World news

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Schumer promises quick but fair trial as Trump impeachment heads to Senate

      by

      Ex-president forms legal team before February hearingsBiden focuses on nominations and legislative prioritiesTrump plots revenge on Republicans who betrayed himThe single article of impeachment against Donald Trump will on Monday evening be delivered to the Senate, where Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer is promising a quick but fair trial. Related: Trump’s second impeachment trial: the key players Continue reading… More

    • 225 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden wants unity and democracy. But in the US these have always been in conflict | David Runciman

      by

      The three words that stood out in Joe Biden’s powerful inaugural address, if only for the number of times he used them, were “democracy”, “unity” and “truth”. But it was democracy that took centre stage. “This is democracy’s day,” he said, in his first statement after taking the oath of office. “The will of the people has been heard … Democracy has prevailed.”Is this apparent vindication of democracy enough for unity and truth to prevail as well? The founding fathers of the American republic, whose history and institutions Biden also repeatedly invoked, might have been surprised to hear him run the three together. They believed they were founding a state that was designed to keep democracy at arm’s length. James Madison, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers and a future president, stated that the American constitution he helped to write would mean “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share [in the government]”.The founders were as keen on unity and truth as Biden. But they thought too much democracy would put them at risk. They viewed the voting public as notoriously fractious and prone to believe all sorts of nonsense. The point of establishing a republic rather than a democracy was to ensure there were safeguards against populism in all its forms.Biden clearly meant something different by democracy than the people gone wild. He was invoking a different, and much later tradition, that sees democracy as defined by the peaceful transfer of power. In academic circles this is sometimes called the minimalist theory of democracy. It says that it is sufficient for democracy if incumbents, who control the armed forces, hand over that control to the people who defeat them at the ballot box. The guns change hands when the voters change sides.The trouble with this view is that it is so minimal, unity and truth are optional extras. There are many places around the world where democracy has failed even this test and defeated incumbents have refused to leave, leading to dictatorship or civil war. But when the test is passed it leaves unresolved most of the questions about how to do politics better.Coming just two weeks after an attempt to storm the Capitol and prevent the certification of the election result, Biden’s inauguration took place in the shadow of the most serious threat to this minimal definition of democracy in recent American history. The country had come dangerously close to failing the test. What Biden could also have said, but didn’t, was that the founders were in part to blame.The anger of Trump’s supporters was stoked by the institutions designed to keep the people away from the most important decisions. In strict majoritarian terms Biden won the election comfortably, by a national margin of more than 7 million votes. But the electoral college made it seem much closer, and allowed the defeated president to look for a few thousand votes here or there that might have made the difference. Millions of voters are much harder to conjure out of thin air.Trump’s resistance to democratic realities also rested its hopes on the other institutions of the republic that were meant to keep the people out. He believed that the supreme court, with three of his appointees on it, should save him. He looked to the Senate, which gives a disproportionate influence to sparsely populated rural states, to have his back. The fact that these hopes were misplaced – and the Senate may yet convict him in an impeachment trial – doesn’t mean that democracy was vindicated. The institutions that quelled popular resistance to the election result were the same ones that inflamed it.This suggests it is not enough for Biden to fall back on the long history of American democracy in making his case for what should come next. The peaceful transfer of power obscures the ways in which American democracy is at odds with the institutions that achieved it.There is a choice to be made here. Democracy could be enhanced – and institutions such as the electoral college and the Senate reformed to reflect current demography rather than ancient history. But that is likely to come at the cost of unity. Republicans would resist fiercely. Truth would probably suffer too, if only because we have learned that these days resistance tends to come as an assault on the facts. Any attempt to change the constitution would be challenged not just as unpatriotic, but probably as a foreign plot.The alternative is to stick with the status quo and hope it is enough to paper over the cracks. In that case, unity will have been prioritised over democracy. It is probably the easier path, and Biden may think he has better things to do than pick a fight on democratic institutional reform. Any bipartisan consensus is unlikely to survive changes that leave one party worse off in electoral terms. Enacting the people’s will can be a deeply divisive enterprise.One temptation – and Biden would hardly be the first president to succumb to it – is to use the word democracy as a catch-all while avoiding these difficult choices. In the short term, it might enable him to concentrate on tackling the immediate challenges the country faces, from the pandemic to the economy. But it also means that frustration with political elites will continue to build.Invoking the will of the people while relying on institutions that are designed to stifle it is not a recipe for long-term stability. Yet doing anything about it risks the unity for which Biden stands. He is treating democracy as though it were a panacea, when in truth it is always a fight.On the day of Biden’s inauguration the people were indeed excluded, but not in the way the founders had intended. Instead, because of the threat from extremists, the crowds were kept away and replaced by military personnel around the podium and flags down the Mall. It was in keeping with an occasion that paid lip service to an idea whose reality is much more contentious.The peaceful transfer of power, particularly achieved at such a high price, is only the bare minimum of what needs to be done for democracy to prevail. The rest is much less certain and comes with many risks.It was the riskiness of democracy that made the founders nervous, but that is its point: the dynamism of people’s politics has always gone with a dangerous unpredictability. But there are other risks too. Keeping democracy at bay for the sake of unity does not guarantee a peaceful life. The danger is that it comes to seem less like democracy fulfilled, and more like democracy endlessly deferred.• David Runciman is professor of politics at Cambridge University More

    • 200 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Jon Bon Jovi on wealth, love and his ugly tussle with Trump: 'It was seriously scarring'

      by

      Jon Bon Jovi is singing Livin’ on a Prayer to me. No, this is not another crazy lockdown dream; it is actually happening.“Tommy used to work on the docks …” he begins, strumming a guitar he produces out of nowhere, his still impressive bouffant (“I’m the only man in my field brave enough to let it go grey!”) bouncing in time to the music.I later look up how much it would cost to hire Bon Jovi for a private party. “More than $1m” is the best estimate. All I did was ask if he was tired of being asked about his 1986 megahit. The answer, apparently, is no.“Union’s been on strike, he’s down on his luck …” he continues.Going from the zero of lockdown to the zillion miles an hour of a Bon Jovi private performance is a helluva ride and I tell him I might pass out. He laughs the laugh of a man who is neither unaccustomed nor averse to female adoration.“That song, God bless it. But my God, who knew? Not us, I can assure you. It was created on a day when none of us had any ideas, we just had a conversation and it came out of that. I’m sure happy my name’s on it!” Bon Jovi grins.So he didn’t know it was a hit when he wrote it?“Not at all. I remember walking out of the room with Richie [Sambora, his band’s second most famous but now former member] and I said: ‘Eh, it’s OK. Maybe we should just put it on a movie soundtrack.’ Richie looked at me and said: ‘You’re an idiot – it’s really good.’ I said: ‘I just don’t know where it’s going.’ But it didn’t have that boom boom boom bassline yet, so it sounded more like the Clash.”Did it buy him a house?Bon Jovi looks at me as if I had asked about the woods-based habits of bears.“It bought a lot of people houses,” he says.Bon Jovi, 58, is talking to me on Zoom from his house in New Jersey. “I am the crown prince of New Jersey,” he declares, which is probably true – he named one of his biggest-selling albums after the state and has stayed firmly loyal to his home turf. (Although I think we both know that if Bon Jovi is the prince of New Jersey, its king is Bruce Springsteen.) From the tiny amount I can see, his house looks lovely – wood-panelled walls and not over-flashy. “My life is much more normal than one would imagine,” says the sixth wealthiest rock star in the world, sandwiched on that list between Sting and Elton John. “There are no platinum records hanging anywhere in my house. The trappings of rock stardom were never a part of my home.” He and his wife of 31 years, Dorothea, have four kids: Stephanie, 27, Jesse, 25, Jacob, 18 and Romeo, 16, and for a long time, he says, “my younger kids weren’t quite sure what I do”.We are talking today because the latest single, Story of Love, from his album 2020, is about to be released in the UK. Anyone whose image of Bon Jovi is still locked in the Livin’ on a Prayer era – the big guitars, the bigger hair – will be somewhat taken aback by 2020. It is a thoughtful look at the past year, addressing gun control (Lower the Flag), the coronavirus crisis (Do What You Can) and the Black Lives Matter movement (the disarmingly beautiful American Reckoning). Perhaps you are thinking that you don’t especially need Jon Bon Jovi’s thoughts on BLM, but reason not the need: as he has done throughout his near 40-year career, he offers solid music and heartfelt lyrics, and, really, hats off to the man for engaging with the moment because Lord knows he doesn’t need to do anything at all any more. When lockdown hit, instead of running off to a house on the beach, Bon Jovi washed dishes every day in JBJ Soul Kitchen, one of the two community kitchens he set up near his home, where meals are provided through donations or volunteering. As celebrity efforts go, that probably beats posting a video of yourself singing Imagine.But just singing about the human cost of the US’s gun laws will count to many as taking a side. Does he worry about alienating any of his fans? “There are men on my stage who see things differently, but I don’t let our differences come between us. I never wanted to become a captive to the stage. How I live my life’s up to me,” he says.When we first speak, Bon Jovi is 48 hours from performing in a televised celebration for Joe Biden’s inauguration. This is his second inaugural event, after singing for Obama in 2009. Bon Jovi first started palling around with politicians when “a governor by the name of Bill Clinton” contacted him in the early 90s, and he has been actively involved since. “If Al [Gore] had got in I’d have been secretary for entertainment,” he jokes. In 2015 he allowed the Republican and then New Jersey governor Chris Christie to use his music in his presidential campaign. Springsteen has repeatedly rebuffed requests from Christie, a superfan, to play at his events. Does he disapprove of Springsteen’s refusal to reach across the aisle?“I don’t know how Bruce has treated Chris, so I can’t comment on that. But I would be a hypocrite if I told you I write songs that claim to be a witness to history, and then don’t listen [to the other side],” he says.Would he let Donald Trump use his music?He recoils as if physically attacked. “No! No no no! On every issue we wholeheartedly disagree, from how he handled the Covid crisis to immigration to the Paris accord – everything! No! No!”Bon Jovi and Trump have an extremely weird history. Back in 2014, the singer, along with some Canadian investors, tried to buy the NFL team the Buffalo Bills, outbidding Trump. But there was suddenly strong anti-Bon Jovi feeling in Buffalo, NY, with “Bon Jovi-free” zones and negative graffiti, stemming from the rumour that he and his partners would move the team out of the city. Bon Jovi fiercely denied that, but the Bills ultimately went to a third bidder and that was the end of that – until three years ago, when it emerged, inevitably, that the anti-Bon Jovi campaign had been started by Michael Caputo, a political strategist, who had been hired by Trump.“I was really shocked at the depths [Trump] went to. He wasn’t even qualified to buy the team, because you have to submit your tax returns, and he never filed the paperwork. Instead, he did this dark shadow assassination thing, hoping to buy the team at a bargain basement price. But I just couldn’t understand how this misinformation was being put out there. It was seriously scarring,” Bon Jovi says, eyes wide.After Trump failed to get the team, he stomped off and ran for president. Maybe you should have just given him the team, I say.“Yeah, for the sake of the world, he definitely should have got the team. Oh well,” he chuckles.Caputo later worked for Trump when he was president and was questioned as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. It was reported last September that Caputo had orchestrated a pressure campaign for official reports into the Covid crisis to be altered to be more flattering to Trump.“I guess we lived a page of Trump’s playbook in Buffalo,” says Bon Jovi.How did it feel to see his nemesis become president only two years after the battle in Buffalo?He hesitates. “Well, like all Americans, I have to support the office of the president – look how political I’m sounding! I’m trying to stop myself from bullshitting. The truth is, I was really disappointed.”Often in interviews Bon Jovi can sound a little monotone and bored, talking about the same things he has been talking about for decades. But today he is strikingly engaged and I ask if that’s because we’re mainly talking about politics rather than music.“Ha! Well, everyone’s an armchair quarterback when talking about politics,” he says.So he’s not thinking of pivoting to politics, spending his days arguing with Republicans such as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell?“Or Chuck Schumer,” he adds, naming the Democrat leader in the Senate for balance. “It’s a shit existence – selling yourself and your soul. Hell no.”John Bongiovi Jr was born and raised in New Jersey, the son of two former marines. He started making music as a kid and wrote Runaway, which would be his first hit, when he was 19. By 21 he had a record deal and a band, of which he was the name, the face and the boss (“More like a benevolent dictator,” he insists). Initially they were marketed as a hard rock band. They certainly looked the part – big hair, tight trousers – but Bon Jovi had a different plan.“I said: ‘I want a tour with the Cars and Bryan Adams and all these pop groups,’ and my manager said: ‘No. You’re going to learn how to play with Judas Priest and Kiss and the Scorpions. Those audiences are loyal; pop audiences are fickle,’” he says. So they were packed off to open for Judas Priest, “a heavy metal band I’d never listened to,” Bon Jovi says. They won over audiences but he must have cut an unusual figure backstage: unlike pretty much everyone else on the 1980s hard rock scene, Bon Jovi never suffered from substance abuse issues. This has obviously worked in his favour: even aside from his unusual, maybe even unique career and marital stability, Bon Jovi at 58 looks like a man who spent his youth on yoga retreats as opposed to hanging out with Aerosmith. But how did he resist when he was so young?“To be honest with you, I didn’t have the capacity to handle drugs. I didn’t find joy in it, and I didn’t need to bury myself emotionally, so what was the purpose?”Was that because he had a reasonably stable childhood?“Mine was as fucked up as anyone else’s, but not enough to start using drugs. I saw a lot of friends die or there was havoc in their personal lives, but I just didn’t have the need or desire,” he says.When the band made their third album, Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi was “so over” being marketed as something he wasn’t that he took back control and worked on telling stories. The music was still rock, but the lyrics were about Tommy and the docks. The public loved it, and Slippery When Wet sold gazillions, its singles You Give Love a Bad Name, Wanted Dead or Alive, Never Say Goodbye and, of course, Livin’ on a Prayer becoming the inescapable soundtrack of the mid-80s. This was followed by New Jersey (Bad Medicine, I’ll Be There for You, Lay Your Hands on Me), and then the shift to the 90s, when Bon Jovi cut his hair and softened the rock a little (Keep the Faith, These Days) and became increasingly known for his ballads (In These Arms, Always). He sold more than 100m albums, at which point he moved into acting, which he was unexpectedly good at, in Moonlight and Valentino (hunky painter), Ally McBeal (hunky plumber) and Sex and the City (hunky photographer). Did he mind being the rent-a-hunk?“Hell no – I never went to the Shakespeare Company!” he laughs. “Nobody had been able to do both [music and acting]: Madonna, Sting, Phil Collins – you tried and failed. I was so anxious to get work I said: ‘I will do the small role, the hunk, just to get enough of a résumé.’”Yet he hardly needed the money. He talks about wanting to learn “humility” and (of course) “loving the craft”, all of which sounds like a euphemism for just needing a change. Producers told him that if he quit making music they would give him bigger parts but Hollywood’s appeal had already waned.“I got the house in Malibu, saw the guys who are looking over your shoulder to see if they should go talk to someone else. That whole lifestyle was so vapid to me. I couldn’t wait to get away from it,” he says.Critics sneer that Bon Jovi – the band and the man – have become too corporate, too cheesy. This isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s missing the point about why Bon Jovi – the man – is such an enduring phenomenon. He has always been a control freak, over himself and his band, as he admitted in his 2000 hit It’s My Life, and he knows what’s needed for his band to survive. His very un-rockstar-like stability has helped. He married his high school sweetheart, and has been with her more than 40 years. “She sat down next to me in history class, and that was it,” he says. His bandmates Tico Torres and David Bryan have also been with him since the beginning. Disruptions to plans upset him inordinately: he says the Buffalo debacle took him five years to get over. The departure of Sambora in 2013 upset him so much that he said he was plunged into “a dark place” for three years. Are he and Sambora in touch now?“No. He chose to do what he did, but my heartbreak is I personally loved having him in the band – I loved my band. But there was not a chance in the world that we would discontinue because of his inability to go on,” he says, the sensitivity still audible.At Bon Jovi’s suggestion, we talk again two days later after the inauguration. To many people’s surprise, instead of relying on the band’s back catalogue, he performed the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun. “I never felt like I needed to sing a song more. It was cathartic,” he says. Initially I missed the usual Bon Jovi bombast, but as the sun rose behind him as he sang, there was no denying that the man knows what works in the moment. But the recording of my private performance of Livin’ on a Prayer? That will last for ever.Bon Jovi’s album 2020 is out now. The new single, Story of Love, will be released on Friday 29 January. Visit bonjovi.com. More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      'I like Ivanka': Marco Rubio sweats over rumoured Trump Senate challenge

      by

      The last time Marco Rubio looked this uncomfortable in the national spotlight, he was stuck on robotic repeat in a Republican debate, being pummelled by Chris Christie.Or maybe it was when he lunged for a bottle of water as he sweated his way through a response to Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, back in 2013.Either way, on Sunday morning Florida’s senior Republican senator squirmed again as he was grilled on the possibility of a primary challenge by Ivanka Trump, the ex-president’s oldest daughter, in 2022.“How seriously do you take Ivanka Trump as a potential opponent?” Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked, citing speculation over the former “first daughter’s” personal political ambitions following her purchase of property in Miami with her husband, Jared Kushner.“Well, I, I, I don’t really get into the parlour games of Washington,” Rubio replied, clearly wishing his potential challenger was called anything other than Trump.“When you decide to run for re-election in a state like Florida, you have to be prepared for a competitive race, you run it like a competitive race, so that’s what I’m preparing to run, a very competitive race against a tough opponent.“I don’t own the Senate seat, it doesn’t belong to me. If I want to be back in the US Senate I have to earn that every six years.”Wallace pressed on, attempting to get the floundering Rubio, who has something of a love-hate relationship with Donald Trump, to at least acknowledge the name of his possible challenger.“I like Ivanka, and we worked very well together on issues, and she’s a US…” Rubio said, trailing off then pivoting swiftly to a list of his perceived successes “for the people of Florida” since he was elected in 2010.The interview ended soon after, a relieved Rubio able to avoid any further reference to his new Miami neighbour.Scholars of Rubio’s previous encounters with Ivanka Trump will have noted this was far from his first moment of awkwardness. In June 2017 he was photographed trying and failing to give her a hug in Washington, the image inevitably going viral.Rubio tried to make light of that episode, promising a full investigation by the Senate intelligence committee into why it was “blowing up Twitter”.In 2016, Rubio ran for the Republican presidential nomination ultimately won by Donald Trump. The senator squared up to the property developer, evidently unfamiliar with the old political saw, variously and wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain or George Bernard Shaw, about why it is never a good idea to wrestle with a pig.You both get dirty, the saying goes, but the pig likes it. Rubio and Trump ended up exchanging insults about the size of their genitals.Rubio’s last robust primary was an all-round chastening experience. Not only did he fail to make much of a mark but during a campaign event in Iowa, the senator also beaned a small child with a football. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump plots revenge on Republicans who betrayed him as Senate trial looms

      by

      Republican divisions over Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial came into clearer focus on Sunday, as the former president spent his first weekend out of office plotting revenge against those he says betrayed him.Stewing over election defeat by Joe Biden, four days after leaving the White House, Trump continued to drop hints of creating a new party, a threat some see as a gambit to keep wavering senators in line ahead of the opening of his trial, in the week after 8 February.Democrats will send the single article of impeachment to the Senate for a reading on Monday evening. It alleges incitement of insurrection, regarding the 6 January riot at the US Capitol that left five dead, including a police officer.Trump spent the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, splitting rounds of golf with discussions about maintaining relevance and influence and how to unseat Republicans deemed to have crossed him, the Washington Post reported.Trump, the Post said, has said the threat of starting a Maga (Make America Great Again) or Patriot party, gives him leverage to prevent senators voting to convict, which could lead to him being prevented from seeking office again.We already have a flaming fire in this country and it’s like taking gasoline and pouring it on top of the fireThose in his crosshairs include Liz Cheney, the No3 House Republican, Georgia governor Brian Kemp and others who declined to embrace false claims of election fraud or accused him of inciting the Capitol riot.Other senior Republicans clashed on Sunday over Trump’s trial and the party’s future. Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, former presidential candidate and fierce Trump critic who was the only Republican to vote for impeachment at his first trial last year, said the former president had exhibited a “continuous pattern” of trying to corrupt elections.“He fired up a crowd, encouraging them to march on the Capitol at the time that the Congress was carrying out its constitutional responsibility to certify the election,” Romney told CNN’s State of the Union. “These allegations are very serious. They haven’t been defended yet by the president. He deserves a chance to have that heard but it’s important for us to go through the normal justice process and for there to be resolution.”Romney said it was constitutional to hold a trial for a president who has left office.“I believe that what is being alleged and what we saw, which is incitement to insurrection, is an impeachable offence. If not, what is?”Romney, however, said he did not support action against Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, senators who supported Trump’s claims of a rigged election and objected to results.“I think history will provide a measure of judgment with regard to those that continue to spread the lie that the [former] president began with, as well as the voters in our respective communities,” he said. “I don’t think the Senate needs to take action.”Other Republicans, including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, are expected to vote to convict. But the party is deeply fractured. For a conviction, 17 Republicans would need to vote with the 50 Democrats. It is unclear if that number can be reached, despite assertions from minority leader Mitch McConnell that the mob “was fed lies” by Trump.Marco Rubio of Florida said he thought the trial was “stupid and counterproductive”.“We already have a flaming fire in this country and it’s like taking a bunch of gasoline and pouring it on top of the fire,” he told Fox News Sunday.“I look back in time, for example Richard Nixon, who had clearly committed crimes and wrongdoing. In hindsight I think we would all agree that President Ford’s pardon was important for the country to be able to move forward. I think this is going to be really bad for the country, it’s just going to stir it up even more and make it even harder to get things done.”John Cornyn of Texas, meanwhile, threatened retaliation.“If it is a good idea to impeach and try former presidents, what about former Democratic presidents when Republicans get the majority in 2022?” he tweeted. “Think about it and let’s do what is best for the country.”Mike Rounds, of South Dakota, said he believed the impeachment was unconstitutional, telling NBC’s Meet the Press: “[The US constitution] specifically pointed out that you can impeach the president and it does not indicate that you can impeach someone who is not in office. So I think it’s a moot point.“But for right now there are other things we’d rather be working on. The Biden administration would love more of their cabinet in place and there’s a number of Republicans that feel the same way. We should allow this president the opportunity to form his cabinet and get that in place as quickly as possible.”Republican unity appears increasingly rare. On Saturday, the Arizona Republican party voted to censure Cindy McCain, the widow of the former senator and presidential candidate John McCain, and two other prominent party members who have crossed Trump.The actions drew swift praise from the former president, who backed Kelli Ward, the firebrand state party chair who was the architect of the censure, and who recently won a narrow re-election.Trump, the Post reported, called Ward to offer his “complete and total endorsement”. More

    • 238 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Biden's talk of 'healing' is pointless, and will be seen as weakness by the right | Nesrine Malik

      by

      Normal. The United States is returning to normal. During Joe Biden’s inauguration, the commentary was overwhelmingly about a country slowly regaining consciousness, blinking away the bad dream that was Donald Trump. That state of normal was one of not just reinstating all the protocols and rituals of high office, but of the pastoral hand of the president. Biden will now “heal” the nation and rebuild America’s standing in the world. “Civility” will cleanse the US of the previous administration’s toxicity.But against the backdrop of the past four years in general and the previous two weeks in particular, the ceremonials all felt a bit flat, like trying to burn incense to banish the smell of a rotting corpse. Trump may be gone as president, but the morbidities he exposed remain. They hang heavily in the air: the 74 million people who voted for him despite four years of lies and carnage; the proportion of voters who still think the election was stolen; the ongoing round-up of those who stormed the Capitol; the hundreds of thousands of lives claimed by coronavirus.None of this was wrought by Trump’s hand alone. None of this could have happened without a pre-existing political culture, the “normal” to which the country now yearns to return. But every significant historical moment needs a narrative, and this was it: Trump had wounded a previously healthy America, divided it and lowered its tone, and Biden would now lay his healing hands on it with the help of a diverse coalition of grownups.In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson likens the US to an old house, flawed in foundation, wrecked by age, weakened by cosmetic changes that never address the structural flaws. “You may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought,” she writes. “Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”The speed with which Trump’s presidency sent the US into a vortex of racial and social discord is the first clue that the old house was built on shaky foundations. These forces cannot be summoned overnight. They were gnawing away at the core of the country long before Trump became president. They are, in fact, why Trump became president. In describing the effects of Covid-19 on those with even mild pre-existing conditions, a doctor told me that the virus is a “mortality accelerant”. It takes the thing that might have claimed you in 20 or 30 years, and weakens your body so that it claims you today.So let us look at the “normal” that Trump disrupted. Before he took office, the US was a country in which, since 9/11, far-right extremists have been responsible for almost three times as many attacks as Islamic terrorists. The year 2019 ended up being the deadliest on record for domestic terrorism in the US since then. Before Trump, while the country’s first African American president was in power, the Black Lives Matter movement was founded in protest at the impunity of those who kill black Americans. And despite the widely accepted fiction that Trump’s popularity was a white working-class revolt, he won against Hillary Clinton among high-income white voters, who went on to benefit from a tax-cut windfall.In a country already riven by economic and class inequality, Trump proved how easily such divisions could be exploited to benefit rightwingers promising economic prosperity for some at the cost of the rest. It may seem that, after four long years of disruption, what is needed is a quiet spell of stability. But what this moment signifies is not a retreat by the forces that Trump has brought to the surface, but a temporary scattering before they regroup (in “some form”, as Trump himself said).To talk about normality, civility, reaching across the divide and healing at a time like this, when millions have rejected that offering at the polls and hundreds marched on the Capitol, is pointless. For the duly elected Democratic party to feel it needs to reassure voters that it comes in peace is an act of weakness – as if it has no radical plans to take on foundational issues and reorder economic and racial relations in the country. This conciliation is a win for the American right – not only for its Capitol-insurrectionist wing, but for its longer-term scaremongering about the “radical left”. This is already evident in the backlash against Biden’s first executive orders that, in merely undoing what Trump established, are seen as “culture war aggression”. Biden should be leading a government ready to take on the twin challenges of rooting out white supremacy and rebalancing the economy, yet it risks being one that aims only to fix the leaks of the past four years. This should be a government that stops papering over the cracks, and finally confronts the causes of divisions and embeds permanent reform. Otherwise, though Trump may be gone, the nightmare will be ongoing. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Can Trump do a Nixon and re-enter polite society? Elizabeth Drew doubts it

      by

      Asking if Donald Trump can rehabilitate himself in US public life as did a disgraced president before him, legendary Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew was not optimistic.“For all their similarities,” she wrote, “Nixon and Trump clearly are very different men. For one thing, Nixon was smart.”Drew, 85 and the author of the classic Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall, published her thoughts in the Washington Post.“Donald Trump and Richard Nixon both left Washington in helicopters and ignominy,” she wrote, “awash in financial problems and their customary self-pity.“Both were above-average paranoiacs who felt (with some justification) that the elites looked down on them and that enemies everywhere sought to undermine them; they despised the press, exploited racism for political purposes and used inept outside agents (the “plumbers,” Rudy Giuliani) to carry out their more nefarious plots.“Neither was inclined to let aides rein them in. Both faced impeachment for trying to manipulate the opposition party’s nomination contest. Both degraded the presidency. Both came unglued at the end.“But then, astonishingly, Nixon rehabilitated himself … [his] post-presidency was a quest to make himself respectable again and it worked … through wit, grit, wiliness and determination he wrought one of the greatest resurrections in American politics.“If he could do it, can Trump?”Her short answer? No.Impeached a second time, Trump now awaits trial in Florida, playing golf but keeping himself involved in Republican politics, making endorsements, sitting on $70m in campaign cash and entertaining thoughts of starting a new political party, if reportedly mostly as a way of revenging himself on Republicans who crossed him.Drew wrote of how after Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, to avoid impeachment over the Watergate scandal, the 37th president went into exile in California. But she also cited his deep background in US politics and institutions – as a former congressman, senator and vice-president who “essentially understood the constitution and limits, even if he overreached at times” – and how, “interested in the substance of governing, he studied white papers and was conversant in most topics the government touched.”Drew also discussed the way Nixon set about re-entering public life, mostly as a sage voice on foreign policy, and eventually moved back east to become “the toast of New York” and, in 1979, one of Gallup’s “10 most admired people in the world”. Ruthlessly, she wrote, Nixon even managed to force his way back into the White House, visiting (under the cover of night) to counsel the young Bill Clinton.Trump, Drew wrote, “lacks discipline, intellectual rigour and the doggedness Nixon used to pull himself up from the bottom.”But on the day the solidly pro-Trump Arizona Republican party formally censured grandees Cindy McCain, Jeff Flake and Doug Ducey for daring to cross Trump, Drew also had a warning.“Trump has one advantage Nixon didn’t,” Drew wrote, “even after the assault on the Capitol this month: a large and fanatically devoted following.[embedded content]“According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released 15 January, 79% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents still approved of his performance. Trump of course had the backing of many Fox News hosts, and … some still supported the Trump line about the 6 January attack on the Capitol (for example, that it was spawned by a leftwing group). There was no such thing as Fox in Nixon’s day.”Though Drew thought Trump unlikely to gain access to mainstream media, as Nixon famously did via interviews with David Frost, and has been suspended by Twitter and Facebook, she did note that he “still has the support of fringe networks like One America News and Newsmax”.“If Trump is canny enough and has the energy,” she wrote, “he will have already begun devising ways to heal his battered reputation with much of the public and, in particular, the Republican politicians who indulged him for years.“But unlike Nixon, Trump faces a paradox: how can he maintain the support of his rabble-rousing followers, particularly if he wants to run again in 2024 or simply remain a force in in the GOP, while building respectability among the broader public?” More