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      Romney: A Reckoning review: must-read on Mitt and the rise of Trump

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      McKay Coppins joined BuzzFeed in 2012, as its Mitt Romney reporter. The former Massachusetts governor won the Republican presidential nomination but lost the election to Barack Obama. Coppins wrote a postmortem, A Mormon Reporter on the Romney Bus. Its subtitle: How America Got Used to His Religion, and Mine.“I quickly found that my expertise in Romney’s religion posed a distinct advantage – not in access or sourcing, necessarily, but in understanding the elusive candidate as an actual person,” Coppins wrote.These days, Romney represents Utah in the US Senate. He has less than 14 months until he retires. His disdain for Donald Trump is legend. In February 2020, he sought to hold Trump accountable for abusing his power and strong-arming Ukraine, becoming the first senator ever to vote to convict a president of his own party in an impeachment trial. He voted to convict Trump again at his second trial, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.Coppins is now at the Atlantic. His new book is a must-read for anyone interested in how the Republican party morphed from the party of Lincoln into a Trumpian mess, picking up where Coppins left off in The Wilderness, his earlier look at the GOP.The 1960s set off a realignment in US politics. Over the past 60 years, resentment and tribalism have come to dominate, social issues come to the fore. In a Republican party once synonymous with the Union army and high-end suburbs, the south and evangelical protestantism now wield major influence.In the 1968 presidential race, the religion of George Romney – the Republican governor of Michigan and Mitt’s father – was a non-issue. His aspirations finally came undone after he said he had been “brainwashed” over the war in Vietnam.Mitt Romney first ran for the Republican nomination 40 years later, in 2008. Times and the party had changed. Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister as well as governor of Arkansas, went gunning for his rival’s religion.“Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” Huckabee asked.Coppins offers an engaging read, the product of 30 interviews with Romney, interviews with aides and friends, and the senator’s emails and diaries. Chock-full of direct quotes, Romney: A Reckoning offers a window into the world of a private man who has darted in and out of the public eye.The book is also a scorching critique, singeing many. Coppins captures Romney strafing a heap of A-list Republicans. Trump and Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, Mike Pence and Chris Christie. All take direct hits. Coppins portrays their peevishness, pettiness and gutlessness – or worse – in Technicolor. Gingrich is a “smug know-it-all, smarmy, and too pleased with himself”. Cruz is “frightening”, “scary” and a “demagogue”.As for Ron DeSantis, in Romney’s estimation, the Florida governor is “much smarter than Trump”. But Romney also asks: “Do you want an authoritarian who’s smart or one who’s not smart?” Months before the primary, the party faithful have rendered their verdict. In poll after poll, Trump clobbers DeSantis.Onwards, to Pence: “No one had been more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly.”Romney also recalls how Jared Kushner tried to convince him Trump’s erratic behavior was actually a manifestation of strategic savvy. Romney wasn’t buying. “I think he’s not smart,” he said. “I mean, really not smart.”Nonetheless, in 2012, Romney sought Trump’s endorsement. Beaten by Obama, Romney conceded on election night. Trump, though, unfurled his lie that the election was rigged. We had seen the future.To George Romney and his son, race relations mattered. The younger Romney parted with Trump after he was slow to disavow backing from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Here, Coppins quotes Romney’s journal: “It is nearly certain that he will be the nominee. I am not tempted in the slightest to retreat. I will fight him on the beaches. I will fight him in the air.” Fine words – that didn’t alter the outcome.Romney then entertained the prospect of serving Trump as secretary of state, only to be publicly humiliated. He ascribes the failed gambit to “a mix of noble motivations and self-centered ones”. Said differently, he wanted the prize but refused to pay the price. “You need to say that you’ve come to the conclusion that I’m terrific,” Trump reportedly demanded. “That I’ll be a great president … We need to clear this up.”Romney would not bend the knee. But he admits: “I like being involved and being in the middle of things, and having something important to do. It’s like, you know, I wanted to be president. If you can’t be president, being secretary of state’s not a bad spot to come thereafter.”George W Bush tells Coppins Romney dodged a bullet. Now, he has little to lose. His time in the Senate ticks down. He has a fortune to enjoy. Published estimates peg him as the third-richest member of Congress, net worth hitting $300m. Yet he is not content. Washington crumbles from within. Violence and menace are coins of the realm. January 6 cemented a new political era.Jim Jordan’s run for House speaker, from the extreme right, triggered a barrage of threats for Republicans who refused to go along. Being primaried by the right is no longer the worst that could happen. On January 6, as the Capitol lay besieged, Ann Romney, Mitt’s wife, cried: “This is our country … This is our country.”
      Romney: A Reckoning is published in the US by Scribner More

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      Bayard Rustin review: fine portrait of a giant of protest and politics

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      At only about 200 pages, Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics is a pleasure to read, 23 contributors giving their take on the great civil rights advocate. Edited by the scholar Michael G Long, it is a must for those who want to better understand the complexity of a Black hero who was also an imperfect man.Rustin, the Obama-produced feature film airing on Netflix, is the most prominent example an industry of emergent Rustin scholarship. A spate of Rustin essays, Rustin books and Rustin docuseries round out the genre. They commemorate the 60th anniversary of Rustin’s foremost achievement: the March on Washington of 1963, a great protest for African American civil and economic rights.The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 was among its results. Long explains how, with this peaceful demonstration as a template, “millions of protesters … would similarly march on Washington for women’s rights, labor rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so much more. No protest in US history has been more influential and consequential.”What is it that makes the book Long has edited so special? It is its economy. Without spending a long time, from several angles you get a good picture of who Rustin was.I never met Rustin, but I did meet and was befriended by Walter Naegle. Legally adopted by Rustin so no one could contest his eventual bequest, in any real sense Naegle is Rustin’s widower. They met in 1977 and were together for the final decade of Rustin’s life.“He had a wonderful shock of white hair,” Naegle writes. “I guess he was of my parents’ generation, but we looked at each other and lightning struck.”When he moved to New York in the late 1930s, Rustin joined the 15th Street Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Any source one consults emphasizes how imperative his Quaker upbringing was. He was reared not by his unmarried teenaged mother but by his maternal grandmother. Her beliefs inspired his highly moral sense of ethics.Naegle writes: “Bayard always credited Julia [Edith Davis Rustin] with having the most profound impact on his early development. She attended West Chester, Pennsylvania’s Friends School. Her education stressed ‘human family oneness, equality, integrity, community, and peace through nonviolence’. It was this Quaker nonviolence, enhanced by Gandhi’s version, that Rustin studied in India, which he taught to Rev Martin Luther King. This was how King’s movement changed history.”I always assumed that as a boy Rustin followed a trajectory similar to that followed by his grandmother. I envisioned him interacting with white Quakers with ease. But Naegle relates something else. When she married, Rustin’s grandmother joined her husband’s African Methodist Episcopal church. Notwithstanding the strong Quaker identity they shared, neither she nor Bayard were welcome to attend the West Chester Friends Meeting. Far from the “Peaceable Kingdom” I pictured, Rustin experienced a grimmer youth. Replete with racial segregation, there was even a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.All the same, Rustin’s Quaker beliefs led him to pacifism. A conscientious objector during the second world war, he received a two-year prison term. He sought to serve fellow inmates, organizing them to protest for better conditions. Earlier, at Wilberforce University, Rustin had been expelled for organizing students – and for being gay. Jail authorities didn’t hesitate to use his sexuality against him. To be queer was to be perceived as deviant and depraved. Confessing his sexuality to his grandmother, he had only been admonished: “Never associate with anyone who has less to lose than you do.” In prison it was a different matter. Black or white, on learning about Rustin’s sexuality, most prisoners wanted nothing to do with him.Being deemed deviant and illegal haunted Rustin’s life well after his release in 1946. One friend stood by him steadfastly. A fellow socialist, Asa Philip Randolph, had established America’s first Black labor union, the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin’s capabilities as an organizer, orator and agitator impressed Randolph early. Their first big protest, a 1941 march on the capital, was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt desegregated war production contracts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy 1960, the worst sex scandal of all threatened to break into public. Envious, Harlem’s Black congressional representative demanded that King cancel a demonstration outside the Democratic National Convention. In his contribution to A Legacy of Protest and Politics, John d’Emilio tells us how the Rev Adam Clayton Powell Jr promised: “If King did not call off the protests … Powell would [claim] that King and Rustin were having a sexual affair. King immediately canceled the demonstrations.”Three years later, before the March on Washington, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina attempted to kill it by reading an old Rustin arrest into the record. It backfired. People laughed. Thanks to Randolph, Rustin was back. Some 250,000 people were safely transported to the Lincoln Memorial. The sound system worked and so did the portable toilets. Despite an overwhelming police presence, no one was shot.Rustin was multifaceted but fallible. In this insightful book, several observers contend that no one else could have done as well. Others are impressed by how Rustin combated oppression and injustice around the world. He helped normalize radical solutions to enduring problems like unemployment and inequality. His endorsement of a two-state solution in the Middle East was tact itself. However, chided by Malcolm X, Rustin’s nonviolent stance evolved. Addressing the Watts riots, he noted somberly: “If negro rioting is to be avoided in the future, it will be because negroes are enabled to get out of the vicious cycle of frustration that breeds aggression; because this country proves that it is capable of creating a new economic way of life without unemployment, without slums, without poverty.”This book makes clear that Bayard Rustin, a man for his time, is a man for our time too.
      Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics is published in the US by New York University Press More

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      Sedition Hunters: how ordinary Americans helped track down the Capitol rioters

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      For one rioter at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, wearing a Caterpillar hoodie proved a bad fashion choice. Admittedly, with an American flag-patterned cap and some shades, the garment helped shield his identity as he manhandled a police officer. Yet it came back to haunt him. Investigators used an app and facial-recognition technology to zero in and eventually got their man: Logan Barnhart, a construction worker in Michigan with a passion for fitness. His résumé included bodybuilding and modeling for romance novel covers. While hitting a punching bag in a workout video, he wore some familiar attire: a Caterpillar sweatshirt. Cue the Dragnet music.There was something else remarkable about this investigation: the sleuths were ordinary Americans, part of a spontaneously formed citizen network volunteering their time to track down Capitol rioters. Now their story is shared in a book that takes its name from the movement, Sedition Hunters: How January 6 Broke the Justice System, by Ryan J Reilly, an NBC News justice reporter.“They were really just random Americans who got together and decided they wanted to do something about what happened on January 6,” Reilly says.Those random Americans did not just identify Barnhart. They sought and found other rioters who stormed the Capitol after Donald Trump refused to accept his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden and invited supporters to rally in Washington on the day Congress was to certify the results. Now, one of the Sedition Hunters, Forrest Rogers, is using his talents to siphon out misinformation of a different sort – as a journalist reporting on the conflict between Israel and Hamas for Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a newspaper based in Zurich.In the wake of January 6, the citizen sleuths proved invaluable to the FBI, which Reilly describes as reeling from the fallout of the riots and overwhelmed by the subsequent federal investigation, the largest in American history, as an initial estimate of 800 rioters entering the Capitol ballooned to more than 3,000.While the FBI approached the task with antiquated technology, the Sedition Hunters had all the latest tools, including the app that helped catch Barnhart, which was designed in a garage by one particular sleuth, known only as Alex in Reilly’s book. Many others did such critical work. Like Alex, “Joan” used an article of clothing to pin down a suspect. In her case, it was a blue-and-white sweatshirt from a school in her home town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, worn by a Capitol window-smasher. Its wearer had also been seen inside but all she had was a nickname: “Zeeker.” Joan searched the school’s Facebook page. Zeeker turned out to be Leo Brent Bozell IV, scion of a conservative dynasty.By the time of Bozell’s arrest, two other people had identified him to authorities. Both knew him. Although there are occasional mentions in the book of people who turned in rioters they knew, the Sedition Hunters focused on tracking down hard-to-find individuals who they had never met.“It was easy to get the person virtually if they posted their own crime, built their own case on a social media post,” Reilly says. “Some of them were making efforts to hide their identity in some way.”In his hoodie, baseball cap and sunglasses, one of many faces in a mob, Barnhart was tough to identify. Alex’s app proved a gamechanger. It created a virtual library of images of the attack collected by the Sedition Hunters, which they could now search to unmask the culprit. Each suspect was given a relevant nickname: Barnhart was “CatSweat”, for his Caterpillar garb. Ironically, an image from the rightwing social media platform Parler delivered the coup de grace. Facial recognition technology confirmed CatSweat as Barnhart. His social media accounts yielded further confirmation: a hat he wore in one photo matched his headgear on January 6. On Twitter, he promised Trump he would “be there” at the Capitol that day.Asked if any of the Sedition Hunters were secretly FBI agents, Reilly discounts the possibility with a quip: “They were way too skilled.” More seriously, he adds: “I think that really is what they brought to bear.”The Sedition Hunters sometimes outperformed their professional counterparts. The FBI made some wrong hits. John Richter, a Biden campaign worker, shared his name with a rioter who reached the Senate floor. Guess who was apprehended first? Although the Democratic Richter convinced them they had the wrong guy, with help from his puppy, two years would pass before the feds arrested the actual rioter.“This guy worked for Joe Biden, got him elected,” Reilly says. “He was probably not the man to look for … Stopping the election of a man he worked for did not make a lot of sense.”Reilly also notes that conservative elements within the FBI supported Trump and were lukewarm on investigating those who rioted for him.“Despite what we heard the past seven or eight years from Donald Trump, at its core, it’s a conservative organization,” Reilly says. “A lot of people generally lean conservative. It does not mean they’re all Trump supporters, but there was a lot of whataboutism in the FBI after the Capitol attacks.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionReilly does provide many examples of FBI personnel acting on tips from the Sedition Hunters. After Joan made her initial identification of Zeeker as Bozell and communicated this to the bureau, she kept scanning images from the riots for that blue-and-white sweatshirt. This uncovered further evidence of his violent actions, which she also transmitted. A special agent thanked her, promised to update prosecutors and made good on that vow, an additional charge against Bozell being brought within 24 hours.Reilly is mindful of some developments still on the horizon. There is a five-year statute of limitations for Capitol rioters – 6 January 2026 – so the window to bring remaining fugitives to justice is about two and a half years wide. There’s a wild card too: what happens if Trump wins the presidency again and decides to issue pardons?“I think it’s very real,” Reilly says of that possibility. “He said he’s going to. To me, it really depends on what the extent is going to be … You can easily see him pardoning everybody who committed misdemeanors, something like that.”Of more serious charges, he adds: “I don’t know across the board.”Who knows what will happen. For now, readers can savor the unheralded work of the Sedition Hunters, best summed up in Joan’s reflection about helping bring Bozell to justice: “He probably would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling sleuths.”
      Sedition Hunters is published in the US by PublicAffairs More

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      Maine representative reverses opposition to assault rifle bans following shooting

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      US House representative Jared Golden, of Maine’s second district, has made a stunning reversal of his opposition to efforts to ban assault rifles in the wake of the mass shooting in a bowling alley and restaurant in Lewiston on Wednesday night, which killed 18.In 2022, Golden was among the few Democrats to vote against a bill in Congress that would have banned the sale of assault weapons to the American public for the first time since 2004. Joe Biden has repeatedly sought such a ban and, on Thursday, a day after the worst such massacre in his state’s history, Golden joined the US president’s call.The bill would have blocked the sale, manufacture, transfer, or possession of military-style semi-automatic assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition devices. Golden also voted against a bill that would have raised the age limit for purchasing a semi-automatic rifle and banned the sale of high-capacity magazines.Golden is now receiving praise from many of his constituents and colleagues for his change of position.Politicians further to the left of Golden have expressed approval of his remarks, which he made on Thursday.He said: “I have opposed efforts to ban deadly weapons of war like the assault rifle he [the gunman] used to carry out this crime. The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure. Which is why I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles, like the one used by the sick perpetrator of this mass killing.“For the good of my community, I will work with any colleague to get this done in the time that I have left in Congress.”Golden, who is originally from Lewiston, ended his speech by asking for forgiveness and support from the people of his hometown, his “constituents throughout the second district, to the families who lost loved ones, and to those who have been harmed”.On X, formerly Twitter, fellow Democrats who have long stood in favor of stricter gun laws, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, applauded Golden.She said: “Powerful, brave, and moving. This is leadership. Thank you. Our community stands with yours throughout this tragedy and in the work ahead.”Representative Maxwell Frost, 26, the first member of gen Z elected to Congress and a survivor of gun violence, said: “It takes a lot of courage to go on national television and admit that you were wrong about something. Thank you @RepGolden. Time to #BanAssaultWeapons”.At least 566 mass shootings have taken place this year across the country, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Tens of thousands of people are killed in the US every year in gun violence, including mass shootings such as the ones at elementary schools in Uvalde, Texas, and Sandy Hook, Connecticut; a high school in Parkland, Florida; and entertainment spots and public events across the country.Golden changed tack after the shooting that affected his home town. Some X users criticized him for not changing his stance sooner.He was elected to national office in 2018. Before that he was a state representative in Maine and a member of the Marine Corps. More

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      ‘Ha, ha, ha’: Mitt Romney laughs off Trump’s ‘total loser’ attack

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      Confronted with Donald Trump’s abuse, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said: “Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.”Romney’s view of the former president and current Republican presidential frontrunner was communicated to McKay Coppins, author of a new biography, Romney: A Reckoning, written in co-operation with its subject.Romney once flirted with joining Trump’s cabinet but has since emerged as a chief antagonist, voting to convict at both Trump’s impeachment trials.Earlier this week, responding to reporting about Coppins’ work, Trump called Romney “a total loser that only a mother could love”, erroneously said the senator “just wrote a book”, and said it was, “much like him, boring, horrible, and totally predictable”.Trump also claimed to have forced “this left-leaning Rino [Republican in name only] out of politics”, a reference to Romney’s announced retirement next year.On Thursday, Coppins spoke to Brian Stelter, the former CNN anchor now host of Inside the Hive, a Vanity Fair podcast.Coppins said: “I sent [Trump’s] statement to Mitt and … I’ll just pull up the text. He wrote back, ‘Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.’ So Mitt kind of enjoyed Trump’s response.”Coppins also discussed how he came to write Romney’s biography – in part because, as he writes in his book, Romney decided not to write a traditional memoir.Coppins said: “When I first approached him, it was just a couple months after January 6. I remember our first meeting was in his Senate hideaway, which is this little cramped windowless room that the senators get near the chamber in the Capitol building. And there was still barbed wire fence around the building because the riots had just happened.”On 6 January 2021, Trump sent supporters to the Capitol to block certification of Joe Biden’s election win. They failed but nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. Thousands have been arrested and hundreds convicted, some for seditious conspiracy.Coppins said Romney’s “initial decision to cooperate with this book was just born of … extreme frustration and disappointment with the leaders of his party and fear for the country. I think he thought of this book as a warning.”Trump faces 91 criminal charges, for state and federal election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments. He also faces civil threats including a fraud trial regarding his business and a defamation trial arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Nonetheless, he leads by huge margins in national and key state polling regarding the Republican presidential nomination.Coppins told Stelter that Romney was now “looking back at the moments in his pursuit of the presidency that he sort of flirted with the more extreme elements of his party.“I think he realises now that the mistake he made, and the mistake that a lot of the Republican establishment made, was thinking that they could basically harness the energy of the far right without succumbing to it.”In 2012, Romney accepted Trump’s endorsement.“He wishes he didn’t do it,” Coppins said. “And I think that that’s emblematic of a lot of these these small ethical compromises that he and a lot of his party leaders made, not realising the kind of Pandora’s box they were opening.” More

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      ‘I ask for forgiveness’: Maine lawmaker who opposed gun ban – video

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      After a gunman killed 18 people in Maine this week, the Democratic representative, Jared Golden, said he was changing his stance on gun legislation and would now support banning assault weapons. At a news conference in Lewiston, where the mass shooting occurred, Golden said he had previously opposed a ban on what he described as ‘deadly weapons of war’ out of fear for the lives of his family members. Announcing his new position, Golden said he would work with any colleague to achieve gun legislation during his time left in Congress More

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      Trump accused of witness threats after Meadows reportedly granted immunity

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      The special counsel Jack Smith accused Donald Trump of trying to “send an unmistakable and threatening message to a foreseeable witness” in the federal election interference case against him, after it was reported that Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows had been granted immunity.The claim from Smith came in a court filing late on Wednesday seeking a limited gag order. The judge in the case, Tanya Chutkan, issued such an order last week but suspended it when lawyers for Trump appealed.Trump faces four federal charges related to his attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020.He also faces 13 state charges related to election subversion in Georgia; 34 charges in New York related to hush-money payments; 40 federal charges concerning his retention of classified information after leaving office; and civil threats including New York cases concerning his business affairs (a case in which Trump has been fined for violating a gag order) and an allegation of rape a judge deemed “substantially true”.Denying all accusations of wrongdoing, Trump enjoys huge leads in national and key state polling regarding the next Republican presidential nomination.ABC News reported the Meadows immunity grant on Tuesday. As the Guardian previously reported, Meadows appeared in March before the grand jury in the case after being forced to testify under court order. Such immunity orders typically see witnesses provide only limited statements, which the justice department promises not to use against them.A Trump spokesperson said: “Wrongful, unethical leaks throughout these Biden witch-hunts only underscore how detrimental these empty cases are to our democracy and system of justice and how vital it is for President Trump’s first amendment rights to not be infringed upon by un-constitutional gag orders.”But Trump himself used Truth Social, the platform he set up after being thrown off Twitter for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress, to address the Meadows story.“I don’t think Mark Meadows would lie about the Rigged and Stollen [sic] 2020 Presidential Election merely for getting IMMUNITY against Prosecution (PERSECUTION!) by Deranged Prosecutor, Jack Smith,” Trump wrote, in typically idiosyncratic style.“BUT, when you really think about it, after being hounded like a dog for three years, told you’ll be going to jail for the rest of your life, your money and your family will be forever gone, and we’re not at all interested in exposing those that did the RIGGING – If you say BAD THINGS about that terrible ‘MONSTER’, DONALD J TRUMP, we won’t put you in prison, you can keep your family and your wealth, and, perhaps, if you can make up some really horrible ‘STUFF’ a[b]out him, we may very well erect a statue of you in the middle of our decaying and now very violent Capital, Washington DC.“Some people would make that deal, but they are weaklings and cowards, and so bad for the future our Failing Nation. I don’t think that Mark Meadows is one of them, but who really knows?”As special counsel, Smith was appointed by but operates independently of Merrick Garland, the US attorney general. Trump has regularly claimed political persecution by Garland and Smith, supposedly at the direction of Biden.In their court filing on Tuesday, lawyers for Smith said a gag order needed to be reinstated in the federal election interference case because Trump “has a demonstrated history of using inflammatory language to target certain individuals in a way that pose[s] a significant and immediate risk that witnesses will be intimidated or otherwise unduly influenced by the prospect of being themselves targeted for harassment or threats; and attorneys, public servants, and other court staff will themselves become targets for threats and harassment”.Trump, the filing said, had “capitalised on the court’s administrative stay to, among other prejudicial conduct, send an unmistakable and threatening message to a foreseeable witness in this case”.On Wednesday, Jonathan Turley, a conservative George Washington University law professor who has appeared as a witness for House Republicans considering impeaching Biden, called Smith’s gag order filing unconstitutional, adding: “Smith is, again, dismissing free speech concerns.”Looking to the Republican primary and perhaps the presidential election beyond, Turley said voters would “have to weigh the merits of these charges and the veracity of witnesses. The gag on Trump will not diminish that chatter and debate.” More

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      Trumpist Mike Johnson is the House speaker. There’s plenty to fear | Margaret Sullivan

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      The process was appalling, and the outcome even more so, as Republicans in the House of Representatives finally found someone they could more or less agree on.That agreement, though, may be more accurately described as simple exhaustion after three weeks of embarrassing misfires.And who is it they have managed to elect speaker of the US House, the person in line to lead the nation just after the president and vice-president?It’s Mike Johnson of Louisiana who, as one example of his profound unsuitability, brags that he doesn’t believe that human beings cause the climate crisis, though his home state has been ravaged by it. He is against abortion, voted against aid to Ukraine and stridently opposes LGBTQ+ rights.Perhaps most notably, Johnson had a leading role in trying to overturn he 2020 election.That means that the official second in line to the presidency “violated his oath to the constitution and tried to disenfranchise four states”, as the writer Marcy Wheeler neatly put it.Johnson certainly has his Trumpian bona fides in order. In 2020, he helped lead a legal effort to reverse the results of the election in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and he hawked Trump’s lies that the election had been rigged.Whatever his shortcomings, we know that Johnson excels at one thing: pleasing Donald Trump, the autocrat wannabe and Republican party leader who loves nothing more than a good yes man.This, of course, follows weeks of chaos for the House Republicans, who put up three better-known nominees – Steve Scalise, another Louisianan, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Tom Emmer of Minnesota – before Johnson.In a historic display of arrogance (not to mention the inability to actually count votes), Jordan tried and failed three times. For this, I suppose, we can be mildly grateful since Jordan is an especially awful person who, as Ohio State wrestling coach, reportedly looked away from credible abuse allegations by the team doctor.The failed efforts by Scalise, Jordan and Emmer came after the ousting of Kevin McCarthy of California – no stalwart for democracy, either – who, in the end, acted a little too responsibly to satisfy the extreme right flank of his party. Those extremists were outraged by McCarthy’s decision to prevent a government shutdown by passing a stopgap funding resolution.All told, it’s been quite a month for Republicans who – with their ever-helpful media allies – enjoy describing the opposing party as “Democrats in Disarray”. In fact, there was quite a bit of actual array over the past month as Democrats stayed unified and voted, time after time, for Hakeem Jeffries of New York.Jeffries was never going to be speaker of this Republican-controlled House but he very likely would have been a fine leader of the chamber. He is someone who apparently understands how elections and the peaceful transition of power are supposed to work, and someone who could competently step in as president, should that need arise.What’s the worst that can happen with Johnson at the helm? There’s no way of knowing but it could be ugly as next year’s presidential election looms.Shortly after Johnson’s election, a reporter asked President Biden if he is worried about whether, if he wins re-election next year, Johnson might try to overturn the election.“No, because he can’t,” Biden responded. “Just like I was not worried that the last guy would be able to overturn the election.” He added: “They had about 60 lawsuits … and every time they lost.”But American democracy has edged ever closer to the brink since then.There’s no guarantee that the guardrails that held fast in 2020 would do so again four years later. And, let’s face it, if Trump is re-elected, they never will again.As for Johnson himself, he wouldn’t address his shameful history of trying to overturn the election, according to the Hill newspaper.“Next question,” he insisted.His Republican colleagues booed the reporter who asked the very question that most needed asking, and told her to shut up.October’s absurd drama in the House may be over, but with Mike Johnson at the helm, there’s nothing to celebrate.And despite Biden’s confident assurances, there’s plenty to fear.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More