Evelyn Reynolds

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    Republicans put the sick in sycophancy as they compete to fawn over Trump

    If proof were needed that Donald Trump’s cult of personality has never been stronger, it comes in the inventive ways Republican members of Congress have spent his first month in office trying to lionise him. Welcome to the sycophancy stakes.On 23 January the congressman Addison McDowell of North Carolina introduced legislation to rename Washington Dulles international airport as Donald J Trump international airport.“We have entered the golden age of America largely thanks to President Trump’s leadership,” McDowell said. Alluding to Ronald Reagan Washington National airport, he added: “It is only right that the two airports servicing our nation’s capital are duly honored and respected by two of the best presidents to have the honor of serving our great nation.”Not to be outdone, on the same day the Tennessee congressman Andy Ogles proposed a House of Representatives joint resolution to amend the constitution so that a president can serve up to three terms – provided that they did not serve two consecutive terms before running for a third.This would continue to bar Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama from running again but enable Trump, elected in 2016 and 2024, to seek a third term in 2028.Ogles explained: “He has proven himself to be the only figure in modern history capable of reversing our nation’s decay and restoring America to greatness, and he must be given the time necessary to accomplish that goal.”On 28 January Anna Paulina Luna, a congresswoman from Florida, put forward legislation to arrange the carving of Trump’s face on the Mount Rushmore national memorial in South Dakota. Such a move would put him alongside the former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.Luna said: “President Trump’s bold leadership and steadfast dedication to America’s greatness have cemented his place in history. Mount Rushmore, a timeless symbol of our nation’s freedom and strength, deserves to reflect his towering legacy – a legacy further solidified by the powerful start to his second term.”On 14 February the New York congresswoman Claudia Tenney introduced legislation to officially designate 14 June as a federal holiday to commemorate Trump’s birthday, along with the date in 1777 when the US approved the design for its first national flag. The holiday would be known as “Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day”.Tenney explained: “Just as George Washington’s birthday is codified as a federal holiday, this bill will add Trump’s birthday to this list, recognizing him as the founder of America’s Golden Age. Additionally, as our nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, we should create a new federal holiday honoring the American flag and all that it represents.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt is far from certain that any of the bills will pass. During the last Congress, a proposal to rename Dulles, which is currently named after John Foster Dulles, an influential secretary of state during the cold war, was referred to the House committee on transportation and infrastructure but failed to gain traction. Many conservatives would be reluctant to tamper with an American icon such as Mount Rushmore, which took 14 years to carve and was completed in 1941.Ogles’s stunt faces the biggest obstacle of all. A constitutional amendment must receive a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and Senate. If that is achieved, three quarters of the states – 38 – must ratify the amendment for it to become part of the constitution.Still, the unsubtle exercises in ring-kissing and genuflection demonstrate that, buoyed by election success, Trump’s control over the Republican party is now all but absolute. From Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” to the upending of US policy on Ukraine, few Republicans are willing to speak out against the president-cum-monarch.“We’ve gone from ‘Make America Great Again’ to make ‘America Great Britain Again’,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and former Republican congressional aide. “You might as well have an image of Donald Trump staring at a portrait of King George and then turning around and putting a crown on his head, a robe around his suit and a sceptre in his hand.” More

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    Culture wars: Trump’s takeover of arts is straight from the dictator playbook

    In 1937, leaders of Germany’s Third Reich hosted two simultaneous art exhibitions in Munich. One, titled the Great German Art Exhibition, featured art viewed by the regime as appropriate and aspirational for the ideal Aryan society – orderly and triumphant, with mostly blond people in heroic poses amid pastoral German landscapes. The other showcased what Adolf Hitler and his followers deemed “degenerate art” (“Entartete Kunst”). The works, chaotically displayed and saddled with commentary disparaging “the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or pencil”, were abstract, profane, modernist and produced by the proclaimed enemies of the Reich – Jewish people, communists or those suspected of being either.The Degenerate Art exhibition, which later toured the country, opened a day after Hitler declared “merciless war” on cultural disintegration. The label applied to virtually all German modernist art, as well as anything deemed “an insult to German feeling”. The term and the dueling art exhibitions were part and parcel of Hitler’s propaganda efforts to consolidate power and bolster the regime via cultural production. The Nazis used culture as a crucial lever of control, to demean scapegoated groups, glorify the party and “make the genius of the race visible to that race”, argued the French scholar Eric Michaud in The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Political control and suppression of dissent were one thing; art, said Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was “no mere peacetime amusement, but a sharp spiritual weapon for war”.Earlier this month, Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of naming himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, one of the nation’s premier cultural centers, after purging the board of Biden appointees and installing a slate of unqualified donors and loyalists. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA”, the US president wrote on Truth Social. (The center hosted a nominal amount of acts with drag elements.) Days later, Trump was formally voted in by the board – “unanimously”, he noted on Truth Social in a Putin-esque flourish. “There’s no more woke in this country,” he told reporters.The move drew outcry from performers, artists and more, but still went through. The Kennedy Center’s trustees are presidential appointees, so technically it is vulnerable to such flexes of control, as are other federally supported institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and DC’s consortium of national museums. Some of Trump’s cultural decrees trend ridiculous, such as an executive order calling for a “national garden of American heroes”, or the continued presence of Kid Rock. Others are more insidious – after long threatening to defund the National Endowment for the Arts during his first term, Trump has imposed restrictions on its terms, barring federal grants for projects concerning Maga’s favorite targets – diversity and “gender ideology”.View image in fullscreenWhile the takeover of the Kennedy Center may seem less dire and court less furor than, say, his dismantling of the civil service, Trump’s efforts to exert control over art typify the strategy of a dictator. Comparisons of the Trump presidency to Nazi Germany may be overdone and easily dismissed – even with Republican efforts to ban books in schools deemed “inappropriate”, among many other parallels, Maga and the Third Reich are not the same – but the new administration’s cultural decrees are very much a part of the authoritarian playbook to suppress dissent, scapegoat select groups and seize power.Pick your oppressive regime throughout time and you will find efforts to control the arts. Some of the most renowned artefacts from ancient Rome, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Trajan’s Column, were commissioned by emperors to vivify their divine right to power, celebrate military conquests and cement preferred narratives. The Stalinist regime in the 1930s Soviet Union abolished all independent artistic institutions, required cultural production to exist in absolute allegiance to the party, and systemically executed all of the country’s Ukrainian folk poets. Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution identified “old culture” as one of the four threats to be eradicated as part of his reshaping of Chinese society, which killed more than a million people. After Augusto Pinochet took over Chile in 1973, the regime arrested, tortured and exiled muralists. In her 2012 book Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship, the art historian Claudia Calirman recalls how the museum director Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt hid artworks and advised artists on how to leave the country after officials from the country’s military regime entered her museum and demanded the removal of “dangerous” images – a claim not far removed from the Trump administration’s fearmongering around “gender ideology” and “threats” to children.These tactics continue in the present, carried out in some cases by Trump’s expressed allies. The same Brazilian dictatorship that overtook and blocked art exhibitions between 1968 and 1975 is today championed by the Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, who worked during his time as president to rewrite the regime’s reputation. On his first day in office in 2019, Bolsonaro dissolved Brazil’s ministry of culture. He also halved funding for the Rouanet Law, a measure that publicly supports artists, and appointed rightwing cultural figures with little relevant experience to prominent cultural positions. In Poland, the rightwing Law and Justice party has tried to rewrite history at the second world war museum in Gdańsk and dismissed its director, Paweł Machcewicz; in recent years, Italy’s rightwing minister of culture, Alberto Bonisoli, threatened to not renew the contracts of non-Italian museum directors. Much ado was made in the western press when Cuba jailed the performance artist Danilo Maldonado for criticizing the Castro regime in 2017, or when China’s ruling party placed the renowned artist Ai Weiwei under house arrest.View image in fullscreenBut perhaps no one models what Trump aspires to be, and hopes to do, more than Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who since his election in 2010 has rewritten the constitution, changed electoral law to favor his Fidesz party, positioned allies as heads of most media outlets and overhauled the justice system. And as part of his consolidation of power into full dictatorship, he has taken control of the country’s cultural institutions, managing their output and enshrining censorship. Starting when Fidesz first gained municipal power in 2006, the party has purged the boards of local theaters and installed Fidesz loyalists. In 2010, Orbán took over public institutions via appointment of governing bodies that could grant or withhold funds according to the organization’s willingness to heed demands. In 2013, he dismissed the artistic director of the National Theatre in Budapest, Róbert Alföldi, on account of his resistance to political interference and his sexuality, viewed as offensive by the homophobic regime.By 2019, Orbán could feasibly declare an era “of spiritual order, a kind of prevailing mood, perhaps even taste … determined by cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs. This is the task we are now faced with: we must embed the political system in a cultural era.” His government subsequently banned funding for gender studies at universities and passed a “culture law” tying funding of theaters to their ability to “actively protect the interests of the nation’s survival, wellbeing and growth”, a censorship measure that significantly chilled the country’s art scene.Such a measure is not dissimilar, in intent and execution, from Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, nor his new mandates on the National Endowment for the Arts, which has already been subject to decades’ worth of US culture wars. Those wars are heating up – if history and very recent precedent are anything to go by, then Trump and his party’s efforts to chip away at US cultural autonomy, at individual and institutional creative expression, will be one of his most corrosive and anti-democratic legacies. More

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    UK populists mix faith and politics with parroting of ‘Judeo-Christian values’

    The splendours of the Parthenon, Colosseum and Great Pyramid of Giza were in stark contrast to the utilitarian conference centre in London’s Docklands, but they were there to make a point.As 4,000 people from dozens of countries filed in for a three-day jamboree of rightwing discourse this week, the images were a reminder that great civilisations of the past had risen, declined and fallen. A commentary warned that western civilisation was at a tipping point, in crisis because it had lost touch with its “Judeo-Christian foundations”.The message greeted those attending a sold-out conference for politicians, policymakers, businesspeople and “culture formers” organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) at the ExCeL centre in east London, where non-discounted tickets cost £1,500.The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, and the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, addressed the gathering in person. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, and the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel joined via video link from the US.It was not explicitly a faith-based event, but a distinctly religious flavour ran through the proceedings. The Arc’s co-founders and principal faces are Philippa Stroud, a Tory peer and devout Christian, and Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist whose lectures draw heavily on the Bible.Among the group’s known funders is the GB News investor Paul Marshall, a hedge fund boss and media tycoon whose worldview is shaped by his evangelical Christian faith. According to one well-connected former Conservative MP, Marshall’s influence on UK rightwing discourse is growing, not just through GB News but also his ownership of the Spectator magazine and the Unherd website.Marshall is not a member of any political party and said in a pre-conference interview last week that faith and politics were a “dangerous combination”. But some rightwingers – energised by Donald Trump’s victory and beguiled by the rhetoric of his Catholic vice-president, JD Vance – see populist potential in advocating for “Judeo-Christian values”.View image in fullscreenThe meaning of this phrase, much repeated at the Arc conference, is the “moral foundation of western civilisation” based on the shared values of Christianity and Judaism, according to Dennis Prager, an American conservative talkshow host. He added: “The ultimate embodiment of Judeo-Christian values has been the United States of America.”The term, drawing on both faiths’ biblical roots, was first used in the early 19th century to refer to Jewish converts from Christianity. Much later, it was adopted by conservative Christians in the US. The former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has fought court battles in an attempt to set up an academy for the Judeo-Christian west – a “gladiator school for culture warriors” – in an Italian monastery.Some believe the phrase has become code for Islamophobia. During Trump’s first term as US president, Meredith Warren of the University of Sheffield said it was a dog-whistle myth peddled by the far right “to draw a line between imagined Christian values and a perceived (but false) threat of Muslim immigration”.Farage, whose populist brand of politics has rarely made reference to the Christian faith, told this week’s conference that Britons should have more children to restore traditional Judeo-Christian culture. “We’ve kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture and that’s where we need to start. And if we recognise that, and if we value that, then I think everything comes from that,” he said.Badenoch did not use the phrase in her speech to the conference but has often described herself as a “cultural Christian”. She understands the “importance of Christian values as the foundation of family and community life”, David Burrowes, a former Tory MP and co-founder of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, said last year.View image in fullscreenThe influence of evangelical Christianity in the Conservative party remains relatively marginal, but it has grown in recent years via two prominent voices: Danny Kruger, an MP since 2019 who has become a leading opponent to legalising assisted dying; and Miriam Cates, who was elected to parliament in 2019 but lost her seat last year, who is a vocal proponent of traditional family values. Kruger and Cates are on the Arc’s advisory board.Georgina Waylen, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester who has been researching the influence of evangelical Christianity on British politics, said it had “grown in recent years, and most notably in the Conservative party, following the election of a small number of rightwing socially conservative evangelical MPs who were well organised, knew what they wanted to achieve and oppose, and have been aided by the increasing influence of evangelical Christians in the rightwing ecosphere.”She added: “The evangelicals work effectively with others, including some rightwing populists, and have taken advantage of the chaos in the Conservative party. They have been active around gender identity issues and oppose assisted dying.”Evangelical conservative Christian groups have been active in lobbying MPs on issues such as abortion and assisted dying, although their involvement has not always been explicit. In November, an Observer investigation found that Christian pressure groups were secretly coordinating and funding anti-assisted dying campaigns ostensibly led by grassroots healthcare workers and disabled people.Organisations on the US Christian right have been accused of “infiltrating” the UK, lobbying MPs to restrict women’s reproductive rights. Last year, the UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom provided “briefing material and legal analysis” to MPs before a vote on introducing buffer zones to prevent anti-abortion activity outside abortion clinics.One reason for the sometimes covert involvement of such groups is the resistance of many people in a largely secular society to religious individuals or organisations seeking to impose their worldview on others. Evangelical Christians have fared poorly in UK politics whenever their views have come into conflict with principles fundamental to British liberal democracy.“Religion is much less of a factor in politics here than in the US,” said Nick Spencer of Theos, a Christian thinktank. “But the Christian right is gaining momentum. I don’t think the Arc conference would have got off the ground 10 years ago.”Those speaking at the conference appeared to be a mixture of conservative Christians, social conservatives, libertarians and “Maga-types”, he said. “It is clear what they’re against – internationalism, net zero, the denigration of national history – but these aren’t necessarily theological positions.”Rob Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, said there was “no comparison whatsoever between the US and UK. Britain is one of the most secular societies in the world. Very few people go to church. The largest group are the people who say they have no religion at all. The kind of highly polarised debate that the Americans have had over abortion is inconceivable in the same way.”But he added: “At the level of political elites, that’s where you get the most interesting similarity that is also a difference. In the US, evangelical Christians are a huge part of politics because they are a huge part of US life. Here you have quite a remarkably high density of evangelical Christians in elite politics.”Some evangelical Christian organisations have sought to nurture potential high-flyers in order to ensure a Christian presence in the upper reaches of public life. Half a century ago, the Iwerne Trust’s Christian holiday camps, mainly for boys attending elite public schools, had precisely this goal. Holy Trinity Brompton, London’s foremost evangelical church, has counted many high-flyers among its congregation – including Marshall.Not all evangelical Christians share the same political views. Tim Farron, the former Liberal Democrat leader who resigned in 2017 saying the role was incompatible with his Christian faith, said the use of the term “Christian values” was sometimes “a proxy for things that aren’t very Christian at all”.He said: “People who talk about the loss of Christian values often have actually lost touch with Christian values themselves. It’s really dangerous when political parties seek to appropriate Christianity for their own ends.” More

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    Trump fires Black joint chiefs chair Hegseth accused of promoting diversity

    Donald Trump abruptly fired the air force general CQ Brown Jr as chair of the joint chiefs of staff on Friday, sidelining a history-making Black fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign to purge the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.The ouster of the second Black general to serve as chair of the joint chiefs comes three months after Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, outlined a plan for ridding the US military of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts during a podcast interview.“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the joint chiefs,” Hegseth said during a November interview on the Shawn Ryan Show. “Any general that was involved, general, admiral, or whatever, that was involved in any of that DEI woke shit has got to go.”Although Hegseth had been meeting regularly with Brown since the former Fox News host took over the top Pentagon job last month, he had openly questioned whether Brown had been named chair because he was Black. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt – which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter,” Hegseth wrote in one of his books.Brown had been praised, including by Time, for breaking racial barriers in the military and for his “warfighter” credentials. When he was sworn in as the air force chief of staff in 2020, during the first Trump administration, Brown acknowledged previous US military service members who had been denied advancement because of their race, Time reported. “It is due to their trials and tribulations in breaking barriers that I can address you today as the air force chief of staff,” Brown said.In 2020, Trump himself had celebrated Brown’s confirmation on social media “as the USA’s first-ever African American military service chief” and noted that he had appointed him to that role. Brown’s experience as the former commander of Pacific air forces also meant he was “highly qualified to deter China and reassure allies in the Indo-Pacific”, Time noted that year.“Under President Trump, we are putting in place new leadership that will focus our military on its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars,” Hegseth said in a statement after Brown’s firing, calling Brown a “thoughtful adviser”.In a post on his social media platform Friday evening, Trump announced he would replace Brown with retired Lt Gen Dan “Razin” Caine, a retired military leader Trump said had been “passed over for promotion by Sleepy Joe Biden”.Trump has repeatedly said that Caine impressed him during his first administration by assuring him that the Islamic State could be defeated very rapidly.“Many so-called military ‘geniuses’ said it would take years to defeat Isis. General Caine, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly, and he delivered,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday.At CPAC in 2019, Trump previously recounted a conversation in which he recalled asking Caine how fast the Islamic State could be defeated, and claimed that Caine had told him: “Sir, we can have it totally finished in one week,” a story that fact-checkers said at the time “didn’t add up”.Caine, who is white, previously served as the associate director for military affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, and had played a direct role in the air defense of Washington DC during the 11 September attacks. Caine recently became a venture partner at Shield Capital, a venture capital firm, which touted his experience as an entrepreneur who “co-founded and successfully exited multiple aerospace, defense, and healthcare companies”.Trump’s announcements set off a period of upheaval at the Pentagon, which is already bracing for firings of civilian staff, a dramatic overhaul of its budget and a shift in US military deployments under Trump’s new America First foreign policy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump also wrote that he would soon swap out five other high-level positions in an unprecedented shake-up of the leadership of the US military.In a statement shortly after Trump’s Truth Social post, Hegseth clarified which five positions Trump appeared to be looking to fill, saying that he was “requesting nominations for the positions of Chief of Naval Operations and Air Force Vice Chief of Staff”, firing Adm Lisa Franchetti and Gen James Slife, who currently hold those positions.“We are also requesting nominations for the Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force,” Hegseth added.Caine’s military service includes combat roles in Iraq, special operations postings and positions inside some of the Pentagon’s most classified special access programs. However, it does not include key assignments that were identified in law as prerequisites for the job, with an exemption for the president to waive them if necessary in times of national interest.The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act states that to be qualified, a chair must have served previously as either the vice-chair, as a combatant commander or a service chief – but that requirement could be waived if the “president determines such action is necessary in the national interest”.Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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    Pentagon lays off 5,400 civilian workers, with tens of thousands more firings due

    The Pentagon announced plans Friday to fire 5-8% of its civilian workforce, staring next week with layoffs of 5,400 probationary workers, a Department of Defense official said in a statement.The initial civilian layoffs will be followed by a Department of Defense hiring freeze to analyze the military’s personnel needs in compliance with Donald Trump’s political goals, Darin Selnick, the acting under-secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said in the statement.“We anticipate reducing the department’s civilian workforce by 5-8% to produce efficiencies and refocus the department on the president’s priorities and restoring readiness in the force,” Selnick said.“It is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical. Taxpayers deserve to have us take a thorough look at our workforce top-to-bottom to see where we can eliminate redundancies.”The announcement of sweeping firings of civilian workers was followed by Donald Trump’s firing of the current chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General CQ Brown Jr.The initial Pentagon job cuts planned for next week are a fraction of the 50,000 defense department job losses that some had anticipated, but they might not be the last. The defense department is the largest government agency, with the Government Accountability Office finding in 2023 that it had more than 700,000 full-time civilian workers.A 5-8% cut in that force would mean layoffs of between 35,000 and 60,000 people.The announcement of the cuts comes after staffers from Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” initiative, or Doge, were at the Pentagon earlier in the week and received lists of such employees, US officials said. They said those lists did not include uniformed military personnel, who are exempt.Probationary employees are generally those on the job for less than a year and who have yet to gain civil service protection.Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has supported cuts, posting on X last week that the Pentagon needs “to cut the fat (HQ) and grow the muscle (warfighters).”Hegseth also has directed the military services to identify $50bn in programs that could be cut next year to redirect those savings to fund Trump’s priorities. It represents about 8% of the military’s budget.Most of recently terminated employees throughout the federal government began their current position in the last year and were therefore considered probationary, giving them less job protection. Roughly half of them live in states that voted for Trump in the 2024 election, government figures show.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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    Trump administration briefing: top immigration official removed and judge clears way for USAid firings

    The Trump administration made several moves Friday regarding US immigration policy, including the removal of the top Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) official and restoring legal aid for unaccompanied immigrant children. Meanwhile, the Senate passed a budget resolution to fund Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan and US officials made more comments about Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president.Here are the biggest stories in US politics on Friday, 21 February.Trump removes Ice chief amid apparent frustrationThe Trump administration has reassigned its top official at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) after the agency’s arrests and deportations were slower than expected, Reuters reported, citing a senior administration official and two other sources familiar with the matter.Read the full storyTrump fires Black joint chiefs chair whom Hegseth accused of ‘DEI woke shit’Donald Trump abruptly fired the air force general CQ Brown Jr as chair of the joint chiefs of staff on Friday, sidelining a history-making Black fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign to purge the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, previously questioned whether Brown got the job because of his skin colour as he outlined a plan for ridding the US military of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.Read the full storyUS judge clears Trump to put more than 2,000 USAid workers on leaveA federal judge on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to put more than 2,000 US Agency for International Development (USAid) workers on leave, a setback for government employee unions that are suing over what they have called an effort to dismantle the foreign aid agency.Read the full storyKellogg hails Zelenskyy in stark contrast with TrumpThe US envoy to Ukraine, Gen Keith Kellogg, has praised Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “the embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war”, striking a dramatically different tone from Donald Trump, who has called Ukraine’s president a “dictator”.Read the full storyAP sues Trump officials over barred access The Associated Press sued three officials in Donald Trump’s administration over access to presidential events, citing freedom of speech in asking a federal judge to stop the 10-day-long blocking of its journalists.Read the full storyUS Senate passes budget to fund Trump’s deportationsThe US Senate has passed a budget resolution that paves the way for funding Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan after his “border tsar” said there were insufficient funds for the operation. Voting concluded in the early hours of Friday morning with a 52-48 vote, almost entirely on party lines, in favor of a spending structure that includes $175bn reserved for border security and a $150bn boost to the Pentagon budget.Read the full storyZelenskyy will sign minerals deal, Trump aide predictsMike Waltz, the White House national security adviser, said on Friday that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was expected to sign a minerals agreement with the United States imminently, as part of broader negotiations to end the war with Russia. Waltz told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC): “Here’s the bottom line: President Zelenskyy is going to sign that deal.”Read the full storyMass firings could cause ‘monumental’ billDonald Trump’s administration could rack up a “monumental” bill and is breaking the law by firing government workers on spurious grounds, according to a top labor lawyer. Officials have cited “poor performance” when terminating thousands of federal workers. In many cases, it’s not true, according to employees embroiled in the blitz, many of whom are now seeking legal advice.Read the full storyFrench far-right leader cancels US speech over Bannon ‘Nazi’ saluteJordan Bardella, the French far-right leader, cancelled a speech at CPAC after Donald Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon flashed an apparent fascist-style salute there hours earlier. Bannon, who helped Trump win office in 2016, finished his speech on Thursday with an outstretched arm, fingers pointed up and palm down – a sign that echoed both the Nazi salute and a similar gesture made by the tech billionaire Elon Musk at the US president’s second inauguration in January.Read the full storyTrump axes support for any research that mentions ‘climate’The Trump administration is stripping away grants and support for scientific research in the US and overseas that contain the word “climate”. The US president, who has said the climate crisis is a “giant hoax”, has already stripped mentions of climate change and global heating from government websites and ordered a halt to programs that reference diversity, equity and inclusion.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    A judge said he would not immediately dismiss Eric Adams’s corruption case, but ordered the New York mayor’s trial delayed indefinitely after the justice department asked for the charges to be dismissed.

    Trump faced pushback from the Maine governor after threatening to withhold federal funds over trans athletes’ participation in female sporting events. Janet Mills calmly told the president: “We will see you in court” as she refused to be cowed during an exchange at a White House event.

    Two polls show Americans are becoming worried that Trump is overreaching, though he still remains more popular than he was in his first term.

    The United States might actually be serious about airstrikes on Mexican drug cartels, but experts don’t think they’d make much of a difference, the Los Angeles Times reports. More

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    US judge temporarily blocks Trump’s anti-DEI purge

    A federal judge in Maryland on Friday temporarily blocked Donald Trump from implementing bans on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at federal agencies and by businesses that contract with the federal government.US district judge Adam Abelson said the directives by Trump and an order urging the Department of Justice to investigate companies with DEI policies likely violate the first amendment of the US constitution.“The White House and attorney general have made clear, through their ongoing implementation of various aspects of the J21 order, that viewpoints and speech considered to be in favor of or supportive of DEI or DEIA are viewpoints the government wishes to punish and, apparently, attempt to extinguish,” Abelson wrote in one widely shared passage.“The supreme court has made clear time and time again, the government cannot rely on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion’ to suppress disfavored speech.”Abelson blocked Trump and several federal agencies from implementing the orders pending the outcome of a lawsuit by the city of Baltimore and three groups.“As plaintiffs put it, ‘efforts to foster inclusion have been widespread and uncontroversially legal for decades’,” Abelson wrote. “Plaintiffs’ irreparable harms include widespread chilling of unquestionably protected speech.”Reuters contributed reporting More

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    Trump removes Ice chief amid apparent frustration over rate of deportations

    Donald Trump’s presidential administration has reassigned its top official at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) after the agency’s arrests and deportations have been slower than expected, Reuters reported, citing a senior administration official and two other sources familiar with the matter said on Friday.The official, Caleb Vitello, was in the role in an acting capacity and had been grappling with pressure to step up enforcement after other top Ice officials were reassigned days earlier.According to a spokeswoman for the homeland security department who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, Vitello is “actually being elevated so he is no longer in an administrative role, but is overseeing all field and enforcement operations: finding, arresting, and deporting illegal aliens”.The outlet went on to report that Vitello will remain at Ice and lead the office that is responsible for arrests and deportations.Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, one Trump administration official said that the White House is expected to announce a new acting director. Another administration official told the outlet that the Ice team is going to be expanded.Vitello was hand-picked by Trump last December and has 23 years of experience with Ice.In a statement on Truth Social explaining his pick, Trump said: “A member of the Senior Executive Service, with over 23 years of service to [Ice], Caleb currently serves as Assistant Director of the Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs, where he oversees Agency-wide training, equipment, and policy to ensure Officer and Public Safety.”Trump added: “Caleb’s exceptional leadership, extensive experience, and commitment to [Ice]’s mission make him an excellent choice to implement my efforts to enhance the safety and security of American communities who have been victimized by illegal alien crime.”The latest reshuffling follows the recent reassignment of Russell Hott and Peter Berg at Ice due to frustrations from the Trump administration over the rate of deportations and arrest numbers.Speaking to the Washington Post which first reported the reassignments of Hott and Berg, a DHS spokesperson said: “Ice needs a culture of accountability that it has been starved of for the past four years. We have a president, DHS secretary, and American people who rightfully demand results, and our Ice leadership will ensure the agency delivers.”According to the outlet, Hott was reassigned to Ice’s local office in Washington while Berg was reassigned to the office in St Paul, Minnesota.Since Trump’s return to the presidency on 20 January, immigration officials have been arresting 826 people daily. At that rate, Trump’s administration would make nearly 25,000 immigration-related arrests in the first 30 days of his second presidency, more than any other month in the past 11 years, which included his first presidency from 2017 to 2021. More