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      Dear CNN, giving Trump a town-hall platform is the height of irresponsibility | Siva Vaidhyanathan

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      With 18 months to go before the next US presidential election, it’s already clear that – barring a physical collapse or two – Joe Biden will represent the Democrats and Donald Trump will carry the hopes of Republicans.This will be the first presidential election after one of the candidates, the president at the time, tried to foment a violent insurrection to overturn the last election. It will be the first election since 1912 in which a former president (in that case Theodore Roosevelt) challenges a sitting president (in that case William Howard Taft). It will be the first election in American history in which one candidate has already been impeached – twice, in fact. It will be the first election since 1800 in which one of the major candidates can reasonably be called a threat to or disloyal to the United States of America (Aaron Burr in 1800 was the first). And Burr had not yet revealed his propensity for treachery in 1800. It will be the first election in which one of the candidates has been indicted on state criminal charges (and possibly federal charges by the time of the election).In other words, it will be a weird election in every way. Yet, despite staring at a growing, violent, nativist, fascist-like movement that doggedly supports Trump, the mainstream American news media seems poised to treat both candidates as if they are viable, reasonable representatives of the traditions their political parties have grown to symbolize.It’s as if they have learned nothing.CNN, the leading 24-hour news network, will host Trump for a “town hall” forum in New Hampshire on Wednesday, as if he were a regular candidate leading the race for the nomination of a regular party. Of course, CNN will probably do the same for the three or four others who are likely to challenge him for the Republican nomination (so far, the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are the only viable non-crank candidates).A few more might jump in, but the more challenges Trump faces, the more likely he will lock up the nomination on the first primary day, rather than a month later.Putting a microphone and three cameras on Trump as if he were just another candidate and not an instigator of the violent disruption of American democracy and leader of a conspiracy to overthrow the results of a national election is the height of journalistic irresponsibility.The conservative columnist Alyssa Farah Griffin defended CNN by saying that the host, Kaitlan Collins, is “tough” and won’t let Trump “get away with lying without being called out”. That’s exactly the problem. CNN is in the business of performing toughness and balance, not primarily producing journalism that serves to enlighten citizens and enhance democracy. CNN seems to exist to create tweetable moments of anchor “toughness”, through which the celebrities who appear on air make events and interviews all about them. The CNN faces are tough enough to stand in the wind and rain of a hurricane, and tough enough to call out a politician – even a bully like Trump – for lying. But that’s easy and shallow. Ultimately, it hurts democracy.The issue is not whether Trump gets caught in a lie or “gets away” with something. Trump doesn’t care when that happens and neither do Republican supporters. We have 40 years of Trump shamelessness to demonstrate that – seven years of Trump as a political figure. He has been “called out” time and time again. It makes no difference to his support or to his habits. Exposing Trump as a liar changes no minds about anything.But he will receive the imprimatur of respectability for warranting this platform in the first place. CNN and all journalists must concede that they perform that work, despite wishing and pretending they did not. They have just been too lazy to question doing things the way they had always done things. Every major news organization has done the same. No one has wanted to admit it is a dangerous moment or new environment.So how should mainstream journalistic organizations like CNN cover Trump – or any candidate – through the election? All plans and policies should be based on the realization that democracy is under direct threat from many small factions in the United States, supported by at least one foreign power (Russia), and that they all support the return of Donald Trump to power. Trump himself is immune to shaming and exposure. So that 20th-century assumption about shining a light or exposing or embarrassing a wrongdoer is not appropriate now. The situation is more dire and the political climate in the United States is beyond such tepid, genteel moves.News organizations should do everything differently. No more “town halls” for any candidate, not just Trump. No more interviews in comfortable chairs and good lighting intended to demonstrate both access to power and a certain toughness in approach. No more unfiltered coverage of rallies and speeches as if they constitute “news” before they are ever broadcast or rendered in text.Coverage should be driven by clear editorial choices. Journalists should decide what the candidates will respond to. They should approach each story based on an issue at hand, in the country, in the world, rather than whatever the candidate chooses to say that day. Every report should be couched in deep context, with every quote encased in statements and reminders of the candidate’s record, the facts about the issue, and what the choice is for voters.Reports should be delivered as multimedia packages, accompanied by deep research just a click away from the video, audio or text that invites the citizen into the story. Organizations should begin planning such coverage now so that nothing they do gets hijacked by shenanigans or games by any candidate – with full knowledge that hijacking the normal practices of 20th-century political journalism was precisely Trump’s strategy from 2015 through today. Steve Bannon told us so. Editors and reporters chose not to take it seriously.If a potential story does not serve to inform voters about what is at stake, it should never make it to publication or broadcast. That’s a simple test: does this story enlighten and enable the electorate? Or does this story merely serve to enrage and entertain the electorate? The moment when news organizations began gathering deep and sophisticated data about audience engagement, they began competing for attention against games and pornography and sitcoms and YouTube clips. That’s a fact of the business and a fact of life. But pandering to that fact instead of resisting it is rendering journalism incapable of functioning because journalism can never win the entertainment game.News organizations must accept that they make news by virtue of their choices. They don’t cover things that already exist as “news”. They are political actors. They must choose democracy or risk being used for free by the forces that oppose democracy. The stakes are too high to continue doing business as usual. The stakes are high in a business sense, of course. But they are higher in the sense of our survival as a democratic republic in a world in which democracy is in danger. More

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      What can the White House do to free Evan Gershkovich? – podcast

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      At the end of March, Russian authorities arrested Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, on espionage charges. He is still in a Moscow prison more than a month later, and at the weekend President Biden promised he was ‘working like hell’ to bring Gershkovich, and others detained in Russia, home.
      This week Jonathan Freedland speaks to Polina Ivanova, a reporter for the Financial Times and friend of Gershkovich’s, who breaks down the politics behind his detention

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong

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      Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Smith’s first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, captures the drama with light prose and a breezy tone. He observes that internet news morphed from being a vehicle for the left into the tool of the right. It’s a lesson worth remembering.Technology is agnostic. The market yearns to build the better mousetrap. Secret sauce seldom stays secret for long. Barack Obama demonstrated a then-unparalleled mastery of electoral micro-targeting; in turn, the first Trump campaign harnessed Facebook and social media in a manner few envisioned.Traffic is the narrative of an industry and its personas. Smith spills ink on the overlapping relationships between the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous rightwing website, Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge. He stresses that ideology tethered to accessible if potentially inflammatory content gains eyeballs and clicks. Kittens are cute. Listicles are good for laughs. On the other hand, dick pics get stale quickly unless there’s a story behind them. Brett Favre is the exception that proves the rule.Smith recounts discussions with Steve Bannon, the dark lord of Trumpworld. He describes a Trump Tower meeting, amid the 2016 campaign. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, “exuded confidence, but it didn’t feel like a winning campaign”, Smith observes. “He didn’t seem to have much to do.”But there was more to the confab than atmospherics. There was insight.“Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, Bannon told me, based on the candidate’s political views.” Rather, “Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it.”Charisma counts. Said differently, Hillary Clinton was only a candidate. Unlike Trump, she did not spearhead a movement, evoke broad loyalty or elicit passion. Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born socialist, stood in marked contrast. And he didn’t give speeches at Goldman Sachs or summer on Martha’s Vineyard.Sanders connected with the white working class and Latinos. A creature of the beer track, he came within two-tenths of a point of beating Clinton in Iowa then clobbered her in New Hampshire. The Democratic primary extended into July. The performance of the senator from Vermont presaged Clinton’s election day woes.“BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement,” Smith writes. “Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie, he asked me.”Smith’s answer satisfied no one, not even himself: “I told Bannon that we came from different traditions.”Greed, sex and ambition also marble Smith’s tale. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and a $10m investor in Semafor, faces a dozen federal criminal counts. The company plans to repurchase his shares. Tainted money is a flashpoint for aggrieved creditors.The pursuit of coolness, cash and desirability seldom respects boundaries. Like moths, journalists gravitate to flames only to be burned. In one chapter, Smith recalls the plight of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson.Johnson came from the Blaze, the hard-right brainchild of Glenn Beck, purveyor, Smith says, of “deranged conspiracies about Barack Obama before [Fox] pushed him out in 2011”. As for Johnson, he generated clickable copy. “He had a gift for traffic,” Smith writes. Johnson also had a plagiarism problem. In hindsight, he flashed warning signs. Apparently, Smith elected to ignore them.“I wasn’t really worried about whether Benny would fit in,” he admits. “I should have been.”Johnson was not another David Brooks or George Will. He was not “a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country”. Rather, Johnson crystallized something new, “a conservative movement more concerned about aesthetics than policy, motivated by nostalgia and culture more than by the overt subject matter of politics”.These days, owning the libs takes precedence over policy debate. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mien matters more than ever.Smith writes: “I sometimes wonder now if Benny was headed toward the kind of rightwing populism that Donald Trump came to embody.”Perhaps. Then again, “bullshit” and looks have always populated politics and the ranks of politicians. Smith’s words, again. After BuzzFeed, Johnson bounced to the National Review then on to the Daily Caller. He is now at Newsmax and Turning Point USA, the $39m non-profit led by Charlie Kirk.Elsewhere, Smith recalls an offer made by Disney in 2013, to purchase BuzzFeed for $450m with the “potential of earning $200m more”. Smith’s colleagues rejected the deal. The Disney chief, Bob Iger, exploded: “Fuck him, he loses, the company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”He was prescient.“By 2022, the internet had splintered,” Smith notes.America now faces a rerun of the last presidential election, Biden v Trump again.In his conclusion, Smith writes: “Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.”Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was the web. Sometimes, creative destruction is just destruction, slapped with a gauzy label.
      Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      Biden calls family of reporter detained in Russia and charged with espionage

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      Joe Biden spoke to the parents of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on Tuesday, nearly two weeks after the Moscow-based journalist was detained in Russia and charged with espionage.The president made the call as he flew to Belfast to start a four-day trip to Northern Ireland and Ireland. The call happened one day after the Biden administration formally declared the reporter had been “wrongfully detained”.The designation elevates Gershkovich’s case for the US government and means that a particular state department office will take the lead on seeking his release.Before departing Washington on Tuesday, Biden again condemned the journalist’s detention. Both the US government and Wall Street Journal have vehemently denied the Russian accusation that Gershkovich is a spy.“We’re making it real clear that it’s totally illegal what’s happening, and we declared it so,” Biden said. “It changes the dynamic.”The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters after the call that Biden “felt it was really important to connect with Evan’s family, his parents”. She said that Gershkovich, 31, has been “top of mind” for the president.The White House’s national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, said that the Russian government has yet to grant US consular access to Gershkovich.“It’s not for lack of trying,” Kirby said, adding that the state department has been seeking access “ever since the moment we found out that he was detained”.Russian authorities arrested Gershkovich in Ekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, on 29 March. He is the first US correspondent since the cold war to be detained in Russia for alleged spying.In their own statement Tuesday, Gershkovich’s family members issued a statement thanking Biden for the call and saying they had “a hole in [their] hearts … that won’t be filled” until the journalist’s return.“We are encouraged that the state department has officially designated Evan as wrongfully detained,” the Gershkovich family’s statement said. “We appreciate President Biden’s call to us today, assuring us that the US government is doing everything in its power to bring him home as quickly as possible.“In addition to being a distinguished journalist, Evan is a beloved son and brother. There is a hole in our hearts and in our family that won’t be filled until we are reunited. We are grateful for the outpouring of support from his colleagues, friends and everyone standing with Evan and advocating for his immediate release.” More

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      Victor Navasky, the New York Times and a key moment in gay history

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      Victor Navasky, the New York Times and a key moment in gay historyThe great editor, who died this week, prompted one of the most important pieces ever published about homosexuality Victor Navasky, who died this week aged 90, was famous for his books about the McCarthy period in the 1950s and Robert Kennedy’s justice department in the 1960s, his longtime editorship of the Nation magazine, and positions at Columbia University including chairing the Columbia Journalism Review.What almost no one remembers is how his homophobic reaction to a famously homophobic article in Harper’s magazine led him to commission the most pro-gay piece the New York Times had published up to that time – a foundational document which appeared in 1971, at the dawn of the movement for gay liberation.In September 1970, Harper’s, a famously liberal magazine, published a notorious article by Joseph Epstein: Homo/hetero: the struggle for sexual identity.Victor Navasky, award-winning author and editor of the Nation, dies at 90Read moreThe earliest long-form reaction to the budding gay movement in a liberal magazine, the article appeared 14 months after police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, sparking famous riots.Epstein wrote that homosexuals were “cursed … quite literally, in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck”. He added that nothing any of his sons could do “would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual. For then I should know them condemned”.Gay activists were horrified and soon staged a sit-in at the Harper’s office. As each employee arrived, a protester greeted them: “Good morning, I’m a homosexual. Would you like some coffee?”Merle Miller, a prominent novelist and magazine writer, was a regular contributor to both Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine. He had never told another straight person about his orientation.The week after Epstein’s article appeared, Miller lunched at Chambertin, a French restaurant that was a favorite Times hangout, with his two editors at the Times Magazine: Gerald Walker and Victor Navasky.Twelve years later, the Columbia Journalism Review (not then edited by Navasky) reported what happened.This was an era when the Harris Poll reported that 63% of Americans considered homosexuals “harmful” to society, and the official manual of the American Psychiatric Association stated that all homosexuals were mentally ill.Miller asked Navasky and Walker what they thought about Epstein’s diatribe. Both editors told him they thought it was a great article.Miller exploded: “Damn it, I’m a homosexual!”He then explained why the article was actually an abomination.Navasky responded to Miller’s outburst with an openness of which almost none of his heterosexual colleagues were capable.“Since you hated the piece so much,” Navasky told Miller, “you should write the response to it.”Miller did so. When his piece, What It Means To Be a Homosexual, appeared in January 1971, James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg were two of the only openly gay writers in America. But Miller was the first ever to come out in the pages of the New York Times.His piece had all the knowledge, nuance and humanity Epstein’s lacked. The only things the two writers agreed about were that “nobody seems to know why homosexuality happens” and, surprisingly, 50 years later, the great fear that a son will turn out to be homosexual.But Miller added: “Not all mothers are afraid that their sons will be homosexuals. Everywhere among us are those dominant ladies who welcome homosexuality in their sons. That way the mothers know the won’t lose them to another woman.”For a 20-year-old gay man like myself, who had never read anything positive about gay people in the New York Times, Miller’s article was a gigantic source of hope.Forty one years later, Miller’s piece was republished as a Penguin Classic paperback, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual. I wrote an afterword. I also invited Navasky to appear at a bookstore, for a panel discussion of his role in the gestation of Miller’s piece. He was delighted to participate. It was the first time he publicly described his momentous lunch with Miller.
      Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America
      TopicsBooksLGBTQ+ rightsHistory booksPolitics booksNew York TimesUS press and publishingNewspapersfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Washington Post condemns Pompeo for ‘vile’ Khashoggi ‘falsehoods’

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      Washington Post condemns Pompeo for ‘vile’ Khashoggi ‘falsehoods’Fred Ryan says former secretary of state ‘outrageously misrepresents’ Post journalist murdered by Saudi Arabian regime The publisher of the Washington Post, Fred Ryan, has blasted the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo for “outrageously misrepresenting” and “spreading vile falsehoods” about Jamal Khashoggi, the Post columnist murdered by the Saudi Arabian regime in 2018.Nikki Haley plotted with Kushner and Ivanka to be Trump vice-president, Pompeo book saysRead more“It is shameful that Pompeo would spread vile falsehoods to dishonor a courageous man’s life and service and his commitment to principles Americans hold dear as a ploy to sell books,” Ryan said.Pompeo’s memoir of his time in Donald Trump’s presidential administration, Never Give an Inch, was published on Tuesday.One of a slew of books from likely contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – if in this case one who barely registers in polling – the book recounts Pompeo’s time as CIA director and secretary of state under Trump.The Guardian obtained and reported a copy last week. In its own review, published on Tuesday, the Post called Pompeo’s book “vicious … a master class in the performative anger poisoning American politics”.The reviewer, the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Tim Weiner, added: “Hatred animates this book. It’s got more venom than a quiver of cobras.”The murder of Khashoggi caused outrage around the world and stoked criticism of the Trump White House over its reluctance to criticise the Saudi regime, particularly the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who grew close to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.US intelligence believes the prince approved the killing of Khashoggi, whose remains have not been found.On the page, Pompeo deplores Khashoggi’s murder. But he also writes that Khashoggi was not a journalist but “an activist who had supported the losing team” and criticises what he calls “faux outrage” over a killing that “made the media madder than a vegan in a slaughterhouse”.On Monday, Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, told NBC News: “Whatever [Pompeo] mentions about my husband, he doesn’t know my husband. He should be silent and shut up the lies about my husband. It is such bad information and the wrong information … This is not acceptable.”Elatr Khashoggi also said she wanted “to silence all of these people who publish books, disparage my husband and collect money from it”.On Tuesday, Ryan said it was “shocking and disappointing to see Mike Pompeo’s book so outrageously misrepresent the life and work of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.“As the CIA – which Pompeo once directed – concluded, Jamal was brutally murdered on the orders of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. His only offense was exposing corruption and oppression among those in power – work that good journalists around the world do every day.”Pompeo responded on Twitter, writing: “Americans are safer because we didn’t label Saudi Arabia a pariah state. I never let the media bully me. Just because someone is a part-time stringer for the Washington Post doesn’t make their life more important than our military serving in dangerous places protecting us all. I never forgot that.”Ryan said Khashoggi, who wrote for the Post while resident in the US, “dedicated himself to the values of free speech and a free press and held himself to the highest professional standards. For this devotion, he paid the ultimate price.”TopicsBooksMike PompeoJamal KhashoggiPolitics booksUS politicsTrump administrationUS foreign policynewsReuse this content More

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      Will the January 6 report bring a second Christmas for US publishers?

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      Will the January 6 report bring a second Christmas for US publishers? Major imprints are racing to sell the committee’s work to the reading public, with help from reporters, panel members, David Remnick and even a former speechwriter to TrumpThe release of the final report of the House January 6 committee has sparked a deluge of publishing activity: seven editions of the 200,000 word document from six imprints, featuring contributions from the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, the House intelligence chair, Adam Schiff, plus six other journalists, another committee member, a former congresswoman and a former speechwriter to Donald Trump.January 6 report review: 845 pages, countless crimes, one simple truth – Trump did itRead moreThere are two reasons for this hyperactivity: the belief that the completion of the report is a significant historical event, and the conviction that here is a big chance to do well by doing good.The Mueller report sold 475,000 copies in various editions, according to NPD BookScan, so the book business is hoping it can do at least that well with the latest copy provided for free by the federal government.Harper Perennial says it is printing 250,000 copies of its version, which features a powerful introduction by Ari Melber, an MSNBC host, that reads like a smart prosecutor’s multi-part indictment. It helps that Melber’s marketing power is at least as great as his brain power. Pushing it on his nightly show, he has already gotten the book to the top of one Amazon bestseller list, long before it has reached any store.The lawyer turned TV personality does the best job of delineating the eight plots Trump and his allies pursued to try to overthrow the election, seven of which were clearly illegal or unconstitutional.“They attempted a coup,” Melber declares. “That is the most important fact about what happened.”Remnick and Jamie Raskin, like Schiff a committee member, teamed up to write an introduction and an afterword for the version being published by an imprint of Macmillan.Remnick gets straight to the heart of the matter: “Trump does little to conceal his most distinctive characteristics: his racism, misogyny, dishonesty, narcissism, incompetence, cruelty, instability, and corruption. And yet what has kept Trump afloat for so long, what has helped him evade ruin and prosecution, is perhaps his most salient quality: he is shameless.”Because so many of us have nearly lost our “ability to experience outrage”, Remnick concedes that “the prospect of engaging with this congressional inquiry … is sometimes a challenge to the spirit … And yet a citizenry that can no longer bring itself to pay attention to such an investigation or to absorb its astonishing findings risks moving even farther toward a disturbing ‘new normal’: a post-truth, post-democratic America.”Raskin sees the assault on the Capitol as the latest in a series of “systematic threats” to US democracy, including “massive voter suppression, gerrymandering of state and federal legislative districts, the use of the filibuster to block protection of voting rights, and right-wing judicial activism to undermine the Voting Rights Act”.His biggest goal is the elimination of electoral college, without any amendment to the constitution. That can be done through “the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among participating states that gives electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the nationwide popular vote, and which has already been adopted by 15 states and the District of Columbia with 195 electoral votes, or 72% of the 270 votes needed” to put it into effect.Writing for Random House, Schiff excoriates Republicans for trying so hard to block certification of Biden’s victory even after the Capitol invasion – 147 Republicans including eight senators lodged objections early on the morning of January 7. But he is also careful to give credit to Republican witnesses who did so much to burnish the committee’s credibility.“These officials, Republicans all, not only held fast against enormous pressure from a president of their party but were willing to stand before the country and testify under oath,” Schiff writes.Schiff argues that the report is an undeniable brief for prosecution of Trump: “Bringing to justice a former president who, even now, advocates the suspension of our constitution is a perilous endeavor. Not doing so is far more dangerous.”For Skyhorse, the former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, the only contributor old enough to have voted to impeach Richard Nixon, echoes Schiff on this point.“Having had to vote to impeach a president when I was in Congress, I am certain that [the January 6 committee] did not make its criminal referrals to the justice department lightly. In the same vein, the DoJ should not treat it lightly – and I hope and believe the American people will not let that happen.”The Hachette book has the largest amount of additional material, including a first-person account of the Capitol attack by a New York Times reporter, Luke Broadwater. After making it to a secure area, Broadwater found he was “much more angry” than “afraid”. So were other more conservative reporters, disgusted by senators who encouraged the myth of election theft. Broadwater recalls “one shouting to a Republican as he passed by, ‘Are you proud of yourself, Senator?’”All of these books are serious efforts to put the committee’s exhaustive findings in a larger political and historical context, including the one published by Skyhorse with an introduction by Holtzman. But Skyhorse also maintains its maverick reputation as a publisher famous for picking up books others have spurned (Woody Allen’s memoir, for example) by publishing two versions of the new report, one with Holtzman’s foreword and another featuring Darren Beattie, a former speechwriter for Trump and Steven Miller.Tony Lyons, the US publisher who picks up books ‘cancelled’ by other pressesRead moreBeattie was fired by the Trump White House after it was reported that he attended a conference with Peter Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigrant website VDare, a “white nationalist” who “regularly publishes works by white supremacists, antisemites, and others on the radical right”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.Beattie is horrified that the January 6 committee describes the assault on the Capitol as an outgrowth of white supremacy.“Far from serving as an objective fact-finding body, the January 6 committee functioned as such an egregiously performative, partisan kangaroo display as to make propagandists in North Korea blush,” he writes – with characteristic understatement.Beattie provides more comic relief with his approach to the alleged election fraud which is one of the main subjects of the report.“It would take us too far afield to consider the election fraud allegations in detail on the merits,” Beattie writes.Then he gives a long explanation of why no one should think Trump really believed he lost the election, just because that’s what his attorney general and so many others told him.“For all of the committee’s fixation on the term ‘Big Lie’, the committee presents precious little if any evidence that Donald Trump didn’t genuinely believe that election fraud ultimately tipped the balance against him.“… The committee’s first televised hearing repeated ad nauseam a video clip of Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr referring to Trump’s election fraud theories as ‘bullshit’.“Apart from Barr, the committee referenced numerous Trump associates who claim to have told the former president his election fraud theories were wrong. The simple fact that some of Trump’s senior staffers may have disagreed with Trump on the election issue is hardly proof that Trump was persuaded by them, and that therefore Trump’s efforts to ‘stop the steal’ amounted to a deliberate lie and malicious attempt to prevent the legitimate and peaceful transition of power.Republican senator called Giuliani ‘walking malpractice’, January 6 report saysRead more“Barr’s additional remark that Trump was ‘completely detached from reality’ when it came to the 2020 election unwittingly undermines the committee’s suggestion that Trump was lying about the matter.”Primetime hearings sometimes reached as many 18 million viewers, a number Remnick notes was “comparable to Sunday Night Football on NBC”. In the midterm elections, many exit polls found that the preservation of democracy was a key factor in the decision of many swing voters to vote against Republicans. It seems clear the investigation bolstered American democracy in more ways than one.While a hearty minority obviously remain as far down a rabbit hole as Trump’s former speechwriter, the results of the recent election bolster my conviction that sane Americans still constitute a small majority of American voters.So, like most of the contributors to these volumes, I think there is much to be grateful for in the work of the most successful congressional investigators since the Senate Watergate committee of 50 years ago. Or, as Remnick puts it, “If you are reaching for optimism – and despair is not an option – the existence and the depth of the committee’s project represents a kind of hope. It represents an insistence on truth and democratic principle.”TopicsBooksJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesPolitics booksfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on the criminality of Donald Trump

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      Interview‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on the criminality of Donald TrumpDavid Smith in Washington The great Washington Post reporter has published 20 interviews he conducted with the then president – who is now running againJust when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Donald Trump is running for president again. That was not a prospect Bob Woodward had to deal with when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, after Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein cracked open the Watergate scandal.“Our long national nightmare is over,” declared Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, and it was. Nixon faded into jowly retirement. But Trump yearns to regain the crown.The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s chilling warning for US democracyRead moreWoodward spoke to the Guardian by phone six hours before the disgraced one-term, twice-impeached president took the stage at Mar-a-Lago, his gaudy personal Xanadu in Florida, to announce what might or might not be the greatest political comeback of all time.Does Woodward, who at 79 has written about nine American presidents, think Trump can win again? Or is Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, hammer of wokeness, now the man to beat?“Who knows? Trump’s got tens of millions of supporters. DeSantis is the flavour of the month. DeSantis may be the one. Maybe not. I remember in 1990, before the ’92 presidential election, with a bunch of friends making a list of the 50 people who might be the next president. [Bill] Clinton was not on the list [though] he would have put himself there. So who knows? You can’t record the future.”But you can revisit the past. Trump pulled off an unlikely victory in 2016 in what many saw as an indictment of the media. While there was some fine reporting that left America in no doubt about what it was getting, there was also wall-to-wall cable news coverage and a constant pressure for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to respond to Trump’s latest unhinged tweet. Are there lessons to learn?Woodward says: “If you look back on 2016, there was a lot of good coverage but it was never enough. He was able to sell himself as a successful, wealthy businessman. What do we know about him now that we didn’t know in 2016? There is a lot of evidence, good reporting, investigations by some committees on the Hill, that actually he was not a successful businessman, he’s not wealthy. What’s the lesson from all that? Dig deeper and then, when you dig deep, dig deeper more and more and more.”His image burnished by the reality TV show The Apprentice, the Trump of 2016 was able to essay the role of political outsider and swamp drainer. Now the novelty has worn off, he faces federal, state and congressional investigations and his four years in the Oval Office are a matter of record.Woodward has contributed a trilogy of books – Fear, Rage and Peril (the last written with Robert Costa) – and now an audiobook, The Trump Tapes, presenting his 20 interviews with the president. The Guardian’s Lloyd Green called it “a passport to the heart of darkness”.Woodward continues: “Now he’s going to run again and we in our business need to focus on what he did as president. That’s the office he’s running for. Yes, it’s a political office, and you see all the stories now about the politics of Trump running, people abandoning him, people sticking with him and so forth – that’s an important story.“But the real scorecard is what he did as president and on foreign affairs, dealing with Kim Jong-un or [Vladimir] Putin or all this stuff that’s on the tapes. He made it personal. He ran it on instinct.”Woodward describes the tapes as a “laboratory” for understanding Trump’s presidency. “My conclusions are very severe. He failed as president, failed to do his constitutional, moral, practical duty, and I think, not all, but most of the reporting should be on his presidency.”Woodward cites the example of Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, estimated to cost $1.9tn over a decade, criticised as a handout to the rich and corporations at the expense of working families.“I fault myself on this. I’ve not seen – maybe I’m not aware – of some really good reporting on the tax cut, how it happened exactly, who benefited. I wrote in one of my Trump books, Fear, that Gary Cohn engineered and drove it. The former president of Goldman Sachs benefited from that and you can surmise but I’d like to see my own paper or the Guardian or anywhere say: this is really who benefited from this.”Nineteen of the Woodward/Trump interviews happened in person or by phone between autumn 2019 and August 2020, amid research for Rage.This period included the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests. Woodward suggested to Trump that both had benefited from white privilege. The president was having none of it. He sneered: “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow.”This chapter of Trump’s tenure was also defined by the coronavirus, which emerged in China in late 2019 but which he downplayed, claiming it would vanish over the summer. Now, more than a million Americans have died of Covid-19.In The Trump Tapes, Woodward interviews Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser who warned Trump the virus would be “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency”, and his deputy, Matthew Pottinger, who likened it to the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 650,000.Woodward adds: “I discovered they issued this warning 28 January. I was as shocked as I’ve ever been as a reporter.”By April, Woodward could not resist pushing Trump to meet the moment, telling him experts were saying he needed to mobilise the country, coordinate with intelligence agencies and work with foreign governments. Woodward argued: “If you come out and say, ‘This is a full mobilisation, this is a Manhattan Project, we are going – pardon the expression – balls to the wall’, that’s what people want.”Had he crossed a line? His wife, Elsa Walsh, also a journalist, thought so. He recalls: “I did these interviews on speakerphone so I could record them with Trump’s permission. She was there many times and Trump knew that and then afterwards she said I was yelling at Trump and that I shouldn’t be doing that. I’m just supposed to ask questions. She berated me for this. It’s on the tape.”But he insists: “It wasn’t an advocacy position. Trump had these coronavirus meetings and had virus deniers there and so the whole atmosphere was one of ‘Let’s not listen to the experts’. I knew some of these people and found out what they said and they were very specific and it had a logic to it, namely that overall Trump needed a world war two-style mobilisation to deal with this.“I couldn’t talk to him so I passed it on and made it clear this is not me but this is my reporting from what the experts are saying. As I said to my wife, we’re in a different world. It’s the reporter who’s on the street and sees somebody shot. Go help them as a human being and then you phone in the story. This is of the magnitude that 1.1 million people died in this country because of the virus.”By the summer, the scale of Trump’s failure and the price in death and grief were clear. In the tapes, Woodward asks: “Was there a moment in all of this last two months where you said to yourself, ‘Ah, this is the leadership test of a lifetime?’”Trump replies, with dead finality: “No.”Woodward reflects: “Even then, let alone now, it was the leadership test of a lifetime and just, ‘No’. It’s tragic. Not only did he conceal what he knew and deny it but it’s a crime. It’s a moral crime to know all this and not tell the people. I once asked him the job of the president and he said, ‘To protect the people.’ I’ve never heard about or read anywhere in my own reporting or in history where a president was so negligent.”The last long interview took place on 21 July 2020. Woodward said things were bad. Trump did not understand so Woodward had to point out that 140,000 people had died. The president claimed to have Covid under control. Woodward asked, “What’s the plan?” Trump said there would be one in 104 days. Woodward wondered what he was talking about. Then he realised: the presidential election was 104 days away.Such exchanges are damning and ensure that more than eight hours of conversations, by his own words shall Trump be condemned. Why, then, did he agree to talk? As the comedian Jimmy Kimmel put it: “Why are you agreeing to do 20 interviews on tape with the guy who took down Richard Nixon with tapes? With tapes!”Trump campaign announcement deepens Republicans’ civil warRead moreOne answer is ego. Trump can be heard flattering “a great historian” and “the great Bob Woodward”. Woodward suggests: “I had been sceptical of the Steele dossier and the Russian investigation and had said so publicly. [Senator] Lindsey Graham, [Trump’s] supporter from South Carolina, had told him I would not put words in his mouth, which was true, and so he agreed to do these interviews.”On the other side of the coin, this is a rare opportunity to hear the Woodward method. The Washington Post, where he has worked for half a century, observed that The Trump Tapes “offers a surprising window into the legendary investigative reporter’s process – a perennial focus of both mystique and critique”.At times, Woodward indulges Trump’s streams of consciousness, airing of grievances and pathological narcissism. At others he cajoles, challenges or confronts. Woodward says: “He’ll talk and talk and talk but I ask questions, very specific questions. What are you doing about the virus? Tell me about Putin.”He did miss one opening. He asked if, in the event of a close election in November, Trump would refuse to leave the White House. The president declined to comment.“It was the only question he didn’t answer in eight hours – 600 questions – and I should have followed up. I should have said, ‘Wait a minute, why isn’t he answering that?’ I didn’t.”Re-listening to all 20 interviews, and finding it such a different experience from reading the transcripts or listening to snatches on TV or the internet, convinced Woodward to release the recordings – a first in his long career. Raw and unfiltered, this is one instance where Trump does not benefit from a reporter “tidying up” his quotations to make him sound more lucid and less repetitive than he actually is.“To be frank, it’s very surprising and it’s a learning experience at age 79, having done this so many years, that there’s something about hearing the voice that gives it an authenticity and power,” Woodward says. “Especially Trump. He doesn’t ever hem and haw, he doesn’t go hmm. He just is right out of the box.”Fifty years since the Watergate break-in, he sees a parallel with the secret White House recording system that caught Nixon.“The Nixon tapes didn’t just come out as transcripts. They came out so you could hear it and this is a version of that. It’s the same problem of appalling criminal – I can’t use any other word for it – behaviour for a sitting president to look away.“There’s a statement that Henry Kissinger once made: ‘What extraordinary vehicles destiny selects to accomplish its design’. I’m not sure destiny exists, but what an extraordinary vehicle.”TopicsBooksBob WoodwardDonald TrumpPolitics booksRepublicansTrump administrationUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More