The president sought an emergency order to block John Bolton’s book, but its explosive excerpts are already making news. Plus, how the pandemic could spell the end of tourism
John Bolton said Donald Trump was prepared to do ‘personal favours’ for dictators.
Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Good morning,
On Wednesday evening, the Trump administration sought a last-minute emergency order from a judge to block the publication of a White House memoir by the president’s former national security adviser John Bolton. But by then it was already too late: many of the book’s most incendiary details had already reached the press, including Bolton’s claim that Donald Trump was willing to halt criminal investigations to “give personal favors to dictators he liked” – and that he didn’t know the UK was a nuclear power.
Trump has attacked his erstwhile aide as a “disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war” while Democrats have again criticised Bolton for refusing to testify at last year’s impeachment inquiry, raising the alarm over the abuses he now purports to have witnessed. But Julian Borger says Bolton’s book, The Room Where it Happened, shows it is still possible to be shocked by Trump’s presidency:
Even with all the inequities of the US electoral system, Trump’s 40% core voters will not be enough to get him reelected. He needs some independents and that’s where Bolton’s book may well deepen and accelerate the process of corrosion.
Rayshard Brooks’s killer has been charged with murder
The Atlanta police officer who shot 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks twice in the back as he fled from an arrest has been charged with his murder. Prosecutors said Garrett Rolfe, who had already been fired by the police department after the incident, kicked Brooks and offered no medical treatment as he lay dying on the ground. It has also emerged that Rolfe was accused of involvement in the cover-up of a 2015 police shooting of another black man.
-
Trump hopes Rolfe “gets a fair shake”. The president told Fox News in an interview on Wednesday that “police have not been treated fairly in our country.”
Activists want reparations over the 1921 Tulsa race massacre
It is perhaps the worst single incident of racial violence in America’s post-civil war history. On 31 May 1921, the vibrant Tulsa area known as “Black Wall Street” came under attack from a white mob, in a 24-hour rampage that left 35 square blocks razed and an estimated 300 people dead. Now, as Trump prepares to hold a controversial rally in the Oklahoma city this weekend, Ed Pilkington finds that the focus on Tulsa has renewed calls from activists for reparations to the survivors and their descendants.
-
The UN’s human rights chief has called for slavery reparations. At a debate on racism and police brutality at the organisation’s Geneva HQ, Michelle Bachelet urged countries to confront their legacies of slavery and colonialism, and to make amends for “centuries of violence and discrimination”.
-
Oakland police are investigating “nooses” found hanging from at least five trees in the city’s Lake Merritt neighbourhood as a possible hate crime.
Fauci says he wouldn’t attend Trump’s Tulsa rally
Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, has said that, “personally”, he would not be inclined to attend the president’s Tulsa rally this weekend – particularly since Oklahoma is among six US states with record numbers of new coronavirus cases. Fauci also warned on Wednesday that the US was “still in the first wave” of Covid-19 infections, with outbreaks flaring across the country amid a continued easing of lockdown restrictions.
-
The Covid-19 jobless crisis in Florida has created headaches for Republicans seeking re-election, while Michael Adno reports from one rural Floridian town where farm labourers have little choice but to keep working, despite the rampant disease.
-
Arizona’s governor has backtracked on masks, telling local governments they can set their own rules on mask-wearing, but insisting he will not mandate the practice statewide amid a surge in coronavirus hospitalisations.
In other news …
-
Beijing says it will “resolutely hit back” over sanctions imposed on its officials under the US Uighur Human Rights Act, which Trump signed on Wednesday in response to China’s mass incarceration of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.
-
The new chief of the US’s state media organisation has purged top career officials and replaced them with Trump allies, raising concerns that the president wants to turn the likes of Voice of America into the sort of loyal state broadcaster more commonly found in authoritarian societies.
-
The world has six months to change the course of the climate crisis, the chief of the International Energy Agency has said, urging governments to develop sustainable economic recovery packages to prevent a continuing rise in emissions.
-
Trump would support Colin Kaepernick’s return to the NFL, the president told an interviewer on Wednesday, three years after he called the players who followed Kaepernick’s example by kneeling for the national anthem “sons of bitches”.
Great reads
Does the coronavirus crisis mean the end of tourism?
Cruise ships have become a symbol for the ravages the coronavirus crisis inflicted on tourism. But their absence – and the welcome break from the crowds and chaos they inflict on the world’s wonders – has many pondering whether tourism itself needs a fundamental rethink, writes Christopher de Bellaigue.
The black progressive upsetting the race to unseat McConnell
Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot, raised a record $2.5m in 24 hours after launching her campaign for Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky Senate seat. But now she may not even make it to November, after weeks of anti-racist protest shifted the spotlight to her Democratic primary challenger Charles Booker. Josh Wood reports from Louisville.
Opinion: Anti-racist protests are achieving more under Trump
The anti-racist movement sparked by George Floyd’s death has achieved more political traction, and faster, than similar protests in the Obama era. They mark a culmination of three-and-a-half years of progressive resistance to the Trump presidency, says Cas Mudde.
If [Joe] Biden is able to defeat Trump in November – despite hopeful polls, this will require a massive mobilization – progressives should not abandon the streets yet again and lose the momentum for fundamental reforms.
Last Thing: Murder, she rewrote
HBO has reimagined Perry Mason, the legendary TV attorney, as a hardboiled, Depression-era gumshoe. Stuart Heritage pitches dark, gritty reboots for five more classic small-screen crime-solvers, from Quincy, ME to Jessica Fletcher.
Sign up
First Thing is delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday. If you’re not already signed up, subscribe now.
