When mass protests forced the Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to fire his brother as prime minister and two other brothers and a nephew as cabinet ministers, he appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe as prime minister. I wrote back then about possible reasons as to why he chose someone whose party had been roundly defeated in the 2019 elections and had only one seat in parliament. I suggested that it may be because Wickremesinghe is a Rajapaksa stooge who had shielded the family from consequences when he was prime minister earlier. Although he is a person of little or no talent or political skill who has got where he was because of nepotism, he was also desperate to become president, having failed in a previous election. He may have been calculating that if Rajapaksa resigned a president, then as prime minister, he was next in line to be president. After the mass protests last Saturday that demanded both their resignations, Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe said they would resign but did not actually do so. Rajapaksa said he would do so today (the 13th) while Wickremesinghe said he would do so after a new government was formed. Protestors saw in this scenario an attempt by this disgraced duo to somehow stay in power.

It looks like that fear was well founded.

In scenes bordering on farce, yesterday Rajapaksa and his wife fled the country in a military plane to nearby Maldives, sparking protests among Maldivians against the Maldivian government for allowing him into the country. He had apparently earlier been foiled in other attempts to leave.
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The fall of Boris Johnson provides a good example of how fragile power is when it is based on celebrity status. His undoing, from winning a massive victory to getting kicked out of office in less than three years, was almost entirely of his own making.

Johnson has always been a decidedly unserious person. I do not mean that he is stupid. It is true that the wheels of his success were greased by him coming from a wealthy family that enabled him to attend prestigious schools and universities and have well-connected friends, the typical road to success of Conservative party leaders. But there is also evidence that he was also academically somewhat gifted, winning scholarships and honors.

He was also highly ambitious and wanted to be the center of attention and popular and he seems to have decided early on in life that the way to be so was to also act like a clown, to the extent of looking disheveled and deliberately messing up his hair before he went out in public. This lovable scamp act brought with it two benefits. It drew attention to himself. It also enabled him to avoid taking responsibility for his mistakes and deflect criticism by claiming ignorance and carelessness rather than deliberate dishonesty. And there was plenty of dishonesty to be hidden. Apart from his chronic lying, he was also utterly self-serving and treacherous in his dealings with others, perfectly willing to stab his erstwhile party colleagues in the back in his rise to power. It is also clear that he had almost no political principles, except for the standard issue conservative one of cutting taxes and regulations on businesses and undermining the social safety net.
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I linked to videos of the protestors in Sri Lanka occupying the official residence of the president and, like many people in Sri Lanka, was stunned at the opulence of the place. The residence is in the heart of the business district in Colombo and I must have passed by it hundreds of times but had never given much thought to what it was like inside. It is a large building and was protected by a high fence with a security guard at the gate. Since only one side of it is visible from the street, I had no idea how extensive the property was.

What the videos reveal is that it is very luxurious with large, well appointed rooms, nice gardens and a swimming pool. Even though the climate is tropical, private swimming pools are a luxury and rare in Sri Lanka and I do not know of anyone who has one. The daughter of a friend of mine was one of the people who entered with the protestors and she had told her mother how they too were stunned by what they saw.
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Alex Holder is a British documentary producer who managed to get a lot of time to interview Donald Trump and his three oldest children from September 2020 past January 2021. Holder was interviewed by the congressional committee that is investigating the events of January 6th.

When the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack deposed British film-maker Alex Holder, it heard from a first-hand fact witness who inadvertently observed some of the darkest and most politically fraught days of Donald Trump’s time in office.
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Holder was there for it all: three sit-down interviews with Trump, including one at the White House, numerous other interviews with Trump’s adult children, private conversations among top aides and advisers before the election, and around the Capitol itself as it got stormed.
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Holder testified for about four hours behind closed doors last week about his roughly 100 hours of footage, used for an upcoming documentary titled Unprecedented, and turned over to House investigators the parts demanded in a subpoena compelling his cooperation.

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Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the beleaguered president of Sri Lanka, who had insisted that he would stay on as president for his full term despite widespread protests and calls for him to quit, has finally decided to resign on July 13th.

This news came following a massive protest organized for today (Saturday) in which people were urged to come to Colombo and show their displeasure with the government. The government tried to block the protest by declaring a curfew and stopping transport to the city but that seems to have failed as crowds gathered at Galle Face Green, a beachfront esplanade in the heart of the city, right next to the office of the president and just a block away from his official residence.

The protestors stormed the president’s office, with the overwhelmed security forces looking on helplessly.

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In a recent post, I discussed the influential 1963 essay by Richard Hofstadter about the paranoid style in politics. The paranoid style in politics is not a clinical diagnosis of individuals but a style characterizing a certain kind of political thinking that may be held by ordinary people. In the case of a paranoid individual, they fear that sinister forces are targeting them personally. In the case of the paranoid style in politics, people do not think that they themselves are under attack as individuals but believe that their way of life, their values, even their nation, is under attack by evil forces. This gives them the sense that their desire to fight back vigorously against these shadowy and malign agents, however misdirected, even delusional, their fears might be, is a noble cause that must be fought to the finish.
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When I went to bed last night, British prime minister Boris Johnson was defiantly claiming that he would stay on even as there was a steady stream of resignations by members of his government and of Conservative party officials, coupled with reports that those cabinet members still remaining had urged him privately to resign because he had lost too much support. Johnson had even been defiant at the weekly session known as PMQs where the prime minister is supposed to answer questions. Needless to say, the House of Commons was overflowing and raucous, with members even sitting on the aisle steps. Johnson kept insisting that he could continue as prime minister and that the country needed him to carry out the mandate that the electorate had given him two years ago.

Here is a brief except.

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