Evelyn Reynolds

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    White House calls Amazon ‘hostile’ for reportedly planning to list tariff costs

    The White House accused Amazon of committing a “hostile and political act” after a report said the e-commerce company was planning to inform customers how much Donald Trump’s tariffs would cost them as they shopped.The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was responding to a report in Punchbowl News, which, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that Amazon would begin displaying on its site how much the tariffs had increased the prices of individual products, breaking out the figure from the total listed price.“Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?” Leavitt asked during a press briefing.Trump himself called Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder, shortly after the report published to complain about the change, according to multiple reports.Amazon’s online marketplace has seen prices rise across the board since Trump announced sweeping tariffs at the start of April, particularly on China, where many products listed on Amazon.com ship from. In response, the company has pressured its third-party sellers to shoulder the burden of the extra import costs rather than pass them on to customers. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“This is another reason why Americans should buy American,” Leavitt continued, though Amazon is headquartered in Seattle.Amazon moved to distance itself from the report, saying the idea had been considered by Amazon Haul, the company’s recently launched low-cost shopping hub, but had been rejected.“The team that runs our ultra-low-cost Amazon Haul store considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products. This was never approved and is not going to happen,” said Tim Doyle, Amazon spokesperson.Online shopping has been upended by Trump’s trade policies. The day before the White House took aim at Amazon, discount retailers Temu and Shein, which ship from China, began displaying 145% “import charges” in customers’ totals to reflect the surcharge on Chinese goods.Asked if the strident statement from the White House signaled a rift between Trump and Bezos, who stepped down as CEO in 2021 and donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund earlier this year, Leavitt said: “I will not speak to the president’s relationships with Jeff Bezos.”Bezos and Trump endured a strained relationship during the president’s initial run for the White House. During the 2016 campaign, the Amazon founder publicly argued that some of Trump’s rhetoric, including threats to lock up his political opponents, damaged democracy, while Trump accused the tech giant of failing to pay enough taxes.Scrutiny of Trump’s first term by the Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos, angered the US president. He was further infuriated by Bezos’s apparent refusal to intervene. In a bid to pile pressure on Amazon, Trump threatened to block federal aid for the US Postal Service unless it hiked shipping rates for online firms.Since Trump’s return to power, however, Bezos has taken a noticeably different approach to the president. He attended Trump’s inauguration, alongside a string of other big tech founders, and Amazon donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund.Days before last November’s presidential election, the Washington Post announced its editorial board would not endorse a candidate for the first time in more than three decades – prompting an exodus of subscribers. Bezos insisted the move was a “principled decision” and claimed that “inadequate planning” had led to the last-minute call.The Post went a step further in February, announcing an overhaul of the newspaper’s opinion section to focus its output “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”, Bezos said. The decision angered readers and staff and prompted the resignation of the opinions editor, David Shipley.His actions drew a sharp rebuke from Marty Baron, the highly regarded former editor of the Washington Post, who told the Guardian that Bezos’s plan for the newspaper’s opinion section amounted to a “betrayal of the very idea of free expression” that had left him “appalled”.Amazon, meanwhile, is reportedly paying some $40m to license a documentary on the life of the first lady, Melania Trump. More

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    The uniting theme of Trump’s presidency? Ineptitude | Robert Reich

    Some Democrats fear they’re playing into Donald Trump’s hands by fighting his mass deportations rather than focusing on his failures on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living.But it’s not either-or. The theme that unites Trump’s inept handling of deportations, his trampling on human and civil rights, his rejection of the rule of law, his dictatorial centralization of power, and his utterly inept handling of the economy is the ineptness itself.In his first term, not only did his advisers and cabinet officials put guardrails around his crazier tendencies, but they also provided his first administration a degree of stability and focus. Now, it’s mayhem.A sampling from recent weeks:1. The Pete Hegseth disaster. The defense secretary didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of the Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother and personal lawyer.He’s a walking disaster. John Ullyot, who resigned last week as Pentagon spokesperson, penned an op-ed in Politico that began: “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” Last Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers. His chief of staff is leaving. As Ullyot wrote, it’s “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” will come soon. The defense department “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership”.It’s not just the defense department. Much of the federal government is in disarray.2. The Harvard debacle. A Trump official is now claiming that a letter full of demands about university policy sent to Harvard on 11 April was “unauthorized”. What does this even mean?As Harvard pointed out, the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the US government – even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach – do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”Even though it was “unauthorized”, the Trump regime is standing by the letter, which has now prompted Harvard to sue.3. The tariff travesty. No sooner had Trump imposed “retaliatory” tariffs on almost all of the US’s trading partners – based on a formula that has made no sense to anyone – than the US stock and bond markets began crashing.To stop the selloff, Trump declared a 90-day pause on the retaliatory tariffs but raised his tariffs on China to 145% – causing markets to plummet once again.Presumably to stem the impending economic crisis, he declared an exemption to the China tariffs for smartphones and computer equipment. By doing so, Trump essentially admitted what he had before denied: that importers and consumers bear the cost of tariffs.Now, Trump is saying that even his China tariffs aren’t really real. Following warnings from Walmart, Target and Home Depot that the tariffs would spike prices, Trump termed the tariffs he imposed on China “very high” and promised they “will come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.”Markets soared on the news. But where in the world are we heading?4. The attack on the Fed chair fiasco. When Trump renewed his attacks on Jerome H Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve – calling him “a major loser” and demanding that the Fed cut interest rates – Trump unnerved already anxious investors who understand the importance of the Fed’s independence and feared that a politicized Fed wouldn’t be able to credibly fight inflation.Then, in another about-face, Trump said on Wednesday he had “no intention” of firing Powell, which also helped lift markets.An economy needs predictability. Investors won’t invest, consumers won’t buy, and producers won’t produce if everything continues to change. But Trump doesn’t think ahead. He responds only to immediate threats and problems.Who’s profiting from all this tumult? Anyone with inside knowledge of what Trump is about to do: most likely, Trump and his family.5. The Kilmar Ábrego García calamity. After the Trump regime admitted an “administrative error” in sending Ábrego García to a brutal Salvadoran torture prison, in violation of a federal court order, Trump then virtually ignored a 9-0 supreme court order to facilitate his return.To the contrary, with cameras rolling in the Oval Office, Trump embraced Nayib Bukele – who governs El Salvador in a permanent state of emergency and has himself imprisoned 83,000 people in brutal dungeons, mostly without due process. Trump then speculated about using Bukele’s prisons for “homegrown” (ie, American-born) criminals or dissidents.Meanwhile, after the Trump regime deported another group of immigrants to the Salvadoran prison under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law, the supreme court blocked it from deporting any more people under the measure.6. Ice’s blunderbuss. Further illustrating the chaos of the Trump regime, immigration officials have been detaining US citizens. One American was held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Arizona for 10 days until his relatives produced papers proving his citizenship, because, according to his girlfriend’s aunt, Ice didn’t believe he was American.Last week, the Trump regime abruptly took action to restore the legal status of thousands of international students who had been told in recent weeks that their right to study in the United States had been rescinded, but officials reserved the right to terminate their legal status at any time. What?Freedom depends on the rule of law. The rule of law depends on predictability. Just like Trump’s wildly inconsistent economic policies, his policies on immigration are threatening everyone.7. Musk’s ‘Doge’ disaster. Musk’s claims of government savings have been shown to be ludicrously exaggerated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRemember the claim that taxpayers funded $50m in condoms in Gaza? This was supposed to be the first big “gotcha” from the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), but as we know now, it was a lie. The US government buys condoms for about 5 cents apiece, which means $50m would buy 1bn condoms or roughly 467 for every resident of Gaza. Besides, according to a federal 2024 report, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) didn’t provide or fund any condoms in the entire Middle East in the 2021, 2022 or 2023 fiscal years.Then there have been the frantic callbacks of fired federal workers, such as up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration who work on sensitive jobs such as reassembling warheads. Four days after Doge fired them, the agency’s acting director rescinded the firings and asked them back. Similar callbacks have occurred throughout the government.Trump and Musk are threatening the safety and security of Americans – for almost no real savings.8. Measles mayhem. As measles breaks out across the country, sickening hundreds and killing at least two children so far, Trump’s secretary for health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, continues to claim that the measles vaccine “causes deaths every year … and all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera”.In fact, the measles vaccine is safe, and its risks are lower than the risks of complications from measles. Most people who get the measles vaccine have no serious problems from it, the CDC says. There have been no documented deaths from the vaccine in healthy, non-immunocompromised people, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.Kennedy also says: “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the [measles] vaccine wanes very quickly.” In fact, the measles vaccine is highly protective and lasts a lifetime for most people. Two doses of the vaccine are 97% effective against the virus, according to the CDC and medical experts worldwide. The US saw 3m to 4m cases a year before the vaccine. Today it’s typically fewer than 200.9. Student debt snafu. After a five-year pause on penalizing borrowers for not making student loan payments, the Trump regime is about to require households to resume payments. This could cause credit scores to plunge and slow the economy.Many of the households required to resume paying on their student loans are also struggling with credit card debt at near-record interest rates and high-rate mortgages they thought they would be able to refinance at a lower rate but haven’t. Instead of increasing education department staffing to handle a work surge and clarifying the often shifting rules of its many repayment programs, the Trump regime has done the opposite and cut staff.10. Who’s in charge? In the span of a single week, the IRS had three different leaders. Three days after Gary Shapley was named acting commissioner, it was announced that the deputy treasury secretary, Michael Faulkender, would replace Shapley. That was the same day, not incidentally, that the IRS cut access to the agency for Doge’s top representative.What happened? The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, told Trump that Musk had evaded him to install Shapley.Meanwhile, the Trump regime is cutting the IRS in half – starting with 6,700 layoffs and gutting the division that audits people with excessive wealth. These are the people meant to keep billionaires accountable. Without them, the federal government will not take in billions of dollars owed.At the same time, the trade adviser Peter Navarro has entered into a public spat with Musk, accusing him of not being a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla relies on parts from around the world. This prompted Musk to call Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, later posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks”.The state department has been torn apart by the firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling USAID, by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state. Career officials charged that Marocco, a Maga loyalist, was destroying the agency; Trump’s Maga followers view Marocco’s firing as a sign that Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.Worse yet, Trump has fired more than a half-dozen national security officials after meeting with the far-right agitator Lara Loomer, who was granted access to the Oval Office and gave Trump a list of officials she deemed disloyal.Bottom line: no one is in charge. Trump is holding court but has the attention span of a fruit fly. This is causing chaos across the federal government, as rival sycophants compete for his limited attention.Incompetence is everywhere. The regime can’t keep military secrets. It can’t maintain financial stability. It can’t protect children from measles. It cannot protect America.While we need to continue to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, we also need to highlight his utter inability to govern America.

    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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    Musk’s companies got billions from the government. Now he’s pulling up the ladder behind him | Christopher Marquis

    “Pulling up the ladder after you’ve climbed it” refers to a familiar social pattern: achieving success thanks to certain advantages – then working to dismantle those very structures, denying others the same opportunities. Many have cited immigrant Trump voters as an example; some who have benefited from relatively open immigration policies now advocate for stricter border controls and cuts to legal immigration. The American upper middle class have been dubbed “dream hoarders” who, after achieving success, work to keep the bottom 80% down with a variety of subtle barriers, such as legacy college admissions and exclusionary zoning. Few individuals embody ladder-pulling more starkly than Elon Musk. Though he has been lauded as a self-made innovator and visionary entrepreneur, Musk’s empire only exists thanks to the support of massive public investment. Yet as leader of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), he has directed and overseen the dismantling of the very government programs, regulations and subsidies that enabled his rise. Musk’s companies, particularly Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity, have benefited from an estimated $38bn in public support, including government loans, tax credits and federal contracts. In 2010, Tesla received a $465m low-interest loan from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) program. That funding was critical to keeping Tesla alive – without it, insiders later told the Washington Post, the company would have gone under. The success of Tesla’s flagship Model S, the expansion of its manufacturing base, and even the illusion of its early profitability were all bolstered by public money.Zero-emission vehicle credits and the $7,500 federal EV tax credit were equally pivotal. Tesla earned billions by selling regulatory credits to legacy automakers struggling to meet emissions standards. In the first nine months of 2024 alone, 43% of Tesla’s net income came from these credits. The company also profited from California’s emissions credit system through a scheme involving phantom battery-swapping infrastructure – credits that provided hundreds of millions in additional income.Despite this, Musk now derides subsidies and regulations as government overreach and has used Doge to slash many of the same types of programs – such as renewable energy incentives and federal climate investments – that once saved his own companies from bankruptcy. These were essential to Tesla’s success, and now he wants to limit other entrepreneurs and businesses from the same opportunities. While Musk claims he aims to eliminate “waste”, his companies continue to benefit from government contracts. SpaceX has received more than $17bn in federal awards since 2015, including lucrative Nasa contracts and taxpayer-funded Starlink deployments in Ukraine. The irony could not be more profound: Musk attacks the legitimacy of public spending even as his empire remains one of its top beneficiaries.The craven self-interest that drives this behavior is particularly on display when considering Musk’s newfound advocacy for policy built on climate denial. Tesla was conceived in the shadow of climate change – and succeeded largely because US federal and state governments treated climate as an emergency. Regulatory frameworks created demand for EVs. Emissions credit markets made Tesla profitable. Yet Musk has now aligned himself with climate deniers like Vivek Ramaswamy and Donald Trump, dismissed environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns as “the devil”, and supported deregulation plans that could allow polluting industries to ignore environmental rules altogether and make it harder for other EV companies to grow. This is not just hypocrisy – it’s a calculated repositioning: he made his fortune as a climate-focused entrepreneur, and now he aims to protect his personal and political power through climate skepticism. Elon Musk did not succeed in a vacuum. In America, we are inclined to celebrate the heroic individual entrepreneur while ignoring – and even downplaying – that massive public support was the foundation of their success. Consider the iPhone: nearly all of its core technologies, from GPS and touchscreen displays to the internet itself, were publicly funded. Covid vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry, too, have relied heavily on NIH-funded research. And yet, Musk, Steve Jobs and other tech titans are cast as heroic innovators, while the state is derided as inefficient or meddlesome – even as it continues to underwrite the very innovations that fuel the economy. Further, while the risks of developing these innovations are mitigated by public funding, the profits they create are almost entirely privatized. If American taxpayers had taken equity in Tesla for their $465m investment, it is estimated such a stake would be worth over $300bn today. Instead, it is Musk alone who has enjoyed such wealth.To deny that is to erase the role of taxpayers, government scientists and policy architects who built the foundation upon which Tesla, SpaceX and many innovative industries rest. But Musk’s recent efforts – whether gutting climate policy, leading anti-regulatory initiatives, or supporting anti-democratic actors – represent not just a betrayal of that legacy, but a systemic effort to pull up the ladder and rewrite the rules to benefit only himself.Ultimately Musk’s story is a warning: those who climb the ladder with public help are inclined to later destroy the mechanisms that led to their success. For Musk to admit that he had substantial help to become the world’s richest man would undermine the lone genius narrative that has granted him astonishing power with impunity. By pulling up the ladder, “lone geniuses” don’t just block others from the same opportunities, but also undermine the very idea of collective progress and investment in the public good. The outcome will be the erosion of future innovation and, ultimately, a well-functioning society.

    Christopher Marquis is the Sinyi professor of management at the University of Cambridge and author of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs. More

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    Why is the US sleeping as autocracy approaches? | Governor Jay Inslee

    When a woman asked me a couple of weeks ago why leaders were not standing up to Donald Trump, my thoughts went immediately to political leaders. When I started to answer, she corrected me and said: “No, no, I’m talking about college presidents and law firms. Where the heck are they?”Where indeed? From all observations, most have been asleep as the US president dismantles democracy piece by jeweled piece. They are either cutting sweet little deals on their knees, or just remaining silent as the fruits of 250 years of national labor and life are strangled by Trump’s tentacles. From the cowering of major media companies to the shameful capitulation of some law firms, and oppressive silence from virtually all of them, the nation is sleepwalking into a slow but ever encroaching totalitarian state.As the woman continued her outpouring of anger and grief, I thought of John F Kennedy’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, Why England Slept, his brilliant exposition of why a proud and resilient nation ignored Germany’s mounting threat to their democracy when it was so obvious and imminent. Kennedy recognized the centrality of moments we now face, writing: “Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It’s the system that functions in the pinches that survives.” We are now being pinched by an autocrat who eats laws for breakfast and will not be stopped by any internal restraint.Whether our democracy survives to preserve the rule of law depends on so much more than senators and representatives. In a way, they are merely personal reflections of the public’s will. Depending exclusively on their personal commitment to the constitution is a good bet for the party now in the minority, but a sore loser for the majority party, or more accurately, the majority cult. The moment demands so much more than eloquence on the floor of the House and the Senate – it demands full-throated, continuous and united rebellion against the perverse oppression and malignant illegality of this authoritarian in the White House.Unfortunately, we are not seeing the necessary courage, not in the east, not in the west, not in large law firms, not in boardrooms, not in school district superintendents, not in chambers of commerce. The silence is deafening.Where was the united voice of major law firms when Trump maliciously began to target several of them? They were hiding. Where are the concerted voices of college presidents as their colleagues are being hung out to dry? Do they not teach history at these colleges, where any freshman could tell you that the Trump plan is right out of every autocrat’s playbook? First you tame the press, then you tame the colleges, then you tame the law firms so that no one can even get to court, then you eventually ignore the orders of the supreme court.We are well on our way to that final death knell of democracy, as we advance through the first three steps.My motivation to rally for our country is not driven solely by my love for democracy. Like millions of Americans, I see my own family being jeopardized by Trump’s callousness. I have seen first-hand the power of special education teachers to raise the prospects of special needs kids in my clan. I rebel at the Musk-Trump administration’s chainsaw attack eliminating the one agency that safeguards our kids’ access to special education investments, the US Department of Education. To Elon Musk, the department may be just a bureaucracy – to our family, it is a guardian angel.Is this passivity and lack of resistance understandable? Of course it is. That’s why the old saw “first they come for the … then they come for you” was invented.But we should call upon our college presidents, law firms, leaders of civil society, to get in touch with their responsibility to democracy itself, as well as their own institutions, which surely will end up on the firing line someday if Trump continues to be emboldened by his victims’ servility.Perhaps it is too strong to refer to these organizations as collaborators. Perhaps. But this wholesale timidity and collapse must be considered rank appeasement at best, modest complicity at worst.Kudos to Harvard University, Perkins Coie and others who have stood up, but some of the finest higher educational institutions in world history are now ignoring the well-trod path of autocracy in world history. Some of the best and brightest law firms in the nation are now providing free legal services to the very administration that has broken laws beyond counting the very legal codes the law firms purport to defend.Certainly, these silent aiders and abettors can explain their individual decision making, but their cumulative damage to the very fabric of democracy calls us to heed Benjamin Franklin when he said we must “all hang together, or all hang separately”. Is it asking too much for the college presidents of the US to band together and say this choking of research funds is unacceptable? Are the law firms just too busy to all say they are not going to yield to Trump’s perverse bullying and say what any good lawyer ought to say: “We’ll see you in court”?In fighting Trump’s assaults on democracy, I speak from experience. As the first governor to come out against his Muslim ban, one of the most vocal in speaking out against his Covid negligence, and telling him to his face to stop tweeting and start protecting our children, earning me the honor of being called a “snake”, I know standing up brings the heat. So be it.But my more important experience is decades watching a courageous citizenry force its federal government to change course. In the 50s and 60s, the government was forced to change, thanks in large part to a woman refusing to sit in the back of the bus. In the 70s, the Vietnam war ended only because thousands marched, including myself, proving the ability of committed people, though unelected, to compel change. In the 80s it was private citizens who forced the federal government to start treating HIV patients like humans.In each of these decades, small acts of defiance led to national change as courage rippled outwards. The benefit of having lived these decades during the American experiment is learning that leaders in civil society who resist should be exalted, joined, and followed.Those who believe that this call to action is an overstatement of the threat understand neither the nature of the tyrant-in-chief nor the slow but inexorable nature of how democracies are lost. I witnessed Trump’s cruelty and lack of empathy as I dealt with him during the Covid pandemic, as he willfully withheld help and then consciously spread misinformation that caused so many needless deaths. Anyone who saw this up close would make the call for resistance I am making today. How can anyone not understand that the refusal to follow the law on January 6 continues in full force today? Why would it stop unless it is made to stop?More importantly, we should listen to the late Justice William O Douglas, who said: “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” It is past time for all our leaders in civil society to wake up, stand up and speak up. We are right in calling them to do so. Hiding is no longer acceptable.

    Jay Inslee served as the governor of Washington from 2013-2025 More

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    ‘They disappear them’: families of the detained see grim echo of Latin American dictatorships in Trump’s US

    Neiyerver Rengel’s captors came one sunny spring morning, lurking outside the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and pouncing as soon as he emerged.The three government agents announced the young Venezuelan man had “charges to answer” and was being detained.“Everything’s going to be OK,” the man’s girlfriend, Richely Alejandra Uzcátegui Gutiérrez, remembers the handcuffed 27-year-old reassuring her as she gave him one last hug.Then Rengel was put in a vehicle and vanished into thin air: spirited into custody and, his family would later learn, dispatched to a detention centre notorious for torture and inhuman conditions hundreds of miles from home.“We have to take him,” Uzcátegui recalls one officer saying before they left. “But if this is a misunderstanding, he’ll be released and given a phone call to contact you.”That call never came.View image in fullscreenThe scenes above might have played out in any number of Latin American dictatorships during the 20th century, from Gen Augusto Pinochet’s Chile to Gen Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina. Thousands of regime opponents were seized at home or on the street – and slipped off the map, becoming “desaparecidos” (the disappeared ones).But Rengel’s disappearance took place on 13 March this year in Donald Trump’s US, where what campaigners call the “forced disappearance” of scores of Venezuelan migrants has fuelled fears of an authoritarian tack under a leader who vowed to be a dictator “on day one” of his presidency. Those fears intensified on Friday amid reports that a judge had been arrested by the FBI for supposedly helping “an illegal alien” evade arrest.Juanita Goebertus, Human Rights Watch’s Americas director, said she had no hesitation in calling the detentions of those Venezuelans enforced disappearances. “Under international law, when someone is detained and there’s no account of where the person is, it amounts to enforced disappearances – and this is exactly what has happened,” she said.View image in fullscreenFor five weeks after Rengel’s detention in Irving, Texas, relatives remained in the dark over his whereabouts. His brother, Nedizon León Rengel, said he spent hours calling immigration detention centres but failed to get clear answers. “They told us he’d been deported but wouldn’t say where,” recalled Nedizon, who migrated to the US with his brother in 2023.Finally, on 23 April, came the bombshell: a report on NBC News said Rengel was one of at least 252 Venezuelans who had been flown to authoritarian El Salvador and jailed for supposedly belonging to the Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan gang that Trump’s administration has designated a foreign terrorist organisation.“Finding out through the news was devastating. But the worst part was having to tell my mum,” said Nedizon. “Before I came here, the US represented a land of opportunity – a place to fulfil dreams and improve our quality of life … Now it feels like a nightmare. Human rights aren’t even being respected any more – not even the right to make a phone call, which is guaranteed to anyone who is detained.”Rengel was not the only Venezuelan to disappear after being ensnared in Trump’s crackdown on immigrants he has repeatedly smeared as rapists, murderers and terrorists who have supposedly launched an “invasion” of the US.Ricardo Prada Vásquez, 33, was apprehended in Detroit in mid-January, days after sending his brother a video showing the Chicago snow – a magical moment for a man raised on Margarita, a sun-kissed Caribbean island, who had never seen a northern winter.On 15 March, Prada told a friend he was being deported to Venezuela – but he never arrived. Nor was Prada’s name on a list published five days later by CBS News identifying 238 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s “terrorism confinement” prison. (Rengel was also not on the list. US and Salvadoran authorities have refused to publish a register of the prisoners’ names.)For the next five weeks, Prada’s relatives – who deny he is a criminal – also had no idea where he was.View image in fullscreen“It’s mentally exhausting to be constantly thinking about how he is and what he’s going through,” his brother, Hugo Prada, said from Venezuela. Only last Tuesday, after Prada’s story was featured in the New York Times, authorities did confirm where he had been sent.“This TDA gang member didn’t ‘disappear’. He is in El Salvador,” Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary, wrote on X, claiming Prada had been “designated a public safety threat”.Prada defended his brother, a former shoe salesman he described as a laid-back, hard-working quipster who migrated to the US last year hoping to provide a better future for his four-year-old son, Alexandro, who still lives on Margarita. “Dammit, he went [to the US] in search of a better life and what he got was this disaster,” said Prada, insisting his sibling was innocent.Before Prada’s detention, he held near-daily video calls with his child. In recent days, Alexandro has repeatedly asked relatives why he can no longer speak with his father. “They say he’s working,” said Hugo, voicing shock that people could vanish into custody in the US.“It’s unbelievable that they just grabbed them and sent them to a concentration camp for them to die, just like Hitler did with the Jews,” Prada added. “[The US is] a democratic country – and it’s as if we’ve gone 50 or 100 years back in time.”View image in fullscreenNelson Suárez, the brother of a third Venezuelan jailed in El Salvador, said the treatment of the detainees – some of whom have been paraded on television with shaved heads and in shackles – reminded him of how the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro dealt with his foes. “[They are doing] the same thing they do in Venezuela when they capture a political prisoner. They lock them up and disappear them – and nobody hears anything more from them until the government feels like it,” said Suárez, whose brother, Arturo Suárez, is a musician with no criminal background.The wave of detentions and disappearances has devastated the US’s Venezuelan community, which has swelled in recent years as a result of the South American country’s economic collapse.“The community lives in uncertainty and in terror,” said Adelys Ferro, who runs the Venezuelan American Caucus advocacy group. “People are petrified. They are thinking: ‘What if I am next? What if they stop me? What is going to happen?’“Even people with documents are terrified. Even people with green cards are terrified,” added Ferro, a Venezuelan-American who has lived in the US for 20 years. “This is something that shouldn’t be happening anywhere in the world, much less – for Christ’s sake – in America.”Six weeks after federal agents seized her hairdresser boyfriend outside their home in Irving, Texas, Uzcátegui said she was still not convinced she knew the full truth about his plight, despite the DHS admitting last Tuesday that he had also been sent to El Salvador.View image in fullscreenWithout offering evidence, McLaughlin told NBC News Rengel was “an associate of Tren de Aragua … a vicious gang that rapes, maims, and murders for sport” – a claim relatives reject. Rengel’s only run-in with the law appears to have been being last year fined $492 after he was stopped in a co-worker’s car in which police found a marijuana trimmer.“To me, he’s still missing. This doesn’t give me peace of mind,” Uzcátegui said of the government’s admission. “Because there’s no record, no photo, no phone call. I insist – he’s still missing.”Even families who now know their loved ones were sent to El Salvador do not know how they are, in which prison they are being held, what charges, if any, they face, or how long they may be held there.“On one hand I feel a little bit calmer knowing that he’s somewhere and he’s not dead. But what situation awaits us? What comes next?” wondered Hugo Prada, who had no idea what charges his brother was facing or how long a sentence he could face.Ferro vowed to continue denouncing the “nightmare” such families were facing. “It is exhausting, and so painful and disheartening. But that pain is not going to make us cease fighting for justice, that’s for sure,” she said.Speaking from her home in Venezuela, Rengel’s 50-year-old mother, Sandra Luz Rengel, recalled begging him “from the bottom of my heart” not to travel to the US. But he was unmoved – and now he was lost.“Not knowing anything about him is outrageous,” she said. “And there’s nothing I can do.” More

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    Trump 100 days: delusions of monarchy coupled with fundamental ineptitude

    He has blinged it with gold cherubim, gold eagles, gold medallions, gold figurines and gilded rococo mirrors. He has crammed its walls with gold-framed paintings of great men from US history. In 100 days Donald Trump has turned the Oval Office into a gilded cage.The portraits of Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan and other past presidents gaze down from a past that the 47th seems determined to erase. Trump is seeking to remake the US in his image at frightening speed. The shock and awe of his second term has challenged many Americans’ understanding of who they are.In three months Trump has shoved the world’s oldest continuous democracy towards authoritarianism at a pace that tyrants overseas would envy. He has used executive power to take aim at Congress, the law, the media, culture and public health. Still aggrieved by his 2020 election defeat and 2024 criminal conviction, his regime of retribution has targeted perceived enemies and proved that no grudge is too small.Historically such strongmen have offered the populace a grand bargain: if they will surrender some liberties, he will make the trains run on time. But Trump’s delusions of monarchy have been coupled with a fundamental ineptitude.His trade war injected chaos into the economy, undermining a campaign promise to lower prices and raising the spectre of recession; his ally Elon Musk wreaked havoc on the federal government, threatening health and welfare benefits for millions; his foreign policy turned the world upside down, making friends of adversaries and turning allies into foes.Having promised so much winning, Trump is losing. Just 39% of respondents approve of how he is handling his job as president, according to an opinion poll by ABC News, the Washington Post newspaper and Ipsos, while 55% disapprove. For the first time Trump is even under water on his signature issue of immigration.“Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president have been 100 days from hell for the American people,” Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, wrote in a letter to Senate colleagues. “His first 100 days have been the worst for any president in modern history, and unsurprisingly, he has the lowest 100-day job approval any president has seen in 80 years.”The scale of the disaster is hard to comprehend for anyone who expected a repeat of Trump’s first term. His first 100 days in 2017 were consequential enough: a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, an order for construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border and the firing of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, over undisclosed contacts with Russia. But while America’s guardrails bent, they did not break.View image in fullscreenFrom the moment he was sworn in on 20 January 2025, with the tech oligarchs Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg looking on, it was clear that Trump’s second presidency would be of a different magnitude. Instead of the conservative stalwart Mike Pence as vice-president, there is the Maga isolationist JD Vance. Instead of the retired four-star general Jim Mattis as defence secretary, there is the former Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth.And instead of experienced hands ready to curb Trump’s impulses, there is a cabinet of sycophants eager to indulge them, including in ostentatious displays for the TV cameras. Trump, 78, told the Atlantic magazine: “The first time, I had two things to do – run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.”Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and White House chief of staff, said: “In the first term there were some guardrails and individuals that were able to restrain him before he took action. In the second term he doesn’t have any guardrails and deliberately selected a cabinet in which loyalty was the primary quality that he was after.“The problem is that he goes ahead and takes actions that can cause tremendous disruption. The only check that I can see is when something he does could very well lead to an economic disaster of one kind or another. It’s only when that seems clear that he basically pulls back.”Trump and his allies had four years in political exile to plot and plan a disruptive agenda laid out in Project 2025, a set of proposals by the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank in Washington. Yet its execution has been undermined by the president’s mercurial nature, cabinet infighting and leaks, especially at the Pentagon, reportedly now in disarray.Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “I’m struck by this weird combination of a focused and very well-planned agenda on the one hand and reckless incompetence on the other. You have Russ Vought [director of the office of management and budget] and the Project 2025 folks who clearly had a blueprint for action ready to go and yet you also see this pattern of dysfunction running through agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense.”For Trump’s diehard supporters, his key strength is his success as a businessman and promise to run the economy accordingly. As president he has imposed tariffs on trading partners including Mexico, Canada and China, with Chinese goods facing a combined tax of 145%.The impact has been profound, with consumer confidence plummeting, stock markets convulsing and investors losing confidence in the credibility of Trump’s policies. In the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, 72% said they thought it was very or somewhat likely that his economic policies would cause a recession in the short term.View image in fullscreenTrump, who promised be a dictator only on “day one”, has signed more than 135 executive orders, well ahead of any other president in their first 100 days, bypassing Congress. He tapped Musk to lead the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, aimed at reducing government waste with a Silicon Valley-inspired “move fast and break things” mentality.Doge has been slashing programmes, jobs and entire agencies, including the Department of Education, that by law receive funding under the purview of Congress. Musk and his team have combed through tax, social security and health records, putting private data at risk. While Musk initially aimed for $1tn in budget cuts, analysts predict that he will fall dramatically short.Doge has caused turmoil in medical research by firing doctors and scientists working to cure diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. It has frozen funding for military veterans’ facilities and fired critical workers at hospitals serving disabled veterans. Musk has also described health and social welfare programmes as “the big ones to eliminate” and social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”.Even long-term political observers are aghast at Trump’s acts of self-sabotage. Paul Begala, a former White House adviser and Democratic strategist, said: “I expected him to be stupid. I expected him to be chaotic. I expected his team to be a bunch of sycophants and nincompoops. I expected the tariffs and trade war.“Here’s what I didn’t expect. For me, the defining word of these 100 days has been betrayal. A good politician takes office and tries to expand beyond his base; an average politician tries to reward his base; Trump is the first politician who’s screwing his base, betraying his base. I honestly don’t understand it.”View image in fullscreenIn keeping with his campaign promise, Trump has implemented some of the hardest-line immigration policies in the nation’s history, driving a sharp decline in illegal border crossings.He invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants without due process, including sending alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador in defiance of a court order. The action was met with legal challenges and judicial rebuke. Trump also pledged to end birthright citizenship and proposed “gold cards” for millionaires to buy US citizenship.Another defining theme of the first 100 days is retribution. On his first day in office, Trump pardoned virtually everyone who took part in the 6 January 2021 insurrection. He has actively targeted prosecutors who investigated him, former officials who criticised him and universities whose policies he disliked. He ordered the justice department to investigate Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity director who refuted unfounded claims of election fraud in 2020.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “This will truly be known as the administration of revenge and retribution. No one’s ever done these things before. Even Richard Nixon, who kept an enemies list and was full of anger and resentment, couldn’t hold a candle to Trump.“It’s frightening and has the effect of intimidating people. He loves to bully and he has done more than any other president, certainly in a short period of time. There’s just nothing like this in all of American history. I’ve had so many people my age say, can I survive this? Because it’s stressful.”Trump’s executive orders have faced more than 150 lawsuits and judges have blocked the administration numerous times. The president called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him, prompting a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. Last week agents arrested Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities at her courtroom.Trump is also waging a culture war. Funding for arts and cultural institutions has been cut, and leaders ousted, with the president declaring them fronts for a “woke” agenda. The administration has gone after the media, fighting against news organisations in court and seeking to dismantle the Voice of America broadcaster. Access for some outlets has been restricted while “Maga media” have been platformed.PEN America, which defends writers worldwide against autocratic regimes, said the opening weeks of the Trump White House were unlike anything seen since the red scare McCarthy era of the 1950s. It warned of a “five-alarm fire” for free speech, education, the right to protest and a war against ideas and language themselves.The events – along with outlandish statements about annexing Greenland, retaking the Panama canal and making Canada the 51st state – have hurt America’s reputation around the globe.View image in fullscreenPatrick Gaspard, a former official in the Barack Obama administration, said: “Donald Trump has been radically successful in demonstrating that in 100 days you can destroy a brand that’s been built up over nearly 250 years. If that’s a success then congratulations.”He added: “We’re in DefCon 1 in a democracy where the president is radically consolidating power, politicising non-partisan agencies, attacking civil society and private firms, and literally disappearing people from our streets. Tragically, those with influence only seem to be moved by the volatility in the stock market because of tariffs, failing to see that the entire edifice that makes their success possible is being dismantled.”Trump’s political honeymoon appears to be over. Even among Republicans, polling shows that there is ambivalence about his priorities, with only about half saying he has focused on the right things. Street protests are growing across the country, judges continue to hand him defeats and Harvard University stood its ground against him. As the Democratic party tries to regroup, Trump could find his second 100 days heavier going than his first.In 2021 Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist, told the Guardian that history would remember Trump as by far the worst president ever on the basis of his first term. “I was wrong,” he acknowledged last week. “This is the worst presidency in American history.“The ignorance was actually our ally in the first Trump term. He didn’t know what he was doing and now, unfortunately, while he still doesn’t know what he’s doing, he knows more than he did. Trump believes he is infallible. He’s going to burn out with the public long before the end of this term.” More

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    Trump 100 days: ‘unpredictable’ US alienates allies and disrupts global trade

    For US foreign policy, Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office were the weeks when decades happened.In just over three months, the US president has frayed alliances that stood since the second world war and alienated the US’s closest friends, cut off aid to Ukrainians on the frontlines against Vladimir Putin, emboldened US rivals around the world, brokered and then lost a crucial ceasefire in Gaza, launched strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and seesawed on key foreign policy and economic questions to the point where the US has been termed the “unpredictable ally”.The tariffs Trump has unleashed will, if effected, disrupt global trade and lead to supply chain shocks in the United States, with China’s Xi Jinping seeking to recruit US trade allies in the region.The pace of the developments in the past 100 days makes them difficult to list. Operating mainly through executive action, the Trump administration has affected nearly all facets of US foreign policy: from military might to soft power, from trade to immigration, reimagining the US’s place in the world according to an isolationist America First program.“The shake-up has been revolutionary, extraordinary. It’s upended 80-some years of American foreign policy,” said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to Nato.The Trump presidency has ended the relative peace in the western hemisphere since the end of the second world war underwritten by US economic, military and diplomatic influence, Daalder said.“The foundation of the Pax Americana was trust, and once you break trust, it’s extraordinarily difficult to restore,” he said. “And restoring trust – trust in America, trust in American institutions, trust in American voters – it takes a long time to rebuild.”The US’s key foreign policy and national security making institutions are in crisis. The Pentagon is mid-meltdown under the leadership of Pete Hegseth, whose erratic and unsteady leadership has been reflected in score-settling among his senior staff, while a leaked Signal chat embroiled the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and others in scandal. The state department under Marco Rubio is undergoing a vast shake-up, and the US’s diplomats are being sidelined in favour of envoys such as Steve Witkoff with little background in foreign policy. Critics say the gutting of USAID will cut back on US soft power for generations.“There’s no better way to get us into a war, perhaps a catastrophic war, than essentially poking out your eyes and numbing your brain, and you’re left with Donald Trump and a few people sitting in the White House winging it, and they’re not competent to wing it,” said Steven Cash, a former intelligence officer for the CIA and Department of Homeland Security, and the executive director of the Steady State, an advocacy group of former national security professionals. “And so we’ve seen that with the tariffs. We’ve seen that with Nato. We’ve seen that with Ukraine, and we’re gonna see a lot more of it.”After assuming office in 2021, Joe Biden declared: “America is back.”“The world now knows America is not back,” Daalder said. “America is gone again.”In a recent interview with the Zeit newspaper, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, expressed similar sentiments, saying: “The west as we knew it no longer exists.”View image in fullscreenIn Munich, JD Vance delivered a landmark speech openly pandering to Europe’s far right, accusing European leaders of “running from their own voters” and saying: “America can do nothing to help you.”A backlash has begun. Last month the EU presented an €800bn ($913bn) plan on the future of European defense, a putative step in what would be a herculean task to overcome internal divisions and onshore European defense manufacturing. The UK and other US allies have considered other efforts, such as limiting intelligence-sharing with the US. “We still need America now, but there is a vision [of a time] when we won’t any more,” said one European diplomat.Meanwhile, the Trump effect is beginning to sway elections as well – though not as he might hope.In the western hemisphere, Trump has terrorised US neighbours and tacitly declared what some have compared to a new Monroe doctrine, saying the White House planned to “take back” the Panama canal and annex Greenland, while regularly calling Canada the future 51st state.In an extraordinary bit of election-day meddling, Trump wrote a social media post suggesting that he was on the ballot in Canada’s vote, repeating that Canada should become the 51st state in order to avoid tariffs and reap economic awards.Canadians responded by duly electing the liberal candidate Mark Carney, completing a 30% swing in polling that has largely been explained by opposition to Trump’s tariff war and territorial menaces.In Europe, populist parties seen as Trump’s ideological allies are also on the defensive. While Trump was popular in terms of his ideological and anti-woke agenda, the trade war has made him “quite toxic, just in the last month or two, with a lot of the populist voting bases”, said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former special adviser to the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.Nowhere has the shift in US foreign policy been felt more acutely than in Ukraine, where the sudden cutoff in US military and intelligence sharing confirmed the Trump administration’s goals of pressuring Ukraine to accept a deal with the Kremlin, rather than the other way around. Those frustrations boiled over into an Oval Office meltdown fueled by Vice-President JD Vance that one former US official close to the talks called “disgraceful”.Trump has swung wildly on the war, on certain days targeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and then quickly pivoting to call out Putin for continuing to rain down missiles on Ukrainian cities. His theatrics have produced symbolic moments, including a sudden recognition that “maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war” after speaking with Zelenskyy this weekend in the baptistry of St Peter’s Basilica. But in terms of hard results, Trump has not fulfilled a promise to end the war within 24 hours or produced a clear path to peace many months later.View image in fullscreenThe Russians have said they largely tune out what he says in public.“We hear many things coming from President Trump,” said Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a television appearance this weekend. “We concentrate, as I said, on the real negotiations which President Trump supports and instructed his people to continue to engage in these negotiations.”Key among those people is Witkoff, a neophyte diplomat who has spent hours in conversation with Putin, often with no other adviser present. One person close to the Kremlin said that Witkoff was viewed as a reliable negotiator in Moscow with “a chance to make an agreement”, but added: “There is a chance it will pass by.”Much of the burden of international diplomacy now rests on Witkoff, who is also running point on other key negotiations. Trump has tasked him with reaching a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, in effect renegotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that he scuttled in 2018. Both the US and Iran have played up the talks, although “differences still exist both on major issues and on the details”, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told state television this week.And then there is the Middle East, where the Trump administration scored its greatest early success by negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza but then failed to prevent its collapse, with Israel cutting off new aid to Gaza as the fighting continues.“There now seems to be less focus on ending the devastating conflict,” wrote Stefanie Hausheer Ali, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs. “Trump’s threat in February to Hamas to release the hostages or ‘all hell is going to break out’ has, in practice, meant Israel restarting the war and blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Without an alternative to Hamas rule, the militant group may hang on and continue to fight as an insurgency, replenishing its ranks by recruiting desperate people.”Trump’s most extreme remarks have turned out to be bluster: he stunned the world when he claimed that he would turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront condos and said that the local Palestinian population would be forcibly removed. Months later, the initiative is largely forgotten.While attempting to close three landmark negotiations at once, the Trump administration has also launched a trade war with the entire world, establishing sweeping tariffs on all foreign imports before abruptly reversing course and cutting tariffs to 10% save for those against China.With so many major efforts ongoing, observers say that the government is largely paralysed to deal with smaller but still crucial issues in foreign policy and national security. As part of a blanket ban on refugees, tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted US troops against the Taliban are left waiting for relocation to the United States, a promise that was extended by previous administrations.“The lack of clarity and the chaos are the things that are causing so much pain,” said Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, a group that works with the state department to help resettle Afghans.He said he was critical of both the Biden and Trump administrations for failing to relocate the tens of thousands of Afghans who were far enough along in the vetting program to be relocated before Trump came into office.“The truth is, is that when America makes a promise, you should be able to trust our word,” he said. “If our flag waving over an embassy in Tunisia or Baghdad or Kabul, or Kyiv doesn’t mean this is the place where there’s truth, where there’s justice … well, then what are we even doing here?” More