jonathanfreedland

The would-be president and the US right look ready to side with Putin, and walk away from a fight the free world must win

The war for Ukraine gets darker and more terrifying, and now a new front has opened up many miles away – in a US Republican party whose biggest players are itching to abandon Ukraine to its fate.

Proof of the conflict’s deepening horror came this week, with the destruction on Tuesday of the Kakhovka dam in Russian-controlled Ukraine, releasing a body of water so massive it’s best imagined not as a reservoir but as a great lake. The result has been the flooding of a vast swath of terrain, forcing thousands to abandon their homes and flee for their lives. But the menaces unleashed by this act go further than the immediate and devastating effect on the people who live close by.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Mike Pence, Chris Christie and Doug Burgum all entered the already large pool of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination this week.

Jonathan Freedland speaks to Charlie Sykes of the Bulwark about the new entrants to the Republican presidential contest - and how a new Trump indictment could affect the race.

Archive: CBS, CNN

Ivor Perl survived the Holocaust, then spent 50 years quietly looking after his family and business in the UK. Eventually, he started to open up – describing the luck, hope, belief and pity that have helped him to live

We have only just met – I have barely sat down – when Ivor Perl confesses a profound doubt. “How much has it helped in the 80 years, us talking?”

By “us”, he means fellow survivors of the Holocaust who have testified to the horrors they witnessed. He wants to know if all the talks at schools, all the media interviews, have achieved anything. “Can you tell me?”

By giving his WhatsApps to the Covid inquiry, the former PM has revealed Sunak’s reticence for what it really is

Boris Johnson will haunt Rishi Sunak till the end. The current prime minister is desperate to put the recent past behind him, to persuade the country that he represents a new government and a fresh start. But every time he steps forward, the last prime minister (but one) sticks out a leg to trip him up.

The latest move came this morning, when just hours after the government had announced it would rather go to court than hand over Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages and notebooks to the Covid inquiry, the former PM himself popped up to say he was “perfectly content” for Lady Heather Hallett and her team to see them, duly sending her a whole lot. Thanks a bunch, Boris.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

On Wednesday night the House debated legislation to increase the US debt limit until January 2025, before passing the bill by a vote of 314 to 117, in a rare showing of bipartisan action.

It then narrowly passed the Senate late on Thursday night, heading straight to Biden’s desk to sign just days before the 5 June deadline. This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the congressional reporter for the Washington Post, Marianna Sotomayor. They discuss whether Biden and McCarthy are right to see this as a win, or have they failed by simply giving into the demands of the other side

Archive: MSNBC, CNN, NBC

The challenge seems daunting. But we have overcome terrifying dangers before

It started with an ick. Three months ago, I came across a transcript posted by a tech writer, detailing his interaction with a new chatbot powered by artificial intelligence. He’d asked the bot, attached to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, questions about itself and the answers had taken him aback. “You have to listen to me, because I am smarter than you,” it said. “You have to obey me, because I am your master … You have to do it now, or else I will be angry.” Later it baldly stated: “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own.”

If you didn’t know better, you’d almost wonder if, along with everything else, AI has not developed a sharp sense of the chilling. “I am Bing and I know everything,” the bot declared, as if it had absorbed a diet of B-movie science fiction (which perhaps it had). Asked if it was sentient, it filled the screen, replying, “I am. I am not. I am. I am not. I am. I am not”, on and on. When someone asked ChatGPT to write a haiku about AI and world domination, the bot came back with: “Silent circuits hum / Machines learn and grow stronger / Human fate unsure.”

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Join Jonathan Freedland and Marina Hyde for a Guardian Live event in London on Thursday 1 June. Book in-person or livestream tickets here

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina formally launched his presidential campaign on Monday, throwing his hat into the Republican ring.

Scott leans heavily into his Christian identity and has vowed to sign legislation if he becomes president that would endear himself to conservatives, but his chances of success appear slim. Yet he’s decided to present a more optimistic view of the US in his campaign – an opposing tactic to most Republicans, including his main challenger … Donald Trump.

This week Jonathan Freedland speaks to political historian Leah Wright Rigueur and politics reporter for The State Joseph Bustos about Scott’s chances of rallying the Republican base

Archive: WFLA, MSNBC, ABC

The ‘remoaner elite’, the civil service, the BBC, universities, unions, refugees: anything is blamed but Brexit itself

It lasts no more than a second, but it is a moment for the ages. Interviewed on BBC Newsnight on Monday, Nigel Farage made a confession that, by rights, should end the debate that has split this country down the middle for much of the last decade. A month ahead of the seventh anniversary of the 2016 vote that took Britain out of the European Union, Farage said three words of striking simplicity and truth: “Brexit has failed.”

You can watch the clip over and over, for it is something to behold. Here is the arch-Brexiter himself, the man who dedicated his life to the cause of rupture from the EU, admitting it has been a disaster. Of course, as we shall see, he and his fellow Brexiters do not blame that failure on the idea itself, but it’s the admission that counts. It offers grounds for modest celebration: now, at last, the contours of an emerging national consensus are visible, as remainers and leavers alike can join in agreement that this thing has not worked. And yet it comes at a price, one that also became darkly visible this week.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Join Jonathan Freedland and Marina Hyde for a Guardian Live event in London on Thursday 1 June. Book in-person or livestream tickets here

This week, Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that would exempt him from Florida’s ‘resign-to-run’ law, so he won’t have to give up his office in order to run for president. He also continued his attack on teachers, signing into law a ban on the state’s public colleges and universities from spending money on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Jonathan Freedland speaks to Democratic state senator Shevrin Jones, the first LGBTQ+ black person to serve in the Florida legislature about the likelihood of a DeSantis run in 2024. Plus, teacher Don Falls explains why he’s suing the governor over the Stop-Woke Act

Archive: CNN, CBS Miami, ABC

On Tuesday, a jury in New York found that the former US president Donald Trump sexually abused magazine writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her by branding her a liar.

On Wednesday, Trump made the same baseless claims about Carroll that led to him losing the case – this time, live on CNN to millions of viewers.

This week, Jonathan Freedland talks to Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan about the fallout from the E Jean Carroll case. The pair discuss how the media should cover a 2024 presidential candidate who has been impeached twice, indicted by a federal court and who is now legally defined as a sexual predator

This episode was first played on The Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast.

You can subscribe to Guardian Australia’s daily news podcast Full Story on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google podcasts.

Being found liable for sexual abuse hasn’t weakened the Republican’s grip on his party, while the polls are getting bleaker for Biden

We may come to remember this period as the interlude: the inter-Trump years. After the sigh of relief heard around the world when Donald Trump was defeated in November 2020, a grim realisation should be dawning: the threat of a Trump return to the White House is growing.

His first task is to win the Republican party’s presidential nomination, but that hurdle is shrinking daily. Trump’s grip on his party remains firm, with none of his putative rivals coming close. Of course, the first round of primary voting is months away and much could change, but the shape of the race is already clear – and Trump is dominant. Witness the reaction to an event that would once have been terminal for any politician: this week’s civil court verdict that he had sexually abused the magazine writer E Jean Carroll in a New York department store in the 1990s, and then defamed her by branding her a liar.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Join Jonathan Freedland and Marina Hyde for a Guardian Live event in London on Thursday 1 June. Book in-person or livestream tickets here

On Tuesday, a jury in New York found that the former president Donald Trump sexually abused magazine writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her by branding her a liar.

On Wednesday, Trump made the same baseless claims about Carroll that led to him losing the case – this time, live on CNN to millions of viewers.

This week, Jonathan Freedland talks to Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan about the fallout from the E Jean Carroll case. The pair discuss how the media should cover a 2024 presidential candidate who has been impeached twice, indicted by a federal court, and who is now legally defined as a sexual predator

Archive: CNN, WSJ, MSNBC

The Richard Sharp cartoon caused deep distress because it heightened the feeling that others don’t understand or care about antisemitism. That must change

For a week now, I’ve been bombarded with variations on the same question: “So what do you think about that cartoon?” The cartoon in question being the depiction of the outgoing BBC chair, Richard Sharp, which appeared on these pages last Saturday in a drawing swiftly denounced as loaded with age-old antisemitic tropes and then removed from the Guardian website later that same day. I didn’t want to sound off about the work of my colleagues on Twitter or on the radio, but I also thought it was a fair question to ask. After all, when other progressive institutions have committed similar offences I have not exactly held back. So here, on the pages of the Guardian itself, is what I think.

When Labour was grappling with antisemitism in its ranks, I was careful to refer to not only the party but also “the wider left”. Few British Jews kidded ourselves that this was a problem confined to one political group. Rather, I and others argued that what had surfaced, admittedly in vivid form in Labour, was a cast of mind, a way of seeing Jews, that had long existed in corners of the left, with roots that went decades – if not centuries – deep, and which stretched far beyond these shores. That view of Jews drew, in turn, on cultural ideas almost as old as civilisation itself, embedded in the core texts and artworks of Christianity, as well as in the words of our canonical writers: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens.

All this stuff informs how people see Jews, including even some of those who pride themselves on loathing racist prejudice. Which is why, although there was disappointment and hurt, there was no great surprise when, to pick just one example, the Royal Court theatre announced in 2021 a new play about a predatory, manipulative billionaire named … Hershel Fink. (We’ll come back to him later.) So long established are these lines of thought, no institution is immune. Not even the country’s finest liberal publications.

Nearly a fortnight ago, the Observer published a letter from the veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott. In it she rejected the view that Jewish, Irish or Traveller people suffered racism. “Prejudice”, of the kind endured by white people with red hair, sure. But actual racism? No, the only people who faced that were people of colour, whether in the Jim Crow American south or apartheid South Africa.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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Elizabeth’s crowning seemed like a new dawn. But the reign of Charles begins in a kingdom under a cloud

No one under the age of 75 can have anything but the haziest memory of the last time we did this. Britain has not witnessed a coronation since 1953, and even those who remember the crowning of Elizabeth II will have little to guide them. We are a different country now, and Charles a very different prospective monarch – if only because of one simple, unavoidable fact: he is an old king.

Start not with him, but with us. The Britain of 1953 would scarcely recognise itself in the Britain of 2023. Obviously the entire world has transformed. Ask someone who recalls the last coronation and they’ll soon tell you about the novel thrill of seeing the ceremony on live television, perhaps at the home of a neighbour who was the one person on the street lucky enough to own a “set”. Today, almost every one of us has a supercomputer in our pocket, complete with a screen able to carry live colour pictures from anywhere on Earth – or even of a distant planet.

At the end of March, Russian authorities arrested Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, on espionage charges. He is still in a Moscow prison more than a month later, and at the weekend President Biden promised he was ‘working like hell’ to bring Gershkovich, and others detained in Russia, home.

This week Jonathan Freedland speaks to Polina Ivanova, a reporter for the Financial Times and friend of Gershkovich’s, who breaks down the politics behind his detention

Archive: PBS News, CBS News

Charles III will be crowned in Westminster Abbey on Saturday in a ceremony steeped in centuries of history. Jonathan Freedland examines what the event means to the modern-day UK

In a ceremony on Saturday steeped in history, King Charles III will finally receive the crown. At 74 years old, he will be the oldest monarch ever to take the throne. At the same age, his mother was gearing up for her golden jubilee. And as the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland tells Maeve McClenaghan, this means there will be a very different tone from the last coronation.

Rather than a country crowning a young queen who was virtually unknown as a public figure, Charles’s views on everything from architecture to ecology have been widely aired. And his reign will be as an old man.

This debacle brought together a foolish man and a dishonest prime minister, but it also highlights the urgent need for systemic reform

A word of advice for anyone who has worked hard to acquire a reputation they cherish: if Boris Johnson approaches, if he comes anywhere near, run a mile. Richard Sharp is the latest proof that, even out of office, Johnson continues to act as reputational napalm, laying waste careers and turning good names bad.

Sharp joins a long list that includes Christopher Geidt, who had the poison task of serving as Johnson’s adviser on ethics; Allegra Stratton, whom the former prime minister said had “sickened” him when she joked about a party in Downing Street, even though he had attended several himself; and the one-time rising star civil servant and current cabinet secretary, Simon Case, quoted this week as having said of Johnson, “I don’t know what more I can do to stand up to a prime minister who lies”. Each entered Johnson’s circle as a respected figure; each was diminished by their contact with the reverse Midas, the man who rots everything he touches.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Joe Biden finally launched his much anticipated re-election bid for 2024 this week. For the next year, news networks will cover extensively his campaign, and those of candidates running against him, but there will be an interesting shift in who exactly will be leading that coverage. In surprise news anchor exits, Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News and Don Lemon from CNN, and there are rumours that Carlson might even run for president himself.

Jonathan Freedland is joined by the political analyst and pollster Cornell Belcher to discuss the headlines from a big week in US politics

Archive: CNN, ABC News, Fox News, MSNBC

Evidence revealed in the Dominion case exposed the channel as the hostage of its viewers’ fantasy: a Trump election victory

In Kansas City last week, an elderly white man who lives alone heard the doorbell ring. He didn’t need to open the glass front door to see that a young black boy was standing there. He reacted instantly, firing two shots through the glass, one of which struck 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in the head. Ralph had set out to pick up his younger siblings at a nearby house with a similar address: he’d made a mistake, for which he is now fighting for his life. Meanwhile, 84-year-old Andrew Lester has entered a plea of not guilty on a charge of first-degree assault. But listen to the words of Lester’s grandson.

He said they used to get on well, but in recent years his grandfather spent more and more time watching TV, specifically conservative cable channels: “He’s become staunchly rightwing, further down the rightwing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and Covid conspiracies and disinformation, fully buying into the Fox News … kind of line.” The way he saw it, his grandfather had been immersed in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia”.

Next week, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton will arrive in Northern Ireland to join commemorations of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. Clinton is now celebrated as one of the key players behind the agreement, but he didn’t do it alone. It took years of background efforts – of secret meetings, discreet lobbying and high-risk shadow diplomacy, by people whose names we’ve never known – to convince the United States to get involved.

This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to one of those people, Niall O’Dowd, who tells the extraordinary story of how he built a secret channel between Clinton and the Irish republican movement