Evelyn Reynolds

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    ‘Godfather of the Trump presidency’: the direct through-line from Dick Cheney to Donald Trump

    He spent the twilight of his career denouncing Donald Trump as a threat to the republic he loved. But Dick Cheney arguably laid the foundations of Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States.The former vice-president died on Monday aged 84. The White House lowered flags to half-mast in remembrance of him but without the usual announcement or proclamation praising the deceased.Cheney, who served under George W Bush for eight years, was one of the most influential and polarising vice-presidents in US history. Some critics said they would never forgive him for pushing the US to invade Iraq on a false pretext but suggested that his opposition to Trump offered a measure of redemption.Perhaps Cheney’s defining legacy, however, was the expansion of powers for a position that he never held himself: the presidency. Cheney used the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks as a pretext to assert a muscular executive authority that Trump now amplifies and exploits to challenge the system of checks and balances.Some commentators perceive a direct through-line from the Bush-Cheney administration’s policies – such as pre-emptive war, warrantless spying and the creation of novel legal categories like “enemy combatant” – to the Trump administration’s actions against immigrants, narco-traffickers and domestic political opponents.“Dick Cheney is the godfather of the Trump presidency,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “Trump is unchained because Dick Cheney had been at war for half a century against the restraints put in place after Vietnam and Watergate. He believed that action was more important than following constitutional rules.”The debate over the balance of power between the White House, Congress and courts did not start with Cheney. In 1973, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr published The Imperial Presidency, arguing that the executive branch had begun to resemble a monarch that often acted without the consent of Congress.However, by the time of the Ronald Reagan administration, young conservatives felt the presidency had become hamstrung. This sentiment culminated in a 1989 American Enterprise Institute volume titled The Fettered Presidency, articulating a doctrine to regain what they saw as constitutionally appropriate powers.As a young chief of staff in the Gerald Ford administration, Cheney experienced the fallout of the Watergate scandal. He concluded that a sceptical Congress, reacting to the abuses of Richard Nixon, had gone too far, leaving the presidency dangerously weakened.Jacobs said: “Dick Cheney took it as his mission to tear all that down. He saw the efforts to return accountability in the 70s after Watergate and Vietnam as profoundly and dangerously limiting presidential power. He talked openly about Congress self-aggrandising and warned that the country would face ruin.”Cheney believed that new constraints such as the War Powers Act, a 1973 law that limited the president’s power to commit US forces to conflict without congressional approval, had hobbled the executive, making it nearly impossible for a president to govern effectively, particularly in national security.In a 2005 interview, he said: “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of presidential power and authority, that it’s reflected in a number of developments – the War Powers Act … I am one of those who believe that was an infringement upon the authority of the president.“A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the 70s served to erode the authority, I think, the president needs to be effective especially in a national security area.”Cheney’s ideas were formalised as the “unitary executive theory”, which asserts that the president should possess total and personal control over the entire executive branch. This effectively eliminates the independence of a vast array of government institutions and places millions of federal employees under the president’s authority to hire and fire at will.As Bush’s No 2, Cheney was dubbed “Darth Vader”. When America was attacked on 9/11 with nearly 3,000 people killed, the trauma created a political climate in which extraordinary measures were deemed necessary. Cheney turned a crisis into an opportunity to broaden executive power in the name of national security.He was the most prominent booster of the Patriot Act, the law enacted nearly unanimously after 9/11 that granted the government sweeping surveillance powers. He championed a National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping programme aimed at intercepting international communications of suspected terrorists in the US, despite concerns over its legality.The Bush administration also authorised the US military to attack enemy combatants acting on behalf of terrorist organisations, prompting questions about the legality of killing or detaining people without prosecution at sites such as Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.This doctrine is now being used by the Trump administration to justify deadly strikes on alleged drug-running boats in Latin America. It claims the US is engaged in “armed conflict” with drug cartels and has declared them unlawful combatants.Last month the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, wrote on social media: “These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than al-Qaida, and they will be treated the same. We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”In 2002 a set of legal memorandums known as the “torture memos” were drafted by John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general, advising that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority during the “war on terror”.Jeremy Varon, author of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, said: “That championed the unitary executive theory and then said as an explicit argument anything ordered by the commander in chief is by definition legal because the president is the sovereign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“In its own day it was considered a dubious if not a highly contestable legal theory, but the Trump administration is almost pretending that it’s settled law and then using expansive ‘war on terror’ powers to create a war on immigrants, a war on narco traffickers and even potentially a war on dissenting Americans as they protest in the streets.”Varon, a history professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, added: “The great irony is that Trump represents, on the one hand, the repudiation of the neoliberal neocon globalists like Cheney and Bush that entangled America in forever wars. But now America First is being weaponised, making use of ‘war on terror’ powers to capture, brutalise, dehumanise and kill people without any sense of legal constraint.”As an architect of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Cheney pushed spy agencies to find evidence to justify military action. He asserted that then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network. Officials used that to sell the war to members of Congress and the media, though that claim was later debunked.The government’s arguments for war fuelled a distrust among many Americans that resonates today with some in the current Republican party. But it did not lead to a significant pushback from Congress aimed at preventing future presidents making a similar mistake.The trend for executive power has been fuelled by an increasingly polarised and paralysed Congress, creating a vacuum that successive administrations, including those of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have filled with executive action, unwilling to cede powers once gained.The ultimate battle for the unitary executive theory is now being waged within the chambers of the supreme court. Recent rulings from the court’s conservative majority signal a shift away from longstanding precedents that have, for nearly a century, placed limits on presidential authority.Since taking office in January, Trump has unleashed a barrage of unilateral presidential actions. He has waged a campaign to remove thousands of career government workers from their posts and shut down entire federal agencies. His deployment of national guard troops to major US cities and attacks on law firms, media organisations and universities have earned comparison with autocrats around the world.Cheney himself did not approve. He became a severe and outspoken critic of Trump, arguing that the president’s actions went “well beyond their due bounds”, particularly regarding the integrity of the US electoral system. His daughter, Liz Cheney, became one of the most prominent opponents of Trump within the Republican party but eventually lost her seat in the House.Ken Adelman, a former US diplomat who knew Cheney since working with him the 1970s, was not surprised that he took a stand. He said: “Trump stood for everything Dick did not stand for and that was foreign policy, you support your friends and you oppose the totalitarians, strong alliances, strong defence and free trade.“He was very uncomfortable and then finally turned and absolutely opposed Donald Trump with every fibre of his bone, which shows that conservatives can oppose Trump and should oppose Trump because he’s not conservative and he’s not decent and he’s not honourable.”Some commentators contend that while Cheney operated to enhance the power of the institution of the presidency for policy and national security reasons, Trump has leveraged that power for self-aggrandisement, pushing beyond boundaries that Cheney himself recognised.Robert Schmuhl, a professor emeritus of American studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, said: “Clearly in his time as vice-president, he pushed that envelope almost as far as anyone could. But the distinction is that Cheney was trying to enhance the power of the presidency for policy and security reasons, while Donald Trump seems to be pushing for greater power in the presidency that also has a personal dimension for him.”Others agree that, along with the rhymes between Cheney and Trump, there are significant differences. Jake Bernstein, co-author of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, said: “You can draw a line between Cheney and Trump. Trump has taken that to the max; as they say in Spın̈al Tap, he’s turned it to 11. It’s a qualitative difference.“Yes, Cheney believed that power had tilted too much towards Congress and had to go back to the executive and certainly believed that, particularly in issues of war-making, the executive should be completely unfettered. He also understood a lot of this balance between Congress and the executive was based on norms that were elastic and could be stretched in one direction or another.“But he was absolutely at heart an institutionalist and he didn’t want to break those norms. He didn’t want to destroy those institutions. He would have been appalled by the neutering of Congress that’s going on under this current Trump administration. Basically Trump is president and speaker of the House at the moment, and that would have offended Cheney.” More

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    Trump’s assault on voting intensifies as midterms loom: ‘a wholesale attack on free and fair elections’

    A year out from the 2026 midterms, with Republicans feeling the blows from a string of losses in this week’s elections, Donald Trump and his allies are mounting a multipronged attack on almost every aspect of voting in the United States and raising what experts say are troubling questions about the future of one of the world’s oldest democracies.While Democratic leaders continue to invest their hopes in a “blue wave” to overturn Republican majorities in the House and Senate next year, Trump and some prominent supporters have sought to discredit the possibility that Republicans could lose in a fair fight and are using that premise to justify demands for a drastically different kind of electoral system.This is not the first time Trump has questioned the credibility of US elections – he did it almost as vigorously in 2016 and 2024, when he won his bids for the White House, as he did in 2020, when he did not – but now the president’s confidants are threatening emergency powers to seize control of a process over which presidents ordinarily have no control.Trump’s former chief political adviser, Steve Bannon, is urging him to get the elections “squared away” even before the voters have a chance to weigh in. Former legal advisers have suggested the electoral system is in itself an emergency justifying extraordinary intervention, possibly including federal agents and the military stationed outside polling stations.When Bannon was asked whether voters might find this intimidating, he replied: “You’re damn right.”View image in fullscreenThe administration itself, meanwhile, is moving on multiple fronts. Most visibly, Trump is pressuring Republican-run states to redraw their congressional maps outside the usual once-a-decade schedule and lock in as many additional safe Republican seats as possible.Texas has gerrymandered an additional five GOP seats, Ohio two, and Missouri and North Carolina one each, and other states are considering whether to follow suit. (California voters, in response, have just approved a map promising five additional Democratic seats.)Meanwhile, the justice department has abandoned its decades-long defense of voting rights, and in some instances – notably, a pending supreme court case that risks erasing a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – has switched to the side arguing against protecting minority rights. The Department of Homeland Security has slashed funding and cut staff at an agency dedicated to protecting elections from physical and cybersecurity threats.The administration is also demanding states hand over sensitive voter data and purge voter rolls, despite grave concerns about this deterring or disenfranchising large numbers of legitimate voters. In an executive order issued in March, the White House said it wants voters to produce birth certificates or passports as proof of eligibility. It wants the vote count to be over on election night, disregarding provisional and late mail-in ballots. In fact, Trump would like to do away with mail-in balloting altogether.View image in fullscreenIf all that doesn’t suffice – if Democrats still threaten to prevail next year – the administration has a multi-agency infrastructure set up to trumpet allegations of voter fraud and threaten legal action, including possible criminal prosecution of poll workers, election administrators, political adversaries and individual voters. “We’re going to come after the people … who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Kash Patel, now FBI director, vowed in the run-up to the 2024 race. (No court has ever substantiated Trump’s claims that Biden was not the rightful winner in 2020.) “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”Another possibility is that Trump will seek to wrest control of voting machines from state and local officials, as he came close to doing five years ago.“Those of us engaged in this fight are witnessing a wholesale attack on free and fair elections,” said Marc Elias, a prominent election lawyer involved in more than 60 election-related suits. “From executive orders to budget cuts, the Trump administration is undermining election security and promoting voter disenfranchisement.”Perhaps the biggest underlying fear is that Trump has no interest in democracy and aims, ultimately, to destroy it. “I don’t think Donald Trump wants another election,” California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, opined as Trump invoked legally questionable emergency powers to deploy national guard troops to US cities.Administration officials insist their concern is to prevent cheating by the Democrats and improve electoral security. But on the campaign trail last year, Trump told evangelical Christian supporters they would need to vote for him only one more time. “Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed,” he said. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”Whatever the ultimate goal, the question uppermost in the minds of many voting rights advocates is how much Trump and his allies will be able to pull off over the next 12 months. The president has almost no power over elections under the constitution, and much of what the administration has advocated is being challenged in court. It is, for example, a federal crime to deploy troops at any election site. Voter intimidation of any kind is similarly prohibited.For that reason, advocates and lawyers say, the risk is less about what Trump is allowed to do and more about what he can persuade people to do anyway.View image in fullscreen“Donald Trump is a marketing machine, and what he is doing right now is marketing power he does not have,” said Justin Levitt, a lawyer who served as a senior adviser on voting rights in the Biden administration. He described Trump’s March executive order, with its demands for strict voter identification procedures and new voting equipment standards, as just “a piece of paper with a scrawly signature on it”. (A federal judge recently blocked the order, saying the president was improperly asserting powers the constitution assigned to Congress and the states.)“It’s an attempt to fool people,” Levitt added. “Trump’s primary power is the power we give him when he asserts he is in control of everything, and we believe him.”Jasleen Singh, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, has no doubt Trump is “directing, dismantling and weaponizing agencies” with the ultimate goal of “election subversion”. But she, too, said it was important not to give in to the force of Trump’s personality.“The law is on our side,” she said. “We have the right to vote. We have the right to participate … Part of this is not letting voters forget the power that they have.”The White House had no specific comment about Trump’s actions or intentions. Deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson limited herself to a crack about “Newscum” – Trump’s favored term of abuse for the California governor – and his “doomed-to-fail” (but unannounced) presidential campaign.Resisting Trump’s pull is proving easier said than done. On a variety of seemingly settled issues – from district maps to the grace period granted for postal ballots to reach their destination – Republican state legislatures have either reversed their own decisions or are considering doing so because of instructions from the White House. “States are under enormous pressure to do what they can to pacify this incredibly vindictive administration,” said Elisabeth Frost, a partner with Elias’s election law group.Election administrators have expressed widespread fears of doxing and physical threats, and many hundreds have quit their jobs under the pressure. The Maga movement has encouraged supporters to run for election offices to influence the process from the inside.In a worst-case scenario, voting rights activists say, Trump would win the rhetorical battle and convince large numbers of Americans that voter rolls are corrupted and ineligible voters are casting ballots in large numbers. He could thus muster support for the emergency intervention his allies are pushing for.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe administration certainly seized on this week’s elections to keep beating the rhetorical drum. The justice department sent federal monitors to California and New Jersey, which some local officials saw as intimidation. Trump called the California ballot initiative a “giant scam”. And New Jersey’s US attorney, Alina Habba, put out a video vowing to prosecute a long list of virtually nonexistent election-related crimes.View image in fullscreenExperts still said they thought that invoking a national emergency remained a remote possibility. More likely, they said, was a continuation of the pressure campaign to suppress votes and cast doubt on results Trump does not like. They expected the administration to continue to push legal limits first and deal with any blowback from the courts after.“Everyone is seeing the polls,” Frost, the Elias Law Group lawyer, said. “Literally none of their policies are popular, so they are terrified of this election. The more Trump can say that the vote count can’t be trusted, the more it serves his purpose … Either voters will be repressed by laws or they will be repressed by misinformation and made-up bombastic nonsense.”Marpheen Chann, a Cambodian American advocate in Maine, has seen first-hand how pressure from the Trump administration – and, in particular, demands for sensitive personal data in the state’s voting records – has deterred community members from participating next November.“Personally, I’m concerned because I’m politically active. I’m a Democrat,” Chann said. “Will I end up on a list?”What is true for him, a community leader with a law degree, runs even deeper through the membership of his organization, Khmer Maine. Many either experienced the 1970s Cambodian genocide first-hand or have been traumatized by it across generations, making them particularly sensitive to any hint of authoritarian behavior. “The fact that the federal government is trying to break into our voting data and violate our privacy definitely does not feel good for the community,” Chann said.Top of mind is the fear that immigration enforcement agents might seek to use inconsistencies in the data – a missing birth certificate, or a mismatch between a birth name and a name on a passport, both of which are issues for Chann – as a pretext to pursue even naturalized citizens for arrest and deportation. Regardless of how justified those fears are, Chann said they are vivid enough to scare people away from civic engagement. “It makes it really hard for me to get people participating and making their voices heard,” he said. “If they make their voices heard, they feel they’re going to be targeted.”In some parts of the country, Republican state legislatures have needed no pressure from the administration to suppress votes – they have been tightening voter ID requirements, cutting early voting hours, restricting voter registration drives and reducing the number of polling stations for the past 20 years. In other places, though, they have done Trump’s bidding even though it offers them little or no partisan advantage.Kansans, for example, recently voted to get rid of a three-day window for mail-in ballots to be counted after election day, even though the mail is notoriously slow there and mail-in voting is popular in rural areas, where voters tend to be conservative.Frost, who is part of a lawsuit to reinstate the three-day window, agreed that Trump’s personal animus against mail-in voting was not necessarily aligned with Republican partisan interests. Still, she saw a political advantage for Trump in demonizing parts of the electoral system.“The same way he’s been painting the Oval Office with gaudy gold adornments,” Frost said, “he’s been trying to pre-paint all these conspiracy theories so if the election doesn’t go the way he wants, he and his allies can point to the sea of litigation they’ve triggered, or they can point back to the March executive order, and say these were things that should have been done to begin with.”To counter the chaos and the conspiracies, voting rights groups have most often turned to lawsuits and have been heartened to see lower courts, at least, blocking crucial parts of the Trump agenda. Increasingly, they have also seen judges reprimand political appointees arguing on behalf of the justice department following a wave of career lawyers being fired or resigning.“The quality of lawyering they are doing now is, in a word, garbage,” Levitt, the former Biden official, said. “You’re going to see the [justice department] lose a lot of cases, and these are cases they should lose.”View image in fullscreenIn the voter data lawsuits, for example, government filings have repeated far-right talking points – and the language of Trump’s executive order – about voter rolls being vulnerable to “illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error”. That assertion flies in the face of mainstream research going back decades that shows it is passingly rare for ineligible voters to cast a ballot.“This tells you a lot about what the [justice department] is willing to endorse,” Frost said. “There are not going to be arguments too wild as we get deeper into the election cycle and we start to see other conspiracy theories float to the top.”Chann, the Cambodian American advocate, worried that facts and the law would not be enough to protect voting rights, especially in immigrant communities. “Even though people I trust in local and state government are saying they’re doing what they can,” he said, “that doesn’t give me any consolation when it comes to whether the federal government will obey its own election and voting laws.”Still, Chann acknowledged that legal avenues were the best hope for holding on to democracy, and he did not hesitate in coming forward as a named defendant seeking to keep the federal government at bay in a lawsuit over Maine’s voter data.“Congress isn’t going to do anything, and the executive branch is overreaching,” he said. “We need to make our last stand in the courts.” More

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    A year on from Trump’s victory, resistance is everywhere | Rebecca Solnit

    A young white woman in yoga clothes berating masked ICE agents in a parking lot this spring. A pope speaking up again and again for immigrants. Furious judges dressing down the Trump administration and ruling against it time after time after time, in response to the blizzard of lawsuits filed by human rights and environmental groups, states, cities and individuals. A senator speaking nonstop for 25 hours and another flying to El Salvador to find out what happened to his kidnapped constituent. The biggest day of protest in US history as an estimated 7 million people showed up for No Kings on 18 October in small towns and red counties as well as big blue cities.Weekly protests at Tesla salesrooms earlier this year that succeeded in damaging the brand, depressing global sales and prompting Tesla CEO Elon Musk to retreat from his Doge slash-and-burn project. Federal workers resisting sometimes merely by adhering to law, truth and fact, and sometimes by speaking out as whistleblowers or in protests, as with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff who staged a walkout in late August in solidarity with senior staff who’d just resigned in protest against the health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s anti-vaccine policies.Extraordinary solidarity organizing for and with immigrants, refugees and the people targeted for looking like them on the streets, in the neighborhoods of Chicago, at Home Depot parking lots, around schools, in courtrooms. Democratic state attorneys general suing again and again, independently and together, and Illinois and California’s governors spending a lot of time ripping into Trump. Airports refusing to play the homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s partisan-propaganda video about the congressional shutdown. Seven major universities refusing to sign a contract with the administration promising financial incentives for compromising academic freedom. This is some of the resistance to the Trump administration and its policies we’ve seen since 20 January, and it’s worth surveying on the anniversary of the election.When people tell me that there’s been no resistance to the Trump administration, I wonder if they’re expecting something that looks like a guerrilla revolution pushing out the government in one fell swoop or just aren’t paying attention, because there has, in fact, been a tremendous amount and variety of resistance and opposition and it’s mattered tremendously. When will it be enough is a question that can only be answered if and when all this is over and we find out what comes next. Another source of disappointment seems to come from the expectation that there will be some sort of obvious and logical building up toward regime change, rather than the reality that tipping points in particular and histories in general are unpredictable animals.Resistance is everywhere, both geographically and in terms of the constituencies participating: civil society and civil servants; human rights, climate and environmental groups (who in many cases had plans in place before the election and hit the ground running when the new administration came in); religious leaders and institutions, elected officials at all levels from city councils to the US Senate, the military, lawyers and judges, educators and students, librarians, of course, medical professionals, journalists, editors and publishers, people in the arts. Of course there’s been shameful collaboration, submission and silence from many figures in most of these constituencies as well. It has been striking that the most wealthy and theoretically most powerful have, in this crisis, often been the first to surrender. It’s non-elites who have stood on principle even when it means taking risks.It wasn’t clear beforehand what the focal point of opposition would be, and the early protests against Doge and the Tesla Takedown actions were in response to the administration and Musk’s attacks on the federal government. Though activists and organizations are defending everything from renewable energy to reproductive rights, the heart of active resistance is now solidarity with those under attack by the border patrol, ICE and the other agencies assigned to terrorize, brutalize, kidnap and violate rights across the country. This manifests in myriad ways from volunteers striving to protect immigrants and refugees when they show up for their immigration-court appointments to neighbors walking kids to school when their parents are afraid to leave home to the lively protests in front of ICE in Portland, Oregon, and the extraordinary neighborhood activism across Los Angeles, and then Washington DC, and then Chicago.As Sarah Conway reported in New York Magazine: “In their free time, or, in some cases, by actively taking time off work, everyday Chicagoans are building rapid-response teams to keep eyes on the streets and follow the movements of federal agents. Some pass out whistles in bars and laundromats; others keep vigil outside Home Depots and taquerías. Activists have begun locating agents’ suburban hotels and hosting noisy protests outside. Some take shifts patrolling their neighborhoods on foot, in cars, and on bikes to alert neighbors to the presence of federal agents and to document their aggressive tactics and arrests.”The Catholic church has shown up, from a midwestern church that put cardboard silhouettes in the pews to represent members of the congregation afraid to attend to Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV. The new pope, seemingly in direct opposition to loud-about-his-Catholic-conversion JD Vance, has repeatedly spoken up for immigrants and the poor. It’s not just Catholics, though: ministers and rabbis have participated in protests, and more than 200 Chicago-area clergy signed a letter titled Jesus is Being Tear Gassed at Broadview. Many cities have reaffirmed their statuses as sanctuary cities and their policies of not cooperating with Ice.Miles Bruner, in resigning from his job as a Republican fundraiser, wrote in the Bulwark: “I quit the Republican party and my job as an accomplice to the party in the throes of an authoritarian cult.” Marine Col Doug Krugman explained his resignation from the military in the Washington Post: “Instead of trying to work within the Constitution, or to amend it, President Trump is testing how far he can ignore it.” The admiral who resigned abruptly from the navy’s southern command last month did not give a reason, but it was widely assumed to be in response to the murderous attacks on small boats in the Caribbean. The veterans group About Face launched a campaign on the Fourth of July to support military members refusing illegal orders and encouraging them to do so.Boycotts have always been a powerful tactic of nonviolent resistance. The Tesla, Target and Disney boycotts all had an effect, and Indivisible has just launched one against Spotify for running Ice recruitment ads. The Disney boycott seems to be why late-night host Jimmy Kimmel got reinstated after being pushed out for making mild remarks after far-right activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Often acts of submission to the administration provoke their own acts of resistance, as when individual lawyers left some of the big law firms that caved to the administration early this year. A lot of journalists have left the Washington Post and other publications that have shifted right to go independent, and small, alternative and independent media have been a vital part of keeping the public informed and engaged.Indivisible has grown hugely in chapters and membership since the new administration took over, 50501 was founded soon after the inauguration to organize more activism and a number of other local and national resistance organizations have sprung up. Trump has called the resistance and progressives more generally “the enemy from within”. But the enemies of human rights, the rule of law, the balance of powers and the constitution, of voting rights and fair elections, of science and history, are in the partially demolished White House. If this country has a future, it’s in the streets, the courts, the movements and the continued exercise of free speech and freedom of assembly against this administration.

    Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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    How Mamdani is defying immigrant expectations by embracing his identity: ‘His boldness resonates’

    Across the country, Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has shaken neighbourhoods, torn apart families and engendered a sense of panic among communities. But in New York, on Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York, and an immigrant from Uganda, chose to underline his identity. “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he told an ecstatic crowd at Paramount theater in Brooklyn.The son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, he was born in Kampala, raised in New York, and identifies as a democratic socialist. Almost every aspect of Mamdani’s identity had been an issue of contention during the election. Earlier this week, the Center for Study of Organized Hate published a report highlighting the surge in Islamophobic comments online between July and October, most of which labelled Mamdani as an extremist or terrorist.Two days before the election, a Super Pac supporting Andrew Cuomo had run an ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers crashing down on 9/11. Earlier, it had artificially thickened and enlarged Mamdani’s beard to make him appear more menacing on a flyer circulated around the city. Towards the end of October, a tearful Mamdani had addressed these accusations in a moving speech in the Bronx. He vowed that as an immigrant, and especially as a Muslim: “I will no longer be in the shadows.”On Tuesday night in Brooklyn, he drove that point home: “I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”Minhaj Khan, who works with the Indian American Muslim Council of North America, a New Jersey organisation that focuses on the tri-state area, told me what “Zohran offers is something different than any other Muslim candidate who fought an election anywhere in the United States: he took a pretty bold stand against the ill that is spoken about Islam and Muslims in this country and his boldness actually resonates a lot with the community right now.”“I think the way that he is not diminishing his identity and all the parts of his experience that have driven him to be pushing his affordability platform is huge,” said Alina Shen, the organising director of CAAAV Voice, the sibling organisation of Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, which played a crucial part in engaging South Asian residents of the city in Mamdani’s campaign. “I think it’s part of what made him stand out as a political candidate, that he’s not changing who he actually is.”Mamdani also started his victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs, the American socialist who was the son of French immigrants, and borrowed the hopefulness for a new dawn in New York City from Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous address to Indians on the eve of the country’s independence: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”Khan, who moved to the US from India in the 1990s, said he was “proud” to hear Mamdani quoting Nehru from the podium. “Nehru was a man who brought everyone together,” Khan told me. “At the time of partition, it was a very vicious environment in India, and in that moment, Nehru stood up as a secular leader, brought people together.”In Khan’s eyes, Mamdani offers something similar: “Zohran’s campaign has shown how you can bring together Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Christians in this highly divisive time in this country.”View image in fullscreenMamdani’s own parents are both children of the Nehruvian age of Indian democracy, steeped in the ideas of pluralism.His father Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of colonialism and a professor at Columbia University, was born to Gujarati Muslim parents in Mumbai. But he grew up in Kampala, Uganda, and first came to the United States on a scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh and became involved in the civil rights movement; he was among the students arrested for travelling to Montgomery, Alabama, from northern universities during the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.After finishing his master’s at Tufts University, Mahmood moved back to Uganda, only to be expelled from his adopted country as part of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Indian diaspora, ending up at a refugee shelter behind the Kensington Palace in London. In the 1980s, Amin’s successor, Milton Obote stripped Mahmood of his Ugandan citizenship for criticizing government policies. His status as a thinker and writer only rose, culminating in a tenured professorship at Columbia University, where he continues to work today.The celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, Zohran’s mother, was born in Orissa, on the other side of the subcontinent from Mumbai, in a family of high-ranking bureaucrats. While in her teens, she turned down a full scholarship to Cambridge University – the scars of British colonialism were still fresh in the Indian psyche – and instead went to attend Harvard. She spent her summers in New York city among the artists and writers, developing an affinity for theater and films. Her first forays into filmmaking explored the lives of residents of Old Delhi, an Indian newspaper dealer in New York, and strippers and street-children of Mumbai.It was while researching her second feature film, Mississippi Masala, which follows the lives of Ugandan Indians displaced by Idi Amin, that Nair first met Mahmood, as part of her research. In 1991, the same year the film was released, the couple got married, and had a son: Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who got his middle name in honour of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary who became the country’s first president.Zohran spent the first five years of his life in Kampala, living in a bungalow overlooking Lake Victoria, where part of Mississippi Masala was shot. In a 2002 profile of Nair in The New Yorker, he was introduced as “Nair’s talkative doe-eyed son, Zohran, who exudes the charm of the well-loved, [and] is known by dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani”.Like his father, Zohran lived an itinerant childhood. After his father moved to New York in a faculty apartment close to Columbia University, Zohran, leaving behind Kampala, was enrolled in the private Bank Street School in Manhattan. Evenings were spent in Riverside Park. At home, dinner guests included Columbia scholars like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, close friends of his father. For high school he went to a selective public school in the Bronx, and attended college in Maine, graduating in Africana Studies in 2014.Zohran’s first meaningful brush with the desperation among the city’s working-class families came during his work as a foreclosure prevention and housing counsellor in Queens. During the 2016 presidential election, he was inspired by the campaign of Bernie Sanders, which focused on costs-of-living, affordability and healthcare. Those same issues would go on to become the bedrock of his mayoral campaign. At a town hall in Brooklyn with Sanders this September, Zohran said it was Sanders’s campaign that first exposed him to the language of democratic socialism. During his term as the representative of New York’s 36th state assembly district, his most notable work was with the taxi drivers in the city.At a time when immigrants around the country are feeling increasingly threatened under the Trump administration, as masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stalk the streets of American cities, harassing, arresting and deporting immigrants, Zohran’s campaign has cultivated a sense of hope among the community.“We are an organization made up of immigrants,” Irene Hsu, communications and media manager at CAAAV, said. “The people who work with us, they’re cooks, they’re restaurant workers, they’re cab drivers, they’re home care workers, they’re students, they’re teachers, they’re parents, they’re elderly folks who have retired from working jobs as construction workers. It’s all these people who really run the city. And I think that Zohran’s platform, which is their own platform, is about shifting the terrain of power in this country.”On Tuesday night, as the results started to trickle in, Faidra Tzedakis, who moved to New York from Greece in 2014, went to a watch party organised by the Democratic Socialists of America in Astoria, Queens. Tzedakis became a US citizen during the summer and has been grappling with what that means.“The previous generation had the American Dream of this nice big house with a fence, and a stable nine-to-five job and that, kind of, has died,” said Tzedakis, who grew up amid the economic crisis in Greece. “It doesn’t really exist anymore.”“I think this campaign just proves that immigrants and younger people and educated people have a voice, and there’s hope: like we can change things,” she said. “So I think that the new dream is that we would live in a world where our leaders speak up and stand up for reproductive rights, against genocides, against Islamophobia and antisemitism, and do their best to protect marginalized groups like undocumented immigrants.”“We’re not afraid of the money or the establishment anymore,” she said. “And we can create a world that is just more accepting, and, yeah, loving.” More

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    Trump news at a glance: President suggests scrapping Obamacare as shutdown flight chaos continues

    Donald Trump on Saturday urged Republican senators to redirect federal money used to subsidize health insurance costs under the Affordable Care Act toward direct payments to individuals, in an effort to overcome an issue at the heart of the US government shutdown.“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over,” Trump wrote in a social media post.His comments came as US senators met on the 39th day of the shutdown and seemed to begin negotiating in earnest. As Saturday’s session got under way, senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Rick Scott of Florida and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana welcomed the proposal from Trump – but the Republicans seemed unable to grapple with the fact that consumers would still need to buy plans from the same insurance companies, or that Republican lawmakers need the support of eight Democrats to reopen the government, and the idea of repealing and replacing Obamacare with savings accounts is unlikely to earn a single Democratic vote.Nearly 1,500 flights canceled on second day of cuts tied to government shutdownUS airlines canceled 1,460 flights on day 2 of the government-mandated flight cuts.So far, the slowdown at many of the nation’s busiest airports hasn’t caused widespread disruptions. But it has deepened the impact felt by what is now the US’s longest federal shutdown.Analysts warn that the upheaval will intensify and be felt far beyond air travel if the cancellations pick up and move closer to the Thanksgiving holiday.Read the full storySenate Republicans embrace Trump’s call – from his Florida golf course – to replace ObamacareUS senators are working through the weekend for the first time since the government shutdown began more than a month ago, but hopes for a bipartisan agreement on how to end the standoff, and keep healthcare affordable for millions of Americans, appeared to recede as Republican senators floated a proposal toxic to Democrats: scrapping the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare.Read the full storyTrump reportedly wants new NFL stadium in Washington named after himDonald Trump is pressing the NFL’s Washington Commanders to name their planned $3.7bn stadium after him, a bid he is pursuing through back-channel conversations with ownership and by leaning on the government bodies that must approve the project, according to several sources familiar with the discussions.Read the full storyBusinesses worldwide brace for extra Trump tariffs on steel importsBusinesses around the world are steeling themselves for another round of Donald Trump’s tariffs, this time on goods ranging from bicycles to baking trays, as US industry embraces a call for more products to tax on import.Small, medium and large American companies have asked the US Department of Commerce to add about 700 more items to an August list of 407 products already facing extra tariffs because of their steel content, which hit items such as Ikea tables with metal nuts and bolts and German combine harvesters.The demands are ringing alarm bells across Europe where industry leaders are fearful of a rolling and growing list of “steel derivatives” that will now face levies because they contain the metal.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    Olivia Rodrigo has criticized the Trump administration after one of her songs was featured in a clip posted on the official Department of Homeland Security and White House Instagram accounts, encouraging undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the US.

    The secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, reportedly authorized the purchase of Spirit Airlines jets before discovering the airline didn’t actually own the planes – and that the aircraft lacked engines.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened 7 November 2025. More

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    Senate Republicans embrace Trump’s call – from his Florida golf course – to replace Obamacare

    US senators are working through the weekend for the first time since the government shutdown began more than a month ago, but hopes for a bipartisan agreement on how to end the standoff, and keep healthcare affordable for millions of Americans, appeared to recede as Republican senators floated a proposal toxic to Democrats: scrapping the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare.The impact on Americans from the longest shutdown of the federal government in history deepened on Saturday, as federal workers went unpaid, airlines were forced to cancel flights and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) benefits have been delayed for 42 million Americans.As Saturday’s session got under way, Republican senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Rick Scott of Florida and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana welcomed a proposal made on social media early Saturday by Donald Trump, from his golf course in West Palm Beach, for subsidies to be replaced by health savings accounts.In a Truth Social post, Trump suggested that instead of meeting the demand from Democrats to extend subsidies for health insurance plans purchased through the ACA marketplace, to pay for sharply increased premiums, Republicans should return to the project of replacing the Obama-era law, which failed during his first administration.“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE,” Trump wrote.Graham welcomed the proposal, which is similar to a replacement for Obamacare he put forward in 2017, writing on social media that Trump’s “recommendation that we stop sending tens of billions of dollars under Obamacare to money-sucking insurance companies and instead send that money directly to the people so they can buy better healthcare is simply brilliant”.“We’re going to replace this broken system with something that is actually better for the consumer,” Graham said later.Cassidy, who was a co-author of Graham’s similar plan in 2017, also praised Trump’s proposal on social media, and stood next to a giant blow-up of Trump’s post as he spoke on the Senate floor.“I’m writing the bill right now,” Scott posted in a response to Trump’s suggestion. “We must stop taxpayer money from going to insurance companies and instead give it directly to Americans in HSA-style accounts and let them buy the health care they want. This will increase competition & drive down costs.”None of the Republican senators seemed to grapple with the fact that consumers would still need to buy plans from the same insurance companies, or that Republican lawmakers need the support of eight Democrats to reopen the government, and the idea of repealing and replacing Obamacare with savings accounts is unlikely to earn a single Democratic vote.Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, shared an alarmed response to Trump’s proposal from Larry Levitt, the executive vice-president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, who wrote on social media: “You have to read between the lines here to imagine what President Trump is proposing. But, it sounds like it could be a plan for health accounts that could be used for insurance that doesn’t cover pre-existing conditions, which could create a death spiral in ACA plans that do.”“In other words, Donald Trump’s ‘concept of a plan’ for health care is another cynical attempt to repeal Obamacare,” Warren commented. “It’s the same failed Republican plan that’s been rejected by voters and Congress. We can lower costs and open the government TODAY by extending ACA tax credits.”Senate Republican leaders have signaled an openness to an emerging proposal from a small group of moderate Democrats to end the shutdown in exchange for a later vote on the “Obamacare” subsidies.Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, who is leading the talks among moderates, said Friday evening that Democrats “need another path forward” after Republicans rejected an offer from Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York to reopen the government and extend the subsidies for a year.Shaheen and others, negotiating among themselves and with some Republicans, have been discussing bills that would pay for parts of government – food aid, veterans’ programs and the legislative branch, among other things – and extend funding for everything else until December or January. The agreement would only come with the promise of a future healthcare vote, rather than a guarantee of extended subsidies.It was unclear whether enough Democrats would support such a plan. Even with a deal, Trump appears unlikely to support an extension of the health benefits. The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, also said this week that he would not commit to a health vote.Schumer on Saturday persisted in arguing that Republicans should accept a one-year extension of the subsidies before negotiating the future of the tax credits.“Doing nothing is derelict because people will go bankrupt, people will lose insurance, people will get sicker,” Schumer said in a floor speech. “That’s what will happen if this Congress fails to act.”Earlier, Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, said they need to stand strong after overwhelming Democratic victories on election day.One bizarre element of the Republican effort to signal that their party is working overtime to end the shutdown, even as Trump golfs in Florida, was a social media post on Saturday from Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma senator. Mullin posted four photographs of himself and two other Republican senators meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, with the caption: “Working through the weekend with President Donald J Trump. It’s always an honor to be in the Oval Office– I never take this opportunity to serve Oklahoma for granted.”What Mullin failed to make clear is that the photographs were taken on Friday, before Trump left for a weekend golf trip at his Florida resort. Mullin himself had previously posted one of the photographs in a social media video Friday night.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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    More than 1,000 flights canceled on second day of cuts tied to government shutdown

    US airlines again canceled more than 1,000 flights on Saturday, the second day of the Federal Aviation Administration’s order to reduce air traffic because of the government shutdown.So far, the slowdown at many of the nation’s busiest airports hasn’t caused widespread disruptions. But it has deepened the impact felt by what is now the nation’s longest federal shutdown.“We all travel. We all have somewhere to be,” said Emmy Holguin, 36, who was flying out of Miami on Saturday to visit family in the Dominican Republic for the week. “I’m hoping that the government can take care of this.”Analysts warn that the upheaval will intensify and be felt far beyond air travel if the cancellations pick up and move closer to the Thanksgiving holiday.Already there are concerns about the impact on cities and businesses that rely on tourism and the possibility of shipping interruptions that could delay getting holiday items on store shelves.Here’s what to know about the flight reductions:Both of the first two days of the FAA’s slowdown have seen more than 1,000 flights canceled, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight disruptions.On Saturday – typically a slow travel day – the airport serving Charlotte, North Carolina, was by far the hardest hit, with 120 arriving and departing flights canceled by midday.Airports in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver and Orlando, Florida, were among the others with the most disruptions. Staffing shortages in Charlotte and Newark, New Jersey, slowed traffic too.Not all the cancellations were due to the FAA order, and those numbers represent just a small portion of the overall flights nationwide. But they are certain to rise in the coming days if the slowdown continues.The FAA said the reductions affecting all commercial airlines are starting at 4% of flights at 40 targeted airports and will be bumped up again on Tuesday before hitting 10% of flights on Friday.The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has warned that even more flight cuts might be needed if the government shutdown continues and more air traffic controllers are off the job.Air traffic controllers have gone without paychecks for nearly a month as the shutdown continues, leading many to call in sick and add to already existing staffing shortages.Most controllers are working mandatory overtime six days a week during the shutdown without pay, and some are taking second jobs to pay their bills, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) has said.Most travelers were relieved to find that airlines largely stayed on schedule on Friday, and those whose flights were called off were able to quickly rebook. So far, longer international flights haven’t been interrupted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere’s still a lot of uncertainty about what flights will be canceled next.And not everyone has the means to pay for a hotel or deal with a last-minute disruption, said Heather Xu, 46, who was in Miami on Saturday after a cruise and flying home to Puerto Rico.“Travel is stressful enough. Then you put these disruptions in place and it really makes everything more challenging,” she said.Rental car companies reported a sharp increase in one-way reservations on Friday, and some people are simply canceling flights altogether.Other repercussions from the air traffic slowdown might also include higher prices in stores, as nearly half of all US air freight is shipped in the bellies of passenger aircraft.Major flight disruptions could bring higher shipping costs that get passed on to consumers, said Patrick Penfield, professor of supply chain practice at Syracuse University.More losses will ripple through the economy if the slowdown continues – from tourism to manufacturing, said Greg Raiff, CEO of Elevate Aviation Group.“This shutdown is going to impact everything from cargo aircraft to people getting to business meetings to tourists being able to travel,” he said. “It’s going to hit the hotel taxes and city taxes. There’s a cascading effect that results from this thing.’’ More

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    Olivia Rodrigo condemns Trump administration’s use of her music for ‘racist, hateful propaganda’

    Olivia Rodrigo has criticized the Trump administration after one of her songs was featured in a government video promoting deportation efforts.A clip posted on the official Department of Homeland Security and White House Instagram accounts encouraged undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the US. The video used a segment of Rodrigo’s song all-american bitch as its soundtrack.Rodrigo, who is Filipino American, reportedly condemned the use of her music in a comment on the post, writing: “don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda.” The comment was later taken down, but not before screenshots were captured and circulated widely.The video, uploaded Tuesday as Americans voted in several states, opens with the loud intro of the track as ICE agents are shown detaining people, accompanied by the caption: “IF ICE FINDS YOU.” It then transitions to scenes of immigrants seemingly choosing to self-deport, underscored by the song lyrics: “All the time/I’m grateful all the time/I’m sexy and I’m kind/I’m pretty when I cry.”The caption concludes with a warning: “LEAVE NOW and self-deport using the CBP Home app. If you don’t, you will face the consequences.”After Rodrigo’s response went viral on Friday, Instagram removed the soundtrack from the clip. An error message, reading “This song is currently unavailable”, is currently displayed.In a statement shared with the Guardian, a DHS spokesperson said: “America is grateful all the time for our federal law enforcement officers who keep us safe. We suggest Ms. Rodrigo thank them for their service, not belittle their sacrifice.”The department did not confirm whether they had removed the original comment by Rodrigo from the post.Rodrigo joins a growing list of artists who have objected to Trump or his administration using their music without consent, with others including Beyoncé, the Rolling Stones and the singer Jess Glynne.Glynne voiced her anger when one of her songs was similarly used, writing on Instagram: “This post honestly makes me sick. My music is about love, unity, and spreading positivity – never about division or hate.”This isn’t the first time Rodrigo has spoken out against the Trump administration. She publicly condemned ICE raids that took place in Los Angeles earlier in the year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe singer, 22, wrote on Instagram: “I’ve lived in LA my whole life and I’m deeply upset about these violent deportations of my neighbors under the current administration. LA simply wouldn’t exist without immigrants. Treating hardworking community members with such little respect, empathy, and due process is awful.”Rodrigo previously collaborated with the federal government under very different circumstances. In 2021, she visited the White House wearing a vintage pink Chanel suit to meet then-president Joe Biden and Dr Anthony Fauci, recording a video to encourage youth vaccination during the Covid-19 pandemic.From the White House podium, she said: “I am beyond honored and humbled to be here today to help spread the message about the importance of youth vaccination. I’m in awe of the work President Biden and Dr Fauci have done and was happy to help lend my support to this important initiative.” More