World news

Subterms

    More stories

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Liz Truss says in book Queen told her to ‘pace yourself’, admits she didn’t listen

      by

      In a new memoir, Liz Truss recounts the advice she was given by Queen Elizabeth II when they met in September 2022 to confirm Truss as Britain’s new prime minister, the 15th and as it turned out last, to serve under Elizabeth II.“Pace yourself,” the 96-year-old queen said – a suggestion Truss admits she failed to heed after the queen died, leaving Truss unsure if she could cope.Truss later introduced radical free-market policies that crashed the British economy and saw her ejected from office just 49 days after winning an internal Conservative party vote to succeed Boris Johnson, making her the shortest-serving prime minister of all.“Maybe I should have listened” to the queen, Truss writes.Replaced in Downing Street by Rishi Sunak, Truss still sits as an MP for South West Norfolk. Just 48, she has increasingly sought to carve out a prominent position on the hard right of British politics and turned her sights on the US, in particular its rightwing thinktanks and lucrative speaking circuit.Truss’s book, Ten Years To Save The West, will be published in the US and UK next week.Though Truss writes that the book is less a memoir than a manifesto for her continuing participation in global politics, it does contain extensive descriptions of her time as an MP, a member of successive Conservative cabinets, a minister of state, foreign secretary and finally, briefly as prime minister.Of her historic meeting with the late queen at Balmoral in Scotland in September 2022, Truss says the 96-year-old monarch “seemed to have grown frailer” since she had last been in the public eye.“We spent around 20 minutes discussing politics,” Truss writes. “She was completely attuned to everything that was happening, as well as being typically sharp and witty. Towards the end of our discussion, she warned me that being prime minister is incredibly aging. She also gave me two words of advice: ‘Pace yourself.’ Maybe I should have listened.”Elsewhere, Truss often writes of struggling with the pressures of high office, including an instance in Spain when she was foreign secretary in which motorcade delays saw her “beginning to lose my rag … on account of constant travel and pressure”, causing her to try to get out of her official car to “remonstrate with police”.That episode was quelled, Truss writes, with an intervention by her staff and “a cooling off period at a sherry bar”.But when the queen died so soon after Truss had become her 15th and final prime minister, Truss writes, the news, though widely expected after the monarch’s health had deteriorated, still came “as a profound shock” to Truss, seeming “utterly unreal” and leaving her thinking: “Why me? Why now?”Insisting she had not expected to lead the UK in mourning for the death of a monarch nearly 70 years on the throne and nearly 100 years old, Truss says state ceremony and protocol were “a long way from my natural comfort zone”.Other prime ministers, she writes without naming any, may have been better able to provide “the soaring rhetoric and performative statesmanship necessary”. She herself, she writes, predominantly felt profound sadness.Truss describes carrying out duties including giving a Downing Street speech about the queen’s death and having a first audience with King Charles III. A subsequent Buckingham Palace meeting between the King and his prime minister was widely noted for its stilted nature – Charles being heard to mutter: “Back again? Dear oh dear”. But Truss says their first official meeting made her feel “a bizarre sense of camaraderie between us, with both starting out in our new roles and having to navigate unfamiliar territory”.As the UK went into mourning, so Truss watched on television with her family as the queen’s coffin was brought from Balmoral to Edinburgh. Truss describes being “suddenly overwhelmed by the emotion of it all”, and breaking down “into floods of tears on the sofa”.“Once again,” she writes, “the grief was mixed with a feeling of awe over the sheer weight of the event, and the fact that it was happening on my watch.”That watch turned out to be shorter than anyone could have expected. But after a period out of the public eye Truss has re-emerged, especially in the US where Donald Trump is seeking to return to the White House as a far-right Republican.Last April, she delivered the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. This February, in Maryland, she spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference or CPAC, telling a pro-Trump audience the Anglo-American right “need[s] a bigger bazooka” to take on its leftwing enemies.At that event, Truss stirred controversy by appearing with far-right figures, including the former Trump White House counselor Steve Bannon and allies of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.Truss announced her book in September last year, saying she would use it to “share the lessons” of her time in government, in which she claimed often to have been “the only conservative in the room”, fighting a supposedly authoritarian left.In the event, she repeatedly blames the so-called “deep state” for her failures, from being excluded from meetings with Trump when Boris Johnson was prime minister to her own short-lived spell in that role.Popular on the US right, the deep state conspiracy theory holds that a permanent government of bureaucrats and operatives exists to thwart the ambitions of populist leaders. Bannon is one of its chief propagators. He has, however, said it is “for nut cases”. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Chef José Andrés says Israel engaging in ‘war against humanity itself’ in Gaza

      by

      The White House has pushed back on comments by World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés that Israel is engaged in “war against humanity itself” following the Israeli drone strike attack that killed seven of his aid workers on 1 April, but ruled out putting US monitors on the ground in Gaza.“There’s going to have to be some changes to the way Israeli defense forces are prosecuting these operations in Gaza to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” White House national security communications adviser John Kirby told ABC’s This Week said on Sunday.“There have to got to be changes in the deconfliction process, between aid workers on the ground and the IDF headquarters so that this kind of targeting can’t happen again,” Kirby said Sunday, but would not be drawn on claims that Israeli drone operators would have been able see the insignia three WCK vehicles carrying the workers that identified them as part of an aid convoy.In an earlier interview on This Week, Andrés had said that the IDF attack on his workers “is not anymore about the seven men and women of World Central Kitchen that perished on this unfortunate event. This is happening for way too long. It’s been six months of targeting anything that seems – moves,” Andrés said.“This doesn’t seem a war against terror,” Andrés added. “This doesn’t seem anymore a war about defending Israel. This really, at this point, seems it’s a war against humanity itself.”The IDF said Friday that there had been three strikes against the convoy, and confirmed that World Central Kitchen had coordinated their movements correctly with them in advance.It said that Israeli officials had failed to update commanders on the convoy and that they were“ convinced that they were targeting armed Hamas operatives and not WCK employees.” The strikes, the IDF added, had been “a grave mistake”.But Andrés refuted those findings, telling ABC News: “Every time something happens, we cannot just be bringing Hamas into the equation.”Asked if destroying three vehicles was following legitimate rules of engagement, Kirby said that the US knew from its own experience that “the intelligence you get, analyze and process may not always be accurate and you act on that intelligence…”But the White House adviser refused to say what consequences the US would impose if the Israel does not act on commitments to allow more humanitarian aid in and reduce violence against civilians in Gaza.“We have to judge it over time, and see if there’s a sustained and verifiable way so that confidence can be restored,” Kirby said. But against increasing calls for the US to suspend or reduce weapons transfers to Israel, Kirby echoed president Biden’s comments to Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu last week.“We’ve got to see changes in the way they are prosecuting these operations and we’re going to have to think about making changes in our own policy toward Gaza.” But, he said: “We have to remember that Israel has a right to defend itself and its important to remember they live in a tough neighborhood.”Kirby downplayed reports on Sunday that the IDF was withdrawing forces from southern Gaza, saying he would let the Israelis speak to their operations.“It’s hard to know exactly what that tells us,” he said. “This is really just about rest and refit for these troops that have been on the ground for four months – and not indicative, so far as we can tell, or some coming new operation.”“The word we’re getting is that they’re tired and need to be refit,” he added.But Kirby rejected calls for there to be US personnel on the ground in Gaza to monitor Israeli accountability to the rules of law are followed. “What we will do is make sure they have the tools and capabilities they need to defend themselves, and hold Israel accountable for the way they are conducting these operations.”Kirby said that Chef Andrés was not wrong when he said you can be a “good friend of Israel in helping them to defend themselves and at the same time holding them to an appropriate standard of accountability”.Meanwhile, one of the late aid workers’ father told Secretary of State Antony Blinken the killings by Israel in the Hamas-run territory must end, and that the United States needs to use its power and leverage over its closest Mideast ally to make that happen.John Flickinger’s 33-year-old son, Jacob Flickinger, a dual US and Canadian citizen, was among the seven humanitarian workers killed in the 1 April drone strikes.“If the United States threatened to suspend aid to Israel, maybe my son would be alive today,” John Flickinger told the Associated Press in describing his 30-minute conversation Saturday with Blinken. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      White Rural Rage review: Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ jibe at book length

      by

      Don’t expect White Rural Rage to win too many hearts or minds. Under the subtitle The Threat to American Democracy, it’s more likely the book will offend. Thomas Schaller and Paul Waldman profess “not to denigrate or mock our fellow Americans who live in rural areas”, but at times appear to do so.Their first chapter title is Essential Minority, Existential Threat. Chapter six, Conditional Patriots. Pro-tip: nobody likes being branded irredeemably deplorable.Schaller is a political science professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Waldman a former op-ed writer at the Washington Post. They seek to cover a lot of ground but often come up short.For starters, the authors refuse to grapple with the age-old concept of “blood and soil” as a driver of politics. Brexit in the UK, the rise of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the persistence of the far-right Le Pens in France are labeled as mere byproducts of globalization and inequality. When it comes to the US, this means neglecting arguments posited more than two centuries ago by John Jay, the first supreme court chief justice, in Federalist No 2.“I have as often taken notice,” Jay wrote, “that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion.”Native Americans might have something to say about that but a lot of white Americans in rural areas do trace their roots back a long way and do not like being told what to do – or even the appearance of it – by urban elites. Fear of immigration, whatever the immigrant roots of such communities, is also a simple fact of politics.Schaller and Waldman also ignore the role of resentments stoked by the Iraq war in cementing the bond between rural America and Donald Trump. The fact is, residents of Republican-run states are more than 20% more likely to join the military and after Iraq and the great recession, the disconnect between white rural America and coastal and cognitive elites swiftly became a chasm.In 2016, parts of the US that felt the effects of the 9/11 wars more as reality than abstract moved to the Republican column. According to Douglas Kriner of Boston University and Francis Shen of the University of Minnesota, “Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan could very well have been winners for [Hillary] Clinton if their war casualties were lower.”Wisconsin is the 20th-most rural state. A quarter of Michigan is rural. Pennsylvania has been characterized as Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west and Alabama in the middle. As Trump prepares for his rematch with Joe Biden, all three states are toss-ups.Schaller and Waldman also downplay the impact in rural areas of Democratic messaging on hot-button issues such as crime. It’s no longer just “the economy, stupid”. Culture wars pack an outsized punch. Outside New England, white rural Democrats are a relative rarity.Inexplicably, Schaller and Waldman do not examine the case of Jon Tester, the three-term Democratic senator from deep-red, highly rural Montana who faces a stern fight to keep his seat this year. In 2020, in the aftermath of widespread protests for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis officer, but also rioting and looting, Tester criticized his party.“I think the whole idea about defunding police is not just bad messaging but just insane,” Tester told the New York Times. “We didn’t come out with strong advertisements saying, ‘Rioting, burglary is not demonstration and it’s not acceptable.’”Personalities matter too. “You cannot have Chuck Schumer talking rural issues to rural people,” Tester said, about the Brooklyn-born New Yorker who leads the Senate. “It ain’t gonna sell.”A century and a half ago, northern rural Protestants formed the backbone of the union army that won the civil war and helped vanquish slavery. Things have very definitely changed.“One can even argue that rural areas around the country have lost their distinctiveness,” Schaller and Waldman write. “One can find Confederate flags flying in rural areas in every corner of the country, all the way to the Canadian border.” In rural New York in 2018, for example, a sign beneath one such flag read: “Heritage not Hate.”Apparently, “live free and die” really is an ethos. Schaller and Waldman catalogue white rural shortcomings such as high rates of gun deaths, lower life expectancies, high out-of-wedlock birth rates. In 2021, vaccine hesitancy put Oklahoma, Alabama, West Virginia, Mississippi and Wyoming – heavily rural, reliably Republican – at the top of the Covid-fatality list. Vermont, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Washington – all Democratic – were at the other end.Elsewhere, Schaller and Waldman criticize Chip Roy, a conservative firebrand congressman from Texas, for failing to push for rural-focused government programs. They acknowledge that Roy is principled in his stance against big government – but fail to mention that unlike 139 of his fellow House Republicans, and eight senators, he voted to certify Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.White Rural Rage is strongest when it points to systemic features that enable rural US states to punch above their weight politically, most obviously the Senate, where each state gets two votes regardless of size.“By 2040, 70% of Americans will reside in the 15 most populous states and choose 30 of the 100 US senators,” Schaller and Waldman write. “Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% of the population will elect 70 senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators – past, present, and forever.”It’s a cold, hard fact. If white rural Americans are angry, they are also powerful. Democrats can either keep on cursing the darkness and losing elections – or deign to light a match.
      White Rural Rage is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

    • 225 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden says ‘union labor and American steel’ will be used to rebuild Baltimore bridge – as it happened

      by

      Joe Biden vowed to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge as quickly as possible, using “union labor and American steel”, in a nod to his administration’s attempts to promote domestic manufacturing.“We’re going to move heaven and earth, to rebuild this bridge as rapidly as humanly possible. We’re gonna do so with union labor and American steel,” he said, speaking on the shore of Baltimore harbor with the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge at his back.He continued:
      We will support Maryland and Baltimore every step of the way to help you rebuild and maintain all the business and commerce that’s here now.
      The chorus of Democratic senators asking Joe Biden to rethink his support for Israel has grown louder in the wake of the killing of seven aid workers earlier this week. Lawmakers aligned with the president are asking him to cancel planned weapons sales, or cut off military support altogether if Israel does not do a better job of protecting civilians. Congress is currently out, with the Senate and House resuming business in Washington DC next week, but in a sign of how fraught the issue has become, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer made no mention of approving more aid to Israel in a letter sent to lawmakers ahead of their return.Here’s what else happened today:
      In a visit to Baltimore, Biden pledged “to move heaven and earth” to rebuild the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, using “union labor and American steel”.
      Democratic senator Chris Murphy warned that Israel’s conduct in Gaza could worsen the threat of terrorism worldwide.
      Student debt relief is reportedly getting a second go from Biden, who will next week announce a plan to reduce what borrowers owe that could survive a court challenge.
      In response to a bid by a Republican lawmaker to rename the biggest airport in the Washington DC-area for Donald Trump, a group of Democratic congressmen wants to bestow his name on a Florida federal prison.
      After today’s earthquake that was felt in New York City, New Jersey and elsewhere in the north-east, rightwing congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said: “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent.”
      As he closed his remarks, Joe Biden again called on Congress to allow the federal government to pay for the cost of rebuilding the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, arguing Washington had picked up the bill following previous disasters.“I fully intend … that the federal government cover the cost of building this entire bridge, all of it,” Biden said. “As we’ve done in other parts of the country in similar circumstances. I stand here, I call on Congress to authorize this effort as soon as possible.”The president also said he would support efforts to get those responsible for the collapse to pay for the cost of repairs:
      My administration is committed absolutely committed to ensuring that parties responsible for this tragedy pay to repair the damage, and be held accountable to the fullest extent the law will allow.
      It’s unclear whether Congress will take Biden up on his request. In the House, the conservative Republican Freedom Caucus said they will only support it if Biden backs down on a ban on new natural gas export projects:Joe Biden vowed to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge as quickly as possible, using “union labor and American steel”, in a nod to his administration’s attempts to promote domestic manufacturing.“We’re going to move heaven and earth, to rebuild this bridge as rapidly as humanly possible. We’re gonna do so with union labor and American steel,” he said, speaking on the shore of Baltimore harbor with the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge at his back.He continued:
      We will support Maryland and Baltimore every step of the way to help you rebuild and maintain all the business and commerce that’s here now.
      He then turned to remembering the six construction workers fixing potholes on the Francis Scott Key Bridge who were killed when it collapsed.“Most were immigrants but … were Marylanders, hardworking, strong and selfless. After pulling a night shift fixing potholes, they were on a break when the ship struck. Just seconds before, one of the men named Carlos, who was only 24, left a message for his girlfriend. He had said, ‘we just poured cement. We’re waiting for it to dry,’” Biden said.“To all the families and loved ones who are grieving, we have come here to grieve with you,” Biden said.Joe Biden started his remarks off on a note of solidarity.“Military members and first responders, most importantly to the people of Maryland, I’m here to say your nation has your back and I mean it. Your nation has your back.”Joe Biden is now starting his much-delayed remarks on the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.He was introduced by Maryland’s Democratic governor Wes Moore, who said: “With the support of President Biden and his team, I know that Marylanders of this generation and the next will look up and once again, they will see the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and they will see it standing tall.”We will let you know what the president says.In Baltimore, Joe Biden has received a briefing from the army corps of engineers and the Maryland department of transportation on their efforts to clear the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and reopen the port of Baltimore.Army corp of engineers brigadier general John Lloyd told Biden of the plan to remove the large section of bridge that landed on the cargo ship Dali. The section weighs 5,000 tons and stands 125 feet high. Lloyd said they want to cut the metal away from the ship so it can be moved, and have 51 divers and 12 cranes working on the scene.If Donald Trump is convicted of mishandling confidential documents at the conclusion of his upcoming criminal trial in Florida, he could be obligated to serve any sentence in a federal prison bearing his name.Three Democratic congressmen on Friday introduced a House bill seeking to rename Miami’s federal correctional institute for the former president, a mocking response to Pennsylvania Republican Guy Reschenthaler’s proposal to rebrand Dulles international airport in a similar vein.It’s an “effort to make Trump feel more comfortable in his future home,” according to the left-leaning website Meidas Touch, which reported the move by Florida congressman Jared Moskowitz, Gerry Connolly of Virginia and John Garamendi of California.Moskowitz in particular is no stranger to trolling Republicans, having introduced a motion to impeach Joe Biden during a House oversight committee meeting last month. A frequent critic of Trumpist committee chair Jim Comer of Kentucky, who led the evidence-free effort to impeach the president, Moskowitz prodded in vain to find a Republican to second his motion.The new bill seeks to recognize the Donald J Trump Federal Correctional Institution “in any law, regulation, map, document, paper, or any other record of the United States”.With a Republican majority in the House, it stands as much chance of becoming law as Rechenthaler’s measure does of clearing the Democrat-led Senate and White House.Trump is currently facing 88 federal charges in four criminal cases, including the one in Florida. He was arraigned last June at the federal courthouse in Miami as a near-circus took place outside.As we wait for Joe Biden to make remarks in Baltimore, rightwing congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has once again found a way to draw attention to herself by implying that the earthquake that rattled the north-east today was, uh, God’s will:Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. As for what we know for sure about the tremor, here’s a link to our coverage:Joe Biden has arrived in Baltimore at the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, where he’s meeting with first responders.His helicopter flight took him over the wreckage of the span, as well as the Dali, the cargo ship that struck it and remains trapped in the debris:The president is schedule to give a speech “reaffirming his commitment to the people of Baltimore” at 2.30pm. We’ll cover it live on this blog.Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will not endorse Joe Biden again this year, a blow of sorts for the president in his looming rematch with Donald Trump.Speaking to Fox News, the wrestler turned Hollywood action star said: “Am I happy with the state of America right now? Well, that answer’s no. Do I believe we’re gonna get better? I believe in that, I’m an optimistic guy. And I believe we can do better.”Long the subject of rumours about political ambitions, Johnson reportedly fielded an approach from No Labels, the centrist third-party group that now says it won’t run a candidate this year.In late September 2020, he endorsed Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, saying: “You guys are both experienced to lead, you’ve done great things. Joe you’ve had such an incredible career, and you’ve led with such great compassion, heart, drive, and soul … Kamala, you have been a district attorney, a state attorney, a US senator. You are smart and tough. I have seen you in those hearings.”But in the Fox News interview broadcast on Friday, he said: “The endorsement that I made years ago with Biden was what I thought was the best decision for me at that time. I thought back then, when we talked about, ‘Hey, you know, I’m in this position where I have some influence,’ and it was my job then … to exercise my influence and share … who I’m going to endorse.“Am I going to do that again this year? That answer’s no.“I realise now going into this election, I will not do that. My goal is to bring this country together. I will keep my politics to myself. It is between me and the ballot box. Like a lot of us out there, not trusting of all politicians, I do trust the American people and whoever they vote for that is my president and who I will support 100%.”Johnson has not disavowed entering presidential politics himself. In 2021, he said: “I don’t think our Founding Fathers EVER envisioned a six-four, bald, tattooed, half-Black, half-Samoan, tequila drinking, pick-up truck driving, fanny pack-wearing guy joining their club – but if it ever happens it’d be my honour to serve you, the people.”The latest bramble for Donald Trump in his legal thorny thicket this week is that New York judge Juan Merchan on Friday blocked the former US president’s bid to subpoena Comcast-owned NBCUniversal for material related to the documentary the media company made about Stormy Daniels.The judge is overseeing Trump’s criminal trial, which begins on 15 April in a historic first for a former US president.Reuters adds that the trial stems from a hush-money payment to Daniels, a porn star and adult film producer, over an old affair she claimed she had with Trump and which she was ready to talk to the press about during the 2016 presidential campaign.Trump denies the sexual liaison and also denies the charges against him in the New York case, one of four criminal cases he faces and the first to go to trial, alleging election financing impropriety as part of a hush-money payment and cover up, also involving model Karen McDougal.The documentary, titled Stormy, came out recently and centers Daniels talking about her life, especially since the scandal ultimately erupted into public view. She is expected to testify for the prosecution in Manhattan court.Joe Biden has departed for Baltimore and there are only thin pickings from the “chopper talk” at the White House, unfortunately.The Guardian’s Washington bureau chief David Smith is on pool duty today and dutifully brings us this report that at the south entrance to the White House, the president said he had spoken to the governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, about the earthquake in the region. The words “all right” were audible.A reporter asked if POTUS had threatened military aid to Israel. POTUS replied only: “I asked them to do what they’re doing.”Then he boarded the Marine One helicopter and left.Joe Biden is on his way to Baltimore now, where the US military has said it hopes to reopen the port to shipping traffic, at least on a limited basis, by the end of the month.The US president will take an aerial tour of the major arterial road bridge that collapsed when a huge container ship hit one of its main stone piers 10 days ago.Biden will be briefed on response efforts from the team in charge of salvage and logistical operations, including the US Coast Guard and army corps of engineers.Maryland governor Wes Moore, Senators Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen will be with the president, as will congressman Kweisi Mfume and Baltimore’s mayor, Brandon Scott, alongside other city, state and federal officials.After touring the site of the disaster, where six men who were working on the bridge at the time of the collision were killed, Biden will meet the bereaved families.The chorus of Democratic senators asking Joe Biden to rethink his support for Israel has grown louder in the wake of the killing of seven aid workers earlier this week. Lawmakers aligned with the president are asking him to cancel planned weapons sales, or cut off military support altogether if Israel does not do a better job of protecting civilians. Congress is currently out, with the Senate and House resuming business in Washington DC next week, but in a sign of how fraught the issue has become, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer made no mention of approving more aid to Israel in a letter sent to lawmakers ahead of their return.Here’s what else is going on today:
      Biden plans to later this afternoon visit the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, where he’ll discuss efforts to get the city’s economically vital port reopened, and meet with families of the six men killed in the disaster.
      Democratic senator Chris Murphy warned that Israel’s conduct in Gaza could worsen the threat of terrorism worldwide.
      Student debt relief is reportedly getting a second go from Biden, who will next week announce plans to reduce what borrowers owe that could survive a court challenge. More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      New book details Steve Bannon’s ‘Maga movement’ plan to rule for 100 years

      by

      Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and White House strategist, believed before the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Congress that a “Maga movement” of Trump supporters “could rule for a hundred years”.“Outside the uniparty,” the Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes in a new book, referring to Bannon’s term for the political establishment, “as Bannon saw it, there was the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which he considered a relatively small slice of the electorate. And the rest, the vast majority of the country, was Maga.“Bannon believed the Maga movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalised by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years.”Arnsdorf’s book, Finish What We Started: The Maga Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, will be published next week. The Post published an excerpt on Thursday.A businessman who became a driver of far-right thought through his stewardship of Breitbart News, Bannon was Trump’s campaign chair in 2016 and his chief White House strategist in 2017, a post he lost after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville that summer.He remained close to Trump, however, particularly as Trump attempted to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.That attempt culminated in the attack on Congress of 6 January 2021, when supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of Biden’s win attacked the US Capitol.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than 1,200 arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured. Trump was impeached for inciting the insurrection but acquitted by Senate Republicans.Notwithstanding 88 criminal charges for election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments, and multimillion-dollar penalties in civil cases over fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”, Trump won the Republican nomination with ease this year.As a Trump-Biden rematch grinds into gear, Bannon remains an influential voice on the far right, particularly through his War Room podcast and despite his own legal problems over contempt of Congress and alleged fraud, both of which he denies.The “uniparty”, in Bannon’s view, as described by Arnsdorf, is “the establishment [Bannon] hungered to destroy. The neocons, neoliberals, big donors, globalists, Wall Street, corporatists, elites.”“Maga” stands for “Make America great again”, Trump’s political slogan.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionArnsdorf writes: “In his confidence that there were secretly millions of Democrats who were yearning to be Maga followers and just didn’t know it yet, Bannon was again taking inspiration from Hoffer, who observed that true believers were prone to conversion from one cause to another since they were driven more by their need to identify with a mass movement than by any particular ideology.”Eric Hoffer, Arnsdorf writes, was “the ‘longshoreman philosopher’, so called because he had worked as a stevedore on the San Francisco docks while writing his first book, The True Believer [which] caused a sensation when it was published in 1951, becoming a manual for comprehending the age of Hitler, Stalin and Mao”.Bannon, Arnsdorf writes, “was not, like a typical political strategist, trying to tinker around the edges of the existing party coalitions in the hope of eking out 50% plus one. Bannon already told you: he wanted to bring everything crashing down.“He wanted to completely dismantle and redefine the parties. He wanted a showdown between a globalist, elite party, called the Democrats, and a populist, Maga party, called the Republicans. In that match-up, he was sure, the Republicans would win every time.”Now, seven months out from election day and with Trump and Biden neck-and-neck in the polls, Bannon’s proposition stands to be tested again.
      Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the world?On Thursday 2 May, 3pm EDT join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More

    • 200 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden and Xi seek to manage tensions in phone call as US officials head to China

      by

      Joe Biden and Xi Jinping have clashed in a telephone call about Taiwan and US trade restrictions on technology, but sought to manage their tensions as two top US officials prepare to visit Beijing.The nearly two-hour telephone conversation on Tuesday was the two leaders’ first direct interaction since a summit in November in California that saw a marked thaw in tone, if not the long-term rivalry, between the world’s two largest economies.The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, will leave Wednesday and visit both Guangzhou, the southern city emblematic of China’s manufacturing power, and Beijing, with secretary of state, Antony Blinken, due in China in the coming weeks, officials said.“We believe that there is no substitute for regular communication at the leader level to effectively manage this complex and often tense bilateral relationship,” national security council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters after the call.US officials said the talks were not aimed at managing but rather than resolving differences, and the two leaders were open about heated disagreements.Xi accused the United States of creating economic risks through Biden’s sweeping ban on high-tech exports to China.“If the United States insists on suppressing China’s high-tech development and depriving China of its legitimate right to development, we will not sit idly by,” Xi warned, according to Chinese state media.Biden rebuffed his appeal, with the White House saying he told him “the United States will continue to take necessary actions to prevent advanced US technologies from being used to undermine our national security, without unduly limiting trade and investment.”Biden also refused to back down on TikTok, the blockbuster Chinese-owned app that Congress is threatening to ban unless it changes hands, with Kirby saying Biden insisted he wanted to protect Americans’ data security.Xi, China’s most powerful leader in decades, has solidified power at home and taken a tough approach in Asia, with a crackdown on freedoms in Hong Kong and assertive confrontations in recent weeks with the Philippines on the South China Sea.But US observers see Xi as eager to temper the friction with the US as China weathers rough economic headwinds.At the California summit, he agreed to two key asks by the United States – curbs on precursor chemicals for making fentanyl, the synthetic painkiller behind a US overdose epidemic, and restoring dialogue between the two militaries to manage crises.Xi may also believe there is more opportunity to work with Biden, who faces a rematch in November’s presidential election with Donald Trump, who has cast China as an arch-enemy.Biden has preserved or even accelerated some of Trump’s tough measures, but has also identified areas of common interest, such as fighting climate change.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe White House said Biden pressed Xi to ensure “peace and stability” across the Taiwan Strait ahead of the inauguration on 20 May of president-elect Lai Ching-te.China has denounced Lai, a longtime supporter of a separate identity for the self-ruling democracy claimed by Beijing, but US officials have been cautiously optimistic that China’s military moves ahead of the inauguration will not go beyond past practice.In the phone call, Xi told Biden that Taiwan remains an “uncrossable red line” for China, according to state media.The United States has voiced growing alarm over rising Chinese moves against the Philippines in the dispute-rife South China Sea.The Biden administration, while maintaining dialogue with China, has put a strong focus on supporting allies.In the midst of the diplomatic flurry with China, the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, will pay a state visit to Washington next week, with the Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos, joining for three-way talks.Blinken and Yellen will both be paying their second visits to China in less than a year, marking a return to more routine interaction following the Covid-19 pandemic and soaring tensions under Trump. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Ronna McDaniel mess shows problem of politics-to-pundit conveyor belt

      by

      It should have been a straightforward appointment in the often lucrative world of political punditry: a former high-ranking party official making the move from actual politics to America’s television screens with a mission to pontificate, opine and spin.US cable news is littered with such figures: ex-congresspeople, former presidential candidates, reformed spin doctors, one-time campaign leaders. All of them on fat contracts for sitting behind desks and arguing the political talking points of the day.So it was somewhat of a surprise when NBC’s hiring of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel triggered a staff revolt, legal fights, endless inches of bad press and a stunning media conflagration that seemed set to burn down America’s premier liberal cable news network, MSNBC. It also ended in McDaniel being canned last week shortly after her appointment was announced.But in an American political landscape still being profoundly reshaped by Donald Trump and his conspiracy-laden rhetoric – especially when it comes to the big lie of a stolen 2020 election – more savvy network bosses should perhaps have expected the turmoil.McDaniel presented a conundrum. On one hand, she had served as Trump’s chosen RNC chair from early 2017, through the turbulence of January 6 Capitol riot, winning re-election to the post in unanimous elections in both 2019 and 2021. Her perspective could be a valuable resource.But along the way, she had participated in a 2020 phone call pressuring Michigan county officials not to certify the vote from the Detroit area. “Do not sign it … we will get you attorneys,” she had said. She has been far from dismissive when it comes to Trump’s promotion of the idea of widespread electoral fraud in the US. For many McDaniel was not just a career politico; she had sought to help a bid to subvert an election.For any network, but especially NBC and its liberal MSNBC sibling, McDaniel’s role in being a threat to American democracy could not be ignored. On her first appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday McDaniel said that the Capitol riot “doesn’t represent our country. It certainly does not represent my party.”But she was immediately grilled as to why she hadn’t said that earlier. “When you’re the RNC chair, you … you kind of take one for the whole team right now. I get to be a little bit more myself, right?” she suggested.Apparently not. Her words were nowhere near enough to quell a rebellion within the broadcaster. The MSNBC anchors Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough condemned the move, along with Jen Psaki (herself fresh from serving as White House spokesperson), Mika Brzezinski and NBC’s Chuck Todd.Maddow said the choice to hire McDaniel was “inexplicable” and accused her employer of giving airtime to someone who is “about undermining elections and going after democracy”. Todd said that “many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”The rage continued for several days, and soon McDaniel was gone. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” Cesar Conde, NBCUniversal’s News Group chairman, wrote to staff. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”Previously it had been typical that the head of talent at a broadcaster made the hires, and newsroom employees went along with it, right or wrong. But these are no longer normal times in America: Trump is virtually certain to be the 2024 Republican nominee and frequently leads Joe Biden in the polls, despite continuing to voice his 2020 election fraud lies.“There are continuous arguments at the networks about how to give voice to the conservative side of the equation without giving voice to fringe elements,” said Rick Ellis, author of the Substack newsletter Too Much TV. “If NBC News had said, yeah, we’re going to have her on our shows to hear her point of view, there wouldn’t have been so much squawking. The tipping point was that she was going to be a paid analyst.”MSNBC already employs one former RNC chair. Michael Steele works as an on-air analyst and host of a weekend show. He, however, did not try to reverse the result of an election.McDaniel has yet to comment, but Politico reported she is considering legal options and expects to be paid out in full for her reported $600,000 two-year deal. A “person close to McDaniel” was quoted criticizing NBC for allowing its talent “to drag Ronna through the mud and make it seem like they were innocent bystanders”.The incident plays into a wider debate about partisanship in the US media. The McDaniel’s blowup follows well-publicized efforts by CNN owner Warner Bros Discovery to broaden its political perspective, an effort that led to the firing of the CNN chief executive, Chris Licht.In statement, the RNC hinted it could pull NBC’s credentials from its convention in Milwaukee this summer. “We are taking a hard look at what this means for NBC’s participation at the convention,” said Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for the RNC and the Trump campaign.But McDaniel and NBC’s predicament also speaks to a larger issue – that of a plush-carpeted corridor between political and media jobs that undermines the integrity of both. In many ways, the only people this system satisfied were the bosses and the pundits. At a time of an extraordinary American election McDaniel and NBC found out that was no longer enough.“There’s entirely too much of this highway between working in the White House or in Congress and ending up on cable news. I understand that its helpful because they know how government works, but the problem is they’re seen coastal or Beltway perspectives and they push out other voices that would be helpful to have in the mix,” said Ellis. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘My jaw dropped’: Annie Jacobsen on her scenario for nuclear war

      by

      Annie Jacobsen was a high school student in 1983, when ABC television broadcast the film The Day After, about the horrors of nuclear war. She never forgot the experience. More than 100 million Americans watched and were terrified too. One of them lived in the White House. According to his biographer and his own memoirs, it helped turn Ronald Reagan into a nuclear disarmer in his second term.Not long after, the world’s stockpile of nuclear warheads peaked and began to decline rapidly, from 70,000 to just over 12,000 currently, according to the Federation of American Scientists.That is still enough however to reduce the Earth to a radioactive desert, with some warheads left over to make it glow. Meanwhile, the global situation is arguably the most dangerous since the Cuban missile crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinding on mercilessly and China contemplating following Moscow’s example by making a grab for Taiwan.The danger of nuclear war is as immediate as ever but it has faded from public discourse, which is why Jacobsen, now a journalist and author, felt driven to write her new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario.“For decades, people were under the assumption that the nuclear threat ended when the Berlin Wall went down,” Jacobsen said, before suggesting another reason the existential threat of nuclear weapons has been filtered out of mainstream discourse – it has been turned into a technical debate.“​​Nuclear weapons and the whole nomenclature around them have been so rarefied it’s been reserved as a subject for those in the know,” she said.In her book, Jacobsen seeks to break through jargon and details in order to tell a terrifying story in a devastatingly straightforward way. The spoiler alert is that it doesn’t end well.As the book promises on the cover, it presents a single scenario for a nuclear war, set in the present day. North Korea, perhaps convinced it is about to be attacked, launches a surprise missile strike against the US, leading Washington to respond with a salvo of 50 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). These are aimed at North Korea’s weapons sites and command centres, but in order to reach their intended targets the missiles have to fly over Russia, because they do not have the range to use any other route.All too aware of the danger of miscalculation, the US president tries to get hold of his Russian counterpart. But the two men and the countries they run are not getting on, and he fails. Making things even worse, Russia’s dodgy satellite early warning system, Tundra, has exaggerated the scale of the US salvo, and from his Siberian bunker, the Russian president (Vladimir Putin in all but name) orders an all-out nuclear attack on the US.The scenario is based on known facts concerning the world’s nuclear arsenals, systems and doctrine. Those facts are all in the public domain, but Jacobsen believes society has tuned them out, despite (or perhaps because of) how shocking they are.Jacobsen was stunned to find out that an ICBM strike against North Korea would have to go over Russia, and that Russia’s early warning system is beset with glitches, an especially worrying fact when combined with the knowledge that both the US and Russia have part of their nuclear arsenals ready to launch at a few minutes’ notice. Both also have an option in their nuclear doctrine to “launch on warning”, without waiting for the first incoming warhead to land.View image in fullscreenA US president would have a few minutes to make a decision if American early warning systems signaled an incoming attack. In those few minutes, he or she would have to process an urgent, complex and inevitably incomplete stream of information and advice from top defence officials. Jacobsen points out that in such circumstances the president is likely to be subject to “jamming”, a chorus of military voices urging he or she follows protocols which lead inexorably towards a retaliatory launch.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“My jaw dropped at so much of what I learned, which was not classified but had just been removed or rather sanitised from the public discourse,” she said. “I found myself constantly surprised by the insanity of what I learned, coupled with the fact that it’s all there for the public to know.”Ultimately, only presidents can make the decision and once it is made, no one has the authority to block it. It is called sole authority, and it is almost certainly the most frightening fact in the world today. It means a handful of men each have the power to end the world in a few minutes, without having to consult anyone.It is not a group anyone would choose to have that responsibility, including as it does the likes of Putin and Kim Jong-un. In Washington it is a choice this year between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. They all bring a lot of human frailty, anger, fear and paranoia to a potential decision that could end the planet.“You would want to have a commander-in-chief who is of sound mind, who is fully in control of his mental capacity, who is not volatile, who is not subject to anger,” Jacobsen said, referring to this year’s presidential election.“These are significant character qualities that should be thought about when people vote for president, for the simple reason that the president has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.”
      Nuclear War: A Scenario is published in the US by Dutton More