theguardian--2020-10-11--Brought to book: how a publishing gold rush pinned Trump to the page

Donald Trump is not a reader but to the publishing industry he is the gift that keeps on giving .
His time in the White House has yielded an avalanche of books with titles like Fear , Rage , Unhinged and Fire and Fury .
Together , they paint a withering portrait of the 45th president .
Some crackle with the fury of scorned employees .
Others are banquets of gossip by seasoned reporters , whether highbrow ( Bob Woodward ) or lowbrow ( Michael Wolff ) .
One is by a member of Trump ’ s own family : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the psychiatrist ’ s chair .
To anyone seeking to understand the presidency of Donald Trump , such books are a goldmine that offer startling insights into his character , personality and mental state .
Here are six categories to guide you through the canon : “ Every critic , every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump , ” was the bold prediction of Omarosa Manigault Newman , a former contestant on The Apprentice , on PBS Frontline in 2016 .
Fired from the White House the following year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ book that proved single-word titles are deadly : Unhinged .
“ It had finally sunk in that the person I ’ d thought I ’ d known so well for so long was actually a racist , ” Manigault Newman writes .
“ Using the N-word was not just the way he talks but , more disturbing , it was how he thought of me and African Americans as a whole.
” This year ’ s Republican convention devoted a segment to working mothers at the White House , seeking to cast Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tells a different story .
A Very Stable Genius , by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post , reports the president complained that Kirstjen Nielsen , his homeland security secretary , did not “ look the part ” , and that he “ abused ” , “ harassed ” and “ pestered ” her over immigration policy .
The demonization of immigrants is a constant theme .
A Warning , by Anonymous , alleges Trump proposed classifying all undocumented migrants as “ enemy combatants ” , the same status as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thus have dispatched them to Guantánamo Bay .
The unknown author , an administration official , quotes the president : “ We get these women coming in with like seven children … They are saying , ‘ Oh , please help !
My husband left me !
’ They are useless .
They don ’ t do anything for our country .
At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.
” A recurring motif is Trump ’ s lack of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on his own white privilege and asks if Trump understands the anger and pain of Black Americans .
The president scoffs : “ No .
You really drank the Kool-Aid , didn ’ t you ?
Just listen to you .
Wow .
No , I don ’ t feel that at all.
” Thanks to the factcheckers at the Post , we know Trump has lied more than 20,000 times in office .
Helpfully , those factcheckers compiled a book , Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth , although as it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ already a few thousand fibs out of date .
Infamously , the whole presidency started out with a lie , characteristically Trumpian in being so provably a whopper : that the crowd for his inauguration was bigger than for Barack Obama .
It is not enough for Trump to lie – others must lie for him .
This one was delivered by Sean Spicer .
In his masochistically fawning memoir , The Briefing , the former press secretary admits knowing he “ didn ’ t have hard and fast stats ” to hand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was gone .
In Team of Vipers , Cliff Sims , a communications aide , laments a “ senseless , unrecoverable act of self-sabotage ” .
As the former Republican strategist Rick Wilson titled his first book , Everything Trump Touches Dies .
In his memoir , A Higher Loyalty , James Comey , the FBI director Trump fired , showed how Trump rules like a mob boss , which means “ lying about all things , large and small , in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump duly lied about why he fired Comey , pitching himself headfirst into the Russia inquiry and on towards impeachment .
And yet Trump lies like something even more terrifying than a mob boss .
Parents will concur with Daniel Drezner ’ s observation , in The Toddler in Chief , that whenever Trump is found out in a lie – climate change is a hoax ; voter fraud is rampant ; I didn ’ t sleep with then pay off that porn star – he doubles down , lies about the lie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ breakable only by ice cream and screen time .
The books depict a president who relishes discord , watching staff fight likes rats in a sack .
But his family – especially his daughter Ivanka – remain untouchable .
The first Trump blockbuster was Wolff ’ s Fire and Fury .
Among its revelations was that the president argued with the Secret Service over whether he could have a lock on his bedroom , “ the first time since the Kennedy White House a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms ” .
Wolff @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Jared Kushner , struck a deal about which would run for president one day : “ The first woman president , Ivanka entertained , would not be Hillary Clinton ; it would be Ivanka Trump.
” In Fear , Woodward chronicles a furious argument between Ivanka and Trump ’ s then chief strategist .
“ ‘ You ’ re a goddam staffer !
’ [ Steve ] Bannon finally screamed at Ivanka .
‘ You ’ re nothing but a fucking staffer !
’ “ ‘ I ’ m not a staffer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ll never be a staffer .
I ’ m the first daughter ’ – she really used the title – ‘ and I ’ m never going to be a staffer !
’ ” Omarosa was a witness to the relationship between Trump and Ivanka .
She writes in Unhinged : “ For as long as I ’ d known Trump , I ’ d observed the way he hugs , touches , and kisses Ivanka ; the way she calls him Daddy .
In my opinion , based on my observations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ line of appropriate father/daughter behavior and jumps right over it.
” Other children fare even less well .
Michael Cohen ’ s Disloyal claims Trump repeatedly told the author his eldest son , Don Jr , has the “ worst fucking judgment ” of anyone he had ever met .
When Trump sees a photo of his sons hunting big game in Africa , he roars at Don Jr : “ You think you ’ re a fucking big man ?
Get the fuck out of my office.
” For what it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s Melania & Me says the first lady influenced Trump against his sons ’ hunting exploits .
Although Ivanka is the favorite , Cohen writes , “ all three kids were starved for their father ’ s love ” .
Some of the most revealing insights , however , come from a time long before Trump entered politics , before his children were born or when they were still young .
In Too Much and Never Enough , Mary Trump characterizes the president ’ s father Fred as a sociopathic bully who encouraged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Chillingly , she suggests that in 2016 , voters chose “ to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family ” .
The New York Times ’ enormous scoop on Trump ’ s taxes will no doubt form the heart of a bestselling book .
In the meantime , its revelations have prompted familiar incredulity and hilarity .
Take the news , for example that Trump claimed a $ 70,000 tax deduction for “ hairstyling for television ” .
Even Ivanka , Wolff writes in Fire and Fury @ @ @ @ @ @ @ father ’ s ] comb-over ” , describing “ the mechanics behind it : an absolutely clean pate – a contained island after scalp reduction surgery – surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front , from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.
” A Higher Loyalty also passes comment on Trump ’ s appearance .
“ His face appeared slightly orange , ” Comey writes , “ with bright white half-moons under his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tanning goggles.
” Comey also says he checked the size of Trump ’ s hands – about which the president is known to be very sensitive – and found them to be “ smaller than mine … but not unusually so ” .
More than 20 women say Trump used his hands to sexually assault them .
In What Were We Thinking : A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era , the Washington Post literary critic Carlos Lozada discusses a telling passage in one of Trump ’ s own ghost-written books , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ claims to have been groped and propositioned himself , by “ a lady of great social pedigree and wealth ” , advances he says he turned down politely .
Lozada isn ’ t buying .
“ As with so many things Trump says and does , ” he writes , “ the old story has an air of projection about it … I don ’ t harass women , he is saying – look , they harass me !
” Why does Trump pander to authoritarians – Vladimir Putin , Kim Jong-un , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cold shoulder to allies ?
The literature offers some clues .
Woodward ’ s Rage includes “ love letters ” between Trump and Kim .
The North Korean dictator describes meeting Trump as a “ precious memory ” that demonstrates how the “ deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force ” .
Trump brags that Kim “ tells me everything ” , including a vivid account of having his uncle killed .
The president also tells the celebrated reporter : “ I get along very well with [ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ re not supposed to because everyone says , ‘ What a horrible guy.
’ But , you know , for me it works out good .
“ It ’ s funny , the relationships I have , the tougher and meaner they are , the better I get along with them .
You ’ ll explain that to me someday , OK ?
But maybe it ’ s not a bad thing .
The easy ones I maybe don ’ t like as much or don ’ t get along with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It Happened , the former national security adviser John Bolton recalls that Trump was willing to halt criminal investigations to “ give personal favors ” to dictators .
Bolton alleges Trump pleaded with Xi Jinping to help him get re-elected by buying more American agricultural products , and even encouraged the Chinese leader to continue to build concentration camps for Muslim Uighurs .
Bolton ’ s account of Trump ’ s approach to foreign diplomacy is not reassuring .
“ It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Battlegrounds , the former national security adviser HR McMaster critiques Trump on policy , but does not dish on the president ’ s resistance to being briefed , or even reading anything at all .
Others , among them Bolton and the classics-quoting Anonymous of A Warning , are quite happy to do so .
At a meeting at the Pentagon in July 2017 which crops up in many Trump books , the defense secretary , James Mattis , and secretary of state , Rex Tillerson , tried to coach the president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ statecraft .
As A Very Stable Genius shows in excruciating detail , the meeting did not go well , leading to Tillerson offering perhaps the most lasting tribute to Trump by a member of his own cabinet .
The president , the secretary of state said , was “ a fucking moron ” .
In Trump ’ s mind he is beyond advice , the smartest guy in the room , an idea encouraged by toadies and terrified advisers alike , even if Trump famously mispronounced Bannon ’ s description of his appeal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ That ’ s what I am , a popularist.
” The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie wrote a particularly self-serving book , Let Me Finish , about how Trump did not let him finish work on the transition .
But reporter Michael Lewis ’ s The Fifth Risk contains the most telling quote from Trump to his sidekick-cum-tackle bag : “ Chris , you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.
” It turned out they couldn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with television , and the channel he prefers to any adviser , Fox News , is the subject of Audience of One by James Poniewozik .
According to the New York Times TV critic , Trump ’ s addiction to TV and Twitter meant that even before he won the presidency , he “ had essentially become a cable news channel in human form , loud , short of attention span , addicted to conflict … a meshing of man and machine ” .

Martin Pengellyin New York and David Smith in Washington

Donald Trump is not a reader but to the publishing industry he is the gift that keeps on giving. His time in the White House has yielded an avalanche of books with titles like Fear, Rage, Unhinged and Fire and Fury. Together, they paint a withering portrait of the 45th president.
Some crackle with the fury of scorned employees. Others are banquets of gossip by seasoned reporters, whether highbrow (Bob Woodward) or lowbrow (Michael Wolff). One is by a member of Trump’s own family: Mary Trump who put her estranged uncle in the psychiatrist’s chair.
To anyone seeking to understand the presidency of Donald Trump, such books are a goldmine that offer startling insights into his character, personality and mental state.
Here are six categories to guide you through the canon:
Sex and race
“Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump,” was the bold prediction of Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on The Apprentice, on PBS Frontline in 2016. Fired from the White House the following year, she turned on Trump in a book that proved single-word titles are deadly: Unhinged.
“It had finally sunk in that the person I’d thought I’d known so well for so long was actually a racist,” Manigault Newman writes. “Using the N-word was not just the way he talks but, more disturbing, it was how he thought of me and African Americans as a whole.”
This year’s Republican convention devoted a segment to working mothers at the White House, seeking to cast Trump as an improbable feminist. The literature tells a different story. A Very Stable Genius, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, reports the president complained that Kirstjen Nielsen, his homeland security secretary, did not “look the part”, and that he “abused”, “harassed” and “pestered” her over immigration policy.
The demonization of immigrants is a constant theme. A Warning, by Anonymous, alleges Trump proposed classifying all undocumented migrants as “enemy combatants”, the same status as captured members of al-Qaida, which would thus have dispatched them to Guantánamo Bay.
Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, the daddy of all Trump books, goes on sale in January 2018. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
The unknown author, an administration official, quotes the president: “We get these women coming in with like seven children … They are saying, ‘Oh, please help! My husband left me!’ They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.”
A recurring motif is Trump’s lack of empathy. In Rage, Woodward reflects on his own white privilege and asks if Trump understands the anger and pain of Black Americans. The president scoffs: “No. You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”
Lies
Thanks to the factcheckers at the Post, we know Trump has lied more than 20,000 times in office. Helpfully, those factcheckers compiled a book, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth, although as it came out in June it’s already a few thousand fibs out of date.
Infamously, the whole presidency started out with a lie, characteristically Trumpian in being so provably a whopper: that the crowd for his inauguration was bigger than for Barack Obama. It is not enough for Trump to lie – others must lie for him. This one was delivered by Sean Spicer.
In his masochistically fawning memoir, The Briefing, the former press secretary admits knowing he “didn’t have hard and fast stats” to hand. On day one, his credibility was gone. In Team of Vipers, Cliff Sims, a communications aide, laments a “senseless, unrecoverable act of self-sabotage”. As the former Republican strategist Rick Wilson titled his first book, Everything Trump Touches Dies.
In his memoir, A Higher Loyalty, James Comey, the FBI director Trump fired, showed how Trump rules like a mob boss, which means “lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth”. Trump duly lied about why he fired Comey, pitching himself headfirst into the Russia inquiry and on towards impeachment.
And yet Trump lies like something even more terrifying than a mob boss. Parents will concur with Daniel Drezner’s observation, in The Toddler in Chief, that whenever Trump is found out in a lie – climate change is a hoax; voter fraud is rampant; I didn’t sleep with then pay off that porn star – he doubles down, lies about the lie, thus creating a horrendous feedback loop breakable only by ice cream and screen time.
Family
The books depict a president who relishes discord, watching staff fight likes rats in a sack. But his family – especially his daughter Ivanka – remain untouchable.
Rage, Bob Woodward’s second Trump book, on sale in Gurnee, Illinois. Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA
The first Trump blockbuster was Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Among its revelations was that the president argued with the Secret Service over whether he could have a lock on his bedroom, “the first time since the Kennedy White House a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms”.
Wolff also told how Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, struck a deal about which would run for president one day: “The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”
In Fear, Woodward chronicles a furious argument between Ivanka and Trump’s then chief strategist. “‘You’re a goddam staffer!’ [Steve] Bannon finally screamed at Ivanka. ‘You’re nothing but a fucking staffer!’
“‘I’m not a staffer!’ she shouted. ‘I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter’ – she really used the title – ‘and I’m never going to be a staffer!’”
Omarosa was a witness to the relationship between Trump and Ivanka. She writes in Unhinged: “For as long as I’d known Trump, I’d observed the way he hugs, touches, and kisses Ivanka; the way she calls him Daddy. In my opinion, based on my observations, their relationship goes up to the line of appropriate father/daughter behavior and jumps right over it.”
Other children fare even less well. Michael Cohen’s Disloyal claims Trump repeatedly told the author his eldest son, Don Jr, has the “worst fucking judgment” of anyone he had ever met. When Trump sees a photo of his sons hunting big game in Africa, he roars at Don Jr: “You think you’re a fucking big man? Get the fuck out of my office.” For what it’s worth, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s Melania & Me says the first lady influenced Trump against his sons’ hunting exploits.
Although Ivanka is the favorite, Cohen writes, “all three kids were starved for their father’s love”. Some of the most revealing insights, however, come from a time long before Trump entered politics, before his children were born or when they were still young. In Too Much and Never Enough, Mary Trump characterizes the president’s father Fred as a sociopathic bully who encouraged him to be a “killer”. Chillingly, she suggests that in 2016, voters chose “to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family”.
Narcissism
The New York Times’ enormous scoop on Trump’s taxes will no doubt form the heart of a bestselling book. In the meantime, its revelations have prompted familiar incredulity and hilarity. Take the news, for example that Trump claimed a $70,000 tax deduction for “hairstyling for television”.
Even Ivanka, Wolff writes in Fire and Fury, “made fun of [her father’s] comb-over”, describing “the mechanics behind it: an absolutely clean pate – a contained island after scalp reduction surgery – surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.”
A Higher Loyalty also passes comment on Trump’s appearance. “His face appeared slightly orange,” Comey writes, “with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles.” Comey also says he checked the size of Trump’s hands – about which the president is known to be very sensitive – and found them to be “smaller than mine … but not unusually so”.
More than 20 women say Trump used his hands to sexually assault them. In What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, the Washington Post literary critic Carlos Lozada discusses a telling passage in one of Trump’s own ghost-written books, The Art of the Comeback.
Trump claims to have been groped and propositioned himself, by “a lady of great social pedigree and wealth”, advances he says he turned down politely. Lozada isn’t buying.
“As with so many things Trump says and does,” he writes, “the old story has an air of projection about it … I don’t harass women, he is saying – look, they harass me!”
Strongmen
Why does Trump pander to authoritarians – Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Mohammed bin Salman – but give the cold shoulder to allies? The literature offers some clues.
Woodward’s Rage includes “love letters” between Trump and Kim. The North Korean dictator describes meeting Trump as a “precious memory” that demonstrates how the “deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force”. Trump brags that Kim “tells me everything”, including a vivid account of having his uncle killed.
The president also tells the celebrated reporter: “I get along very well with [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan, even though you’re not supposed to because everyone says, ‘What a horrible guy.’ But, you know, for me it works out good.
“It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You’ll explain that to me someday, OK? But maybe it’s not a bad thing. The easy ones I maybe don’t like as much or don’t get along with as much.”
In The Room Where It Happened, the former national security adviser John Bolton recalls that Trump was willing to halt criminal investigations to “give personal favors” to dictators. Bolton alleges Trump pleaded with Xi Jinping to help him get re-elected by buying more American agricultural products, and even encouraged the Chinese leader to continue to build concentration camps for Muslim Uighurs.
Bolton’s account of Trump’s approach to foreign diplomacy is not reassuring. “It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine,” he writes.
Ignorance
In his new memoir, Battlegrounds, the former national security adviser HR McMaster critiques Trump on policy, but does not dish on the president’s resistance to being briefed, or even reading anything at all. Others, among them Bolton and the classics-quoting Anonymous of A Warning, are quite happy to do so.
Copies of former FBI director James Comey’s book A Higher Loyalty, seen at a store in Washington. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters
At a meeting at the Pentagon in July 2017 which crops up in many Trump books, the defense secretary, James Mattis, and secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, tried to coach the president on the need for alliances and traditional statecraft. As A Very Stable Genius shows in excruciating detail, the meeting did not go well, leading to Tillerson offering perhaps the most lasting tribute to Trump by a member of his own cabinet.
The president, the secretary of state said, was “a fucking moron”.
In Trump’s mind he is beyond advice, the smartest guy in the room, an idea encouraged by toadies and terrified advisers alike, even if Trump famously mispronounced Bannon’s description of his appeal and said, according to Woodward: “That’s what I am, a popularist.”
The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie wrote a particularly self-serving book, Let Me Finish, about how Trump did not let him finish work on the transition. But reporter Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk contains the most telling quote from Trump to his sidekick-cum-tackle bag: “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.” It turned out they couldn’t.
Trump’s symbiotic relationship with television, and the channel he prefers to any adviser, Fox News, is the subject of Audience of One by James Poniewozik. According to the New York Times TV critic, Trump’s addiction to TV and Twitter meant that even before he won the presidency, he “had essentially become a cable news channel in human form, loud, short of attention span, addicted to conflict … a meshing of man and machine”.


theguardian--2020-10-11--Is Donald Trump a bully or bold protector? That depends on whom you ask | Arlie Hochschild

It ’ s said that to every man with a hammer , the world looks like a nail .
So it is , too , that to every bully , a conflict looks like a brawl , a debate looks like a shouting match and even a pandemic an occasion to “ bully ” the truth .
And so it has proved with the president of the United States .
As children , I would guess that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden were bullied , Trump by his demanding father and Biden by schoolmates for his stutter .
If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their shared challenge in nearly opposite ways , with great consequences for the people each has become and for the nation faced with a choice between them .
Most polls suggest that Biden will win the election , although none has really probed the effect of bullying in the recent TV debate – Trump ’ s doing it or Biden ’ s inadequate handling of it ; nor the effect of Trump ’ s bluster since .
But with the citizenry so stressed – by Covid-19 , job losses , fires , floods @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s important to ask what voters are looking for in a leader .
Do some Americans actually want a bully ?
Many studies have shown that Republicans yearn for a “ strong leader ” , a “ fighter ” , and this may make them hesitant to condemn bullying .
I came to know Sharon Galicia , a lively single mum and medical insurance saleswoman from Louisiana , while researching my 2016 book about the American right , Strangers in Their Own Land .
“ The man liberals see as an arrogant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ conservatives see as Rocky Balboa.
” Many good-hearted blue-collar voters with American flag decals on their pickups tune into Trump on a frequency that secular liberals can not hear .
Where most liberals hear bullying , Trump supporters hear : “ I ’ m your guy .
I do all I do for you and I deliver.
” Where liberals hear an interrupter , many conservatives hear , when Trump speaks : “ My enemies – the deep state , whistleblowers , impeachment-seekers , the mainstream media , the Democrats , Covid-19 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for you .
Stand by me as I bully back.
” To bully someone is to seek to harm , intimidate or coerce another who ’ s perceived as vulnerable .
As the National Center Against Bullying elaborates , there are many types of bullying .
Reviewing them , we , especially liberals , can recall times when Trump has exemplified nearly all of them .
There is physical bullying – tripping , kicking , hitting ; remember his calls in 2016 to oust Black Lives Matter demonstrators in the “ old-fashioned way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in palm ) .
There is verbal bullying – name-calling ( Sleepy Joe , Crooked Hillary , Little Mario ) .
There is mockery by imitation .
Recall his laughing imitation of a disabled reporter , palsied arms and hands shaking .
Then there is social bullying – showing contempt for someone ’ s social reputation ( think of the Gold Star parents , Khizr and Ghazala Khan , ridiculed for the silence of the grieving mother ) .
The wider consequences of this approach are huge .
The way Trump works is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the law-and-order answer to that violence .
In the near absence of any other ways of managing social unrest arising from the death of George Floyd , and a steady refusal to disavow armed white supremacists , he has been “ fanning the flames of hate ” , in Biden ’ s words , and “ recklessly encouraging violence ” in Oregon and Michigan ( where extremists plotted to kidnap the governor ) .
“ Stand back and stand by , ” Trump told the Proud Boys , a militant far-right group , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ logo .
Trump thus helps bring on the storm , then hands out Trump-branded umbrellas .
When he ominously declares that the only fair election is one in which he himself wins , many fear that he plans to bully his way into a second term even while talking freely of a third .
So , many now ask where the bullying stops and what it might take to stop it .
With Biden , where do we look for evidence of strength to combat the president ?
As a child , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , money got tight and he was sent to live with grandparents .
When his first wife and 13-month-old daughter died in a car accident , and , much later , his grown son Beau died of brain cancer , a steely but not-unfeeling resilience showed through again .
Now that America is enduring a series of hits to its health , economy and soul , it may be just such resilience we need .
But beyond resilience , a good leader also needs to be able to face and admit the existence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has done .
Although early in declaring himself a commander in the war on Covid-19 , Trump did not fully face or tell his troops when or how the “ enemy ” was arriving .
He said it might disappear “ like magic ” .
He spoke before maskless crowds , routinely refused to wear one himself and , in one of his 128 debate interruptions , mocked Biden for the size of his mask .
He encouraged citizens to flout their ( Democratic ) governors ’ orders about precautions , as if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as if it were a sissy thing to imagine that one existed .
He issued too few boots and guns and , indeed , aimed his own fire at medical advisers .
In short , and to continue with the martial imagery , Trump told troops to leave the battlefield while missiles whistled through the air .
And some have recently hit home .
Twenty lawmakers and 120 Capitol Hill workers , including 40 members of the US Capitol police , have been diagnosed with Covid-19 .
One staff member for a Republican @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as if bullying did the trick , Trump stands by his statement to the American people : “ Don ’ t be afraid of Covid.
” As the nation faces the enormous challenges ahead – jobs , climate change , automation , racial justice , drug addiction , Covid-19 – the truth is that the bully ’ s hammer causes many more problems than it solves .
Bullies do not solve such problems .
Leaders do .
• Arlie Hochschild is professor emerita in sociology at the University of California , Berkeley , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Own Land : Anger and Mourning on the American Right

It’s said that to every man with a hammer, the world looks like a nail. So it is, too, that to every bully, a conflict looks like a brawl, a debate looks like a shouting match and even a pandemic an occasion to “bully” the truth. And so it has proved with the president of the United States.
As children, I would guess that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden were bullied, Trump by his demanding father and Biden by schoolmates for his stutter. If so, the two have dealt with their shared challenge in nearly opposite ways, with great consequences for the people each has become and for the nation faced with a choice between them.
Most polls suggest that Biden will win the election, although none has really probed the effect of bullying in the recent TV debate – Trump’s doing it or Biden’s inadequate handling of it; nor the effect of Trump’s bluster since. But with the citizenry so stressed – by Covid-19, job losses, fires, floods, urban unrest and more – it’s important to ask what voters are looking for in a leader. Do some Americans actually want a bully?
Many studies have shown that Republicans yearn for a “strong leader”, a “fighter”, and this may make them hesitant to condemn bullying. I came to know Sharon Galicia, a lively single mum and medical insurance saleswoman from Louisiana, while researching my 2016 book about the American right, Strangers in Their Own Land. “The man liberals see as an arrogant bully,” she told me, “conservatives see as Rocky Balboa.”
Many good-hearted blue-collar voters with American flag decals on their pickups tune into Trump on a frequency that secular liberals cannot hear. Where most liberals hear bullying, Trump supporters hear: “I’m your guy. I do all I do for you and I deliver.” Where liberals hear an interrupter, many conservatives hear, when Trump speaks: “My enemies – the deep state, whistleblowers, impeachment-seekers, the mainstream media, the Democrats, Covid-19 critics – bully me. I suffer for you. Stand by me as I bully back.”
A good leader also needs to be able to face and admit the existence of a national threat, as Biden has
To bully someone is to seek to harm, intimidate or coerce another who’s perceived as vulnerable. As the National Center Against Bullying elaborates, there are many types of bullying. Reviewing them, we, especially liberals, can recall times when Trump has exemplified nearly all of them. There is physical bullying – tripping, kicking, hitting; remember his calls in 2016 to oust Black Lives Matter demonstrators in the “old-fashioned way” (with a show of fist in palm). There is verbal bullying – name-calling (Sleepy Joe, Crooked Hillary, Little Mario). There is mockery by imitation. Recall his laughing imitation of a disabled reporter, palsied arms and hands shaking. Then there is social bullying – showing contempt for someone’s social reputation (think of the Gold Star parents, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, ridiculed for the silence of the grieving mother).
The wider consequences of this approach are huge. The way Trump works is to promote violence and then pose as the law-and-order answer to that violence. In the near absence of any other ways of managing social unrest arising from the death of George Floyd, and a steady refusal to disavow armed white supremacists, he has been “fanning the flames of hate”, in Biden’s words, and “recklessly encouraging violence” in Oregon and Michigan (where extremists plotted to kidnap the governor). “Stand back and stand by,” Trump told the Proud Boys, a militant far-right group, a phrase it soon emblazoned on its logo. Trump thus helps bring on the storm, then hands out Trump-branded umbrellas.
When he ominously declares that the only fair election is one in which he himself wins, many fear that he plans to bully his way into a second term even while talking freely of a third. So, many now ask where the bullying stops and what it might take to stop it.
With Biden, where do we look for evidence of strength to combat the president? As a child, he recalls when his father lost his job, money got tight and he was sent to live with grandparents. When his first wife and 13-month-old daughter died in a car accident, and, much later, his grown son Beau died of brain cancer, a steely but not-unfeeling resilience showed through again. Now that America is enduring a series of hits to its health, economy and soul, it may be just such resilience we need.
But beyond resilience, a good leader also needs to be able to face and admit the existence of a national threat, as Biden has done. Although early in declaring himself a commander in the war on Covid-19, Trump did not fully face or tell his troops when or how the “enemy” was arriving. He said it might disappear “like magic”. He spoke before maskless crowds, routinely refused to wear one himself and, in one of his 128 debate interruptions, mocked Biden for the size of his mask. He encouraged citizens to flout their (Democratic) governors’ orders about precautions, as if there were no enemy at hand and as if it were a sissy thing to imagine that one existed. He issued too few boots and guns and, indeed, aimed his own fire at medical advisers.
In short, and to continue with the martial imagery, Trump told troops to leave the battlefield while missiles whistled through the air. And some have recently hit home. Twenty lawmakers and 120 Capitol Hill workers, including 40 members of the US Capitol police, have been diagnosed with Covid-19. One staff member for a Republican congressman has died of Covid. But as if bullying did the trick, Trump stands by his statement to the American people: “Don’t be afraid of Covid.”
As the nation faces the enormous challenges ahead – jobs, climate change, automation, racial justice, drug addiction, Covid-19 – the truth is that the bully’s hammer causes many more problems than it solves. Bullies do not solve such problems. Leaders do.


theguardian--2020-10-11--Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain's spaniel became Trump's poodle

That Lindsey Graham would become Donald Trump ’ s poodle was not a tale ( or tail ) foretold .
But it has landed him in the dogfight of his life for re-election to his Senate seat in South Carolina , challenged by a relentless and capable Democratic candidate , Jaime Harrison , who methodically chased Graham around the ring in their debate , repeatedly jabbing him as a hypocrite , until he struck him with a haymaker , ending the verbal fisticuffs with a TKO : “ Be a man.
” Bruised and battered , Graham retreated to his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Fox News , to beg : “ I ’ m getting overwhelmed … help me , they ’ re killing me money-wise .
Help me.
” Graham has climbed the greasy pole within the Senate , to a position that historically has been rewarded by his state with a lifetime tenure .
He succeeded to the seat that Strom Thurmond held for 48 years before he died at 100 .
From Graham ’ s chairmanship of the Senate judiciary committee he has taken up the defense of Trump , to unmask the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to handle the confirmation of a justice on the supreme court , to pack it with a conservative majority for a generation to come .
But just at this consummate moment of his career , events have conspired to dissolve his facade and expose his flagrant hypocrisy .
His presumed strength has turned into his vulnerability .
Worse , in Washington , where the press has treated him for more than 20 years like the genial star of the comedy club , he has become an object of ridicule .
In British political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be described with the seemingly enigmatic phrase of “ reverse ferret ” , applied to a politician who takes a dramatic and often contorted U-turn .
According to the classic work Lying , by Sissela Bok , the word “ hypocrisy ” has its origins in Greek theater , as the slanted reply of an actor to the action on the stage .
“ Its present meaning is : the assumption of a false appearance of virtue or goodness , with dissimulation of real characters or inclinations.
” The hypocrite deceives in order @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dishonesty is in the service of an image of honesty .
Unlike Trump , Graham is not a pathological liar , but his mendacity fits the category of “ duping delight ” as defined by Bok : “ It evokes the excitement , allure , challenge that lying can involve.
” For Graham , it ’ s the thrill of the illicit done in public , creating a suspension of disbelief , the skill of the actor .
Graham has always been more than complicit with liars like Trump , not simply as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well before Trump , he has advanced his career through hypocrisy as his chief means of ambition , knowingly engaging in deceit , adopting a false attitude to win praise and applause as a truth-teller .
The political tasks Trump has delegated to Graham , intended as rescue operations at the close of the presidential campaign , have become showcases for how Graham ’ s hypocrisy threatens his political life .
He squirms in the spotlight he has sought .
On 30 September , Graham called former FBI director James Comey before the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ somehow prove the “ Obamagate ” conspiracy theory .
According to that inverted theory , the intelligence community ’ s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to assist Trump was really a plot against Trump .
Graham sprayed out multiple falsehoods and distortions to create the impression of a vast conspiracy .
One part had already been investigated by the intelligence community inspector general and almost all of it dismissed as untrue .
Another piece of the theory , that Hillary Clinton ’ s campaign contrived the entire story about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ emails and somehow manipulated the intelligence community , had already been discredited as Russian disinformation .
Graham bore down on Comey , demanding answers about “ Hillary Clinton ’ s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server ” .
To which Comey replied , deadpan : “ That doesn ’ t ring any bells with me.
” Graham excitedly harassed him .
“ Let ’ s just end with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the intelligence committee to look at the Clinton campaign basically trying to create a distraction , accusing Trump of being a Russian agent or a Russian stooge or whatever to distract from her email server problems … ” Graham ’ s nonsense was not particularly helpful in laying the publicity groundwork for the potential October surprise of a report from John Durham , the US attorney from Connecticut , named by the attorney general , William Barr , as a special prosecutor to investigate the alleged anti-Trump plot .
To Trump ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would not be forthcoming before the election .
The planned explosion was a fizzle .
“ Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes , ” Trump railed on 8 October , “ the greatest political crime in the history of our country , then we ’ re going to get little satisfaction unless I win and we ’ ll just have to go , because I won ’ t forget it.
” That revenge might encompass Lindsey Graham , too , for failing to execute the smear .
On the matter of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Trump ’ s Russian connections , written by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele .
Graham ’ s manufactured zealotry should have been more earnestly directed toward a cross-examination of himself .
The facts are that in late 2016 , after Trump ’ s election , John McCain , Graham ’ s mentor , disturbed at what he had heard about Trump ’ s Russian ties , sent an aide , David Kramer , a Russia expert , to London to retrieve the dossier from Steele .
In March 2019 , after McCain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , saying , “ I ’ m not a fan ” and explaining that McCain was the one who gave the dossier to the FBI for “ very evil purposes ” .
But there was an additional subplot .
McCain did not act alone .
He asked Graham what he should do with the damaging information .
“ And I told him , ” Graham recounted to reporters , “ the only thing I knew to do with it , it could be a bunch of garbage , it could be true , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ somebody whose job it is to find these things out , and John McCain acted appropriately.
” That bit of Graham ’ s own history was never mentioned at his own hearing .
He seemed a caricature of the lyrics of Bob Dylan ’ s Talkin ’ John Birch Paranoid Blues : Graham ’ s risible hypocrisy on “ Obamagate ” , however , has been overshadowed by a more spectacular case .
In 2016 , Graham followed the lockstep order of Mitch McConnell , the Republican Senate majority leader , to deny @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supreme court , federal judge Merrick Garland , a hearing and committee vote , on the invented doctrine that a president should not be permitted to propose a justice in his last year in office .
“ He ’ s a very nice man , ” said Graham about Garland , “ … very honest , very capable judge.
” But , no dice .
Graham elevated McConnell ’ s raw cynicism into a constitutional principle .
“ I want you to use my words against me , ” he said .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term , you can say Lindsey O Graham said , ‘ Let ’ s let the next president , whoever it might be , make that nomination.
’ And you could use my words against me , and you ’ d be absolutely right.
” In 2018 , with Trump in office , Graham underscored his self-incriminating pledge .
He chose his favored venue of the Aspen Ideas festival , where his transfixing hayseed act has been a perennial marquee @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ll tell you this , ” he said , pointing his finger .
“ This may make you feel better , but I really don ’ t care .
If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump ’ s term and the primary process has started , we ’ ll wait till the next election.
” “ You ’ re on the record , ” his interlocutor , Jeffrey Goldberg , editor of the Atlantic , reminded him .
“ Hold the tape , ” said Graham .
Then , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his next topic and broad expertise : “ North Korea.
” The audience burst into laughter .
( Now , the Never Trumper Lincoln Project is running an ad featuring that tape in an endless feedback loop . )
Graham ’ s antic hypocrisy seems confounding to some who previously admired him when he was a camp follower of McCain ’ s anti-Putin foreign policy .
“ Why ?
” beseeches Anne Applebaum , a former neoconservative turned Never Trumper , about Graham ’ s transmogrification into complicit Trump enabler , comparing his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ regimes .
“ In this negative sense , collaborator is closely related to another set of words : collusion , complicity , connivance .
This negative meaning gained currency during the second world war , when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers .
At base , the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason : betrayal of one ’ s nation , of one ’ s ideology , of one ’ s morality , of one ’ s values.
” But Graham did not set @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when he announced his candidacy in June 2015 for the Republican nomination for president .
He pledged he would restore Ronald Reagan ’ s cold war approach of “ Peace Through Strength ” and excoriated “ Obama/Clinton policies ” for weakness against our “ enemies ” .
He was running as a kind of proxy for McCain .
Like nearly everything else in his political career , his pose wound up becoming a setup for hypocrisy .
By the fall of 2015 , Graham told every reporter whose ear he could bend that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ line to prevent “ nutjob ” and “ jackass ” Donald Trump from seizing the nomination .
Graham ’ s campaign had failed to spark the slightest interest .
His poll ratings could not break 1 % .
In the early debates he was demoted to what he called “ the kids ’ table ” , excluded from the big boys ’ main stage , and after registering invisibility in a qualifying poll was dropped even from there .
Humiliated and broke , he desperately needed to sustain his status in the capital @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the social network of Washington journalists , his base constituency , always available to be entertained with his private animadversions of other politicians .
Graham quickly found a relevant role that allowed him to hold the attention he craved : the anti-Trump whisperer .
He had learned the lesson long ago when he gained entrée to the Washington press corps as an inside dopester to feed the inside dopesters .
With his round boyish face , short height and restless gestures he developed a comedic routine in which he portrayed himself as an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a brothel to tell us with bug-eyed astonishment about the scenes of debauchery he had somehow stumbled across .
To perfect his Huckleberry Finn imitation , one off-kilter wisecrack after another , he always finishes with a trademark darting looking of complicit knowing and a smile to seal approval .
As reporters related , during Graham ’ s anti-Trump phase , his hilarious outtakes described Trump as the Beast threatening western civilization that he , Lindsey Graham , would single-handedly destroy , St George against the dragon .
On and on he went @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attention and nodding heads , though not votes .
Graham ’ s public denunciations of Trump went from grim to grimmer .
“ Go to hell , ” he said in March 2016 .
“ I think his campaign ’ s built on xenophobia , race-bating and religious bigotry.
” He soon raised the stakes : “ What I see is a demagogue , somebody that has solutions that will never work , that is playing on people ’ s prejudices and dark side of politics.
” When Trump stated in April 2016 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a reasonable partner , Graham was apoplectic .
He called Trump ’ s statement “ unnerving , ” “ pathetic ” and “ scary ” .
“ Our enemies will enjoy this ; our friends have got to be scared to death .
It ’ s nonsensical , it makes no sense .
He has no understanding of the world and the role we play.
” In May , he tweeted : “ If we nominate Trump , we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.
” In June , after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he said : “ I would like to support our nominee , I just can ’ t. ” Graham ’ s close association with McCain was the critical event in his makeover .
Graham was an air force lawyer who was never a top gun but McCain was the genuine article : a war hero , the preeminent voice of the Republican party for a hardline foreign policy , especially toward Putin ’ s Russia , and a presidential nominee .
Even before his tagging after McCain , Graham demonstrated a penchant for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Representatives , elected in the Republican wave of 1994 , Graham first attached himself to Newt Gingrich , the radical reactionary speaker who early perfected the toxic politics of polarization .
But Gingrich ’ s erratic character , a prefiguring of Trump , triggered an internal revolt .
Graham was one of the rebels who conspired against Gingrich for the crime of being too moderate toward Bill Clinton .
Toppling Gingrich , and doing the bidding of the ruthless and corrupt majority leader Tom DeLay , Graham advanced as a House manager @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a histrionic role running up the scales to a high pitch .
“ You know , where I come from , any man calling a woman at 2am is up to no good , ” he said .
I encountered Graham in his impeachment phase when I was subpoenaed as a witness in the Senate trial .
When I entered the Senate hearing room to be questioned , Graham shook my hand and said , “ If there ’ s anyone here who wants to be here less than you , it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I ’ m , we ’ re , on the wrong side of history.
” Graham ’ s shambolic performance irritated the Republican “ judge ” , Senator Arlen Spector , a former prosecutor , who repeatedly admonished him .
Finally , Spector chided Graham : “ We ’ re still looking for that laser.
” Graham quickly ended and bounded over to me to shake hands and say : “ Listen , when this is over , when you ’ re going to introduce a patients ’ bill of rights , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
” He shook the hand of my wife , Jackie , saying : “ I ’ m sorry .
I just don ’ t know what to say.
” Sometime later , I ran into a friend of Graham ’ s , Representative Mary Bono , Sonny ’ s widow , a Republican from California , who cheerfully told me : “ Lindsey sure had a good time making fun of your name.
” Was Graham an anti-Semite , as she implied ?
Of course not .
He was play-acting , all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s impeachment frolics , however , left a residue of a future hypocrisy .
In 1999 , he argued : “ In every trial that there has ever been in the Senate regarding impeachment , witnesses were called.
” But in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump , Graham was in the forefront insisting that witnesses , especially former national security adviser John Bolton , not be called .
“ If we seek witnesses , then we ’ re going to throw the country into chaos , ” he said .
Graham @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reverse ferret on supreme court appointments .
The running thread of his consistency is his hypocrisy from one side of the Capitol to another .
Elected to the Senate in 2002 , in his quest for a more serious persona , Graham fastened himself to McCain .
“ Lindsey for some reason had sort of a man-crush on John McCain , ” said his friend , Senator Steve Largent , Republican of Oklahoma .
One southern senator confided to me that he and a number of his colleagues had dubbed Graham “ Little @ @ @ @ @ @ @ larger than life McCain like a spaniel .
In McCain ’ s presence , “ Little Brother ” tried to puff himself up as big , too .
But the senator I spoke with dismissively waved him away as a chronic self-aggrandizer and hypocrite , and flicked away Graham ’ s foreign policy talk as aspirational clichés .
Hillary Clinton was then a senator from New York , and at her initiative and to his initial surprise she approached Graham , and they wound up co-sponsoring healthcare legislation for members of the national @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stronger figure .
He had a kind of crush on her , too .
In 2006 , he wrote an article for Time Magazine ’ s 100 Most Influential People issue to praise her as a “ smart , prepared , serious senator ” , with whom he had found “ common ground ” .
Most importantly , Hillary was a friend of McCain , augmenting the looming shadow .
Together they all traveled abroad on congressional trips , when Hillary and McCain famously closed down bars with shots of vodka .
Graham @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , claimed he abjured the hard stuff .
“ I was drinking water , pretending it was vodka , ” he said .
“ I had to go to the bathroom , before they stopped drinking.
” But one of those present told me he would sometimes nurse a glass of white wine .
His teetotaling was a little white lie – a sauvignon blanc lie .
When Hillary became secretary of state , Graham was effusive in his praise .
In 2012 , he stated she was “ a good role model @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of states , greatest ambassadors for the American people that I have known in my lifetime ” and “ extremely well-respected throughout the world , handles herself in a very classy way , and has a work ethic second to none ” .
But , preparing for his campaign for the Republican nomination , Graham blamed her for the killing of the US ambassador to Libya in a terrorist attack at Benghazi .
“ Hillary Clinton got away with murder in my view , ” he said .
Graham ’ s brief presidential @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tree in the forest that no one heard fall .
Getting out , his endorsement of Jeb Bush was weightless .
After Bush disappeared , Graham moved down the food chain to endorse Ted Cruz .
After Cruz washed out , he was left face-to-face with the Beast .
Graham gave Hillary a shout-out .
“ Hillary , ” he said , about Middle East policy , “ If you get to be president , I ’ ll help you where I can.
” Still the jokester , he wished above all to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He was positioning himself to be Hillary ’ s “ Little Brother ” .
But after Trump won he would befriend the Beast .
Graham decided he was not a dragon slayer , after all .
“ Little Brother ” justified his Trump whispering as a grown-up offering his wisdom to guide the naïve newcomer .
But it was more than half an excuse for being in the room where it supposedly happens , except in Trump ’ s room nobody but Trump matters .
Trump enabled Graham to think of himself as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the other adults in the room , cheek by jowl with John Kelly and James Mattis , while they enabled Trump .
“ I think Lindsey feels a little bit like the adult in the room , speaking with the president , ” Steve Largent explained .
“ [ T ] here ’ s something about , I ’ m not going to say innocence , but the president ’ s affability as well as his naïveté that Lindsey is drawn to.
” Graham ’ s relationship with Trump flourished from the date @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Basking in Trump ’ s presence , Graham happily demeaned himself .
Trump , he said , “ beat me like a dog ” in the 2016 primaries .
Before a Republican gathering , he demanded unquestioning loyalty .
“ To every Republican , if you don ’ t stand behind this president , we ’ re not going to stand behind you , ” he said .
Graham argued that unstinting support for Trump extended beyond any policy issue but required embrace of Trump ’ s view of himself as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ It ’ s not just about a wall .
It ’ s about him being treated different than any other president.
” Graham confessed to Mark Leibovich of the New York Times it has all been just an act .
“ This , ” he said , “ is to try to be relevant.
” How could anyone blame a self-professed hypocrite for his hypocrisy ?
But he and Trump were also secret sharers as entertainers , playing on hypocrisy .
“ The point with Trump is , ” Graham said , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ joke.
” But there was something even more alluring .
“ I have never been called this much by a president in my life .
It ’ s weird , and it ’ s flattering , and it creates some opportunity .
It also creates some pressure.
” The greatest pressure on Graham was that Trump hated McCain .
“ He lost , so I never liked him as much after that , because I don ’ t like losers , ” Trump said .
He went on to denigrate McCain ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ torture by the North Vietnamese : “ He ’ s not a war hero .
He ’ s a war hero because he was captured .
I like people that weren ’ t captured.
” “ I don ’ t like what he says about John McCain , ” Graham shrugged .
“ But when we play golf , it ’ s fun.
” He was moving on .
Graham has seemingly shed several skins , but that ’ s the illusion of the reflected light of the larger figures he has sought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his character only from his distance from McCain to Trump , he has evolved from hypocrisy to hypocrisy while remaining remarkably the same underlying person he was as an attention-seeking little boy .
In 2015 , he self-published a short memoir about his early life .
He described spending much of his time in the bar his father owned , the Sanitary Café , trying to entertain the white working-class men who frequented it .
“ But when the place started to fill in and liven up , I would get my act @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I would strut around the place , sometimes dressed as a cowboy – hat , vest and plastic six shooters .
I might get up on the bar and walk up and down it while talking to folks .
When customers went to the restroom , I might steal their beer and chug it .
I might smoke their cigarette , too , if they left it burning in the ashtray .
Those were antics that earned me the nickname , ‘ Stinkball ’ , which everyone in the bar except my parents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ movingly recounts the illnesses and deaths of his mother and father from cancer .
He ends his book as a Republican candidate winning his seat in the South Carolina state legislature at the start of his political career .
It makes him wish his parents could have seen his triumph .
On 28 July 2017 , John McCain , in his last act of bravery , strode to the well of the Senate and turned his thumb down to cast the deciding vote against the Republican bill to replace the Affordable Care Act @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He had crusaded for years to repeal Obamacare .
Yet the ACA would have offered early detection and treatment of the kind of cancers that killed his parents .
McCain died a year later .
Graham gave one of the eulogies at the memorial service at the National Cathedral .
Trump did not attend .
When McCain announced days before his death he was refusing further medical help , Trump alone among prominent officials in Washington had not sent well wishes .
Out in the audience sat his daughter and son-in-law , Ivanka @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arranged to get them tickets to the funeral .
• None Sidney Blumenthal , former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton , has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln : A Self-Made Man , Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth

That Lindsey Graham would become Donald Trump’s poodle was not a tale (or tail) foretold. But it has landed him in the dogfight of his life for re-election to his Senate seat in South Carolina, challenged by a relentless and capable Democratic candidate, Jaime Harrison, who methodically chased Graham around the ring in their debate, repeatedly jabbing him as a hypocrite, until he struck him with a haymaker, ending the verbal fisticuffs with a TKO: “Be a man.”
Bruised and battered, Graham retreated to his corner, Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, to beg: “I’m getting overwhelmed … help me, they’re killing me money-wise. Help me.”
Graham has climbed the greasy pole within the Senate, to a position that historically has been rewarded by his state with a lifetime tenure. He succeeded to the seat that Strom Thurmond held for 48 years before he died at 100. From Graham’s chairmanship of the Senate judiciary committee he has taken up the defense of Trump, to unmask the dastardly conspiracy of “Obamagate” and to handle the confirmation of a justice on the supreme court, to pack it with a conservative majority for a generation to come. But just at this consummate moment of his career, events have conspired to dissolve his facade and expose his flagrant hypocrisy. His presumed strength has turned into his vulnerability. Worse, in Washington, where the press has treated him for more than 20 years like the genial star of the comedy club, he has become an object of ridicule.
In British political discourse, a figure like Graham would be described with the seemingly enigmatic phrase of “reverse ferret”, applied to a politician who takes a dramatic and often contorted U-turn. According to the classic work Lying, by Sissela Bok, the word “hypocrisy” has its origins in Greek theater, as the slanted reply of an actor to the action on the stage. “Its present meaning is: the assumption of a false appearance of virtue or goodness, with dissimulation of real characters or inclinations.” The hypocrite deceives in order to be perceived as virtuous. His dishonesty is in the service of an image of honesty.
Graham has always been more than complicit with liars like Trump, not simply as an enabler
Unlike Trump, Graham is not a pathological liar, but his mendacity fits the category of “duping delight” as defined by Bok: “It evokes the excitement, allure, challenge that lying can involve.” For Graham, it’s the thrill of the illicit done in public, creating a suspension of disbelief, the skill of the actor. Graham has always been more than complicit with liars like Trump, not simply as an enabler. From the beginning, well before Trump, he has advanced his career through hypocrisy as his chief means of ambition, knowingly engaging in deceit, adopting a false attitude to win praise and applause as a truth-teller.
The political tasks Trump has delegated to Graham, intended as rescue operations at the close of the presidential campaign, have become showcases for how Graham’s hypocrisy threatens his political life. He squirms in the spotlight he has sought.
On 30 September, Graham called former FBI director James Comey before the judiciary committee as a witness, to somehow prove the “Obamagate” conspiracy theory. According to that inverted theory, the intelligence community’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to assist Trump was really a plot against Trump. Graham sprayed out multiple falsehoods and distortions to create the impression of a vast conspiracy. One part had already been investigated by the intelligence community inspector general and almost all of it dismissed as untrue. Another piece of the theory, that Hillary Clinton’s campaign contrived the entire story about Trump and Russia to distract from her emails and somehow manipulated the intelligence community, had already been discredited as Russian disinformation.
Graham bore down on Comey, demanding answers about “Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server”. To which Comey replied, deadpan: “That doesn’t ring any bells with me.” Graham excitedly harassed him. “Let’s just end with this, you get this inquiry from the intelligence committee to look at the Clinton campaign basically trying to create a distraction, accusing Trump of being a Russian agent or a Russian stooge or whatever to distract from her email server problems …”
“I’m sorry, senator,” Comey replied. “Is there a question?”
Graham and Trump during a campaign rally at the North Charleston Coliseum, in February. Photograph: Al Drago/EPA
Graham’s nonsense was not particularly helpful in laying the publicity groundwork for the potential October surprise of a report from John Durham, the US attorney from Connecticut, named by the attorney general, William Barr, as a special prosecutor to investigate the alleged anti-Trump plot. To Trump’s fury, Barr leaked that the report would not be forthcoming before the election. The planned explosion was a fizzle. “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes,” Trump railed on 8 October, “the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win and we’ll just have to go, because I won’t forget it.” That revenge might encompass Lindsey Graham, too, for failing to execute the smear.
On the matter of how the FBI obtained the notorious dossier on Trump’s Russian connections, written by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. Graham’s manufactured zealotry should have been more earnestly directed toward a cross-examination of himself. The facts are that in late 2016, after Trump’s election, John McCain, Graham’s mentor, disturbed at what he had heard about Trump’s Russian ties, sent an aide, David Kramer, a Russia expert, to London to retrieve the dossier from Steele. In March 2019, after McCain’s death, Trump trashed McCain, saying, “I’m not a fan” and explaining that McCain was the one who gave the dossier to the FBI for “very evil purposes”. But there was an additional subplot. McCain did not act alone.
He asked Graham what he should do with the damaging information. “And I told him,” Graham recounted to reporters, “the only thing I knew to do with it, it could be a bunch of garbage, it could be true, who knows? Turn it over to somebody whose job it is to find these things out, and John McCain acted appropriately.”
That bit of Graham’s own history was never mentioned at his own hearing. He seemed a caricature of the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues:
Well, I fin’ly started thinkin’ straight
When I run outa things to investigate
Couldn’t imagine doin’ anything else
So now I’m sittin’ home investigatin’ myself!
Hope I don’t find out anything.
Graham’s risible hypocrisy on “Obamagate”, however, has been overshadowed by a more spectacular case. In 2016, Graham followed the lockstep order of Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, to deny Barack Obama’s nominee to the supreme court, federal judge Merrick Garland, a hearing and committee vote, on the invented doctrine that a president should not be permitted to propose a justice in his last year in office.
“He’s a very nice man,” said Graham about Garland, “… very honest, very capable judge.” But, no dice.
Graham elevated McConnell’s raw cynicism into a constitutional principle. “I want you to use my words against me,” he said. “If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey O Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’ And you could use my words against me, and you’d be absolutely right.”
In 2018, with Trump in office, Graham underscored his self-incriminating pledge. He chose his favored venue of the Atlantic festival, where his transfixing hayseed act has been a perennial marquee attraction.
“Now, I’ll tell you this,” he said, pointing his finger. “This may make you feel better, but I really don’t care. If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term and the primary process has started, we’ll wait till the next election.”
“You’re on the record,” his interlocutor, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, reminded him.
“Hold the tape,” said Graham. Then, he blurted out a non-sequitur to suggest his next topic and broad expertise: “North Korea.” The audience burst into laughter. (Now, the Never Trumper Lincoln Project is running an ad featuring that tape in an endless feedback loop.)
Graham’s antic hypocrisy seems confounding to some who previously admired him when he was a camp follower of McCain
Graham’s antic hypocrisy seems confounding to some who previously admired him when he was a camp follower of McCain’s anti-Putin foreign policy. “Why?” beseeches Anne Applebaum, a former neoconservative turned Never Trumper, about Graham’s transmogrification into complicit Trump enabler, comparing his turn to collaborators with Nazi and communist regimes.
“In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the second world war, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.”
But Graham did not set out to become a collaborator and traitor when he announced his candidacy in June 2015 for the Republican nomination for president. He pledged he would restore Ronald Reagan’s cold war approach of “Peace Through Strength” and excoriated “Obama/Clinton policies” for weakness against our “enemies”. He was running as a kind of proxy for McCain. Like nearly everything else in his political career, his pose wound up becoming a setup for hypocrisy.
By the fall of 2015, Graham told every reporter whose ear he could bend that he would lay his life on the line to prevent “nutjob” and “jackass” Donald Trump from seizing the nomination. Graham’s campaign had failed to spark the slightest interest. His poll ratings could not break 1%. In the early debates he was demoted to what he called “the kids’ table”, excluded from the big boys’ main stage, and after registering invisibility in a qualifying poll was dropped even from there. Humiliated and broke, he desperately needed to sustain his status in the capital. But he still had access to the social network of Washington journalists, his base constituency, always available to be entertained with his private animadversions of other politicians.
Graham with Jim Gilmore, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal at a ‘kids’ table’ debate in Cleveland in August 2015. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters
Graham quickly found a relevant role that allowed him to hold the attention he craved: the anti-Trump whisperer. He had learned the lesson long ago when he gained entrée to the Washington press corps as an inside dopester to feed the inside dopesters. With his round boyish face, short height and restless gestures he developed a comedic routine in which he portrayed himself as an innocent who had just stepped out of a brothel to tell us with bug-eyed astonishment about the scenes of debauchery he had somehow stumbled across. To perfect his Huckleberry Finn imitation, one off-kilter wisecrack after another, he always finishes with a trademark darting look of complicit knowing and a smile to seal approval.
As reporters related, during Graham’s anti-Trump phase, his hilarious outtakes described Trump as the Beast threatening western civilization that he, Lindsey Graham, would single-handedly destroy, St George against the dragon. On and on he went, as usual, eliciting laughter, attention and nodding heads, though not votes.
Graham’s public denunciations of Trump went from grim to grimmer. “Go to hell,” he said in March 2016. “I think his campaign’s built on xenophobia, race-bating and religious bigotry.” He soon raised the stakes: “What I see is a demagogue, somebody that has solutions that will never work, that is playing on people’s prejudices and dark side of politics.” When Trump stated in April 2016 that he would deal with Putin as a reasonable partner, Graham was apoplectic. He called Trump’s statement “unnerving,” “pathetic” and “scary”. “Our enemies will enjoy this; our friends have got to be scared to death. It’s nonsensical, it makes no sense. He has no understanding of the world and the role we play.” In May, he tweeted: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.” In June, after Trump had wrapped up the primaries, he said: “I would like to support our nominee, I just can’t.”
Graham’s close association with McCain was the critical event in his makeover. Graham was an air force lawyer who was never a top gun but McCain was the genuine article: a war hero, the preeminent voice of the Republican party for a hardline foreign policy, especially toward Putin’s Russia, and a presidential nominee.
Even before his tagging after McCain, Graham demonstrated a penchant for trailing strong men. In the House of Representatives, elected in the Republican wave of 1994, Graham first attached himself to Newt Gingrich, the radical reactionary speaker who early perfected the toxic politics of polarization. But Gingrich’s erratic character, a prefiguring of Trump, triggered an internal revolt. Graham was one of the rebels who conspired against Gingrich for the crime of being too moderate toward Bill Clinton. Toppling Gingrich, and doing the bidding of the ruthless and corrupt majority leader Tom DeLay, Graham advanced as a House manager in the impeachment, where he performed a histrionic role running up the scales to a high pitch.
“You know, where I come from, any man calling a woman at 2am is up to no good,” he said.
I encountered Graham in his impeachment phase when I was subpoenaed as a witness in the Senate trial. When I entered the Senate hearing room to be questioned, Graham shook my hand and said, “If there’s anyone here who wants to be here less than you, it’s me. That’s right, I’m, we’re, on the wrong side of history.” Graham’s shambolic performance irritated the Republican “judge”, Senator Arlen Spector, a former prosecutor, who repeatedly admonished him. Finally, Spector chided Graham: “We’re still looking for that laser.” Graham quickly ended and bounded over to me to shake hands and say: “Listen, when this is over, when you’re going to introduce a patients’ bill of rights, would you let me be the co-sponsor?” He shook the hand of my wife, Jackie, saying: “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to say.”
Sometime later, I ran into a friend of Graham’s, Representative Mary Bono, Sonny’s widow, a Republican from California, who cheerfully told me: “Lindsey sure had a good time making fun of your name.” Was Graham an anti-Semite, as she implied? Of course not. He was play-acting, all just in “fun”.
Graham’s impeachment frolics, however, left a residue of a future hypocrisy. In 1999, he argued: “In every trial that there has ever been in the Senate regarding impeachment, witnesses were called.” But in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Graham was in the forefront insisting that witnesses, especially former national security adviser John Bolton, not be called. “If we seek witnesses, then we’re going to throw the country into chaos,” he said. Graham’s contradiction was symmetrical to his reverse ferret on supreme court appointments. The running thread of his consistency is his hypocrisy from one side of the Capitol to another.
Elected to the Senate in 2002, in his quest for a more serious persona, Graham fastened himself to McCain. “Lindsey for some reason had sort of a man-crush on John McCain,” said his friend, Senator Steve Largent, Republican of Oklahoma. One southern senator confided to me that he and a number of his colleagues had dubbed Graham “Little Brother”. Graham trotted after the larger than life McCain like a spaniel. In McCain’s presence, “Little Brother” tried to puff himself up as big, too. But the senator I spoke with dismissively waved him away as a chronic self-aggrandizer and hypocrite, and flicked away Graham’s foreign policy talk as aspirational clichés.
Hillary Clinton was then a senator from New York, and at her initiative and to his initial surprise she approached Graham, and they wound up co-sponsoring healthcare legislation for members of the national guard. She was another bigger and stronger figure. He had a kind of crush on her, too. In 2006, he wrote an article for Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People issue to praise her as a “smart, prepared, serious senator”, with whom he had found “common ground”.
Most importantly, Hillary was a friend of McCain, augmenting the looming shadow. Together they all traveled abroad on congressional trips, when Hillary and McCain famously closed down bars with shots of vodka. Graham, strictly the “Little Brother”, claimed he abjured the hard stuff. “I was drinking water, pretending it was vodka,” he said. “I had to go to the bathroom, before they stopped drinking.” But one of those present told me he would sometimes nurse a glass of white wine. His teetotaling was a little white lie – a sauvignon blanc lie.
When Hillary became secretary of state, Graham was effusive in his praise
When Hillary became secretary of state, Graham was effusive in his praise. In 2012, he stated she was “a good role model, one of the most effective secretary of states [sic], greatest ambassadors for the American people that I have known in my lifetime” and “extremely well-respected throughout the world, handles herself in a very classy way, and has a work ethic second to none”.
But, preparing for his campaign for the Republican nomination, Graham blamed her for the killing of the US ambassador to Libya in a terrorist attack at Benghazi. “Hillary Clinton got away with murder in my view,” he said.
Graham’s brief presidential campaign in 2016 was like the proverbial tree in the forest that no one heard fall. Getting out, his endorsement of Jeb Bush was weightless. After Bush disappeared, Graham moved down the food chain to endorse Ted Cruz. After Cruz washed out, he was left face-to-face with the Beast. Graham gave Hillary a shout-out. “Hillary,” he said, about Middle East policy, “If you get to be president, I’ll help you where I can.” Still the jokester, he wished above all to be seen as a wise man. He was positioning himself to be Hillary’s “Little Brother”. But after Trump won he would befriend the Beast. Graham decided he was not a dragon slayer, after all.
John McCain and Graham at Sather Air Base in Baghdad, March 2008. Photograph: Reuters
“Little Brother” justified his Trump whispering as a grown-up offering his wisdom to guide the naïve newcomer. But it was more than half an excuse for being in the room where it supposedly happens, except in Trump’s room nobody but Trump matters. Trump enabled Graham to think of himself as one of the grown-ups, huddling with the other adults in the room, cheek by jowl with John Kelly and James Mattis, while they enabled Trump. “I think Lindsey feels a little bit like the adult in the room, speaking with the president,” Steve Largent explained. “[T]here’s something about, I’m not going to say innocence, but the president’s affability as well as his naïveté that Lindsey is drawn to.”
Graham’s relationship with Trump flourished from the date McCain was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Basking in Trump’s presence, Graham happily demeaned himself. Trump, he said, “beat me like a dog” in the 2016 primaries. Before a Republican gathering, he demanded unquestioning loyalty. “To every Republican, if you don’t stand behind this president, we’re not going to stand behind you,” he said. Graham argued that unstinting support for Trump extended beyond any policy issue but required embrace of Trump’s view of himself as a victim of his host of enemies. “It’s not just about a wall. It’s about him being treated different than any other president.”
The greatest pressure on Graham was that Trump hated McCain
Graham confessed to Mark Leibovich of the New York Times it has all been just an act. “This,” he said, “is to try to be relevant.” How could anyone blame a self-professed hypocrite for his hypocrisy? But he and Trump were also secret sharers as entertainers, playing on hypocrisy. “The point with Trump is,” Graham said, “he’s in on the joke.” But there was something even more alluring. “I have never been called this much by a president in my life. It’s weird, and it’s flattering, and it creates some opportunity. It also creates some pressure.”
The greatest pressure on Graham was that Trump hated McCain. “He lost, so I never liked him as much after that, because I don’t like losers,” Trump said. He went on to denigrate McCain’s captivity as a prisoner of war and torture by the North Vietnamese: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
“I don’t like what he says about John McCain,” Graham shrugged. “But when we play golf, it’s fun.” He was moving on.
Graham has seemingly shed several skins, but that’s the illusion of the reflected light of the larger figures he has sought out. Contrary to those who measure his character only from his distance from McCain to Trump, he has evolved from hypocrisy to hypocrisy while remaining remarkably the same underlying person he was as an attention-seeking little boy. In 2015, he self-published a short memoir about his early life. He described spending much of his time in the bar his father owned, the Sanitary Café, trying to entertain the white working-class men who frequented it.
“But when the place started to fill in and liven up, I would get my act going,” he wrote. “I would strut around the place, sometimes dressed as a cowboy – hat, vest and plastic six shooters. I might get up on the bar and walk up and down it while talking to folks. When customers went to the restroom, I might steal their beer and chug it. I might smoke their cigarette, too, if they left it burning in the ashtray. Those were antics that earned me the nickname, ‘Stinkball’, which everyone in the bar except my parents called me.”
Graham’s autobiography movingly recounts the illnesses and deaths of his mother and father from cancer. He ends his book as a Republican candidate winning his seat in the South Carolina state legislature at the start of his political career. It makes him wish his parents could have seen his triumph.
Trump, Graham, North Carolina, March 2020. Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters
On 28 July 2017, John McCain, in his last act of bravery, strode to the well of the Senate and turned his thumb down to cast the deciding vote against the Republican bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. Graham voted the other way. He had crusaded for years to repeal Obamacare. Yet the ACA would have offered early detection and treatment of the kind of cancers that killed his parents. McCain died a year later.
Graham gave one of the eulogies at the memorial service at the National Cathedral. Trump did not attend. When McCain announced days before his death he was refusing further medical help, Trump alone among prominent officials in Washington had not sent well wishes. Out in the audience sat his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Graham had arranged to get them tickets to the funeral.
“Hold the tape. North Korea.” (Laughter)
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth


theguardian--2020-10-11--China’s reckless ambition could be the biggest threat to a Biden victory

How does Joe Biden lose ?
Dozens of national and swing-state polls dating back to the spring have consistently given him a winning lead .
Nearly all now predict Biden will defeat Donald Trump handily on 3 November .
Depending on how key states break , it could be a landslide – plus a Democratic clean sweep of Congress .
Even if the polls are as wrong as they were in 2016 , Biden , whose national lead is 10 % , is still projected to win the popular vote by 7 % .
He still wins battleground states such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with them , the electoral college that was Hillary Clinton ’ s undoing four years ago .
All Trump ’ s clumsy and divisive efforts to change the dynamic of the race have failed so far .
His Covid-19 histrionics won him scant sympathy .
It seems the die is cast .
So , assuming the polls are not totally off , what could go wrong for Biden ?
One risk , given his age , 77 , is that he becomes unwell , either from Covid or some other cause .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ it would undermine confidence in his fitness to lead .
Or Biden could make a trademark gaffe , though it would have to be truly egregious to matter .
More plausible scenarios are that deliberate fraud or sheer incompetence skew the election outcome or , if the result is close , Trump refuses to accept defeat and wins in the supreme court , as George W Bush did in 2000 .
But another elephant trap lurks : the risk that an international crisis could erupt – by accident or design – allowing Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doughty defender while sidelining Biden .
The more desperate Trump gets , the higher the risk of this happening .
China needs watching closely right now .
Its hawkish dictator-president , Xi Jinping , has over-reached , and faces possible push-back at home .
Yet on past evidence , he will double down – in order to reassert his post-virus authority and justify his increasingly counter-productive hardline policies .
If push comes to shove , Xi could turn on the US .
Xi has come a long way since he stood smiling in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Obama in September 2015 , and promised a new era of bilateral friendship .
“ China is committed to the path of peaceful development and a foreign policy characterised by good neighbourliness and partnership , ” he declared .
China believed “ democracy and human rights are the common pursuit of mankind ” and respected international law , national sovereignty and freedom of navigation , he said .
“ China does not intend to pursue militarisation ” of the South China Sea .
Yet since then , China ’ s behaviour has grown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has picked fights with India , Australia and European countries , crushed democracy in Hong Kong , reduced domestic freedoms , and tightened the state ’ s chokehold on Tibetans and Xinjiang ’ s Uighurs .
His South China Sea pledge proved meaningless .
US attitudes have changed radically too .
Trump ’ s damaging trade war , sanctions , and “ China virus ” rhetoric have turned supposed amity into open hostility .
In particular , Trump ’ s weapons sales and stepping up of diplomatic and military support for Taiwan have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recover the “ renegade province ” by any and all means .
Deteriorating relations have meanwhile accelerated debate in Washington about ending the 40-year-old policy of “ strategic ambiguity ” over whether the US would fight for Taiwan if it were attacked .
Richard Haass , an influential foreign policy veteran , argues only a clear US pledge to intervene will deter China and its ever-more formidable military .
“ There is speculation that Xi will marry his ambitions with the new means at his disposal to realise his ‘ China Dream ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as soon as 2021 .
No one should dismiss the possibility that Taiwan could become the next Hong Kong , ” Haass warned .
Current US policy was untenable , wrote conservative columnist George Will .
“ China is demonstrating the arrogance that begets recklessness ... Taiwan might provide the most perilous US moment since the Cuban missile crisis.
” Concern that US attitudes are hardening and that Washington is actively encouraging Taiwanese defiance – potentially thwarting the putative crowning achievement of Xi ’ s reign – has produced a rising torrent of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and vitriolic sniping from Beijing in recent weeks .
“ The militaristic tone reflects the hawkishness of Xi .
The risk is that the propaganda could translate into more provocative actions ...
Recent military moves in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait raise the possibility of actual clashes , intended or not , ” the New York Times ’ s Steven Lee Myers reported .
Never one to dial down confrontation , US secretary of state Mike Pompeo was in Tokyo last week , cranking up the “ China threat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2021 .
But what if Xi decided to make a move now , at a moment of maximum US distraction and vulnerability , when Pentagon chiefs are in isolation and Trump ’ s eccentric behaviour grows ever more bizarre ?
In such an emergency , Biden ’ s preferred policy of dealing with China through verbal strictures , dialogue and alliances might look lame .
Xi probably has no wish to help Trump get re-elected .
And he will surely not risk a head-on collision if he ’ s thinking clearly .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ record of unchecked aggression , no one knows which way he will jump .
Xi may calculate that now is his best chance to force the Taiwan issue .
Trump has long accused Biden of being soft on China .
If a crisis with Beijing erupted by chance , or were deliberately provoked by either side , he is not above exploiting it electorally to make the Democrat look weak and himself strong – even if doing so risks a war .
Biden must hope the guns stay silent .

How does Joe Biden lose? Dozens of national and swing-state polls dating back to the spring have consistently given him a winning lead. Nearly all now predict Biden will defeat Donald Trump handily on 3 November. Depending on how key states break, it could be a landslide – plus a Democratic clean sweep of Congress.
Even if the polls are as wrong as they were in 2016, Biden, whose national lead is 10%, is still projected to win the popular vote by 7%. He still wins battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona and, with them, the electoral college that was Hillary Clinton’s undoing four years ago. All Trump’s clumsy and divisive efforts to change the dynamic of the race have failed so far. His Covid-19 histrionics won him scant sympathy. It seems the die is cast.
So, assuming the polls are not totally off, what could go wrong for Biden? One risk, given his age, 77, is that he becomes unwell, either from Covid or some other cause. That would not disqualify him, but it would undermine confidence in his fitness to lead. Or Biden could make a trademark gaffe, though it would have to be truly egregious to matter.
More plausible scenarios are that deliberate fraud or sheer incompetence skew the election outcome or, if the result is close, Trump refuses to accept defeat and wins in the supreme court, as George W Bush did in 2000.
But another elephant trap lurks: the risk that an international crisis could erupt – by accident or design – allowing Trump to pose as the nation’s doughty defender while sidelining Biden. The more desperate Trump gets, the higher the risk of this happening.
China needs watching closely right now. Its hawkish dictator-president, Xi Jinping, has over-reached, and faces possible push-back at home. Yet on past evidence, he will double down – in order to reassert his post-virus authority and justify his increasingly counter-productive hardline policies. If push comes to shove, Xi could turn on the US.
Xi has come a long way since he stood smiling in the White House Rose Garden alongside Barack Obama in September 2015, and promised a new era of bilateral friendship. “China is committed to the path of peaceful development and a foreign policy characterised by good neighbourliness and partnership,” he declared.
China believed “democracy and human rights are the common pursuit of mankind” and respected international law, national sovereignty and freedom of navigation, he said. “China does not intend to pursue militarisation” of the South China Sea.
Yet since then, China’s behaviour has grown steadily more aggressive and lawless. Xi has picked fights with India, Australia and European countries, crushed democracy in Hong Kong, reduced domestic freedoms, and tightened the state’s chokehold on Tibetans and Xinjiang’s Uighurs. His South China Sea pledge proved meaningless.
US attitudes have changed radically too. Trump’s damaging trade war, sanctions, and “China virus” rhetoric have turned supposed amity into open hostility. In particular, Trump’s weapons sales and stepping up of diplomatic and military support for Taiwan have infuriated Xi, who has vowed to recover the “renegade province” by any and all means.
Taiwan might provide the most perilous US moment since the Cuban missile crisis George Will
Deteriorating relations have meanwhile accelerated debate in Washington about ending the 40-year-old policy of “strategic ambiguity” over whether the US would fight for Taiwan if it were attacked. Richard Haass, an influential foreign policy veteran, argues only a clear US pledge to intervene will deter China and its ever-more formidable military. “There is speculation that Xi will marry his ambitions with the new means at his disposal to realise his ‘China Dream’ and force reunification with Taiwan, potentially as soon as 2021. No one should dismiss the possibility that Taiwan could become the next Hong Kong,” Haass warned.
Current US policy was untenable, wrote conservative columnist George Will. “China is demonstrating the arrogance that begets recklessness... Taiwan might provide the most perilous US moment since the Cuban missile crisis.”
Concern that US attitudes are hardening and that Washington is actively encouraging Taiwanese defiance – potentially thwarting the putative crowning achievement of Xi’s reign – has produced a rising torrent of threats, aerial incursions, invasion drills, and vitriolic sniping from Beijing in recent weeks.
“The militaristic tone reflects the hawkishness of Xi. The risk is that the propaganda could translate into more provocative actions... Recent military moves in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait raise the possibility of actual clashes, intended or not,” the New York Times’s Steven Lee Myers reported.
Never one to dial down confrontation, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo was in Tokyo last week, cranking up the “China threat”.
The American focus is on 2021. But what if Xi decided to make a move now, at a moment of maximum US distraction and vulnerability, when Pentagon chiefs are in isolation and Trump’s eccentric behaviour grows ever more bizarre? In such an emergency, Biden’s preferred policy of dealing with China through verbal strictures, dialogue and alliances might look lame.
Xi probably has no wish to help Trump get re-elected. And he will surely not risk a head-on collision if he’s thinking clearly. But given internal pressures, and his post-2015 record of unchecked aggression, no one knows which way he will jump. Xi may calculate that now is his best chance to force the Taiwan issue.
Trump has long accused Biden of being soft on China. If a crisis with Beijing erupted by chance, or were deliberately provoked by either side, he is not above exploiting it electorally to make the Democrat look weak and himself strong – even if doing so risks a war. Biden must hope the guns stay silent.