More stories

  • in

    George Shultz obituary

    Many politicians and diplomats from the 1980s lay claim to a pivotal role in ending the cold war, but the former US secretary of state George Shultz, who has died aged 100, had a better claim than most. And he was not shy in letting people know, as he did at length in his 1,184-page account of his years at the state department, Turmoil and Triumph (1993).
    When he became secretary of state in 1982 – a job he was to hold for seven years – relations between the US and the Soviet Union were at a dangerous low. The administration of US president Ronald Reagan was packed with anti-Soviet hardliners. Reagan himself in 1983 dubbed the Soviet Union “the evil empire”.
    Shultz seldom let his frustration with anti-Soviet colleagues in the Pentagon, the CIA and elsewhere in the administration show in public. But he let his guard down in a terse response to a reporter who asked whether he was enjoying the job: “I did not come here to be happy.”

    [embedded content]

    He persevered, opening up a secret channel to the Soviet Union and gradually winning over Reagan, with whom he established a close bond. Relations with the Soviet Union began to improve. Four years after taking office, Shultz was in the room at one of the most extraordinary diplomatic encounters of the 20th century, the 1986 Reykjavik summit at which Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came briefly and tantalisingly close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
    When Shultz left office in January 1989, he said Americans were unable or unwilling to recognise that the cold war was over. “But to me it was all over bar the shouting,” he wrote. Ten months later the Berlin Wall came down and in December 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved.
    Shultz looked stuffy and conventional, and for the most part he was, but he liked to persuade people he was not as conservative as he appeared. A regular ploy when being interviewed was to direct journalists to a signed photograph of him dancing at a White House dinner with Ginger Rogers. She had written: “Dear George, For a moment I thought I was dancing with Fred. Love, Ginger.”

    [embedded content]

    Born in New York, George was the son of Margaret (nee Pratt) and Birl Shultz, who in 1922 helped found the New York Institute of Finance to train those working on Wall Street. When he was three the family moved to New Jersey.
    He studied economics at Princeton and after graduating in 1942 joined the Marines. Service in the Pacific included the taking of the Palau islands in 1944, when more than 2,000 Americans and 10,000 Japanese were killed.
    During a rest and recreation break in Hawaii Captain Shultz met a lieutenant in the army nursing corps, Helena “Obie” O’Brien. They married in 1946 and had five children.
    Although an average student at Princeton, he completed a PhD in labour relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 and stayed on to teach.
    Throughout the rest of his life, he combined academia – MIT was followed in 1957 by the University of Chicago, and in 1968 by Stanford University – with long spells in business and in government. He was a Republican, but more pragmatic than ideological. He became one of the ultimate Washington insiders, serving under three presidents – Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan – and worked on various federal task forces at the request of John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He was an informal but influential adviser on foreign policy to George W Bush. More

  • in

    Biden will not lift sanctions to get Iran back to negotiating table

    Joe Biden has said the United States will not lift its economic sanctions on Iran in order to get Tehran back to the negotiating table to discuss how to revive the Iran nuclear deal.Asked if the United States will lift sanctions first to get Iran back to the negotiating table, Biden replied: “no” in an interview with CBS News, which was recorded on Friday but released on Sunday ahead of the Super Bowl.Former president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US in 2018 from the atomic deal, which saw Iran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Biden has said he will seek to revive the deal, but insisted that Iran must first reverse its nuclear steps, creating a contest of wills between the nations.Asked if Iran had to stop enriching uranium first, Biden nodded. It was not clear exactly what he meant, as Iran is permitted to enrich uranium under the 2015 nuclear deal within certain limits.“Will the US lift sanctions first in order to get Iran back to the negotiating table?” CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell asked.“No,” Biden responded.“They have to stop enriching uranium first?” O’Donnell asked. Biden nodded.Earlier on Sunday Iran’s supreme leader urged the US to lift all sanctions if it wants the country to live up to commitments under its nuclear deal with world powers, according to state TV.In his first comments on the matter since Biden took office, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted as saying: “If (the US) wants Iran to return to its commitments, it must lift all sanctions in practice, then we will do verification then we will return to our commitments.”“This is the definitive and irreversible policy of the Islamic Republic, and all of the country’s officials are unanimous on this, and no one will deviate from it,” Khamenei added Sunday, reiterating Iranian leaders’ previous remarks that the US must ease its sanctions before Iran comes back into compliance.The supreme leader, 81, has the final say on all matters of state in Iran and approved the efforts at reaching the nuclear deal in 2015.In response to Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, the country began to gradually violate its atomic commitments, and threatened further provocations in a bid to increase its leverage and get Biden to prioritize a return to the deal as he moves to dismantle Trump’s legacy. Biden has signed a series of executive actions that reverse course on a wide range of issues, including climate change and immigration.Following the killing last December of an Iranian scientist credited with spearheading the country’s disbanded military nuclear program, Iran’s parliament approved a law to block international nuclear inspectors later this month – a serious violation of the accord.Iran also has begun enriching uranium closer to weapons-grade levels and said it would experiment with uranium metals, a key component of a nuclear warhead. The country has announced its moves and insisted that all breaches of the pact are easily reversible. Tehran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.Reuters contributed to this report More

  • in

    How Donald Trump's hand-holding led to panicky call home by Theresa May

    For the former prime minister Theresa May, one of the most pressing matters she confronted during her encounter with Donald Trump a few days after his inauguration went beyond mere diplomacy.May had travelled to Washington in 2017 with the intention of persuading the new US president to make a supportive statement about Nato. Little did she expect that she would be calling her husband, Philip, to warn him that images of the US president of holding her hand as they walked through the White House would soon be flashing around the world.With Trump out of power, those who had ringside seats during four years of dangerous and often chaotic foreign policy are now describing their – often bruising – encounters in a major new documentary series.The three-part BBC series, Trump Takes on the World, by the award-winning documentary maker Norma Percy, reveals extraordinary access to key observers of the president.With testimony from a who’s who of world leaders and senior US officials, it offers an unmediated reflection of Trump shorn of political hypocrisies.It was not just May who found Trump unsettling: to European diplomatic observers, he seemed a “strange creature”. And he also triggered alarm among some American officials in the room with him, with one defence official noting that the president’s notoriously short attention span suggested a “squirrel careening through the traffic”.May’s encounter with Trump, which is described to Percy by British aides as well as Trump insiders, was a taste of what was to come. May was seen as “not strong” by Trump, according to KT McFarland, the former US deputy national security adviser. But the prime minister had gone into the meeting determined to persuade the president to make a statement backing Nato and warn him over his closeness to Vladimir Putin.The meeting took a bizarre twist as they walked through the White House. “He held her hand going through the colonnades, which took us all by surprise, and as it turns out, took Theresa by surprise,” Fiona McLeod Hill, the former joint chief of staff at No 10, told Percy.“She couldn’t really take her hand back, so she was stuck … And the first thing she said [afterwards] was ‘I need to call Philip just to let him know that I’ve been holding hands with another man before it hits the media’.”Before May had the opportunity to call her husband, Trump hosted her for lunch, where another boundary-shattering episode was waiting. First May was treated to the “full bloom” – one of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness rants, described by Thomas Shannon, then US undersecretary for political affairs, as running “the gamut from his own inauguration to his disdain for the press”.Then, keen to raise the issue of Putin, May asked Trump if he had spoken to the Russian leader, which Trump denied. At that point, however, Trump’s chief of staff intervened to tell the president that Putin had actually called, but not been put through.Hill takes up the story of the “toe-curling” outburst. “Trump at this point looks not orange but red. He flipped. Furious.” In front of May, he scolded his advisers in what Shannon recalled as “an unseemly moment”. “He said: ‘You’re telling me that Vladimir Putin called the White House and you’re only telling me now during this lunch?… Vladimir Putin is the only man in the world who can destroy the United States and I didn’t take his call’.”May was far from alone in being exposed to Trump’s flagrant disregard for boundaries. From his unilateral withdrawals from the Iranian nuclear treaty and the Paris climate accord to his dealings with the Palestinians, Russia and China, few – even those close to him – could ever fully grasp the extent of his unpredictability or his disdain for detail.The former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was thrown off balance by Trump’s behaviour during an encounter at a G20 meeting in Hamburg also in 2017.Like May, Turnbull had important issues on his mind, in this case steel tariffs. Taking his chance, Turnbull collared Trump, who was obsessing about something else. “Donald said: ‘Malcolm, do you want to see my SCIF? It is so cool.’ I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought he was talking about a boat [a skiff]. We turned around a corner and there was this big steel box about the size of a shipping container.”Trump pulled Turnbull into what turned out to be a “sensitive compartmented information facility”, an ultra-secure communications hub, with the new French president, Emmanuel Macron, also in tow.“He said: ‘This is so cool – when you’re in there, nobody can hear you, not even the Chinese. It’s so secret.”Expectations of Trump from European leaders were not so much low as non-existent. For the former French president François Hollande, who dealt with Trump only briefly, an early red flag was raised when the US leader asked him in all earnestness who he should appoint to his team in the White House. “I thought he was just being courteous; it was pretty outrageous. Imagine I phoned Obama and said: ‘You know France well, who should I appoint as an adviser?’” Later, briefing his successor Macro during the transition, Hollande was clear how he regarded the US leader – sentiments Percy herself regards as a summing up how many foreign leaders viewed the Trump era.“I said to [Macron],” Hollande recalls, “don’t expect anything from Donald Trump. Do not think you’ll be able to change his mind. Don’t think that it’s possible to turn him or seduce him. Don’t imagine that he won’t follow through with his own agenda.”“Some friends asked me why I was doing it,” said Percy, who has made the documentaries The Death of Yugoslavia, End of Empire and Watergate, and who filmed the new series under lockdown. “The view was that we knew what Trump was like. He was on the news every night. But this is the inside story of those who had to deal with him.”Trump Takes on the World begins on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC Two More

  • in

    The crucial differences in Trump’s second impeachment trial

    It might be tempting to call it the trial of the century but it is just as likely to invoke a sense of deja vu. This week Donald Trump faces an impeachment trial in the US Senate. Yes, another one.Trump stands accused of inciting an insurrection when he urged supporters to “fight” his election defeat before they stormed the US Capitol in Washington on 6 January, clashed with police and left five people dead.In some ways it will be a replay of his first impeachment trial a year ago. Again Trump himself will not be present and again the outcome, given his subjugation of the Republican party, has an air of inevitability – acquittal.But there are crucial differences the second time around. Trump is now a former president, the first to be tried by the Senate after leaving office. For this reason the sessions will be presided over not by John Roberts, the chief justice of the supreme court, but 80-year-old Patrick Leahy, the longest-serving Democratic senator.Whereas Trump offered running commentary on the first trial via Twitter, he has now been banned from the platform for incendiary statements. And whereas his first trial, on charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress, turned on whether phone records and paper trails showed that he pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, the sequel promises to be more raw and visceral.Proceedings will unfold at the scene of the crime: the hallowed Senate chamber that was invaded by rioters including white supremacist groups. The nine Democratic impeachment managers are expected to present new video footage and eyewitness testimony that will vividly evoke the terror felt by members of Congress as they barricaded themselves inside offices and feared for their lives.“If the Democrats do what’s being reported and present the visual evidence, it will be nothing a Senate trial has ever seen before,” said Charlie Sykes, founder and editor-at-large of the Bulwark website. “It’s going to be a graphic narrative of the build-up and the attack and the violence and the scope of the threat and it’s going to be very difficult to minimise that, especially because every one of those senators was a witness to it in some way.“So I actually think that it’s going to be more powerful than some people expect. The result is preordained – I don’t have any illusions about that – but, because the evidence has been mounting over the last several weeks, I am expecting it to be dramatic.”There have only been four presidential impeachments in American history and Trump owns half of them: his second came last month in a vote by the House of Representatives, with all Democrats and 10 Republicans charging him with inciting violence against the US government.That set the stage for Tuesday’s Senate trial where legal briefs filed by both sides offer a preview of the territory that will be contested. House prosecutors argue that that Trump was “singularly responsible” for the sacking of the Capitol – where Biden’s election win was being certified – by “creating a powder keg, striking a match, and then seeking personal advantage from the ensuing havoc”.If the Democrats do what’s being reported and present the visual evidence, it will be nothing a Senate trial has ever seen beforeIt is “impossible” to imagine the attack taking place as it did without Trump whipping up the crowd into a “frenzy”, they argue, citing the same view expressed by the Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, a Republican who defied the party line by voting for impeachment.But in a 14-page brief that uses the word “denied” or “denies” some 29 times, Trump’s hastily assembled legal team contend that he cannot be blamed because he never incited anyone to “engage in destructive behavior”. The people “responsible” for the attack are being investigated and prosecuted, they add.But the Democrats’ brief carries detail of the horror felt by politicians and their staff during the mayhem. “Some Members called loved ones for fear that they would not survive the assault by President Trump’s insurrectionist mob,” they write.The anguish was on vivid display in recent days as members such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib recalled the traumatic events of 6 January during speeches on the House floor. Tlaib broke down in tears as she pleaded with colleagues: “Please, please take what happened on January 6 seriously. It will lead to more death, and we can do better.”Trump’s conduct not only “endangered the life of every single member of Congress”, the impeachment managers say, but also “jeopardized the peaceful transition of power and line of succession”.Their brief details threats to Mike Pence, the then vice-president, and Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, as the pro-Trump mob rampaged through the building and “specifically hunted” them. Some chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” and branded him a traitor for refusing to overturn the election result, video footage shows.But how ever emotive the evidence, Trump’s team denies that the Senate has the authority to hear the case because he is now a private citizen and no longer in office. Democrats reject this, pointing to the example of William Belknap, a war secretary whose resignation in 1876 did not prevent him being impeached by the House and tried the Senate.They also argue that the constitution explicitly allows the Senate to disqualify a convicted former official from holding office in the future, a vital consideration given that Trump has not ruled out running for president again in 2024.The defence’s challenge to the constitutionality of the trial, however, looks certain to clinch Trump’s acquittal. Already 45 out of 50 Senate Republicans, including the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, voted on that basis in an effort to end the trial before it began.A two-thirds majority of the 100-member Senate would be required to support the charge to convict Trump, meaning that 17 Republicans would need to join all 50 Democrats. Most Republicans have repeatedly shown they are loyal to Trump and wary of retribution from his base.Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, predicted: “You may be able to get seven or eight Republicans at the end of the day voting to convict but they’re weak and afraid that they may lose their little precious seat. ‘So the country be damned, I’m still going to be a senator, I have to get re-elected.’“That’s the most important thing for them. If their mama were on trial, they would sacrifice their mama if they get to keep their seat: that’s what it boils down to. Tell me, what are you willing to sacrifice your re-election for, if not the country?”Even so, there is still some suspense around whether Trump will pressure his legal team to push “the big lie” of a stolen election. Over two months his bogus claims of election fraud were rejected by courts, state officials and his own attorney general.What are you willing to sacrifice your re-election for, if not the country?The defence’s legal brief points to the first amendment, which protects freedom of speech, to assert that Trump was entitled to “express his belief that the election results were suspect”. Pushing this hard at the trial could prove a spectacular own goal that will make it harder for Republicans to defend him.Steele added: “If they present that as an argument, they’ll get laughed out of the out of the chamber. They would actually be lying. They would be presenting false evidence because they could make the allegation and, if I’m a senator, ‘Show me the proof. You mean to tell me you have proof that 60 courts and the supreme court didn’t have?’”A key figure in the trial will be Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor who, despite being a relatively new member of the House, has risen to prominence as lead impeachment manager. His 25-year-old son, Tommy, a Harvard law student who struggled with depression, took his own life on New Year’s Eve. Raskin told CNN last month: “I’m not going to lose my son at the end of 2020 and lose my country and my republic in 2021.”Raskin requested that Trump, now living at his luxury estate in Florida, testify under oath at the trial but the ex-president’s lawyers, Bruce Castor and David Schoen, rejected the idea as a “public relations stunt”. It remains unclear whether the prosecutors will be able to call other witnesses, such as police officers still recovering from serious injuries.Impeachment is inescapably a political process and the fact that Leahy, a Democrat, is presiding rather than the neutral chief justice is only like the fuel the partisan fires among senators who always have an eye on the next election.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “The key audience for this trial, if it exists, is suburban voters. They defected from the Republicans at the presidential level and defected from them in Georgia at the Senate level in the runoff.“If the Democrats can gain with suburban voters by tying the incumbent Republican senators to Donald Trump for the next two years, it helps them keep the Senate and that’s the whole reason this trial is happening.”Schiller added: “You can see why the House impeached Donald Trump: a, he was still in office and b, it was to safeguard the country against any abuses of power that he might commit in the 10 days between impeachment and January 20. [But] It’s very hard to make the argument that this trial is meaningful.” More

  • in

    American Kompromat review: Trump, Russia, Epstein … and a lot we just don't know

    Craig Unger’s new book has already made headlines, in this newspaper and elsewhere, because of a charge from an ex-KGB colonel, Yuri Shvets, that Donald Trump has been a KGB asset for 40 years.But as Unger himself points out, former CIA director Michael Morell has called Trump an “unwitting agent” of the Russians; former national security director James Clapper has described him “in effect … an intelligence asset”; and former CIA director John Brennan has said Trump is “wholly in the pocket of Putin”. So Shvets’ accusation isn’t really very surprising.Many other Trump-Russia books have dated Trump’s initial contact with the Russians to a visit to Trump Tower by then Soviet ambassador to the United Nations Yuri Dubinin, in 1986. Unger – through Shvets – reports that the association actually began six years earlier when Trump purchased 200 television sets from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue. According to Shvets, Kislin was actually a spotter agent for the KGB. Kislin denies any connection.In any case, the meaning of this transaction – like scores of anecdotes recorded in these pages – is never fully explained. The subtitle of Unger’s book is How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power and Treachery – a rubric that enables the author to throw in almost every bit of unconfirmed gossip ever published about everyone from convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to former British press magnate Robert Maxwell. And Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine, who was – or wasn’t, depending on which page of this book you’re on – Epstein’s girlfriend as well as allegedly his collaborator in recruiting underage girls to sate Epstein’s seemingly unquenchable sexual appetite.As well as being a publisher, according to Unger, Maxwell was extremely close to the Israeli secret service, Mossad, and the KGB. And perhaps Mossad was actually responsible for killing Maxwell, whose drowning off his yacht was officially ruled an accident.Unger’s sourcing for this is typical of the book. He writes: “According to the Sunday Age, in Melbourne, Australia, on 2 November 1991 … an unnamed source close to the Israeli cabinet told Hersh that Maxwell would soon be eliminated. The author did not know how seriously to take the threat. Three days later, Robert Maxwell went missing …”Hersh is Seymour Hersh, probably the most famous investigative journalist of his generation, but in the copious source notes of Unger’s book there is no indication Unger ever contacted Hersh to confirm this Australian bulletin. Since Hersh is in the phone book, and he actually answers his own phone, I found it quite easy to reach him.Did he remember being contacted “by a source close to the Israeli cabinet” who told him Maxwell was about to be knocked off?“I have absolutely no memory of getting such a tip,” Hersh told me. “And I must note that most people, so I gather, who want to kill prominent others do not usually discuss such in advance.”And so it goes throughout Unger’s book: dozens and dozens of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all “too good to check”, in the parlance of old-time journalists.This is particularly true of the lengthy section about Epstein, who is here because he had the largest collection of kompromat of anyone in history. Or did he?Unger writes that it was “widely known” that Epstein “was making tapes of grave sexual crimes”. But Unger has never seen any of the tapes, or found any reliable witness who says that he has.: “The people who knew weren’t talking,” Unger writes. “There was speculation that it was used to facilitate deals with Wall Street power brokers and to cement the loyalty of various actors in the drama, be they high-powered lawyers, heads of state, royalty, billionaires, media moguls, or operatives in any intelligence service.”On page 186, we are treated to a barrage of bold-faced names from Epstein’s notorious black book – everyone from Deepak Chopra, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson to Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth and Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud. And that sounds very exciting – until you get to page 195, when Unger admits that “being on Epstein’s contact list meant nothing in and of itself. It’s far more indicative of the power brokers he and Ghislaine were cultivating than whether they actually had knowledge of or participated in Epstein’s nefarious activities.”Unger is much more interesting in a long section about Opus Dei, the secret Catholic society with origins in fascist Spain which the lawyer and Columbia lecturer Scott Horton describes as “the most effective secret society in American history, especially when it comes to changing the nature of the judiciary and filling vacancies with people who are their picks”.There is also the remarkable story of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, the most successful Soviet double agent of modern times, who belonged to Opus Dei and whose brother-in-law, John Paul Wauck, got a job writing speeches for then acting attorney general William Barr in 1991. At that moment, Unger writes, Barr was overseeing “the greatest mole hunt in FBI history, yet presumably [was] unaware that the mastermind spy they were hunting was his own speech writer’s brother-in-law, and that all three of them were closely tied to Opus Dei”.Details like that keep you turning the pages. But Unger’s willingness to include almost anything to titillate makes this book wildly uneven, and ultimately unsatisfactory. More

  • in

    Congress is 'better poised than ever' to pass paid family leave bill, lawmakers say

    Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has said US Congress is in a “unique moment” and “better poised than ever” to pass a paid family and medical leave bill that would make the benefit permanently accessible to all American workers for the first time, as she and congresswoman Rosa DeLauro reintroduced the legislation on Friday.Currently, the US is the only industrialised nation in the world not to have a national paid family and medical leave policy.The two Democrats first introduced the Family Act in 2013 and in every Congress since then, but it has so far failed to gain sufficient support to become law. Now, however, following the pandemic and the change of administration, they believe the momentum is finally with them and paid leave could soon become a permanent reality for American workers.“I see this as a unique moment in time … Not only is paid leave understood, it’s something supported by the majority of Americans – Democrats and Republicans,” Gillibrand said in a video press conference.So far the legislation, which they reintroduced on Friday, has the support of more than 230 members of Congress. It would entitle every worker, regardless of company size and including those who are self-employed or work part-time, to up to 12 weeks of partial income – including for their own health conditions, pregnancy, birth or adoption, or to care for a child, parent or spouse.Nearly 80% of US workers – a disproportionate share of whom are women and people of colour – do not have access to paid leave through their employer, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF).“This first introduction has more co-sponsors in the Senate and the House than we’ve ever had, so we are better poised than ever before to actually pass this bill,” Gillibrand said. “It’s something that Joe Biden believes in, Kamala Harris believes in, I have the support of the entire Senate leadership.”Following the pandemic, an emergency paid leave scheme was introduced last year as part of the Cares Act. Biden has since pledged to expand and extend it as part of the $1.9tn Covid-19 relief package that is making its way through Congress.Gillibrand said it was a good “first step”, but next they want to see paid leave become permanent. When asked about a timeline for getting it passed, the senator said: “We want to get the pandemic paid leave in this next Covid bill and then we want to get the permanent paid leave in whatever the next budget funding spending bill that exists.”She said they are “open to every legislative avenue”, adding: “We are ready and waiting to work collaboratively with all our colleagues.”DeLauro said they met with Biden, Harris and White House staff on Friday morning and talked about how they would get the bill passed.“We’re going to work it out so that it happens and we’ve got the support of the administration on making sure we can get it across that finishing line,” she added.Gillibrand said being able to address Biden and Harris directly is “exactly what is making this moment ripe for success”.They said the pandemic – and the emergency leave – has helped the issue gain traction as more members of Congress, across the political spectrum, realise how critically it is needed.Gillibrand said: “Getting it in the Covid relief bill, even in a pandemic form, is extremely valuable because it lays the groundwork for a permanent paid leave.”DeLauro added: “If there’s anything that this pandemic has done is to shine a light on the inequities that are out there, making paid family leave more important than ever …“Several years ago this was at the fringe, it was not discussed. Today, paid family and medical leave is at the centre of the discourse with every opportunity to see it become a reality.”Joycelyn Tate, senior policy adviser at Black Women’s Roundtable, said paid leave is a critical issue for many Black women.“Many Black women are working in these frontline jobs like home healthcare aids, grocery store workers, janitorial service workers and delivery drivers and they do not earn a single day of paid leave,” she said. “Now this forces Black women to make the agonising choice between our health and the health of our families, or our economic security if we or our family members get sick.”Debra Ness, president of the NPWF, said “the time is now” to take action.“The time is now to pass an inclusive paid family and medical leave policy so workers no longer have to make the impossible choice between caring for themselves or a loved one and their financial security.” More

  • in

    Who is the Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene?

    Awaiting punishment for her lengthy history of extreme and violent commentary on Thursday, Marjorie Taylor Greene rose to introduce herself to the Congress. Wearing a mask embroidered with the words “FREE SPEECH”, the freshman congresswoman from Georgia regretted that she had not yet had a chance to tell her House colleagues “who I am and what I’m about”.Over the next eight minutes, Greene sought to untangle herself from the litany of dangerous and unfounded conspiracy theories that she had peddled on social media in recent years – “words of the past” that did not represent her.Greene renounced her embrace of QAnon, an ideology the FBI has called a potential domestic terrorism threat. She said school shootings in Parkland and Sandy Hook were “absolutely real”, and not so-called “false flag” events designed to build support for gun control laws, as she once suggested. “I also want to tell you 9/11 absolutely happened,” she declared, somewhat sheepishly, after previously questioning whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon.Despite a show of contrition, however, she offered no explicit apology. Instead, a defiant Greene warned that those seeking to “condemn me and crucify me in the public square for words that I said and I regret” were wading into dangerous political territory that would haunt them should Republicans reclaim the majority.She remained in the chamber for the debate, as her colleagues litigated her past – and sought to tie it to her party’s future.“The party of Lincoln, the party of Eisenhower, the party of Reagan is becoming the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the party of violent conspiracy theories,” the House rules committee chairman, Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a floor speech.Hours later, the House rendered its verdict, stripping Greene of her committee assignments in an extraordinary rebuke of the first-term lawmaker who Donald Trump once praised as a “future Republican star”.Yet Greene’s exile – over the objection of all but 11 House Republicans – has only exacerbated the growing chasm within the party, between an emboldened extremist movement that flourished under Trump’s presidency and an increasingly isolated group of conservatives who want to move beyond the divide-and-conquer politics of the last four years.As pressure built on Republicans to discipline Greene, Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, called her “looney lies” a “cancer” to the party and the nation. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, also condemned Greene’s statements, but ultimately declined to take any punitive action, arguing that she should not be punished for remarks made before she was elected.In those social media posts and videos, only some of which she disavowed and many of which came to light before she was elected, Greene indicated support for executing top Democrats, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi; claimed that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in government; and compared Black Lives Matter activists to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.She also trafficked in a slew of conspiracy theories, many of which are rooted in antisemitism, Islamophobia and white nationalism. Most notably, she embraced QAnon, a conspiracy that claims Trump is trying to save the world from a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. In posts unearthed recently, Greene wrote in 2018 that a devastating California wildfire was caused by a Jewish-controlled “laser” beamed from space.fIn another video, she accosts the gun-control activist David Hogg, who survived the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, as he walked down a street in Washington. He was there to lobby lawmakers in support of passing gun safety measures, while she was there to oppose them. “He’s a coward,” she said of Hogg.Greene represents an ascending far-right movement within the Republican ranks that carries the banner of Trump’s grievance politics – and the support of his loyal supporters who are now critical to the party’s future.“We’re thankful for her,” said Dianne Putnam, chair of the Whitfield county Republican party, which is situated in Greene’s district. “We’ve been waiting to have a congressman [sic] that would take a stand for conservative causes and be a voice for us that we felt we’ve never had.”In her telling, Greene was not particularly political before 2016, when she was galvanized by the billionaire’s “plain talk”. She became increasingly political – and radical.In 2017, disenchanted with mainstream news coverage of Trump’s presidency, she turned to online message boards where she discovered QAnon, at the time a fringe internet subculture. She began writing for a now defunct conspiracy blog called American Truth Seekers, publishing articles that expressed support for QAnon and other outrageous theories, among them that Hillary Clinton was behind John F Kennedy Jr’s 1999 death in an airplane crash.Greene told the House on Thursday that she “walked away” from QAnon in 2018 after discovering “misinformation, lies, things that were not true”. But as recently as late last year, she spoke openly and favorably of the movement.In 2019, Greene decided to run for Congress. She initially launched a campaign in the district where she lived, a competitive seat in suburban Atlanta held by the Democratic congresswoman Lucy McBath. But when the Republican congressman Tom Graves announced his retirement, she switched to run in Georgia’s 14th congressional district, a deep-red corner of the state that borders Tennessee to the north and Alabama to the west.Running on a “pro-Life, pro-Gun, pro-Trump” platform, the political novice cast herself as a deeply Christian mother of three who was the first in her family to graduate from college. She touted her success as a businesswoman, running a commercial construction company founded by her father, and later, a CrossFit gym.After placing first in a crowded primary field, Greene advanced to a runoff against John Cowan, a neurosurgeon who pitched himself as equally conservative and pro-Trump minus the “circus act”. “She is not conservative – she’s crazy,” he told Politico ahead of the election, adding: “She deserves a YouTube channel, not a seat in Congress.”Though her messaging raised concern among some national Republicans, there was never a concerted strategy to defeat her. A handful of party leaders and conservative groups intervened to endorse Cowan, but many remained neutral. She earned crucial support from the members of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, including Jim Jordan, the group’s founder, and Andy Biggs, its chairman.Greene won the runoff with nearly 60% of the vote, and coasted to victory in November.Since her arrival in Congress, she has continued to build on her brand as a far-right provocateur. Sporting masks that said “Stop the Steal”, Greene was a vocal proponent of the baseless claim that Trump won the presidential election, and was among a handful of conservatives who met with him at the White House to discuss overturning the election results.Greene referred to 6 January, the day Congress was set to formalize the election results, as Republicans’ “1776 moment” before a rally to defend the president turned into a deadly riot on Capitol Hill. Even after the assault, she continued to claim Trump would remain in office and decried his impeachment. Days later, she announced that she would file articles of impeachment against Joe Biden – before he was even sworn into office.Far from being a fringe figure, Greene represents the “tip of the spear” of a radical movement that is building power within the Republican party, said Adele Stan, director of Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way.In Congress, she is joined by Lauren Boebert, a freshman Republican from Colorado who has also expressed support for QAnon conspiracy theories. Across the country, local parties and elected officials are rushing to embrace – rather than confront – the swirl of toxic conspiracy theories and disinformation coursing through their grassroots.By failing to unilaterally punish Greene, Stan said Republicans were giving “passive affirmation” to the ideology promulgated by the web of far-right and white nationalist groups who organized and led the deadly siege at the Capitol on 6 January.“If you don’t hold people accountable, then things will continue to spiral out of control, which is what we’re seeing happen in the Republican party right now – and why there was an insurrection at the Capitol,” she said. “People need to be held accountable for what they say.”Banished from her committees by House Democrats and 11 Republicans after just a month in Congress, Greene said she felt liberated. At a news conference on Friday, Greene said she would use her political sway and social-media savvy to grow the pro-Trump movement and push Republicans further to the right.“I woke up early this morning literally laughing thinking about what a bunch of morons the Democrats (+11) are for giving some one like me free time,” Greene wrote on Twitter. “Oh, this is going to be fun!” More

  • in

    Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki has embraced normalcy – is it working?

    The blue door at the side of the White House podium slid open. “Hi everyone!” exclaimed Jen Psaki with a congeniality seldom heard in the briefing room in recent years.The press secretary introduced Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, and stepped away from the podium only to hastily reach back for a face mask she had momentarily forgotten there. Warning reporters that their time with Sullivan was limited, she quipped: “I will be the bad cop as per usual over here.”“Bad cop” is one of Psaki’s trademark phrases, along with “circle back” and “I don’t have anything more for you”. All are now becoming familiar to cable news viewers at the restored daily White House press briefing. After four madcap years of Donald Trump, the sessions are disorientingly civil, fact-based and unnewsy. In a word, “normal”.“To actually hear questions and substantive answers is refreshing,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster. “It does feel like something from a different era.”Psaki is the most prominent public face of a Joe Biden administration that has pledged to restore order and trust with a press castigated by Trump as “the enemy of the people”. Its communications strategy has involved a blitz of speeches, briefings and policy documents, including thrice-weekly virtual sessions with experts on the coronavirus pandemic. Whereas Trump’s White House was a theatre of anarchic improvisation, Biden’s is a set where everyone sticks to the script.At Thursday’s press briefing, Sullivan previewed Biden’s announcement cutting off support for Saudi military operations in Yemen. Psaki wielding a giant briefing book, reeled off facts and figures about why the president’s $1.9tn Covid relief plan is essential. Then she took questions, starting with the Associated Press, another quietly revived tradition.For the dozen or so reporters – masked and physically distanced due to coronavirus precautions – sitting in the blue seats of the compact briefing room, the back and forth is crisper than in the Trump era. There is a sense of kinetic energy that was lacking when the president himself could be rambling and soporific and when his press secretaries aimed sound bites mostly at cable news and YouTube.But there is also a fast chess game taking place, with reporters moving pieces forward in search of a weakness and Psaki marshaling her defenses to dodge questions or avoid a headline-generating gaffe. And when the pressure mounts, she has a queen’s gambit.She told National Public Radio’s (NPR) humorous Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! program last weekend: “I have a little secret thing I do – maybe not secret because I’m telling all of you. But when reporters are getting really loud, or they’re starting to ask crazy questions, I just slow down my pace, and I talk very quietly, and I treat them like I’m an orderly sometimes in an insane asylum.”But it is not all smooth-sailing.There was a minor clean-up required this week when Psaki was asked about Trump’s much-mocked space force. The press secretary replied with more than a hint of sarcasm: “Wow. Space force. It’s the plane of today!” – a reference to a past question about the color scheme of Air Force One.Republicans demanded an apology with the Alabama congressman Mike Rogers fulminating: “It’s concerning to see the Biden administration’s press secretary blatantly diminish an entire branch of our military as the punchline of a joke.” Psaki did not say sorry but did feel compelled to tweet recognition of the space force’s “important work”.If the 42-year-old from Connecticut is a polished performer, it is because she has deep experience. She was a traveling press secretary for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, a state department spokesperson and, from 2015 to 2017, White House communications director. She was then a political commentator for CNN and a fellow at Georgetown University in Washington.Mike McCurry, a former White House press secretary under Bill Clinton, is an acquaintance who has offered Psaki occasional advice such as “keep a good sense of humour” and “don’t let it consume every bit of your life”.He said: “Two weeks in, she’s doing very well. She’s gives good, complete answers, She’s taken on some tough subjects. She knows how to kind of parry and thrust, as you have to do from the podium, and I think that the press appreciates it. There’s a requisite amount of spin that goes with the job to try to put things in a favorable light for the president but she doesn’t overdo that.”That could not be said for Psaki’s predecessor, Kayleigh McEnany, who pushed false conspiracy theories about a stolen election and ended each briefing with a tirade against the “fake news” media. Compared to such cartoon villains, as they were perceived by critics, the new team of professional bureaucrats were bound to enjoy a honeymoon period.Jen Psaki has become must-see TV. I think many people are glued to these press conferencesWendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “Jen Psaki has become must-see TV. I think many people are glued to these press conferences. They’re longer than they used to be and she’s very good at what she does and, to the extent that she answers questions as truthfully as she can, it’s like being in a rainstorm after a drought.”Communications strategy is an early case study in the question of whether Trump did change the presidency forever or the White House and other institutions are more resilient than often supposed and able to revert to Bush and Obama-era norms.Those norms were hardly flawless. All presidents lie, argued Adam Serwer in the Atlantic magazine, providing a list of examples from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama and concluding that Biden will inevitably lie too when the public interest conflicts with the political interest of the White House. Trump’s narcissistic mendacity was hardly a solution to the problems of political doublespeak, but a snap back to the previous norm of evasiveness and spin may not be it either.Where the Biden White House will also break from the immediate Trumpian past, Schiller predicted, is by giving a more prominent role to other officials. “Biden has explicitly chosen very experienced politicians for most of his key positions, people who have been in front of cameras before, people who know how to communicate for the most part. He will rely heavily on a lot of those cabinet secretaries to get out his message on particular policies and give them some autonomy and freedom to do that,” Schiller said.Trump, by contrast, was often said to be his own communications director, press secretary and all-round salesman. He tormented his staff by upending their message of the day with heat-of-the-moment tweets that announced firings, threatened wars and dominated news cycles. But even some detractors admitted that it provided a real-time window on the president’s thinking unlike anything seen before.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There’s no doubt that Donald Trump was a pioneer in the use of social media. He was able to drive the agenda in a way that few presidents have ever been able to do using Twitter.”Meanwhile Biden generated the headline on the Mashable website: “Joe Biden’s first @POTUS tweet is refreshingly boring.” Indeed, Biden’s conventional tweets lack the personal authenticity not only of Trump but of social media savvy politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Given the president’s history of gaffes, this may be no bad thing, Jacobs added.“With Biden there’s really no choice because he’s a guy who shares Trump’s problems with agenda control. Biden is only effective as a communicator as long as he’s being handed talking points. When he’s gone off script, it’s been a wild ride. He doesn’t have the communication skills of Trump and he is prone to seat-of-the-pants comments that are damaging.”The Biden communications team was spared potentially troubling distraction last month when Trump was banned from Twitter, effectively cutting his mic. Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, does not miss him. “We didn’t learn anything from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed except that the man was an egomaniacal, hypersensitive petulant child,” he said.“As president there is a way to use it that doesn’t come off like you’re sitting in your underwear at two in the morning tweeting manically because you just saw something online that that pissed you off.” More