday, the senator who praised Hillary and helped get the Steele dossier to the FBI will preside over a hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, a nominee to tilt the supreme court right for years to come. His is a quintessential Washington tale More

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      Brought to book: how a publishing gold rush pinned Trump to the page

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      Donald Trump is not a reader but to the publishing industry he is the gift that keeps on giving. His time in the White House has yielded an avalanche of books with titles like Fear, Rage, Unhinged and Fire and Fury. Together, they paint a withering portrait of the 45th president.Some crackle with the fury of scorned employees. Others are banquets of gossip by seasoned reporters, whether highbrow (Bob Woodward) or lowbrow (Michael Wolff). One is by a member of Trump’s own family: Mary Trump who put her estranged uncle in the psychiatrist’s chair.To anyone seeking to understand the presidency of Donald Trump, such books are a goldmine that offer startling insights into his character, personality and mental state.Here are six categories to guide you through the canon:Sex and race“Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump,” was the bold prediction of Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on The Apprentice, on PBS Frontline in 2016. Fired from the White House the following year, she turned on Trump in a book that proved single-word titles are deadly: Unhinged.“It had finally sunk in that the person I’d thought I’d known so well for so long was actually a racist,” Manigault Newman writes. “Using the N-word was not just the way he talks but, more disturbing, it was how he thought of me and African Americans as a whole.”This year’s Republican convention devoted a segment to working mothers at the White House, seeking to cast Trump as an improbable feminist. The literature tells a different story. A Very Stable Genius, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, reports the president complained that Kirstjen Nielsen, his homeland security secretary, did not “look the part”, and that he “abused”, “harassed” and “pestered” her over immigration policy.The demonization of immigrants is a constant theme. A Warning, by Anonymous, alleges Trump proposed classifying all undocumented migrants as “enemy combatants”, the same status as captured members of al-Qaida, which would thus have dispatched them to Guantánamo Bay. More

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      Republicans express fears Trump will lose presidential election

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      Ted Cruz fears an election “bloodbath”. His fellow top Republican senator Thom Tillis is talking in terms of a Joe Biden presidency. And even Mitch McConnell, the fiercely loyal Senate majority leader, won’t go near the White House over Donald Trump’s handling of coronavirus protocols.Individually, they could arguably be seen as off-the-cuff comments from Trump’s allies attempting to rally support for the US president just days ahead of a general election that opinion polls increasingly show him losing.But collectively, along with pronouncements from several other Republicans appearing to distance themselves from Trump, his administration and its policies, it reflects growing concern inside the Republican party’s top tier that 3 November could be a blowout win for Joe Biden and the Democrats.“I think it could be a terrible election. I think we could lose the White House and both houses of Congress, that it could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions,” Cruz, the junior senator for Texas and former vocal critic of Trump, said in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Friday.“I am worried. It’s volatile, it’s highly volatile,” he added, although he did say he also saw the possibility of Trump re-elected “with a big margin”.Tillis, one of several Trump associates who contracted Covid-19 apparently at a super-spreader White House event two weeks ago, faces a tough fight for re-election as senator for North Carolina, and raised the prospect of a Trump defeat during a debate against Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham.“The best check on a Biden presidency is for Republicans to have a majority in the senate,” he said, inadvertently suggesting he thought a Democratic victory next month could be a done deal. “Checks and balances does resonate with North Carolina voters,” he added.Elsewhere, Republican displeasure at Trump is becoming increasingly evident, especially among candidates locked in tight election races of their own.Martha McSally, the Arizona senator trailing the former Nasa astronaut Mark Kelly by a significant margin, attacked Trump for his repeated attacks on her predecessor, John McCain. “Quite frankly, it pisses me off when he does it,” she said in a debate this week. The Texas senator John Cornyn slammed Trump this week for “creating confusion” over coronavirus and “letting his guard down” as the pandemic spread across the nation.McConnell’s comments, meanwhile, about why he has not been to the White House for at least two months could be seen in a different context, given he is 78 and in the same at-risk demographic as the already infected president.“My impression was that their approach to how to handle this is different from mine and what I suggested that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing,” he said.But dissent from the staunch Trump ally has been almost unheard of through the four years of the presidency. McConnell’s words seem to reflect the threat that a nationwide backlash to Trump’s pandemic handling poses to the Republican senate majority. More