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      The Steal review: stethoscope for a democracy close to cardiac arrest

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      The Steal review: stethoscope for a democracy close to cardiac arrest Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague have produced an indispensable and alarming ground-level record of how Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election played out in precincts and ballot-counting centers in key statesIn their terrific new book, the veteran reporters Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague argue that the mob that invaded the Capitol in Washington almost exactly a year ago “had no more chance of overthrowing the US government than hippies in 1967 had trying to levitate the Pentagon”.From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animalsRead moreThe “real insurrection” was the one “led by Trump and his coterie of sycophants” in Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. It “was only slightly better organized than the mob but considerably more calculated and dangerous”.That real insurrection is the subject of this timely and important volume. The authors have used a stethoscope to examine the minutia of the American election process. The result is a thrilling and suspenseful celebration of the survival of democracy.The attempted coup was led by Donald Trump. Its intended denouement, in which the vice-president, Mike Pence, would ignore the votes of the six states above plus Washington DC in order to swing the election to Trump, was outlined in an insane memo written by the lawyer John Eastman, described here as “surely the most seditious document to emerge from the White House in American history”.That final act, of course, never happened. Not even Pence, the most sycophantic vice-president of modern times, could bring himself to violate the constitution so blatantly to keep his boss in the White House.But the genuine heroes, brought to life here, were the “hundreds of obscure Americans from every walk of life, state and local officials, judges and election workers. Many of them were Republicans, some were Trump supporters. They refused to accept his slander of themselves, their communities and their workers, and they refused to betray their sworn duty to their office and their country. They were the real patriots.”Bowden and Teague – the latter a Guardian contributor – take us through six battles that lasted from the night of the election, 3 November 2020, until Joe Biden’s election was finally certified by Congress early on 7 January last year.Their book performs a vital service, demonstrating just how well our tattered democracy managed to function despite vicious partisanship and all the new challenges created by the pandemic. For the first time, I understood how brilliantly new machines used to count the votes performed, the intricacies of opening outer and inner envelopes, capturing the images of both then preserving the vital paper ballots inside, making it possible to confirm electronic results with a hand count in case of any failure in technology.In Arizona, the elections department conducted “the mandatory hand count of election day ballots from 2% of the vote centers and 1% of the early ballots as required by Arizona law and it yielded a 100% match to the results produced by the tabulation equipment”.Scott Jarrett was co-director of elections in the populous Maricopa county, and he is one of the crucial bureaucrats celebrated here: “A pale slender young man … dressed in a plain gray suit, the very picture of an earnest functionary, a man happily engaged in the actual machinery of government and quietly proud of his own unheralded importance and competence.”In a public hearing crowded with crazed conspiracy theorists, Jarrett carefully explained how only one of the two “encrypted memory cards (both with tamper-proof evidence seals)” was transported from various polling centers to the main counting location, “so that the results on one card could be double-checked against the other as well as the precinct ballot report they had generated. Backing up that memory were, of course, the actual ballots that had been run through the machines. The memory cards and the ballots were sealed and delivered by “two members of different parties”, escorted by county sheriffs.Clint Hickman, chairman of the Maricopa county board of supervisors, noted that if the eyes of some in the audience were glazing over, he just wanted “people that are watching this” to understand “we don’t glaze over”.The authors point out that Hickman was touching on a fundamental feature of The Steal, the factitious narrative concocted by Trump and his cronies: conspiracy theorists depend on ignorance.“They begin with distrust: only a sucker believes the official story. They then replace the often tedious, mundane details of an intricate process … with a simpler narrative”: theft.They invent colorful stories about a “deal struck with a late Venezuelan dictator to deliver tainted election machines, or a plot to preprint fake ballots in the dead of night”. This creates what cognitive scientists call “a community of knowledge”.The big problem that didn’t exist even 30 years ago is the speed with which such idiotic stories are spread through the internet and by the Twitter feed of a malevolent president like Trump, exploding the reach of such stories and their power to undermine democratic norms.March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican readsRead moreThe book reminds us that democracy itself depends on a modicum of trust. That is why Trump’s ability to persuade so many Americans of the truth of so many lies has had such a disastrous effect on our body politic.Bowden and Teague have performed a singular service by revealing the details that disprove Republicans’ unceasing inventions about voter fraud.The problem is that so many Republicans will continue to ignore the lessons of this book. American democracy could still be destroyed by the torrent of voter suppression laws already passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures, spurred by lies invented by Trump and amplified by insidious “journalists” like Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson, whose perfidy is brilliantly dissected in these pages.If democracy does prevail, it will survive because of the ability of authors like Teague and Bowden to make the truth even more compelling than Fox News fictions.
      The Steal is published in the US by Atlantic Monthly Press
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      It’s not all about the culture war – Democrats helped shaft the working class | Robert Reich

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      OpinionUS politicsIt’s not all about the culture war – Democrats helped shaft the working classRobert ReichResults in Virginia and New Jersey do not make Republican dog-whistle politics the future. The left must do more to help Sun 7 Nov 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 7 Nov 2021 01.03 EDTAfter Tuesday’s Democratic loss in the Virginia gubernatorial election and near-loss in New Jersey, I’m hearing a narrative about Democrats’ failure with white working-class voters that is fundamentally wrong.Is this a presidency-defining week for Biden? Politics Weekly Extra – podcastRead moreIn Thursday’s New York Times, David Leonhardt pointed out that the non-college voters who are abandoning the Democratic party “tend to be more religious, more outwardly patriotic and more culturally conservative than college graduates”. He then quotes a fellow Times columnist, the pollster Nate Cohn, who says “college graduates have instilled increasingly liberal cultural norms while gaining the power to nudge the Democratic party to the left. Partly as a result, large portions of the party’s traditional working-class base have defected to the Republicans”.Leonhardt adds that these defections have increased over the past decade and suggests Democratic candidates start listening to working-class voters’ concerns about “crime and political correctness”, their “mixed feelings about immigration and abortion laws”, and their beliefs “in God and in a strong America”.This narrative worries me in two ways. First, if “cultural” messages top economic ones, what’s to stop Democrats from playing the same cultural card Republicans have used for years to inflame the white working class: racism? Make no mistake: Glenn Youngkin focused his campaign in Virginia on critical race theory, which isn’t even taught in Virginia’s schools but comes out of the same disgraceful Republican dog-whistle tradition.The other problem with this “culture over economics” narrative is it overlooks the fact that after Ronald Reagan, the Democratic party turned its back on the working class.During the first terms of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. They scored some important victories, such as the Affordable Care Act and an expanded earned income tax credit.But both Clinton and Obama allowed the power of the working class to erode. Both ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the working class. Both refused to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them or enable workers to form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Union membership sank from 22% of all workers when Clinton was elected to fewer than 11% today, denying the working class the bargaining leverage it needs to get a better deal.The Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout but let millions of underwater homeowners drown.Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust to ossify – allowing major industries to become more concentrated and hence more economically and politically powerful.Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. He never followed up on his re-election campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United v FEC, the 2010 supreme court opinion that opened the floodgates to big money in politics.What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate power and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy and you shaft the working class.Adjusted for inflation, American workers today are earning almost as little as they did 30 years ago, when the American economy was a third its present size.Biden’s agenda for working people – including lower prescription drug prices, paid family leave, stronger unions and free community college – has followed the same sad trajectory, due to the power of big money. Big Pharma has blocked prescription drug reform. A handful of Democratic senators backed by big money have refused to support paid family leave. Big money has killed labor law reform.Resilience: the one word progressives need in the face of Trump, Covid and more | Robert ReichRead moreDemocrats could win back the white working class by putting together a large coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, Blacks and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the huge shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to reallocate power in the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that paper over the increasing concentration of power at the top.But to do this Democrats would have to end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street and the wealthy. And they would have to reject the convenient story that American workers care more about cultural issues than about getting a better deal in an economy that’s been delivering them a worsening deal for decades.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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      Misfire review: a bullseye from Tim Mak – but the NRA isn’t beaten yet

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      BooksMisfire review: a bullseye from Tim Mak – but the NRA isn’t beaten yet The NPR reporter has written an important book about the moral bankruptcy which put the powerful and merciless gun group on the back footCharles KaiserSat 6 Nov 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 6 Nov 2021 02.02 EDTTim Mak has written a sprawling tale of the greed, incompetence and narcissism which has dominated the National Rifle Association throughout Wayne LaPierre’s 30 years as its leader. Abetted by his wife, Susan, LaPierre has allegedly used his members’ dues to fund a billionaire’s lifestyle.‘We have to break through that wall’: inside America’s battle for gun controlRead moreThe LaPierres’ wedding in 1998 was a near miss: he almost ran from the altar, until she and the priest changed his mind. Mak calls this “emblematic” of “a man driven by fear and anxiety over all other forces … his reaction to these emotions is usually to flee and hide”.These qualities, Mak writes, have made LaPierre “prey” to an endless series of conmen, throughout his leadership of America’s most-feared lobbying group.“Pushed and prodded” by his wife to discover “money’s alluring glow”, Mak writes, LaPierre saw his salary balloon from $200,000 in the mid-1990s to $2.2m in 2018. According to the investigation of the New York attorney general, which has done the most to expose serial excesses at the NRA, between 2013 and 2017 the black cars, private jets and hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive clothing led to $1.2m in reimbursed expenses.Between 2013 and 2018, companies used to book the LaPierres’ private planes received an astonishing $13.5m. There were trips to Lake Como, Budapest and the Bahamas. Just the hired cars for trips to Italy and Hungary cost $18,000. LaPierre spent $275,000 on suits at a single Beverly Hills emporium, including $39,000 on one day in 2015. To disguise such excesses, the bills were sent to an outside vendor which the NRA reimbursed.Mak also does a good job of describing how every mass shooting has pushed the NRA ever further right, transforming it from advocacy group for gun rights into a fully fledged player in the culture war, especially after the massacre of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012.Mak offers a particularly depressing account of how the NRA chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, was personally involved in negotiations over the Manchin-Toomey bill, a Senate measure which would have modestly increased background checks if, as Mak points out, not enough to have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre, since that gunman used guns legally obtained by his mother.In any case, after months of negotiation the NRA double-crossed both sponsors, made sure the bill failed to get the 60 votes it needed to pass the Senate, then dropped its A-ratings for Manchin and Toomey to D and C respectively.The NRA’s role in the Trump-Russia scandal was substantial. Maria Butina, eventually convicted as a Russian spy, used “relationships within the NRA to build an informal channel of diplomatic relations with Russia”. Her efforts included a famous public exchange with Donald Trump during his first campaign, in which he expressed his affection for Vladimir Putin and promised to improve relations as president.The NRA spent $30m to help to elect Trump, more than his own fundraising super pac. Ironically, NRA membership dues fell after Trump entered the White House. The organization lost its most lucrative fundraiser when Barack Obama left office.Power struggles and a ‘personal piggy bank’: what the NRA lawsuit allegesRead moreThe great unravelling began on 6 August 2020, when the New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed a lawsuit to dissolve the NRA entirely. She accused LaPierre of using the organization for 30 years “for his financial benefit, and the benefit of a close circle of NRA staff, board members, and vendors”.Six months later, the NRA filed for bankruptcy. But despite endless infighting, Wayne LaPierre remains in charge. And because Trump was elected, with the NRA’s help, the supreme court now includes three justices appointed by him – at least two of whom seemed eager in arguments this week to demolish most of the remaining state restrictions on carrying concealed weapons, in New York and six other states.The passions of gun owners – and the fear they have instilled in a majority of public officials – remain dominant forces in American politics despite the greed and incompetence of their leaders chronicled so thoroughly in this important book.
      Misfire is published in the US by Dutton
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      Why corporate social responsibility is BS | Robert Reich

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      OpinionBiden administrationWhy corporate social responsibility is BSRobert ReichWhile big corporations tell Americans how virtuous they are, they lobby up a storm against Biden’s social policy bill Sun 26 Sep 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 27 Sep 2021 09.46 EDTIn recent years, “corporate social responsibility” has been viewed by some as the answer to the multiple failings of capitalism. Chief executives have responded to all sorts of problems – worsening climate change, widening inequality, soaring healthcare costs and so on – by promising their corporations will lead the way to solutions because they’re committed to being “socially responsible”.House Democrats are scared to tax billionaires – that’s a costly mistake | Robert ReichRead moreNinety-eight percent of this is rubbish. CEOs won’t do anything that hurts their bottom lines. They’re in the business of making as much money as possible, not solving social problems.In fact, real social change would prevent them from doing many of the hugely profitable things they now do. Which means they won’t change their ways unless they’re required by law to change (and even then, only when the penalty times the probability of getting caught is higher than the profits from continuing anyway). Their soothing promises of social responsibility are intended to forestall such laws.I’ve seen this repeatedly. When I was secretary of labor, big corporations would violate laws on worker safety, wages and hours and pensions, whenever doing so was cheaper than obeying the laws. And they’d fight like hell against such laws to begin with – all the while telling the public what wonderful citizens they were.You may recall that in August 2019, the Business Roundtable – one of Washington’s most prestigious corporate groups, on whose board sit the CEOs of Apple, Walmart and JPMorgan – issued a widely publicized statement expressing “a fundamental commitment” to the wellbeing of “all of our stakeholders” (emphasis in the original), including their employees, communities and the environment.The statement was widely hailed as marking a new era of corporate social responsibility.Since then, the Roundtable and its members have issued a continuous stream of jejune statements about their dedication to such things as providing childcare, pre-K and affordable healthcare, promoting community college and workforce training, alleviating poverty and reversing climate change.It turns out these are exactly the priorities in Joe Biden’s $3.5tn reconciliation bill. But guess what? The Business Roundtable isn’t lobbying for the bill. It’s lobbying intensely against it.Jessica Boulanger, a spokeswoman, told the Washington Post the Roundtable is engaged in “a significant, multifaceted campaign” to stop tax increases that would finance the bill, and will “continue to ramp up our efforts in the coming weeks”. The group is launching a seven-figure digital advertising campaign to oppose the bill.Hypocrisy? Only if you believed the Roundtable BS about corporate social responsibility. If you know the truth – that corporations will do whatever they can to maximize their profits and share values, social responsibility be damned – there’s nothing surprising here.Why didn’t business groups fight the president’s infrastructure bill? Because government spending on infrastructure helps their bottom lines by lowering their costs of procuring supplies and getting goods to market. Social responsibility had nothing to do with it.It’s tempting to chalk all this up to “corporate greed”. But that makes sense only if you think corporations are capable of emotions, such as greed. They’re not. Corporations aren’t people, no matter what the supreme court says. They’re bundles of contracts.The specific people who enter those contracts (on behalf of big corporations as well as thousands of people who run vast investment funds on behalf of millions of shareholders) are neither greedy nor socially responsible. They’re merely doing what they understand to be their jobs. Greed and social responsibility have been laundered out of these transactions.If we want these transactions to change – to align better with public needs rather than private profits – laws must change. For example, taxes on big corporations must rise in order to fund public investments and safety nets.But such laws won’t change if corporations continue to spend vast sums on politics. Corporate spokespeople like Boulanger of the Business Roundtable – along with platoons of corporate lobbyists and influence peddlers, corporate lawyers and hired-gun economists, corporate political operatives and PR flaks – together form in effect a fourth branch of government, wielding huge and increasing power. About one out of every four people now working in downtown Washington fills one of these roles.US’s wealthiest 1% are failing to pay $160bn a year in taxes, report findsRead moreThe result is clear. The most telling trends over the last three decades have been the growing share of the economy going into corporate profits – generating ever-greater compensation packages for top executives and ever-higher payouts for big investors (all of whom live off shares of stock) – and the declining share going to most Americans as wages and salaries.The meaningless blather over “corporate social responsibility” is intended to mask these trends. Biden’s $3.5tn plan is aimed at reversing them.But big business is doing everything in its power to sabotage Biden’s plan. The only way to stop this sabotage is to ignore all mention of corporate social responsibility and make one hell of a ruckus in support of Biden’s plan, as well as laws to reduce the power of big money in politics.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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      Patrick Byrne: pro-Trump millionaire pushing election conspiracy theories

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      This Memorial Day weekend, several prominent conservative allies of Donald Trump, who have promoted almost nonstop his false narratives about the 2020 election results, are slated to hold rallies in Florida and Texas endorsed by the wealthy libertarian Patrick Byrne.Billed as featuring the Trump confidant Roger Stone, the retired general Michael Flynn, Byrne and other pro-Trump stalwarts, the dual events underscore that Byrne – who has been leading private fundraising for the politically driven vote audit now under way in Arizona’s largest county – seems intent on funding and pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections.Byrne’s influence and activities reveal him to be a rising figure on the Trumpist right and also show how fake narratives around the 2020 election – far from receding – are in fact still a powerful motivating force among Trump supporters.Just last month Byrne created a non-profit, dubbed the America Project, which has been instrumental in funding the Arizona audit, and is promoting the two weekend rallies on its website. The Byrne non-profit quickly launched fundtheaudit.com in Arizona that has indicated it wants to raise $2.8m. As of mid May, it had reportedly pulled in $1.7m.Byrne, whose net worth has been pegged at about $75m, has said he personally donated $1m to the America Project and $500,000 to fundtheaudit.com.Byrne’s America Project seems to aspire to play a key role in tandem with other conservative pro-Trump bastions in spreading election disinformation: the America Project’s website says it wants to “lead a new American renaissance by arming citizens with the tools to fight for their freedoms, building like minded pro-freedom networks and uniting pro-America organizations who want to fight together in support of our nation”.Byrne’s high-profile backing of pro-Trump conspiracies follows some bizarre contacts he had with Trump, post-election. In December, Byrne attended a White House meeting that also drew Flynn, who had publicly suggested Trump might invoke martial law to stay in power, and the rightwing lawyer Sidney Powell, who was helping Trump’s legal team.Byrne is the founder and ex-chief of the company Overstock, and says he didn’t vote for Trump, but this year wrote The Deep Rig, a self-published conspiracy-ridden look at the 2020 elections. Byrne’s growing role on the far right comes after he publicly revealed he had an affair with Maria Butina, the convicted unregistered foreign agent for Russia, which prompted his resignation from Overstock in 2019.The upcoming Florida rally on Sunday is set to feature Byrne, along with Flynn and Stone – both of whom Trump pardoned after they had been convicted as part of the inquiries into Russian influence in the 2016 elections. Advertised as a Patriots Day rally, it is slated to take place at a private ranch in Jupiter.The three-day Texas event is billed as a rally for “God and country” that started on Friday and is scheduled to include talks by various pro-Trump stalwarts including Flynn and lawyers Powell and Lin Wood.But Byrne’s central role in funding the Arizona audit and how it is being run is attracting growing scrutiny. Byrne has acknowledged that he had some brief contacts last December with Doug Logan, the head of the little-known Florida-based cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, which was selected by Arizona officials to lead the audit, even though it had no experience in doing one previously.“This is an audit like none that has ever been performed,” Byrne boasted to the AP. “This audit is an audit check for all forms of mischief.”Byrne’s non-profit outfits, which won’t have to disclose how the funds are spent or who is writing the checks, also have reportedly played a role in recruiting volunteers for the audit.In an email to local Arizona Republicans last week, a state official requested more volunteers and referred them to Byrne’s website to apply, the Arizona Republic reported. Byrne told the AP his operation merely sends volunteers to Cyber Ninjas for “vetting”.The private funding Byrne is spearheading comes on top of $150,000 that the Arizona senate allocated to do the latest audit, a project which many Republican figures in Arizona and nationally have attacked as a waste of resources and dangerous since Biden’s victory in Maricopa county has already been certified as accurate.Voting rights specialists are dismayed at the haphazard and private drive in Arizona that Byrne and his cohorts are mounting.“This is yet another piece of evidence that the whole effort in Arizona is more of a disinformation campaign than anything else,” said Larry Norden, the director of the electoral reform program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “A good rule of thumb is that you should not take election’s work out of the hands of the professionals who run them and outsource it to people with a clear political agenda. It’s profoundly dangerous for our democracy.”Some former Republican members of Congress say the privately run crusade by Byrne and his allies is hurting democracy in America as a whole.Jeff Flake, a Republican former Arizona senator, said in an interview that Byrne’s “involvement in all this does not add credibility. It’s damaging to the Republican party and our system of government.”Byrne did not respond to requests for comment left with the America Project.But judging by his media appearances, Byrne isn’t fazed by critics of the growing role he has been playing.Last month, Byrne in an interview with the New Tang Dynasty, an obscure television outlet whose website claims it was launched by Chinese-Americans who fled communism, flatly claimed: “It was a fraudulent election. It didn’t end for us on January 20.’’Likewise, Byrne’s fundraising to promote false information about the elections may not end in Arizona.The America Project website says if fundraising exceeds the $2.8m goal, it will use the monies “for other election integrity activities’’ including audits in other states and related expenses. More

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      Ted Cruz threatens to burn John Boehner’s book over criticisms

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      Republican senator Ted Cruz has responded to fiery criticism from John Boehner with a tactic beloved of authoritarian regimes: threatening to burn his book.In an email to supporters, the Texas politician said he also might machine-gun or chainsaw the memoir, depending on how much his supporters paid for the privilege to watch.Boehner, a Republican congressman from Ohio for 24 years and House speaker from 2011 to 2015, published his book On the House this week. It contains strong criticism of political figures from Donald Trump to Barack Obama but hits Cruz especially hard.The senator who drove a government shutdown in 2013 is “Lucifer in the flesh”, Boehner has said.On the page, he writes: “There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.”The book also contains a memorable sign-off: “PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.”But Cruz, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and may well do so again in 2024, is nothing if not a bomb-thrower himself, as well as a nimble opportunist.“John Boehner doesn’t like me much,” his fundraising email said. “That’s fine, I’m not a big fan of his either.”Calling the speaker-turned-lobbyist a “Swamp Monster” and accusing him of “an unhinged smear campaign”, the email told supporters Cruz had “put this trash right where it belonged, in my fireplace”.“But I didn’t finish it off just yet,” it added. Instead, the Texas senator announced a “72-hour drive to raise $250,000”, in which donors would “get to VOTE on whether we machine gun the book, take a chainsaw to it or burn the book to light cigars!”The email also said Cruz would livestream the evisceration or incineration.There is nothing new about American politicians shooting or eviscerating texts they don’t like in order to raise campaign dollars. Ask the Democratic senator Joe Manchin, who has both taken aim at Obamacare and fired his gun to defend it.But it could also be pointed out that Cruz’s attempt to stoke outrage – and dollars – might only succeed in bringing Boehner’s book to wider attention.As Ray Bradbury, author of the classic novel Fahrenheit 451, about a society which bans books, once said: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”On Thursday morning, On the House was the No 1 seller on Amazon. More

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      Trump reportedly told Republican party to stop using his name for fundraising

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterDonald Trump has told the Republican National Committee and other party bodies to stop using his name and likeness in fundraising efforts, it was reported on Saturday.“President Trump remains committed to the Republican party and electing America First conservatives,” Politico quoted an unnamed adviser to the former president as saying about the legal cease-and-desist notice, “but that doesn’t give anyone – friend or foe – permission to use his likeness without explicit approval.”The website previously reported that Trump’s ire was stoked by bodies including the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) using his name while fundraising for Republicans who voted for his impeachment.The former president felt “burned and abused”, Politico said, detailing the House minority leader Kevin McCarthy’s struggles to manage the former president, even after a January trip to kiss the ring in Florida.Liz Cheney, the House No 3 Republican, was the most senior of 10 Republican representatives to back Trump’s second impeachment, for inciting the Capitol riot on 6 January. She has faced protests stoked by elected officials and will be challenged for her seat from the right. Others who voted for impeachment are also facing primary fights.Seven senators voted to convict Trump at trial. That meant he was acquitted a second time, as the 57 guilty votes fell 10 short of the necessary super-majority.The verdict left Trump, 74, free to run for office again. Though he continues to baselessly claim his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of massive voter fraud, a lie repeatedly thrown out of court and now the subject of legal investigations, he has toyed with running in 2024. He remains the clear favourite in party polls.His own fundraising based on the “big lie” about electoral fraud proved lucrative, raking in at least $175m. At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, Trump told attendees they should only donate to his own political action committee, Save America. In the CPAC straw poll, 55% backed Trump to be the next nominee.The Republican National Committee is led by Ronna McDaniel, a niece of the Utah senator Mitt Romney who dropped Romney from her name after Trump won the White House, reportedly at Trump’s request. Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee for president, is the only Republican who voted to impeach Trump twice.Politico said the RNC sent out two emails on Friday, asking donors to put their name on a “thank you card” for Trump.On Saturday morning, an email trumpeting a “March Fundraising Blitz” claimed “we’ve NEVER been the Party of Elite Billionaires and we NEVER will be” and asked “hard working everyday Americans” to “continue to DEFEND President Trump’s ‘America FIRST’ policies”.Forbes rates Trump’s net worth at $2.5bn.“Privately,” Politico reported, “GOP campaign types say it’s impossible not to use Trump’s name, as his policies are so popular with the base. If Trump really wants to help flip Congress, they argue he should be more generous. His team, however, sees this differently.”Later on Saturday, the New York Daily News reported that Trump would on Sunday return to the city he called home until 2016 for the first time since losing power. The former president planned to stay till Tuesday, the paper said, though Trump adviser Jason Miller refused to confirm or deny the plans. More

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      Wall Street billionaire backed Republicans who later tried to overturn election result

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      The Wall Street billionaire who has been heralded for giving Oxford University its largest donation “since the Renaissance” gave campaign contributions during the election cycle to seven of the Republican lawmakers who later voted to overturn the 2020 election results and backed candidates late last year even as they disputed Joe Biden’s victory.Stephen Schwarzman, the founder and chief executive of Blackstone Group, also financially supported a campaign group – Georgians for Kelly Loeffler – that is alleged to later have published a Facebook ad that darkened the skin of Loeffler’s Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock.While Schwarzman has been praised for his philanthropy, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to Oxford, Yale University, MIT, and the New York Public Library, the financial support billionaires like Schwarzman, Richard Uihlein, and Jeffrey Yass gave to Trump and other rightwing Republicans is facing fresh scrutiny in light of the violent insurrection by Trump supporters on the US Capitol on 6 January.In the months before November’s election of Joe Biden, Trump would not commit to a a peaceful transfer of power or promise to respect the election results. The former president was impeached – for a second time – in the House of Representatives for inciting the violence that engulfed the Capitol on 6 January.Hours after the riot, in which five people died, including a police officer, 147 Republicans voted to invalidate the 2020 election.Public records show that Schwarzman donated about $33.5m to groups supporting Republicans in the 2020 election cycle, including $3m to Trump’s America First Action Pac, a donation he made in January 2020. Schwarzman also donated funds to political action committees supporting seven Republicans who, months later, voted to invalidate results in Pennsylvania and Arizona, a move that was seen as a direct affront to the votes of Black and other minority Americans whose support were critical to Joe Biden’s victory.According to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, Schwarzman was the third largest individual donor to Republican “objectors”, and the eight largest mega-donor in the 2020 election cycle. The late Sheldon Adelson topped the list of mega-donors, followed by two liberal donors: Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer.Asked about Schwarzman’s record, Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump campaigning group that has sharply criticized major Republican donors, said: “There are few people that have financed more directly to candidates who engaged in the poisoning of American democracy.”Schwarzman himself is not a stranger to controversy. In 2010 the CEO apologized for making an “inappropriate analogy” when he likened Barack Obama’s plan to tax private equity firms to the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.In response to questions from the Guardian, a spokesperson for Schwarzman emphasized that the CEO’s last donation to Trump’s presidential campaign was in January 2020, long before the former president was accused of inciting an insurrection, and that the two have not spoken “in over six months”.Schwarzman’s spokesperson also emphasized that his assistance was “purely about matters related to economic policy and trade, not politics”.But Trump engaged in controversial and racist rhetoric long before January 2020. Documented incidents include the former president’s embrace of birtherism, his initial defense of far-right protesters in Charlottesville, his Muslim ban on immigrants, his contention that migrants from African nations and Haiti come from “shithole countries”, his statement that four progressive Democratic congresswomen of color “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”, and his close association with advisers who embrace white supremacy.A spokesperson for Schwarzman said: “Of course Steve finds these statements objectionable and disagrees with them. As has been publicly reported, Steve did not hesitate to weigh in on areas where he disagreed with President Trump.” The spokesperson said Schwarzman supported Trump during the Democratic primaries because he believed his “policy and economic agenda were the best path forward”.While some billionaires – like Richard Uihlein of the Uline packaging company – have a record of donating to the most rightwing Republican groups, Schwarzman’s record is mixed. Public records show he donated most to Republicans who did – eventually – acknowledge and certify Biden’s win, including Joni Ernst and Rob Portman. He has also made campaign donations to Liz Cheney, one of 10 Republican members of Congress who voted in the House of Representatives to impeach the president.A spokesman for Schwarzman pointed out that the CEO’s donations to other Republicans vastly outweighed his donations to Trump.But Schwarzman also donated in the past to some of Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill, including: Devin Nunes and Andy Harris, who was recently stopped by police from bringing a concealed firearm on the floor of the House of Representatives.Seven of the Republicans whose campaigns Schwarzman financially supported in 2020 ultimately voted to overturn the election results. Those donations were made early in the 2020 cycle.In September 2020, Schwarzman also donated $5,600 to Georgians for Kelly Loeffler, the former Republican senator’s political action committee. Months later, in December, as Loeffler faced a special election against her Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock, the group published an ad on Facebook in which it is alleged that Warnock’s skin was darkened. The issue was reported at the time by Salon. Loeffler’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.There is no evidence that Schwarzman had any role in the ad or that he was aware of it, or approved or endorsed it.Schwarzman’s steadfast loyalty to Trump was described in a recent New York Times article, which pointed to the access the Wall Street financier got to world leaders in his former role as an adviser to the president, including an investment commitment from Saudi Arabia. The article also noted that Schwarzman weighed in on policy areas where he disagreed with Trump and, according to Blackstone colleagues, sought to talk him out of his more extreme positions. He reportedly called for the continuation of Daca, the immigration program that Trump sought to end, and argued but failed to convince Trump to stay in the Paris climate accord.A report in the Financial Times in the days after the US election in November alleged that Schwarzman was privately defending Trump even as others grew alarmed by the former president’s claims that the election had been stolen.At the time, Blackstone told the FT that “[Schwarzman] believes the electoral system is sound and that the democratic process will play out in an orderly and legal manner, as it has throughout our nation’s history”.After the November election, it became clear that control of the US Senate would be determined by two runoff elections in Georgia, where Loeffler and fellow Republican David Perdue faced off against two Democratic opponents.On 9 November, as Georgia tipped in Biden’s favor days after the November election, the two Republican senators in Georgia called for the resignation of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, making unfounded claims that the official, Brad Raffensperger, had failed to deliver “honest and transparent elections”.Billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch, began pouring donations into the Republican-controlled Senate Leadership Fund to try to bolster Loeffler and Perdue’s campaigns. Among the largest was Schwarzman’s $15m donation, which was recorded in public documents as being made on 12 November, three days after Loeffler and Perdue’s unfounded challenge to Raffensperger. Loeffler would later appear on stage with the rising rightwing star Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly elected congresswoman from Georgia who believes QAnon conspiracy theories.Then, on 23 November, three weeks after the election, Schwarzman released a statement acknowledging that Biden had won. He said: “In my comments three days after the election, I was trying to be a voice of reason and express why it’s in the national interest to have all Americans believe the election is being resolved correctly. But the outcome is very certain today, and the country should move on.”He pledged to help the new Democratic president “rebuild our post-Covid economy”.On 6 January, Schwarzman issued a further public statement in response to the riot at the Capitol, saying he was “shocked and horrified by the mob’s attempt to undermine our constitution … the outcome of the election is very clear and there must be a peaceful transition of power”.A spokesperson for Schwarzman said: “Steve made it crystal clear in a November public statement, long before the January electoral college certification, that President Joe Biden won the election and that he was ready to help the new president in any way he could. This was followed by a deeply personal statement expressing his horror and disgust at the appalling insurrection that followed President Trump’s remarks on January 6.”The spokesperson added: “Steve has been a lifelong Republican and his last donation to the campaign was January 2020, before President Biden won a single primary. As Steve’s previous statement makes clear, he strongly condemns the appalling attempts to undermine our constitution.”The Guardian asked Oxford, Yale, and MIT, to comment on Schwarzman’s record of support for Trump and his political donations. Only one institution – Yale, where Schwarzman attended university and donated $150m – defended Schwarzman’s political activity.“Mr Schwarzman did not stand by Trump through his rejection of the election results. On November 23, Mr Schwarzman stated that the election outcome was clear and that he was ready to help President Biden and his team to rebuild our economy. On January 6, like other heads of corporations, he condemned the violence at the Capitol,” the Yale spokesperson said.A spokesperson for Oxford declined to comment specifically on Schwarzman’s record of political donations.The Oxford spokesperson said: “Mr Schwarzman has been approved by our rigorous due diligence procedures which consider ethical, legal, financial and reputational issues. All decisions about donations are made by the University’s Committee to Review Donations and Research Funding, whose members include Oxford academics with expertise in relevant areas like ethics, law and business.”Schwarzman’s £150m gift to Oxford, unveiled in 2019, will be used to create the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, including a building that will bear the private equity executive’s full name.A spokesperson for MIT, which has received $250m from Schwarzman, did not comment on questions about Schwarzman’s values or his political donations, but said: “What brings our community together is mutual respect and a commitment to science, technological innovation, and the pursuit of knowledge.” More