28 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
OXFORDPOSTCARD
BERNIE’SBRO
N
ext month, American expatriates
all over the world will vote in
the Democrats Abroad primary, which
awards delegates to the Democratic Na-
tional Convention. In 2016, Bernie
Sanders won the expat vote handily,
snapping up nine delegates to Hillary
Clinton’s four. At that year’s conven-
tion, in Philadelphia, the last delegate
to cast his vote for Bernie was also the
candidate’s brother, Larry Sanders, who
has lived in England for the past five
decades. He travelled back home to
pledge his support. “It is with enormous
pride that I cast my vote for Bernie
Sanders,” Larry announced, choking up,
and using the nickname for his little
brother, whom he usually calls Bernard.
“In the back of my mind, I knew it
was such a long shot,” Larry said, last
week, of his brother’s prospects in 2016.
“His whole weakness amongst people
of color was obvious. He hoped to shift
it, but it was going to be very difficult.”
Larry was sitting in his kitchen, in Ox-
ford, wearing a navy cardigan, gray
slacks, and socks under his sandals. He
is six years older than Bernie. (The two
look similar and sound almost the same,
but Larry’s hair is gray.) Larry is also a
socialist politician; for eight years, until
he retired, in 2013, he represented East
Oxford as a county councillor for the
Green Party, which, in 2016, appointed
him its health spokesperson.
Larry lives on a quiet side street by
the Kidneys, a nature reserve about a
mile from Oxford’s city center. Apple
and quince trees grow in his back yard,
dropping fruit at the foot of a slide that
he installed for his grandchildren. Larry
was headed to London the next day, to
host an event on behalf of his brother’s
campaign. “The situation is much differ-
ent now,” he said. “His odds of winning
are so much better.” He had printed out
several articles to review, including an
op-ed from the Boston Globe praising
the “realism” of Bernie’s climate plan.
The house was strewn with campaign
paraphernalia: a “Join-the-Action” fig-
ure, a sticker depicting Bernie as a char-
acter from “Sesame Street,” and a poster
bearing his slogan, “Not Me. Us.” In
the living room were flyers for next
month’s Democrats Abroad primary.
(Americans can participate if they ab-
stain from sending in state absentee
ballots.) “I had no idea this existed until
four years ago,” Larry said. Before 2016,
he hadn’t voted since leaving the United
States, in the sixties, when he followed
his first wife abroad.
The Sanders brothers grew up in
Brooklyn in the forties and fifties, play-
ing stickball and attending Dodgers
last week, following his brief and wit-
ness-free impeachment trial, the most
striking reminder of the constitutional
issues at stake was provided by Mitt
Romney, the Republican Presidential
nominee in 2012, as he joined a united
Democratic caucus to vote for Trump’s
conviction on the article charging abuse
of power. In eloquent remarks, he de-
scribed the President’s conduct as “a
flagrant assault on our electoral rights,
our national security, and our funda-
mental values.” He went on, “Corrupt-
ing an election to keep oneself in office
is perhaps the most abusive and destruc-
tive violation of one’s oath of office that
I can imagine.”
Whether Trump will nonetheless be-
come the first President in U.S. history
to be impeached and then reëlected re-
mains a matter of mortal dread among
many Democrats. For a President pre-
siding over a growing economy and low
unemployment, Trump’s disapproval
ratings remain high, but incumbents
with not much better numbers have
gone on to win a second term. His fol-
lowers still camp out overnight to gain
admission to his rallies. Given the wide-
spread animus toward the President in
big blue states like California and New
York, it seems doubtful that he can win
the popular vote in November, yet re-
cent state polls show that he has a plau-
sible path to an Electoral College vic-
tory, similar to the one he constructed
in 2016. Democratic voters seem moti-
vated to defeat Trump above all other
goals, yet they must first navigate a Pres-
idential nominating contest in which
there is no decisive front-runner and
plenty of potential for divisiveness.
In “A Very Stable Genius,” Rucker
and Leonnig provide an arresting nar-
rative of how Trump has come to op-
erate with far fewer constraints and much
greater conviction about the soundness
of his own instincts. The President’s ig-
norance can be staggering. (On a tour
of the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, he
made clear to his chief of staff at the
time, John Kelly, that he did not know
what had happened at Pearl Harbor.)
But the book’s most frightening scenes
document Trump’s indifference to the
rule of law, compounded, in some cases,
by his reliance on right-wing television
personalities for ideas. In 2018, he grew
deeply frustrated with then Homeland
Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, be-
cause she ignored border-security pro-
posals floated by the Fox Business host
Lou Dobbs; she had concluded that the
proposals were infeasible or illegal.
When Trump insisted that Nielsen act
as he wanted, she told him, “Federal law
enforcement doesn’t work like that....
These people have taken an oath to up-
hold the law. Do you really want to tell
them to do the opposite?” According to
Rucker and Leonnig, Trump answered,
“Then we’ll pardon them.” By now, any
dispassionate reading of the Mueller re-
port, the impeachment investigation,
and the accumulating record of journal-
ism can lead to but one conclusion: we
have been warned.
—Steve Coll
Larry Sanders
