My favorite nugget in Tapper's Original Sin and Simon Schama's holocaust revelations

What a godsend Jake Tapper’s Original Sin has been for Trump! There is nothing the media enjoys more than whaling on scandals it missed at the time, even as the Trump corruption tour – from the Qatar plane freebie, to the Mar-a-Lago crypto gala, to shakedowns by the venal spawn of the president and his circle from Riyadh to Don Jr’s Executive Branch club in DC (initiation fee: $500,000) – has accelerated to an all-you-can-eat buffet of bling. But who cares? Outrage is so old school. Thanks to CNN’s Tapper having a whole network at his command to promote his book (his co-writer Alex Thompson did most of the reporting but little of the talking), a weeklong news cycle was dominated instead by the made-for-TV psychodrama of an addled former president shielded by advisers who covered up his decline like a five-person Edith Wilson. Just what we needed at the beginning of summer.

Kudos to Tapper, I was hooked by his readout on the gaslighting of Robert Hur, the former special counsel who interviewed Biden in October 2023 about his retention of classified documents. They included a binder stashed along with his 1967 Corvette Stingray in his Wilmington garage, after he left the vice presidency. There’s a great Biden aside caught on tapes obtained by Hur that were recorded by the president’s ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer during sessions to hash out his memoir in early 2017. Biden’s unmistakable voice can be heard saying to Zwonitzer – and Biden’s sister Val – “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” Bingo.

But according to Original Sin, far from being a Ken Starr-style partisan eager to bring Biden down, Hur took on the thankless assignment of investigating the classified documents case with some reluctance and for reasons of patriotic duty. His conclusion that the president was a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and thus likely to be too sympathetic for a jury to hand down a guilty verdict, generated fury in the White House.

Given Biden’s clear culpability, far from being belittling and “gratuitous,” as Kamala Harris called it, Hur’s assessment could be seen as benevolently milquetoast. The transcripts show a president befuddled to the point of aphasia, though Tapper doesn’t explore why his supposedly overprotective staff allowed this interview to go forth the day after the October 7th Hamas atrocities in Israel, when Biden was under crippling stress dealing with Bibi Netanyahu and multiple hours of national security discussions. Still, the transcripts are not pretty. Twice Biden groped for the word for “fax machine,” maundering off into anecdotes about Mongolia. And during questions about the time he lived on Chain Bridge Road in northern Virginia, he forgot the date his son Beau was deployed, the date of Beau’s death, and the date of Trump’s election. It’s so bad I almost wonder if it was a deliberate head fake, the political version of mobster Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, the late boss of the Genovese crime family, wandering around the streets of Greenwich Village in the early 90s wearing a bathrobe and mumbling to himself in an effort to convince the feds he was mentally unfit to stand trial. It didn’t work for Gigante, but one might argue it did work for Biden, who wasn’t charged, but who did not expect Hur to add the caveat in his public statement about how mentally out of it he seemed.

All kidding aside, none of this is the point right now. The Greek tragedy of the Biden presidency reached its zenith on May 18 when we learned that, in the midst of his brutal reputation shredding in Original Sin, Biden has been diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones. It seems that one critical adviser not to have been overprotective was his own doctor, Kevin O’Connor, who, for reasons yet to be fully explained, hadn't administered a PSA test since 2014. Perhaps it's time now to get ready for the eulogies remembering him as the president who saved NATO from falling apart, passed a massive infrastructure bill, and in his finest moment, aged 80, made the 10-hour train ride from Poland to war-crushed Ukraine to meet with Zelensky, declaring, “One year later, Kyiv stands. And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands.”

Biden, alas, is done. But his calamitous last act had more authors than his self-delusion alone. No Democrat except the quixotic congressman Dean Phillips had the balls to risk political opprobrium and challenge him in a primary. Kamala Harris would never have won no matter how many more months she’d had to run. The Democrats’ condescending disregard of working-class concerns was a gift to the raw, ruthless energy of the other side. It’s time for the Democrats to stop pounding sand.

No, the point now is Trump’s out of control cryptocracy, in which we can see the real plan for his second term. It’s even worse than the grim policy agenda of Project 2025 to put “bureaucrats into trauma” and chainsaw every agency that serves the public good. While Biden’s speaking fees have sunk to around $300k if he’s lucky, his successor’s net worth is reportedly $1.2 billion higher than it was last year. Trump’s major focus and that of his family is to remove every restraining force, every individual of probity, every effective regulator, every judicial hindrance that gets in the way of leveraging the United States to fill his personal coffers. The purpose of his second term is plunder. As the NYT’s Peter Baker reported, “The president’s sons scoff at the idea that they should limit their business activities, which directly benefit their father. Donald Trump Jr. has said that the family restrained itself during his father’s first term only to be criticized anyway, so it made no sense to hold back anymore. ‘They’re going to hit you no matter what,’ he said last week at a business forum in Qatar. ‘So we’re just going to play the game.’ ”

If we are going to keep hammering on Biden’s cognitive decline, perhaps we should parse out the all-caps rant on Truth Social that Trump posted to mark this year’s Memorial Day. I might sleep better at night with a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in the Oval Office than a vindictive, marbles-free maniac who never forgets a grudge.

In full here:

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS, WHO ALLOWED 21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE TO ILLEGALLY ENTER OUR COUNTRY, MANY OF THEM BEING CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY INSANE,THROUGH AN OPEN BORDER THAT ONLY AN INCOMPETENT PRESIDENT WOULD APPROVE, AND THROUGH JUDGES WHO ARE ON A MISSION TO KEEP MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, RAPISTS, GANG MEMBERS, AND RELEASED PRISONERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN OUR COUNTRY SO THEY CAN ROB, MURDER, AND RAPE AGAIN — ALL PROTECTED BY THESE USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK, AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY. HOPEFULLY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, AND OTHER GOOD AND COMPASSIONATE JUDGES THROUGHOUT THE LAND, WILL SAVE US FROM THE DECISIONS OF THE MONSTERS WHO WANT OUR COUNTRY TO GO TO HELL. BUT FEAR NOT, WE HAVE MADE GREAT PROGRESS OVER THE LAST 4 MONTHS, AND AMERICA WILL SOON BE SAFE AND GREAT AGAIN! AGAIN, HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY, AND GOD BLESS AMERICA!

(enter men in white coats)

(PBS)

Meeting The Monster

Last Tuesday I interviewed the intellectual multi-hyphenate Sir Simon Schama — historian (19 celebrated tomes), Columbia professor, filmmaker (16 documentaries for the BBC and PBS), and FT columnist — at Manhattan’s Center for Jewish History about his new PBS documentary: The Holocaust, 80 Years On. If you haven’t watched it yet, it's mandatory, memorable, and relevant. The night after we talked, two young Israeli embassy staff members, days away from their engagement to be married, were assassinated by a fanatic shouting “Free Palestine” on their way out of a gathering of earnest truth seekers in DC learning about how to deliver humanitarian relief to Gaza. By Thursday, the scholarly Center for Jewish History in Manhattan was holding traumatized interfaith vigils and beefing up security. The young optimistic faces of the murdered couple in the headlines were hauntingly similar to the images in Simon’s film of youthful lovers long faded into the nameless black and white maw of the Holocaust.

I’ve known Simon for over 30 years, since my New Yorker days, when I reeled him in to be our art critic, one of my proudest hires. Compelling, warm, and hilarious on his feet, he produces work that is an uncanny combination of universalism and particularism, ranging widely and deeply over a forbidding array of times and places – The French Revolution, Rembrandt, the history of vaccines – and yet also excavating his native realms with his histories of the Jewish people and everything English. He makes all he touches almost unbearably vivid, both as a storyteller and a thinker.

At 80, his explosively fertile mind was about to turn to his memoir, but the October 7^th slaughters by Hamas and the wave of antisemitism they have unleashed wrenched him back to Jewish history. He decided to confront, on film, in person, a looming omission in his historical travels: the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and extermination center — that crumbling edifice of evil 70 km west of Krakow, the dreadful locus of inhumanity at its very worst — where a million Jews perished during World War II. Until now, Schama could not bring himself to “intrude upon the sacred ground.” But if you are “going to Auschwitz,” he says, “you feel this immense monster lying beneath the surface. So, we are going to meet the monster.”

Some might wonder (I did), how can this film offer anything new after 80 years of obsessive efforts to explain the horror? How could it be more unsettling than Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant Oscar-winning movie The Zone of Interest about the commandant’s family living its humdrum untrammeled life outside Auschwitz’s walls? But everything in Schama’s film felt new. Unlike his other docs, also produced by Nick Kent, his longtime creative collaborator, this one is unscripted. The camera captures Schama’s unfiltered reflections as he begins the Auschwitz story, not at the camp itself but in what led up to it, the awful unfathomable journey of unfolding pan-European complicity.

Schama’s film starts in the summer of 1941 in Lithuania, where his mother’s family originated, in the town of Kaunas. Most of us tend to think that Jewish extermination was forced on reluctant nations by the Nazis. Kaunus was a city with a thriving Jewish community of schools and social clubs and Jewish newspapers and robust cultural activity, a place where Jews and others had always coexisted and felt safe. But all it took was the German invasion of Lithuania to create a savage atmosphere of permission and unleash the beast of local antisemitism with such speed and unexpectedness that it traumatized the Jews as much as the acts of brutality themselves. The first victim was the beloved rabbi of Slobodka, beheaded as he was sitting over a book of the Talmud. People he thought of as fellow citizens cut off his head and displayed it in the window. Lithuanian partisans and ultra-nationalists beat 50 to 70 Jews to a pulp with iron crowbars and waterboarded them with hosepipes forced down their throats.

One interviewee reveals that witnesses told of Luftwaffe planes flying overhead with a cameraman beside the pilot, capturing the massacre to show Hitler how easy it was to stir up the local people to inflict atrocities. So much easier than they expected! Such enthusiastic executioners! Were the Nazis simply empowering passive local populations to become their buried hate-filled selves? The thought is terrifying. In 1941, there was no social media. Today, hate is an industry, against migrants, against Jews, against Palestinians, against people of color, against women. What does it take for the first beheading, the first bullet in the head, to trigger industrial-scale killings of such creative cruelty? It’s disquieting that podcaster Joe Rogan and MAGA megaphone Tucker Carlson, with combined audiences of millions, both hosted on their shows the brazen Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, who called Winston Churchill the real villain and the Holocaust itself a kind of humanitarian measure.

Seventy to eighty thousand Jews were murdered in the leafy glades of Ponar Forest outside Vilnius. A trampoline was set over one of the burial pits and the naked, helpless victims were forced to bounce up and down as they were shot in midair like a fairground game. Today, in that sylvan setting, all is tranquility and the rustle of leaves as Schama tries to search for words to describe what happened.

Perhaps the most shocking moment in the film is footage from 2000 that features an interview with an inoffensive-looking woman named Regina who tells how she bought a gold tooth extracted from a Jewish victim while he was still alive. “I don’t know how much I paid,” she says dully. “And where is that tooth now?” asks the interviewer. “Here!” she says and, with a vestige of a shrug opens her mouth, and taps a shiny gold tooth still in place after 55 years.

In Amsterdam, it was a slower, more bureaucratic version of the same story: a city that was a vibrant and safe space for Jews, for whom the Dutch expressed empathy when the Nazi persecution began, respectfully doffing their hats at a Jew compelled to wear a yellow star, until a general strike provoked a vicious Nazi crackdown and gradually, as Schama puts it, there was “a shriveling of the bravery ... and the most inclusive place in Europe for Jews became a place of exclusion and seclusion.” By the end of the war, the highest percentage of Jews in all of Western Europe to be murdered was in the Netherlands. “The Holocaust can also come with gloves on, and that’s as horrifying in its own way,” Schama says.

What will happen when the files of Dutch collaborators, currently being digitized, are released online to the public for the first time? “They were businessmen and mayors, civil servants, journalists, all kinds of people,” Schama says. Their descendants will no longer be able to pretend they were resisters. “If Hitler had made it over the channel, there is absolutely no doubt it would have gone the same way,” Schama told me, an observation that should make every living Brit’s hair stand on end. It grieves him that at a time when there has never been more Holocaust education there has also been a steep rise in its denial. According to the FBI in the US in 2023 there was an increase of 63% in antisemitic hate crimes. In The Holocaust, 80 Years On Schama confronted the monster, but have we?