the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt ten)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

For the first seven months of his presidency, Trump vacillated on canceling DACA, the highly popular program that protected from deportation some seven hundred thousand people who had come to the US as undocumented children. Obama had instituted DACA in June 2012, through an executive action, and Trump had campaigned against it, then reversed himself, in a rare acknowledgement of how extreme it would look to target such a sympathetic population. “We are going to deal with DACA with heart,” he said, after taking office. “To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have, because you have these incredible kids.” Later, he added, “We love Dreamers.” Miller, however, had always been hostile to the policy. In an email to an editor at Breitbart, he said that expanding “the foreign-born share” of the US workforce was an instance of immigration being used “to replace existing demographics.”

In September 2017, under pressure from Miller and other White house advisers, Trump agreed to cancel DACA, setting a six-month deadline for Congress to find a legislative solution. He left the announcement to Sessions, who delivered it on the Tuesday morning after Labor Day. At the press conference, Sessions called Dreamers by a different name. They were, he said, “A group of illegal aliens” who were taking jobs away from citizens, contributing to “lawlessness,” and threatening the country’s “unsurpassed legal heritage.”

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt nine)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

Most important was Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, the first Republican in the Senate to endorse Trump for president. Of the eleven candidates in the primary field, Sessions had been expected to back Texas senator Ted Cruz, who began the race as the far right’s favorite. Sessions, Cruz said, was “the strongest opponent of amnesty in the United States Congress.” On February 27, 2016, a week after Trump beat Cruz in the South Carolina primary, Sessions had an hour-long phone conversation with Steve Bannon, the head of Breitbart News. Sessions and Bannon had spent several years on the political margins, scheming to move the party’s center of gravity to the far right. In 2013, Bannon had even tried to recruit Session to run for president on a nationalist platform built around immigration and trade, but Sessions declined. Two years later, on the morning of June 16, 2015, Bannon was at Breitbart’s headquarters, in a Washington town house, watching Trump descend the escalator at Trump Tower to the soundtrack of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Soon, he was advising Trump and recruiting other ideologues to the cause. “Trump is a great advocate for our ideas,” Sessions admitted to Bannon on the phone in February. His only reservation was whether Trump could break through. “Do you think he can win?” he asked. Bannon replied, “One hundred percent. If he can stick to your message and personify this stuff, there’s not a doubt in my mind.” The next day, on a stadium stage in Madison, Alabama, Sessions stood next to Trump and said, “This isn’t a campaign. This is a movement.” With Sessions convinced, others followed. “Sessions was Trump’s Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” said Mark Krikorian, the head of the influential anti-immigration think tank Center for Immigration Studies.

Sessions was a short, mousy man in his early seventies with an impish smile and a thick Southern drawl. He had spent the entirety of his political career as a lightning rod and a punch line. In 1986, while he was serving as a US attorney in Alabama, Reagan nominated him to be a judge, but allegations of racism blocked his confirmation. At the time, Sessions was the first nominee for a federal district judgeship not to be confirmed in more than thirty years. This was an embarrassing setback, but it also made him an early martyr for white identity politics. He claimed to stand for a “humble and honest populism.” Ten years later, he was elected to the US Senate, where his career was defined by his rabid opposition to immigration. In 2007, he attacked George W. Bush for proposing comprehensive immigration reform, and in 2013 he assailed Obama for the same thing. Sessions may have lacked the clout to pass any bills, but he generated enough heat to scuttle them.

In 2015, after the Republicans took control of the Senate, Sessions rebutted the consensus inside the Republican establishment that Mitt Romney had lost the 2012 presidential election because he’d moved too far to the right. In a memo titled “Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority,” Sessions argued that the GOP had lost the election because it hadn’t been aggressive enough. “The last four decades have witnessed the following,” he wrote. “A period of record, uncontrolled immigration to the United States; a dramatic rise in the number of persons receiving welfare; and a steep erosion in middle class wages.” He went on, “The largest untapped constituency in American politics are the 300 million American citizens who have been completely left out of the immigration debate. Speak to that constituency—with clarity and compassion—and change the issue forever.”

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt eight)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

Half a decade of near misses and failed efforts to reform the immigration system had preceded this moment. In the summer of 2001, the Bush administration had been in advanced talks with Mexico to announce a comprehensive plan when 9/11 inverted the agenda. For the next several years Congress funded a harsh enforcement regime in preparation for legalization measures that never materialized. In 2006, a bill sponsored by Ted Kennedy and John McCain passed the Senate but wasn’t taken up in the House. The Bush White House supported this latest version, and the Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress. Yet there were other complications. For one, McCain was no longer a sponsor. He was preparing to run in the Republican primary for president and had decided to keep his distance from controversial legislation. The fact that advocated and a bipartisan group of senators were on the verge of giving millions of people a path to citizenship had galvanized the opposition. The congressional phone lines crashed from an onslaught of calls placed by enraged conservative voters, stirred up by representatives on the far right, talk-radio hosts, and Lou Dobbs, a CNN anchor who filled the prime-time slot with nightly rants about “amnesty for illegals.”

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt seven)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

In 2005, President Saca had finalized the terms of a regional free trade agreement with the US, making El Salvador the first country in Central America to become a party to the deal. Among the myriad foreign companies that began investing in El Salvador were Sykes, AT&T, and Dell, which were outsourcing large shares of their US labor force. Drawn by low operating costs and generous tax incentives, call centers were on the rise, fueled in large part by the influx of English-speaking job seekers.

Deportees were a natural fit for the workforce: they spoke idiomatic American English, were desperate for money, and couldn’t find work anywhere else. Deportees were “very loyal,” a call-center recruiter once admitted to the news service McClatchy. “They know they won’t get another shot.” Eddie hadn’t known it when he first arrived at the San Salvador airport, but there amid the crowds—in crisp khakis and gold shirts, beaming solicitous smiles—were call center recruiters, rushing to hire deportees almost as soon as they stepped off the planes. In Latin America, the burgeoning industry depended on US immigration policy, which was uprooting tens of thousands of Americanized immigrants each year. The call centers ran the gamut in El Salvador, from large and highly professional ones to midsize firms and smaller, boutique shops. What differentiated them, typically, was the number of accounts each had; at the bigger outfits, there could be as many as three or four American companies spread across multiple floors, farming out different aspects of their operations, from sales to customer support. At many of them, more than half of the employees had been deported. Sykes was known, in English, as “homieland” because of all its deportees.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt six)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

Having heard Juan tell his story in public, Roberts knew he would make an ideal plaintiff, but she felt ambivalent as his friend. “Litigation can be horrible,” she said. It could dredge up old traumas, provoke threats, and invite unflattering press. There were two cases in development. Vides Casanova and García were the defendants in both. Juan would serve as a plaintiff in the second. The first was being filed on behalf of the four American churchwomen raped and murdered on December 2, 1980. The brother of one of the victims, Bill Ford, was adamant that his sister would have wanted her case to include Salvadoran victims. In 1998, Ford had convinced attorneys at the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights to travel to El Salvador to interview four National Guardsmen who’d been arrested and imprisoned for the crime. From that trip, the lawyers had learned the whereabouts of Vides Casanova and García. At least a thousand war criminals from all over the world were living in the US at the time, including many Salvadoran military officers. On war refugee bumped into his torturer on a public bus in the Bay Area. The man who had killed Óscar Romero sold used cars in Modesto, California. A colonel implicated in the assassination of the Jesuit priests in 1989 had a job at a candy factory outside Boston.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt five)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

On March 3, shortly after the Anzoras left for El Salvador, a Black man named Rodney King was hurtling down Interstate 210, drunk and speeding. When the police caught up with him near an apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley, there were more than two dozen officers on hand. King emerged from the car, laid down on the ground, then stood back up. He wobbled a bit, and staggered toward one of them before the beating began. The officers formed a circle, while three of them took turns kicking him and hitting him with batons. They landed fifty-six blows in all—shattering one of King’s eye sockets, fracturing his cheekbone, breaking his leg, and knocking multiple fillings from his teeth. From across the street, a resident with a camcorder captured everything, including the scream of an onlooker: “Oh, my god, they’re beating him to death.”

In the weeks and months after the incident, snippets of the video footage were shown on a loop on local news, and city officials announced charges against the officers. The King beating was the latest in a series of city tragedies. A handful of police brutality cases had left several Black Angelinos injured, dead, or dispossessed. A predictable set of acquittals had followed. One of them was of three officers who faced misdemeanor charges for destroying the apartments of Black and Latino residents at Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue, during the raids a few years before. They were acquitted in June 1991, three months after the King footage surfaced. The following month, a commission appointed by the mayor, a Black political veteran and former cop named Tom Bradley, released the findings of an extensive investigation into police misconduct. “There is a significant number of officers in the LAPD who repetitively use excessive force against the public,” its authors wrote. By then, Bradley was openly feuding with the white police chief, Daryl Gates, whom he was trying to oust. There were calls for Gates to resign, but there was resistance inside the department. In August, three Korean markets in South Central were firebombed, including one where a Korean grocer had shot and killed a Black teenager she’d accused of shoplifting. In November, a judge granted the grocer probation rather than jail time, which unleashed a wave of street protests.

Bradley and Gates hadn’t spoken for a full year when, on April 29, 1992, a jury reached a verdict on whether the three officers shown on the video beating Rodney King, along with their supervisor, were guilty of violating his civil rights. The acquittal was announced that afternoon, from a courtroom in Simi Valley. It struck like an earthquake. Within hours, rioting had broken out across the city. At six forty-five p.m., a group of Black men pulled a white truck driver out of his vehicle on the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues and beat him, bashing his head with a brick. An hour later, a liquor store nearby went up in flames. The city had become a hotbed of tribalism and racial tension: Blacks against Koreans, Latinos against Blacks, the police against everybody. The king verdict lit the fuse of an all-out war. Store owners armed themselves with pistols. People were attacked at random. Shoplifters ran through streets, clouded with plumes of smoke, carrying whatever they could take. Others drove in to haul their loot in the trunks of their cars or strapped to the roofs.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt four)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

In the spring of 1981, Reagan’s advisers were so divided on immigration policy that they could agree only that the president should avoid the subject altogether. It was a “no win issue,” one of his counselors wrote in a memo. “Given the difficulties that can be expected,” another noted, White House action “may be more detrimental to domestic standing than living with the current situation.”

The current situation was this: There were somewhere between three million and six million people living without legal documentation in the US, and another four hundred thousand to a million migrants crossing the border that year. The budget of the INS was less than half that of the Philadelphia police department. “Nothing short of a Berlin Wall could keep illegals out,” one of Reagan’s advisers confessed. The country was in a recession, which further inflamed the public against immigrants who were seen as competitors for their jobs. The president also had to think about his core political supporters. Growers, industrial farming operations, hotels, restaurants, and manufacturers along the border and in the Sunbelt depended on cheap labor, and already there was a shortage of unskilled workers in the Southwest. In May, a well-connected California farmer sent an angry letter to Willian French Smith, Reagan’s attorney general, complaining about INS activity in Fresno. Arrests by Border Patrol, he claimed, were costing him an average of seventeen hundred workers each month. He was losing crops.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt three)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government. The other was an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, known inside the country as the Octopus because it had tentacles everywhere. It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, controlling the country’s only Atlantic port, almost every mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole telephone and telegraph facilities. US State Department officials had siblings in the upper ranks of the company. Senators held stock. Running United Fruit’s publicity department in New York was a legendary adman who claimed to have a list of twenty-five thousand journalists, editors, and public figures at his beck and call. They formed, in his words, “an invisible government” with “true ruling power” over the US, to say nothing of the countries under American sway.

By 1952, the president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, only the second democratically elected president in the country’s history, was trying to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its vast holdings. Not only had the company been exempt for decades; it had also secured a guarantee to pay its employees no more than fifty cents a day. In response, United Fruit unleashed a relentless lobbying campaign to persuade journalists, lawmakers, and the US government that Árbenz was a Communist sympathizer who needed to be overthrown. It didn’t matter that in a country of some three million people, the Communist Party had only about four thousand members. The start of the Cold War made American officials into easy marks. “We should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council said, in 1953.

Over the following year, the CIA and the United Fruit Company auditioned figures to lead a “Liberation” force against the government. They eventually landed on Carlos Castillo Armas, a rogue Guatemalan military officer with dark, diminutive features and a toothbrush mustache, who came across as flighty and dim. “He looked like he had been packaged by Bloomingdale’s,” one commentator said at the time. His chief qualification was his willingness to do whatever the Americans told him. In June 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed by the US ambassador, he was rewarded with the presidency. Árbenz was flown into Mexican exile, but not before Castillo Armas forced him to strip to his underwear for the cameras as he boarded the plane. The State Department helped select the members of Castillo Armas’s cabinet.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt two)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

In El Salvador, the political left extended well beyond the Christian Democrats, and included a spectrum of smaller parties ranging from armed guerrilla groups to nonviolent Marxists, socialists, and unionists whose views fell to the left of the governing junta. On November 27, six leaders of the non-guerrilla left—formally called the Frente Democrático Revolucianairo (FDR)—were preparing to deliver a statement at a Jesuit high school in San Salvador. They had decided to negotiate with the junta, which was significant, because the Christian Democrats in the government had been struggling for support from the country’s leftists. Before the leaders could speak, however, two hundred officers from the state’s combined security forces surrounded the school, while two dozen men stormed the building and kidnapped them. Soon afterward, their bodies were found near Lake Ilopango, just east of the capital, showing signs of torture. CIA cables at the time cited intelligence that Garcia and other high-ranking military officials had backed the operation. Ambassador White sent a message to Washington: “The military have explicitly reject dialogue and heralded a policy of extermination.”

On the evening of December 2, Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary, arrived at the San Salvador airport. They were picking up two Maryknoll Sisters in their forties named Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, who were returning from a conference in Nicaragua. The funeral of the murdered FDR leaders was being held the next day. The four women had just merged onto the highway outside the airport when a truck full of National Guardsmen pulled them over and placed them under arrest. They were raped and murdered later that night, their bodies thrown in a ditch by the side of the road.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt one)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

The revolt in 1932 sputtered in a matter of days, but the repression it provoked went on for weeks. The military intervened on the side of the landowners. They were joined by members of the National Guard, who had been suppressing labor disputes for years. Together the soldiers slaughtered some thirty thousand people—roughly 2 percent of the Salvadoran population. Anyone who looked vaguely Indigenous or dressed like a peasant was branded a rebel and executed. Corpses were dumped in public or left hanging to instill terror. In one town, troops rounded up prisoners in groups of fifty and brought them before firing squads.

La Matanza froze the country in time for the next four and a half decades. The government replaced the real story of what had happened with lavish propaganda about how the military had fended off bloodthirsty communist hordes. The National Library removed references to the events from its records. Newspaper accounts were destroyed. Government files from the time were hidden or burned. What remained, the American historian Thomas Anderson wrote in 1971, was a “paranoiac fear of communism that has gripped the nation ever since. This fear is expressed in the continual labeling of even the most modest reform movements as communist or communist inspired.” Roque Dalton, the Salvadoran poet and activist, put it more succinctly: “We were all born half dead in 1932.”

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt nine)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $ 1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them.

Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future.

This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation.

The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt eight)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

That Alito served as the mouthpiece for the majority was probably all one needed to know. Where Chief Justice John Roberts cuts a genteel figure, Alito wages Kulturkampf with the ferocity of a man who views himself as civilization’s last best hope. He has the zeal of the late Antonin Scalia without the humor or the need to be liked.

The decision, in draft form, wasn’t Solomonic reasoning. It read like a strident essay in National Review, not even bothering with the pretense of persuading the other side. He wrote, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”

For months, the White House knew there was a possibility a decision like this might land. A small working group, led by Jennifer Klein (director of the White House Gender Policy Council) and Dana Remus (White House counsel), prepared options for the president—a slate of policies and executive orders that he could roll out in the event of a decision like Dobbs. With the Politico leak, the White House was no longer dealing with hypotheticals. It knew roughly what it would confront. The time had arrived to get Biden’s take.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt seven)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

Biden obsessed over gas prices. It sometimes seemed that Biden couldn’t go through a meeting without asking about the price at the pump. He asked that a report on gas prices be included in the binder that he took home with him every evening to peruse.

He was convinced that the fossil fuel industry was using the war in Russia as a pretext for profiteering—and because the oil companies had every incentive to restore Republican majorities in Congress, some of his aides were convinced that they were going to screw Biden by keeping prices high.

Even if his energy policy intended to wean America from fossil fuels, he wasn’t going to let that policy objective get in the way of his party’s political survival, or of blunting inflation’s toll on the consumer. He kept ordering oil released from the government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to drive down prices. Indeed, each time he added a fresh batch of oil to the world’s supply, the cost of the commodity dropped. Over the months, after he released 180 million barrels of oil, the reserve dwindled to its lowest levels since the 1980s.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt six)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

What did Joe Manchin want? The answer was slippery. He clearly didn’t like the size of the Build Back Better proposal, which now totaled $3.5 trillion. There was evidence of rising inflation, and Manchin didn’t want a fresh injection of government spending compounding the problem. But was he bargaining in good faith to create a bill that allayed his substantive concerns? Or was he preparing to grind Biden down with an endless negotiation on behalf of his friends in the fossil fuel industry back in West Virginia?

The thing about Manchin is that he is like a Faulkner novel, a stream of consciousness monologue that could be painfully difficult to read, since the point of view kept shifting. But there was one consistent sentiment that he mouthed in nearly every meeting and that reassured Ron Klain. Even as he expressed his doubts, he kept telling Biden, “Don’t worry, Mr. President, we’re going to get this done.” So instead of constantly reinterpreting Manchin, the White House assumed that most of his outbursts were just noise, which could be largely ignored.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt five)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

But then suddenly, the Taliban boarded a bus and began demanding that the Albania-bound women unveil so that their faces could more thoroughly be checked against their passport photos. For the first time, the Taliban said that the women couldn’t leave without an Albanian visa—but that document had never been issued to them.

A member of the staff of Vital Voices, one of the NGOs that Clinton had cofounded, was already in Tirana, the Albanian capital, to begin securing housing for the White Scarves. She went to the foreign ministry and spent the night creating an electronic visa that could be sent to the White Scarves on their phones. The Albanians felt that a QR code would make the email look more official. Since there was a bag of potato chips sitting around, they took a photo of the QR code on the side of the packaging and appended it to the improvised visa.

When the White Scarves showed the Taliban the visa on their phones, it was good enough. The women on the bus escaped to Albania—and so did more than one thousand other Afghan women and their families who Hillary Clinton and her groups managed to rescue.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt four)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

Afghanistan was a collective trauma for the administration, especially the State Department. When Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, went to check in with members of a task force working on the evacuation, she found grizzled diplomats in tears. She estimated that a quarter of the State Department’s personnel had served in Afghanistan, at one point or another. They felt a connection with the country, an emotional entanglement. Fielding an overwhelming volume of emails describing hardship cases, they had an easy time imaging the faces of refugees. Even in the seat of American power, they felt the shame and anger that comes with the inability to help. To deal with trauma, the State Department brought a therapy dog into the building with the hope that it might help ease the staff’s pain.

In the crisis, the State Department redirected the attention of its sprawling apparatus to Afghanistan. Embassies in Mexico City and New Delhi became call centers. Staff in those distant capitals assumed the role of caseworkers, assigned to stay in touch with the remaining American citizens in Afghanistan. They tracked their flights and helped counsel them through the terrifying weeks.

Sherman sent her Afghan-born chief of staff, Mustafa Popal, to Hamid Karzai International Airport to support John Bass. All day long, she responded to pleas for help: from foreign governments, who joined a daily video conference she hosted; from Yo-Yo Ma, who kept writing on behalf of an orchestra; from members of Congress. There was a moment in the midst of the crush when Sherman felt compelled to travel down to the first floor, to spend fifteen escapist minutes cuddling with the therapy dog.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt three)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

For his primary negotiating partner from the other side of the aisle, Portman worked with Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Even among the small group of moderate Democrats in the gang, there was a sense that Portman outfoxed them with his choice. Sinema could generously be described as mercurial. When she first ran for Senate in Arizona in 2018, she faced accusations that she exaggerated her up-from-poverty biography for dramatic effect. In a short time, she went from being an activist affiliated with the Green Party to the sort of politician that activists hounded. Yes, she transgressed the unspoken sartorial rules of the stodgy chamber with adventurous fashion choices. But she also zealously raised money from business interests, and her voting record reflected that alliance.

Portman and Sinema were fellow moderates, but profoundly different creatures. Portman had spent years preparing budgets and negotiating with foreign governments on behalf of the United States. He fixated on details. His colleagues complained about how tight he held the purse strings. Where Portman traveled with a small army of wonks—he usually brought a war room full of staffers with him to negotiations—Sinema would show up in his office with just her chief of staff. It was asymmetrical warfare, and the Democrats knew it.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt two)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

As the meeting began, the leaders posed for the requisite photo session, along with Tony Blinken and foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. They sat in the library surrounded by leather-bound volumes, a globe separating the pair, as if harkening back to the day when the world was divided into spheres of influence. Putin posed in the disaffected slouch that he reserved for occasions like this, a technique to distract from his own diminutive stature. Biden once described the pose to a friend as that of an “asshole schoolkid.”

When the press left the room, Putin’s body language changed. He suddenly seemed less diffident. The Russian press had spent months portraying Biden as a fragile old man, a piece of spin that Putin internalized. But when he greeted Biden, he seemed taken aback by his appearance. “You look good,” he exclaimed. It was an observation that he kept repeating. When Putin called Angela Merkel to deliver his postmortem of the meeting, he told her, “President Biden is very fit.”

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt one)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

On the morning of January 20, Klain might have preferred to attend in person the inaugural ceremony of the man whose political career he worked so hard to advance. But he was missing it, stuck in the building at the behest of Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

Ever since the November election, much of the Trump administration acted as if the Biden people were engaged in a hostile takeover of the government. They refused to share the most basic details that would allow the incoming administration to prepare for the monumental tasks in front of it. A pandemic was raging—and the Trump people withheld access to civil servants and government data that would have provided the Biden White House with a basic sense of the government’s vaccination program. When Biden officials asked Trump’s trade negotiator for details about the state of conversations with China, he refused. Trump appointees at the Office of Management and Budget broke with generations of practice and prevented civil servants from helping Biden aides prepare the budget that they were legally required to submit to Congress in February.

After all that petty obstruction, Meadows’s invitation to meet felt like an act of comity that shouldn’t be shirked.