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BooksI Alone Can Fix It review: Donald Trump as wannabe Führer – in another riveting read Gen Mark Milley saw that the US was in a ‘Reichstag moment’ – four days before the Capitol riot. With this and much more startling reporting, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post deliver the goods once againLloyd GreenFri 16 Jul 2021 07.37 EDTLast modified on Fri 16 Jul 2021 08.24 EDTCocooned at his resorts, the Trump Organization indicted, Donald Trump has come to embrace the insurrection.Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book saysRead more“Personally, what I wanted is what they wanted,” he tells Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post.Five people died after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on 6 January, seeking to overturn the election.Last week, Trump declared: “These were peaceful people, these were great people.”So much for blaming Antifa. Think Charlottesville redux, on a larger stage. Or something even more ominous.In their second book on the Trump presidency, Leonnig and Rucker report that on 2 January 2021, two months after election day and as Trump still refused to concede defeat, Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told aides: “This is a Reichstag moment.”He was referring to the fire at the German parliament on 27 February 1933, an incident seized as a pretext by Hitler to begin arresting opponents and to consolidate his power.“The gospel of the Führer,” the authors quote Milley as saying.According to the general, the US under Trump was experiencing its own version of the late Weimar Republic, complete with modern-day “Brownshirts”. A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Milley was not alone in seeing shadows of the past slither into the daylight.Trump, Leonnig and Rucker quote a senior official as saying, is a “guy who takes fuel, throws it on the fire, and makes you scared shitless”, then says “‘I will protect you.’“That’s what Hitler did to consolidate power in 1933.”This is a blockbuster follow-up to A Very Stable Genius, in which Leonnig and Rucker chronicled the chaos of Trump’s first three years in office. I Alone Can Fix It pulls back the curtain on the handling of Covid-19, the re-election bid and its chaotic and violent aftermath.The pair are Pulitzer winners, for investigative reporting. Their book is essential reading. They have receipts, which they lay out for all to see.Of Covid, they capture Marc Short, Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, telling folks in February 2020: “It’s not that bad.” The families of more than 600,000 dead Americans would probably disagree. (Short later contracted the virus.)Feeling burned by the authors’ first book, this time Trump sat for a two-and-a-half-hour interview. At the end of it, he let it be known – with a “twinkle in his eye” – that “for some sick reason” he “enjoyed it”.Much as he claims to hate the media and the elite, Trump craves their attention. Much as he believes in his own power of persuasion, Leonnig and Rucker were not converted.Trump’s hubris shines through. But for the pandemic, he claims re-election was inevitable. It’s a salesman’s pitch but one sufficiently rooted in reality. He also claims America’s two greatest presidents could not have defeated him. That is just surreal:
I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice-president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me.”
Before Covid, the economy was humming. Trump had taken down Qassem Suleimani, a top general in Iran’s Quds force, and the public approved.Joe Biden lost nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. His first win was on 29 February, days after the stock market’s Covid-induced crash, assisted by James Clyburn of South Carolina, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and House majority whip.On the relationship between Covid and Trump’s defeat, Leonnig and Rucker describe Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s now former prime minister, sharing his thoughts with Tony Fabrizio, a pollster who worked for him and Trump, in early 2020.Netanyahu said: “The only thing that can beat President Trump is coronavirus.”With analytic capacity Trump could never muster and a sense of history he lacked, Netanyahu added: “If you don’t understand what a pandemic is and the mathematics behind how this will spread if we don’t contain it, it will collapse economies, and that changes the ball game tremendously.”In August, Trump reamed out Fabrizio after he warned the president the electorate was “really fatigued”. Trump bellowed: “They’re tired? They’re fatigued? They’re fucking fatigued? Well, I’m fucking fatigued, too.”The book’s rawest revelations concern 6 January. At best, Trump was blasé about Mike Pence’s plight, presiding over confirmation of Biden’s win, stuck inside the Capitol as halls and offices were plundered. Like Nero watching Rome burn, Trump fiddled in front of his TV.As for the rioters, Trump now claims he and they are one: “They showed up just to show support because I happen to believe the election was rigged at a level like nothing has ever been rigged before.”On 6 January, James Lankford of Oklahoma argued against certification, citing constituents’ concerns about voter fraud. He failed to mention it was Trump who spread that very concern.Hours later, however, the senator voted to certify. Months earlier, Tulsa was the venue for Trump’s infamous comeback rally, a flop which cost Brad Parscale his job as campaign manager and Herman Cain his life.Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarmingRead moreLiz Cheney also makes a telling appearance in Rucker and Leonnig’s story. In a 7 January call with Gen Milley, the Wyoming congresswoman unloaded on Jim Jordan, a hard-right Ohio representative and Trump favorite, as a “son of a bitch”.Stuck with Jordan during the Capitol siege, Cheney discounted his expressions of concern, saying: “Get away from me. You fucking did this.” Cheney is now a member of the House select committee charged with investigating the riot.Leonnig and Rucker also quote Doris Kearns Goodwin: “There is nothing like this other than the 1850s, when events led inevitably to the civil war.”Politicians and acolytes make pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s mecca in Palm Beach. Each dusk, Leonnig and Rucker write, he receives a standing ovation.Just the way he likes it.
I Alone Can Fix It is published in the US by Penguin and in the UK by Bloomsbury
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BooksDrunken Giuliani urged Trump to ‘just say we won’ on election night, book saysAs key states started to slip away from Trump, Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged former president to lie, according to new book
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BooksLandslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarming Fire and Fury infuriated a president and fueled a publishing boom. Its latest sequel is required reading for anyone who fears for American democracyLloyd GreenMon 12 Jul 2021 19.00 EDTThe 45th president is out of office and Michael Wolff has brought his Trump trilogy to a close. First there was Fire and Fury, then there was Siege, now there is Landslide. The third is the best of the three, and that is saying plenty.Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from TrumpworldRead moreThree years ago, Trump derided Fire and Fury as fake news and threatened Wolff with a lawsuit. Now, Trump talks to Wolff on the record about what was and might yet be, while the author takes a long and nuanced view of the post-election debacle. Wolff describes Trump’s wrath-filled final days in power.Aides and family members have stepped away, leaving the president to simmer, rage and plot with Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and other conspiracy theorists, all eager to stoke the big lie about a stolen election. Giuliani calls Powell “crazy”. Powell holds Giuliani in similar regard. “I didn’t come here to kiss your fucking ring,” she tells the former New York mayor.Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is elsewhere, hammering out the “Abraham Accords”, seeking to leave his mark on the world with some sort of step towards Middle East peace. Hope Hicks, a favorite Trump adviser, has gone. Two cabinet secretaries of independent wealth, Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, say adiós. As with hurricanes and plagues, the rich know when to head for high ground.Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s fourth and final press secretary, is awol. Even Stephanie Grisham, Melania Trump’s ultra-loyal chief of staff, has resigned rather than bear witness to the president’s implosion in the aftermath of the deadly assault on the US Capitol.Wolff’s interview with Trump is notable. It is held in the lobby at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort to which Trump retreated. The club’s “throne room”, in the author’s words, is filled with “blond mothers and blond daughters, infinitely buxom”. Fecundity and lust on parade. A palace built in its creator’s image.The interview is an exercise in Trumpian score-settling. He brands Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor brutally fired from the transition in 2016, a “very disloyal guy” – apparently as payback for a debate preparation session that stung Trump with its ferocity, laying bare his vulnerabilities as others watched.Christie told Trump what he didn’t want to hear about his handling of Covid-19. He bandied about expressions such as “blood on your hands” and “failure”. He also reminded Trump that while Hunter Biden, his opponent’s scandal-magnet son, was a one-off, there was a whole bunch of Trump kids to target. Their father was unamused.Turning to the supreme court, Trump lashes out at Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts, the chief justice. Trump accuses Kavanaugh of lacking courage and vents his “disappointment” in his most controversial pick for the bench. Under Roberts, the justices refused to overturn the election. So Trump had little use for them. He also takes aim at the Republican leader in the House. Apparently, Kevin McCarthy’s abject prostration still left something to be desired.Trump calls Andrew Cuomo, now New York’s governor but once, in a way, Trump’s own lawyer, a “thug”. He has kind words for Roy Cohn, another Trump lawyer, before that an aide to Joe McCarthy in the witch-hunts of the 1950s who wore that four-letter word far better. But he’s long dead. Bill Barr, the attorney general who made the Mueller report go away but wouldn’t back the big lie and resigned before the end, fares badly.Trump laments four years of “absolute scum and treachery and fake witch-hunts”. Introspection was never his strongest suit. “I’ve done a thousand things that nobody has done,” he claims. Landslide homes in on the bond between Trump and his supporters. Wolff sees that the relationship is unconventional and organic. Trump was never just a candidate. He also led a movement: “He knew nothing about government, they knew nothing about government, so the context of government itself became beside the point.” The bond was rooted in charisma. Trump was “the star – never forget that – and the base was his audience”.Landslide acknowledges that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election were born of his disregard for democratic norms and inability to acknowledge defeat. His legal and political arguments wafted out of the fever swamps of the fringes. As drowning men lunge for lifebelts, so Trump, Giuliani and Powell clung on.Wolff is open to criticism when he argues that the path between the 6 January insurrection and Trump is less than linear. Those who stormed the Capitol may well have been Trump’s people, Wolff argues, but what happened was not his brainchild. Six months ago, Trump also put distance between himself and the day’s events. Not any more.Trump has embraced the supposed martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt, the air force veteran who endeavored to storm the House chamber, where members were sheltering in place.“Boom,” he said on 7 July. “Right through the head. Just, boom. There was no reason for that. And why isn’t that person being opened up, and why isn’t that being studied?”Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national traumaRead moreBeyond that, ProPublica has produced a paper trail that supports the conclusion senior Trump aides knew the rally they staged near the White House on 6 January could turn chaotic. What more we learn will depend on a House select committee.Wolff also fails to grapple with the trend in red states towards wresting control of elections from the electorate and putting them into the hands of Republican legislatures.Trump’s false contention that the presidential election was stolen is now an article of faith among Republicans and QAnon novitiates. Ballot “audits” funded by dark money are a new fixture of the political landscape. Democracy looks in danger.Trump tells Wolff his base “feel cheated – and they are angry”. Populism isn’t about all of the people, just some of them. As for responsibility, Trump washes his hands. On closing Wolff’s third Trump book, it seems possible it will not be his last after all. All the trauma of 2020 may just have been prelude to a Trump-Biden rematch.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationMichael WolffUS politicsRepublicansUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More
BooksFrankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from Trumpworld As well as grabby headlines about Hitler, Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal shows us how millions have been led astrayLloyd GreenSat 10 Jul 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 10 Jul 2021 03.11 EDTOn election night in 2016, Donald Trump paid homage to America’s “forgotten men and women”, vowing they would be “forgotten no longer”. Those who repeatedly appeared at his rallies knew of whom he spoke. Veterans, gun enthusiasts, bikers, shop clerks. Middle-aged and seniors. Life had treated some harshly. Others less so.Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book saysRead moreSome had voted for Barack Obama, only to discover hope and change wasn’t all it was advertised to be. Regardless, the Democratic party’s urban and urbane, upstairs-downstairs coalition didn’t mesh with them. Or vice-versa. Politics is definitely about lifestyles.In his new book, Michael Bender pays particular attention to those Trump supporters who called themselves “Front Row Joes”. They attended rallies wherever, whenever. It was “kind of like an addiction”, Bender quotes one as saying.No longer did they need to bowl alone. Trump had birthed a community. Their applause was his sustenance, his performance their sacrament.One Front Row Joe, Saundra from Michigan, was a 41-year-old Walmart worker. On 6 January, in Washington DC, she made her way up the west side of the US Capitol.“It looked so neat,” she said.She also said she and other Trump supporters who stormed Congress did not do so “to steal things” or “do damage”. They had a different aim.“We were just there to overthrow the government.”The next day, Saundra flew home. Trump’s wishes, real or imagined, were her command. Later in January, two days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Senator Mitch McConnell declared that the mob had been “fed lies” and provoked by Trump.Bender covers the White House for the Wall Street Journal. Frankly, We Did Win This Election is his first book. It is breezy, well-written and well-informed. He captures both the infighting in Trump’s world and the surrounding social tectonics.Trump goes on the record. The interview is a solid scorecard on who is up or down. He brands McConnell “dumb as a rock”. The loathing is mutual – to a point. The Senate minority leader has made clear he will back Trump if he is the nominee again.Liz Cheney occupies a special spot in Trump’s Inferno. The Wyoming representative, daughter of a vice-president, now sits on a House select committee to investigate 6 January. But to most of Trump’s party, six months after the insurrection, what happened that afternoon is something to be forgotten or at least ignored.Mike Pence dwells in purgatory.“I don’t care if he apologizes or not,” Trump says of his vice-president presiding over the certification of Biden’s win. “He made a mistake.”Once before, in their second year in office, the two men reportedly clashed over a political hiring decision. Back then, Trump reportedly called Pence “so disloyal”.Pence still harbors presidential ambitions. Good luck with that.Bender’s book is laden with attention-grabbing headlines. He reports Trump telling John Kelly, then White House chief of staff, that Hitler “did a lot of good things”. Trump denies it. Kelly stays mum. More than 30 years ago, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, let it be known that he kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. Everyone needs a hobby.Bender writes of Trump urging the military to “beat the fuck” out of protesters for racial justice, and to “crack their skulls”. The 45th president’s asymmetrical approach to law enforcement remains on display. “Stand back and stand by” was for allies like the Proud Boys. Law and order was for everyone else. Political adversaries were enemies.Trump now embraces the supposed martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt, an air force veteran who stormed Congress on 6 January and was killed by law enforcement.“The person that shot Ashli Babbitt,” he said this week. “Boom. Right through the head. Just, boom. There was no reason for that.”To say the least, that is highly contestable.Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, cowered behind the doors Babbitt rushed. Hours later, the bulk of the House GOP opposed certifying Biden’s win. The party of Lincoln is now the party of Trump.Focusing on the 2020 election, a contest under the deathly shadow of Covid, Bender conveys the chaos and disorganization of the Trump campaign. After a disastrous kick-off rally in Tulsa, Trump began looking for a new campaign manager. Brad Parscale’s days were numbered. He was a digital guy, not a major domo.According to Bender, Trump offered the job to Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee – and niece of Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, 2012 nominee and, in Trumpworld, persona decidedly non grata. Her reply: “Absolutely not.”Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national traumaRead moreTrump also sent word to Steve Bannon, his campaign chair in 2016. He declined too. Bannon was banished from the kingdom for trashing Trump and his family. But he understood the base better than anyone – other than Trump himself.There was a reason Saturday Night Live spoofed Bannon as the power behind the throne, and that he appeared on the cover of Time. There was no return to court but Trump did pardon Bannon of federal fraud charges. Not a bad consolation prize.Parscale was demoted and kicked to the curb. Within months he appeared in the news, shirtless, barefoot, drunk and armed. His successor, Bill Stepien, brought Trump to within 80,000 votes of another electoral college win.Bender makes clear that Trump is neither gone nor forgotten. His acquittal in his second impeachment, for inciting the Capitol attack, only reinforced his desire to fight another day.“There has never been anything like it,” Trump tells Bender. So true.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More
BooksRupert Murdoch approved Fox News Arizona call that signaled Trump defeat, book says
Loss of Arizona signalled Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat
Murdoch reportedly said: ‘Fuck him’
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Donald Trump’s “big lie” that he lost the 2020 US election because of voter fraud is “a bit like WWF”, Mitt Romney said on Sunday, referring to the gaudy and artificial world of professional wrestling, an arena in which Trump starred before entering politics.“It’s entertaining,” said the Utah senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee. “But it’s not real.”Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, Romney was asked about former attorney general William Barr’s assertion to the Atlantic on Sunday that Trump’s claims were always “bullshit”.Barr said as much publicly in December – a month after Joe Biden’s win. He told the Atlantic the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, had wanted him to say so in November.Romney suggested most Americans have always known Trump is lying about electoral fraud, which he was told about by conspiracy theorists – “the MyPillow guy [Mike Lindell and] Rudy Giuliani” – rather than any official source.Most Americans, Romney suggested, would not take seriously such partisan operations as an ongoing recount in Arizona’s most popular county. Polling, however, shows belief in Trump’s claims shared by a majority of Republican voters.Romney also said Trump’s lie “is surely being used around the world to minimise the support for democracy”.“If the autocratic nations can point to the United States,” he said, “which is the birthplace really of this modern democracy, and can say, ‘Look, they can’t even run an election there that’s not fraudulent … that obviously is having an impact on on the cause of democracy and freedom around the world.”But in the US, Romney insisted, “it’s pretty clear. The election was fair. It wasn’t the outcome that the president wanted, but let’s move on.”Trump has not moved on. At a rally in Ohio on Saturday which marked his return to the campaign trail, supporters wore T-shirts saying “Trump won, deal with it”; “Trump 2024. Make votes count again”; and “Biden is not my president”.Trump told them: “This was the scam of the century and this was the crime of the century. We’re never going to stop fight for the true results of this election … Remember I’m not the one trying to undermine American democracy. I’m trying to save American democracy.”Romney was the only Republican in Congress to vote to impeach Trump twice. But he was joined at Trump’s second trial by six other GOP senators who thought Trump guilty of inciting the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, by a mob seeking to overturn the election.Despite that, Republicans in the Senate blocked the formation of a 9/11-style independent commission to investigate the January attack. This week the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced the formation of a select committee.Republicans say that will be too partisan. Key witnesses such as the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who pleaded with Trump to call off the attack, seem unlikely to agree to appear.Romney said he hoped Pelosi would “appoint people that are seen as being credible and are willing to look at the evidence on a clear-eyed basis”.He added: “I voted in favour of a bipartisan commission. I think that would have had more credibility … and yet there will be a an effort to look back at what happened on 6 January. I think there are questions that are appropriate to be evaluated.“One question is why did it take so long for security to come to the Capitol and to rescue the Capitol police that were battling away, and to make sure that the Vice-President [Mike Pence] was safe and his family was safe, as well as other elected officials.“Why was the delay so long? Why didn’t the Pentagon for instance move more quickly? What happened in the White House?“… That was a terrible day in American history, and it’s going to be used against us around the world. It already is by China and Russia. It has huge implications. It should never happen again in any effort to understand why it happened, is in my opinion, appropriate.” More
Mike Gravel, a former US senator from Alaska who read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record and confronted Barack Obama about nuclear weapons during a later presidential run, has died. He was 91.Gravel, who represented Alaska as a Democrat from 1969 to 1981, died on Saturday, according to his daughter, Lynne Mosier. Gravel had been living in Seaside, California, and was in failing health, said Theodore W Johnson, a former aide.Gravel’s two terms came during tumultuous years when construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was authorized and when Congress was deciding how to settle Alaska Native land claims and whether to classify enormous amounts of federal land as parks, preserves and monuments.He had the unenviable position of being an Alaska Democrat when some residents were burning President Jimmy Carter in effigy for his measures to place large sections of public lands in the state under protection from development.Gravel feuded with Alaska’s other senator, Republican Ted Stevens, on the land matter, preferring to fight Carter’s actions and rejecting Stevens’ advocacy for a compromise. In the end, Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, a compromise that set aside millions of acres for national parks, wildlife refuges and other protected areas. It was one of the last bills Carter signed before leaving office.Gravel’s tenure also was notable for his anti-war activity. In 1971, he led a one-man filibuster to protest the Vietnam-era draft and he read into the Congressional Record 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page leaked document known as the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s history of the country’s early involvement in Vietnam.Gravel re-entered national politics decades after his time in the Senate to twice run for president. Gravel, then 75, and his wife, Whitney, took public transportation in 2006 to announce he was running for president as a Democrat in the 2008 election ultimately won by Obama.He launched his quest for the 2008 Democratic nomination as a critic of the Iraq war.“I believe America is doing harm every day our troops remain in Iraq – harm to ourselves and to the prospects for peace in the world,” Gravel said. He hitched his campaign to an effort that would give all policy decisions to the people through a direct vote, including health care reform and declarations of war.Gravel garnered attention for his fiery comments at Democratic forums. In one 2007 debate, the issue of the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iran came up, and Gravel confronted Obama, then a senator from Illinois.“Tell me, Barack, who do you want to nuke?” Gravel said.Obama replied: “I’m not planning to nuke anybody right now, Mike.“Gravel ran as a Libertarian after he was excluded from later debates. In an email to supporters, he said the Democratic party “no longer represents my vision for our great country”.“It is a party that continues to sustain war, the military-industrial complex and imperialism – all of which I find anathema to my views,” he said.He failed to get the Libertarian nomination.Gravel briefly ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020. He again criticized American wars and vowed to slash military spending. His last campaign was notable in that both his campaign manager and chief of staff were just 18 at the time.“There was never any … plan that he would do anything more than participate in the debates. He didn’t plan to campaign, but he wanted to get his ideas before a larger audience,” Johnson said.Gravel failed to qualify for the debates. He endorsed Vermont senator Bernie Sanders in the contest eventually won by now-President Joe Biden.Gravel was born Maurice Robert Gravel in Springfield, Massachusetts on 13 May 1930. In Alaska, he served as a state representative, including a stint as House speaker, in the mid-1960s. He won his first Senate term after defeating incumbent Ernest Gruening, a former territorial governor, in the 1968 Democratic primary.Gravel served two terms until he was defeated in the 1980 primary by Gruening’s grandson, Clark Gruening, who lost the election to Republican Frank Murkowski. More
