Philippa Kaur

If you want to get an idea of how Donald Trump’s mind works (and this can change from day to day, as we know), it’s worth taking a look at his TruthSocial website. As I write, beneath a video pinned to the top of his feed featuring an AI-generated vision of “Trump Gaza” (complete with casinos, shopping malls and a giant golden statue of the man himself), can be found a clue to the frenetic presidential activity of the past month.

In a post threatening legal action against any writer or publisher whose “Fake books” offends, Trump refers to himself as “a President who is being given credit for having the Best Opening Month of any President in history”. Apparently George Washington is second on that list – and, given that Potus #1 took 33 days to sign the first bill passed under the new US constitution, you could say Potus #47 has left him trailing in his wake.

Of course #47 appears to face fewer constitutional constraints than his illustrious predecessor.

Sadly, though, Trump will be unable to include in this list the deal he has reportedly just struck with Volodymyr Zelensky which swaps a share in Ukraine’s mineral wealth for an as yet unspecified security guarantee.

Precise details of this deal aren’t confirmed. But we’re told that the original US$500 billion (£394 billion) demand has been dropped in return for a share in an investment fund into which Ukraine will contribute 50% of the revenue from its mineral resources. “What better could you have for Ukraine than to be in an economic partnership with the United States?” commented US national security adviser, Mike Waltz.

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But for the sake of social media, a deal’s a deal and can be trumpeted as such. Zelensky is heading to Washington to sign the agreement and we shall find out in due course whether or not this will assure Ukraine’s future security. There is still the actual peace deal with Russia to work out, after all.

Another landmark foreign policy deal brokered by the Trump White House was with the Taliban in 2020 and concerned the future of Afghanistan. And, as Philip A. Berry writes, Zelensky can take little comfort in that.

Berry, a research fellow at King’s College London, who has extensive experience of working with anti-narcotics agencies in Afghanistan, points to similarities in the way Trump managed negotiations with the Taliban and his deal-making with Ukraine and discussions so far with Russia. The Afghan government was largely cut out of the negotiations, as Trump has threatened to do to Ukraine with regards a peace deal. And like the current situation, Trump’s regular public utterances seriously undermined the talks. Berry concludes:

Trump’s Taliban deal excluded the US’s ally, conceded too much to an adversary, and was partly motivated by the perception of wasting American dollars in a far-off land. Unfortunately, these hallmarks are all too evident in the president’s stance on Ukraine. Zelensky can only hope that things work out better this time around.

Read more:
How Trump the ‘master deal-maker’ failed when it came to negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan

Trust will be absolutely vital if the US and Ukraine are to conclude this agreement and, more critically, if they are to reach terms with Russia that will guarantee the “just peace deal” that Zelensky craves, writes David J. Wilcox of the University of Birmingham. Wilcox points to the relationship of trust built by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s which paved a way for a series of nuclear weapons reduction treaties between the Soviet Union and the US.

It has just been announced that preparations are being made for “expert-level” talks between the US and Russia, but, as Wilcox points out, “any negotiations to end the war will rest ultimately on those two states and their leaders”. And at present, nothing has been publicly said about whether Putin and Zelensky have even agreed to meet.

Read more:
Ukraine war: why negotiations depend on trust

Meanwhile, what do we know about Ukraine’s mineral wealth and what sort of return Trump can expect for the US? Dafydd Townley, an expert in international security at the University of Portsmouth, stresses that Trump’s recent decision to impose punitive tariffs against Beijing has closed off China as a source of key minerals on which the US has been reliant up until now.

It’s a clue, writes Townley, as to why the US president seemed very keen on bringing his deal-making facilities to bear on Greenland, which also has large deposits of desirable minerals.

Interestingly, as Townley points out, Russia has taken control of about 20% of Ukraine’s mineral deposits under the territory it now controls (which America would be open to exploiting according to an offer made by Vladimir Putin’s aides at the recent talks in Saudi Arabia).

It’s also worth noting that Ukraine’s extraction sector has suffered over the past decade from chronic under-investment, thanks to the ongoing hostilities between Russia and Ukraine. As a result it could be some years before the US gets what it needs from the deal it has reportedly struck with Kyiv.

Read more:
Why Trump really wants Ukraine’s minerals — China has put theirs off limits

Three long years

Amid all the shuttle diplomacy and wheeler-dealing taking place around them, at the start of the week the embattled Ukrainian population marked the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion. They were joined by more than a dozen foreign leaders who gathered in Kyiv to express their continuing support.

Sombre gathering: European leaders in Kyiv mark the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
EPA-EFE/Javad Parsa

As the conflict moves into its fourth year, Stefan Wolff, an international security expert at the University of Birmingham, takes a look at the broader geopolitical implications of the conflict in the era of Trump.

He sees worrying parallels with the Munich conference of 1938 which sealed Czechoslovakia’s fate. Not, as you might expect, in terms of Trump’s apparent appeasement of Putin – but because, like Munich, talks on the fate of a sovereign nation are being held without that nation being present. Wolff writes:

There is every indication that Putin is unlikely to stop in or with Ukraine. And it is worth remembering that the second world war started 11 months after Neville Chamberlain thought he had secured “peace in our time”.

This, of course, is the prospect that has both terrified and stiffened the resolve of Ukraine’s western allies. But Wolff also points to limitations in this analogy, in that he doesn’t believe that Trump is acting out of fear that he is in a weaker position than Putin, as did Neville Chamberlain and the French prime minister Édouard Daladier.

It’s rather that Trump sees himself as part of a triumvirate of world leaders, along with Putin and China’s president, Xi Jinping, who have the opportunity to carve out spheres of influence and establish a new world order based on the exercise of raw power.

Read more:
Ukraine war: Trump is not trying to appease Putin – he has a vision of a new US-China-Russia order

Richard Youngs, meanwhile, sees the dawning of what he calls a “no world order”. Youngs, an international relations expert at the University of Warwick, sees an era of flux, where the stability of the past 80 years is disintegrating without anything stable or concrete to replace it.

Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, with EU commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and European Council president, Antonio Costa.
EPA-EFE/Ukrainian presidential press service

Several European leaders, including Keir Starmer who is today visiting Trump in Washington, are due to meet this Sunday ahead of a bigger defence summit in Brussels next week, to continue discussions about how to respond to the changing Ukraine situation. Reports suggest a European defence bank or fund that would include the UK may be on the cards.

Youngs certainly believes that European powers will need to consider practical measures in order to bind themselves into more cohesive relationship and ensure their continuing autonomy. One of those will be in boosting their defence capabilities – something that is now gathering pace in the face of US pressure.

But more radical thinking will be needed, writes Youngs, who has coined the term “geoliberalism” as a way of visualising the sort of thinking about the values and certainties that can bind Europe together in the face of global turbulence.

Read more:
No world order: Europe needs more radical thinking for the Trump era

Alex Titov, meanwhile, believes that for all the talk of “deals” to end the violence, both sides have their reasons for wanting to continue, given that their stated positions remain diametrically opposed and irreconcilable.

Russia’s battlefield progress, while steady, is slow and there’s no real prospect of it forcing a capitulation from Kyiv in the next 12 months. But – particularly with the radically different US position under Donald Trump, neither is there any chance of Russia being forced off the territory it has captured. Ominously, Titov concludes, this could mean that “the bloodiest battles of the war are yet to come”.

Read more:
Ukraine war three years on: the bloodiest battles may be still to come

A new way of governing

After a whirlwind first month, Trump held his first cabinet meeting this week, with a special appearance from his right-hand man Elon Musk, who reportedly got to speak more than anyone else. Musk, of course, has been responsible for much of the maelstrom of activity that has caused so much disquiet and is providing a lot of work for lawyers who are pushing back against many of the new adminstration’s measures on the grounds they are unconstitutional.

Special guest star: Elon Musk addresses Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting.
EPA-EFE/Al Drago/pool

Musk, Trump and his vice-president J.D. Vance have, in turn, pushed back against judges who have issued injunctions to either halt or delay some of their measures. Musk, in a fit of pique this week when three judges halted three of the administration’s policies, complained bitterly “What is the point of having democratic elections if unelected activist ‘judges’ can override the clear will of the people? Well, that’s no democracy at all!”

Stephen Lovell, professor of modern history at King’s College London, has been looking at the way that Trump and his team are attempting to bend the US constitution to their will, comparing their approach to that of Vladimir Putin. Putin, as we know, never saw a constitutional loophole he didn’t want to wriggle through or otherwise obliterate.

Read more:
Trump, Putin and the authoritarian take on constitutionalism

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Canada emerged victorious in the 4 Nations Face-off hockey tournament on Feb. 20, but the event was overshadowed by growing political tensions between Canada and the United States.

In the lead-up to the final game, American fans booed the Canadian national anthem, likely in response to Canadian fans booing the American national anthem ahead of a game between the two teams on Feb. 15.

This was not the first recent airing of grievances from Canadian fans at a sporting event. Following U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of tariffs against Canada and repeated calls for Canada to become the 51st state, fans at a Toronto Raptors game and Ottawa Senators game booed the American national anthem.

Read more:
How Donald Trump’s attacks on Canada are stoking a new Canadian nationalism

Despite the proposed tariffs being postponed for 30 days, Trump’s antagonistic vision for Canada-U.S. relations has stoked anti-American sentiments among Canadians, including calls to boycott American goods and a deteriorating belief in close Canada-U.S. relations.

Those anti-American sentiments boiled over again when Canada faced the U.S. in Montréal, showcasing how sport can be used as an expression of nationalism — especially at a time of increased tensions between the two countries.

Why sports matter politically

It’s not surprising that sport has become an arena for nationalist political rhetoric. Sport possesses powerful symbolism that can be exploited to great affect in forming a coherent national identity.

In this way, sporting events are a way fandoms can reinforce national identity as an objective symbol that connects to primitive forms of national ideology.

Sport is also a powerful psychological setting for national rhetoric. A person’s social identity, or how they see themselves in relation to others, can be reinforced through sport. This can happen, for instance, when someone views themselves as a member of a team and celebrates their success, or views a rival team or country in a negative light after a loss.

Additionally, the outcome of a game can boost in-group favouritism, which can influence whether consumers buy goods from a specific vendor.

Toronto Raptors forward Bruce Brown, left to right, forward Scottie Barnes and forward Chris Boucher react as fans boo the American national anthem before first half NBA action against the Los Angeles Clippers in Toronto on Feb. 2, 2025.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

Nationalism versus patriotism

Generally, research suggests sports reinforce a national in-group identity that is more patriotic than nationalistic. However, the vitriol Canadians have expressed during the American national anthem leans towards expressing nationalist views rather than patriotic ones.

Patriotism typically focuses on why a country is great without necessarily disparaging outsiders or other countries. Nationalism, on the other hand, tends to play up why one’s country is great while vilifying another country or group.

Trump’s focus on using tariffs to bully Canada into increasing security at the border has undoubtedly soured relations between the two countries. If Trump decides to flex the United States’ capacity to be a bully in U.S.-Canadian relations, Canada is stuck with limited options.

But are Canadians playing right into Donald Trump’s hand by leaning into an adversarial relationship?

How Trump uses sports for political gain

Trump has a history of using major sporting events to his political benefit. During his last presidential campaign, he attended the Army-Navy football game and became the first sitting president to attend the recent Super Bowl in New Orleans.

Trump also considered attending the 4 Nations final between the U.S. and Canada in Boston, but couldn’t attend due to a scheduled speech with U.S. governors. Still, he made his presence felt by calling the American team the morning before the game to wish them luck.

Looking ahead, Trump may continue to use international sporting events to assert his vision for U.S. relations with Canada and Mexico.

Elon Musk, right, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, centre, FIFA President Gianni Infantino and Jared Kushner listen as Trump speaks at the Future Investment Initiative Institute summit in Miami Beach, Fla., on Feb. 19, 2025.
(Pool via AP)

In January, Trump invited Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, to his inauguration, just as preparations have begun for the 2026 World Cup, which is to be hosted by Canada, Mexico and the U.S.

With Infantino and Trump becoming increasingly friendly, it seems likely Trump will use the upcoming World Cup to influence North American relations. At the very least, he will likely try to insert himself into its coverage.

Trump using sport to reinforce his image

Beyond politics, Trump uses sports to play into his crafted image as a hyper-masculine man. This image has played a large part in Trump’s popularity among young men and helped him win a second term as president.

Yet Trump does not necessarily fit the masculine norms his supporters lionize. Trump is fairly tall, which has been shown to be preferred among American voters. However, unlike past presidents such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, who played college football, Trump’s athletic background is limited to high school football.

Nor did Trump serve in the military like previous presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, both of whom served in the Second World War. Trump, by contrast, avoided service during the Vietnam war for medical and educational reasons.

Despite a lack of traditional masculine bonafides, Trump has shown an ability to use sporting events for his political gain. He has used sporting events as potent media environments to insert his talking points and burnish his masculine image.

In the end, the boos from Canadian fans may be music to Donald Trump’s ears. He wants to be hated by outsiders so he can turn around to his supporters and say that the U.S. is under attack at its borders. He wants the sporting accomplishments of the American men’s teams to reflect on his strength.

It can still go against him, as we saw Thursday night with Canada beating the U.S. in overtime. Justin Trudeau wasted no time using that moment to respond with strong rhetoric in a tweet.

What happened on the ice was out of Trump’s control. But he used the event to serve his own goals, sowing greater divisiveness across borders. The shadow of his combative rhetoric loomed large over the entire event. More

When U.S. President Donald Trump first suggested Canada should become the 51st American state, the federal government dismissed it as just a joke. Finance Minister Dominic Leblanc insisted it was “in no way a serious comment.”

Similar skepticism was expressed by political leaders across the world when Trump talked about seizing Greenland and the Panama Canal in early January, by military force if necessary, to buttress U.S. national security. He also floated the idea of taking over Gaza to transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Now that Trump has carried through on his aggressive economic threats — launching a trade war with China and raising the possibility of similar conflicts with Canada, Mexico and the European Union — his imperialist expansionism is in plain sight.

Canadian leaders have come to realize that Trump’s actions may not be a temporary or minor irritant, but rather an attack on Canadian sovereignty itself.

The failure to take Trump’s words seriously is reminiscent of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s skepticism in 1938 that Hitler would actually risk world war despite the latter’s aggressive rhetoric, annexation of Austria and threats to Czechoslovakia and Poland.

What, then, have been the signs of Trump’s expansionist tendencies? American economic and military might, albeit declining relative to emerging powers like China and India, still provides a solid basis for the projection of U.S. supremacy. But there are also two new key elements at play.

A billionaire-corporate administration

The Trump administration appears to operate with a distinctly corporate mindset, treating the nation like a business empire. Trump has stacked his administration with private sector leaders and corporate billionaires such as Elon Musk, Doug Burgum and Howard Lutnick.

Like other billionaires, their immense business success has been founded not on mainstay competitive market practices like productivity or cost-cutting, but on predatory and cannibalistic ones.

President Donald Trump speaks with reporters as Elon Musk listens in the Oval Office at the White House on Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
(Photo/Alex Brandon)

These include controlling resources like oil, gold, diamonds and coltan to secure production inputs; buying out competitors to monopolize markets and patents; and deliberately breaking up and destroying companies through mergers and acquisitions with little regard for the resulting job losses.

It is within this framework that Trump’s allegations about buying Greenland and Gaza, annexing Canada through “economic force” and capturing the Panama Canal need to be seen.

Read more:
Billionaires and loyalists will provide Trump with muscle during his second term

Under the guise of national security, the idea is not simply to safeguard borders, but to engage in economic expansionism and real estate development, aided by the U.S. military when needed. Taking control of land, waterways and mineral wealth is critical to building “America’s Golden Age” of corporate capitalism.

This approach seems to be a mainly business one, with little concern for the social costs (recession, unemployment, violence) produced by such imperialistic ventures. In line with his infamous book, The Art of the Deal, Trump appears to view foreign nations and domestic opponents alike as obstacles to be callously bullied, degraded, manipulated, exploited and finally vanquished.

American nationalist populism

The Trump administration’s imperial ambitions lie in the nationalist populism that propelled Trump and his allies into power for the second time.

Trump’s populism has successfully tapped into widespread anxieties among Americans — job insecurity, food prices, the housing crisis — by promising to soothe their worries through the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) agenda.

Read more:
Trump’s view of the world is becoming clear: America’s allies come second to its own interests

Like other right-wing populist movements around the globe — Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s in Turkey, Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary and the Brexit campaign in the U.K. — the MAGA movement has sought to unify the U.S. by identifying and targeting perceived national enemies. These include so-called “illegal” migrants, transgender people and the country’s largest trading rivals: Mexico, Canada and China.

By blaming these groups, especially those seen as contributing to America’s economic decline, MAGA whips up nationalist sentiment in the form of suspicion, aggression and vengeance. The result is a deeply polarized nationalist discourse in which one is either a loyal supporter or an enemy; a believer or a “woke” liberal.

A lethal imperial set-up

The combination of U.S. global power, nationalist populism and the Trump administration’s corporate-driven, predatory approach makes for a dangerous dynamic.

This mix is fuelling a form of economic expansionism that is now beginning to manifest itself. The impending trade wars, potential dismantling of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (which Trump initiated in 2018 to avoid unilateral trade moves by its signatories) and the brazen disregard for the socioeconomic consequences of foreign territorial control, such as the forced displacement of Palestinians, are all signs of this.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivers a statement as he stands with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, left, and European Council President Antonio Costa, right, as they arrive to the EU-Canada leaders meeting at the European Council building in Brussels on Feb. 12, 2025.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

While many assumed Trump’s administration would be protectionist and isolationist, a more troubling and nefarious reality is emerging. His administration appears to be intent on securing America’s industrial dominance through trade wars while expanding it through hawkish economic imperialism.

There is a clear ruthlessness to this approach, with a willingness to pressure not only America’s perceived enemies but also its allies. “America First” is starting to looks like “America Above All Others” as Trump attempts to bully U.S. rivals into subordination, with disturbing echoes of past authoritarians.

Unravelling American imperial designs

Many obstacles could prevent Trump’s aggressive expansionism from fully taking shape. While the key ingredients may already be there, and some have begun to be deployed, that doesn’t mean they will come to fruition.

The Trump administration’s policymaking process is often chaotic and theatrical, prioritizing short-term political gains over long-term strategy. This instability undermines any consistent efforts at expansion.

There is also the risk that Trump’s trade wars will backfire. They could end up causing hardship to U.S. companies and consumers through higher food and energy prices, job losses in key industries like agriculture and auto manufacturing, and increased stock market instability. Such consequences could negatively affect Trump’s corporate allies.

Meanwhile, Trump’s economic and military rivals could forge new alliances to challenge his attempts at global supremacy. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for instance, recently met with the head of NATO and other European allies to strengthen trade and security ties.

The first step to any countermoves by Trump’s foreign adversaries will be seeing his regime’s designs for what they are: chaotic, perhaps, but serious expansionist ones. More

At the start of his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump declared, “The golden age of America begins right now!”

A month later, Trump’s supporters gathered at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, from Feb. 19-22 to celebrate the advent of this golden age.

Gold glitter jackets, emblazoned with phrases like “Trump the Golden Era,” are for sale in the CPAC exhibition hall. There, attendees decked out in other MAGA-themed clothing and accessories network and mingle. They visit booths with politically charged signs that say “Defund Planned Parenthood” and collect brochures on topics like “The Gender Industrial Complex.”

Another booth with a yellow and black striped backdrop resembling a prison cell’s bars was called a “Deportation Center.” Attendees photographed themselves at this booth, posing beside full-size cutouts of Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan.

Former Jan. 6 prisoners, including Proud Boys’ former leader Enrique Tarrio, have also been a visible – and controversial – presence at CPAC.

The conference’s proceedings kicked off on Feb. 20 with an Arizona pastor, Joshua Navarrete, saying, to loud applause, “We are living in the greatest time of our era – the golden age!”

Many subsequent speakers repeated this phrase, celebrating the country’s “golden age.”

For many outside observers, claims of a golden age might seem odd.

Just months ago during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said that an American apocalypse was underway, driven by a U.S. economy in shambles and major cities overrun by an “invasion” of “illegal alien” “terrorists,” “rapists” and “murderers.”

Now, Trump’s critics argue, the U.S. is led by a convicted felon who is implementing policies that are reckless, stupid and harmful.

Further, these critics contend, Trump’s illegal power grabs are leading to a constitutional crisis that could cause democracy to crumble in the U.S.

How, they wonder, could anyone believe the country is in a golden age?

As an anthropologist of U.S. political culture, I have been studying the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement for years. I wrote a related 2021 book, “It Can Happen Here.” And I continue to do MAGA research at places like this year’s CPAC, where the mood has been giddy.

Here are three reasons why the MAGA faithful believe a golden age has begun. The list begins, and ends, with Trump.

Elon Musk holds a painting of himself during CPAC in Oxon Hill, Md., on Feb. 20, 2025.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

1. The warrior hero

Trump supporters contend that after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attacks, which they consider a “peaceful protest,” Trump became a political pariah and victim.

Like many a mythic hero, Trump’s response was “never surrender.” In 2023, he repeatedly told his MAGA faithful, “I am your warrior, I am your justice.”

Trump’s heroism, his supporters believe, was illustrated after a bullet grazed his ear during an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July 2024. Trump quickly rose to his feet, pumped his fist in the air and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight.”

The phrase became a MAGA rally cry and, in February 2025, it has been stamped on CPAC attendees’ shirts and jackets.

After Trump’s 2024 election victory, many Trump supporters dubbed it
“the greatest comeback in political history.” MAGA populist Steven Bannon invoked this phrase at a pre-CPAC event on Feb. 19.

When Bannon spoke on the CPAC main stage on Feb. 20, he led the crowd in a raucous “fight, fight, fight” chant. He compared Trump with Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and called for him to run again for president in 2028.

This is despite the fact that Trump running for a third term would violate the Constitution.

2. A wrecking ball

The MAGA faithful believe that Trump is like a human “wrecking ball,” as evangelical leader Lance Wallnau said in 2015. This metaphor speaks to how Trump supporters believe the president is tearing down an entrenched, corrupt system.

The day Trump took office, MAGA stalwarts underscore, he began to “drain the swamp” with a slew of executive orders.

One established the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is devoted to eliminating government waste. DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has dismantled USAID and fired thousands of government workers whom MAGA views as part of an anti-Trump “deep state.”

Musk stole the show at CPAC on Feb. 20. Speaking to a cheering crowd, Musk held up a large red chain saw and yelled, “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy.”

Speaker after speaker at this year’s CPAC have celebrated this and other wrecking-ball achievements on panels with titles like “Red Tape Reckoning,” “Crushing Woke Board Rooms” and “The Takedown of Left Tech.”

3. The Midas touch

A golden age requires a builder. Who better, the MAGA faithful believe, than a billionaire businessman with a self-proclaimed “Midas touch.” This refers to King Midas, a figure in Greek mythology who turns everything he touches into pure gold.

“Trump Will Fix It” signs filled his 2024 campaign rallies. And MAGA supporters note that Trump began fixing the country on Day 1 by “flooding the zone” with executive orders aimed at implementing his four-pronged “America First” promise. In addition to draining the swamp, this plan pledges to “make America safe again,” “make America affordable and energy dominant again” and “bring back American values.”

These themes run through the remarks of almost every CPAC speaker, who offer nonstop praise about how Trump is securing the country’s borders, increasing energy independence, repatriating who they call illegal aliens, restoring free speech and reducing government regulation and waste.

CPAC speakers said that Trump has already racked up a slew of successes just a month into his presidency.

This includes Trump using the threat of tariffs to bring other countries to the negotiating table.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters are pleased that he has been working to cut deals to end the conflict in Gaza and the war between Russia and Ukraine, while reorienting U.S. foreign policy to focus on China.

House Speaker Mike Johnson expressed the prevailing MAGA sentiment when he stated at CPAC that Trump “wrote the art of the deal. He knows what he’s doing.”

CPAC attendees wear Trump-themed clothing at the four-day political conference on Feb. 20, 2025.
Andrew Harnick/Getty Images

American exceptionalism restored

The golden-age celebration at CPAC centered on Trump and his mission to “make America great again.”

Speaker after speaker, including foreign conservative leaders from around the world, paid homage to Trump and this message.

During her CPAC speech, Liz Truss, the former prime minister of the U.K., stated, “This is truly the golden age of America.” Truss, who does not have a current political position, told the CPAC audience that she wanted to copy the MAGA playbook in order to “make Britain great again.”

The MAGA faithful believe that Trump is restoring an era of American exceptionalism in which the U.S. is an economic powerhouse, common sense is the rule, and traditional values centered on God, family and freedom are celebrated.

And they believe in a future where the U.S. is, as Trump said in his inaugural address, “the envy of every nation.” More

Like many, I entered The New Yorker through the cartoon door. The first cartoon I loved, and remember to this day, featured a New Yorker staple – two guys sitting in a bar – with one saying to the other: “I wish just once someone would say to me, ‘I read your latest ad, and I loved it’.”

For someone whose first job after university was an unhappy stint in an advertising agency, the cartoon was a tonic. They are still the first thing I look at when the magazine arrives by mail or the daily newsletter by email, and the first thing shared with my family. There have been around 80,000 published since the magazine’s first issue on February 25 1925.

I had discovered The New Yorker while studying literature at Monash University and writing an honours thesis on the playwright Tom Stoppard. The English drama critic Kenneth Tynan had written a long profile of Stoppard for the magazine in 1977, combining sharp insights into the plays, behind-the-curtains material from Tynan’s time as literary manager at the National Theatre (he bought the rights to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1966) and slices of Stoppard’s life.

The most enticing of these was Tynan’s account of a Saturday afternoon cricket match between a team from The Guardian, comprising several no-nonsense typesetters and the paper’s industrial correspondent, and Harold Pinter’s XI, which was actually a IX owing to two late withdrawals, including the captain himself.

Stoppard arrived in dazzlingly white whites but didn’t seem to take the game seriously, inadvertently dropping a smouldering cigarette butt between kneepad and trousers as he took the field. “Playwright Bursts into Flames at Wicket,” he called back to Tynan standing on the boundary.

A younger Tom Stoppard.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Once the game began, though, Stoppard was a revelation, first as wicket-keeper where his “elastic leaps and hair-trigger reflexes” saw him dismiss four players, and then as a batsman, when he smoothly drove and cut his way to the winning score.

I had never read anything like this. It wasn’t academic literary criticism, which tended to assault the English language on a polysyllabic basis. It wasn’t the daily newspaper, which as Stoppard himself mocked, was terse, formal and leaned to the formulaic. It wasn’t a biography of someone long dead, but a “profile”, whatever that was, of a living, breathing person.

I wanted more and so began looking out for the magazine but read it only intermittently. Released from advertising, I began working in journalism in 1981. The 1980s coincided with the final years of William Shawn’s 35-year editorship when The New Yorker almost collapsed under the weight of very long articles about very slight subjects and Shawn’s legendary prudishness. (Tynan once referred to a “pissoir”, which Shawn changed to “circular curbside construction”.)

Shawn began working at The New Yorker as a fact-checker eight years after its founding in 1925 by Harold Ross, a former newspaperman, and his wife, reporter Jane Grant. Shawn took over as editor after Ross’s death in 1951, and was brilliant, encouraging writers such as Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt and Truman Capote to do work better than even they expected.

Truman Capote in 1959.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

More than 60 writers have dedicated books to Shawn that grew out of New Yorker articles, according to Ben Yagoda’s excellent 2000 history of the magazine.

In Shawn’s later years, though, the weaknesses of his approach became dominant, and he could not bear to let go of the editorship. As John Bennet, a staff member trying to decipher Shawn’s gnomic utterances, said:

Shawn ran the magazine the way Algerian terrorist cells were organised in the battle of Algiers – no one knew who anybody else was or what anybody else was doing.

Yagoda writes the cornerstones of the magazine were:

A belief in civility, a respect for privacy, a striving for clear and accurate prose, a determination to publish what one believes in, irrespective of public opinion and commercial concerns, and a sense that The New Yorker was something special, something other and somehow more important than just another magazine. These admirable values all had their origin in the Ross years. But under Shawn, such emotional energy was invested in each of them that they became obsessive and sometimes distorted and perverted, in the sense of being turned completely inward.

The 1980s may have been a difficult period for the magazine, but it still produced some outstanding journalism, and it was the journalism I increasingly turned to, particularly that of Janet Malcolm. Today, readers know of her work through books such as In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer and The Silent Woman, but all three, like most of her writing, originally appeared as long articles in the magazine.

I can still recall the jolt I felt reading the famous opening paragraph of The Journalist and the Murderer (published in the magazine in 1989):

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Malcolm’s dissection of the relationship between Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, and Joe McGinniss, a journalist convicted by her ice-cold, surgically precise prose, is by turns brilliant, thought-provoking, infuriating and incomplete. Well over three decades later, Malcolm’s book is one all journalists should read.

Janet Malcolm pictured in 1993.
George Nikitin/AAP

To Malcolm, the relationship between journalists and their subjects was the “canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism”, which could not be rooted out. Hers was a long overdue wake-up call for an industry allergic to reflection and self-criticism. But in the end, for all the brilliance with which she opened up a difficult topic, Malcolm packed the journalist–subject relationship in too small a box.

Among her colleagues at the magazine were many who carefully and ethically navigated the challenges of gaining a subject’s trust, then writing about them honestly, as I learnt when researching a PhD which became a book, Telling True Stories.

One example is Lawrence Wright’s work for the magazine on the rise of Al-Qaeda, and the subsequent book The Loooming Tower. In a note on sources, Wright reflects on the questions of trust and friendship that haunt the journalist–subject relationship.

Knowledge is seductive; the reporter wants to know, and the more he knows, the more interesting he becomes to the source. There are few forces in human nature more powerful than the desire to be understood; journalism couldn’t exist without it.

By conspicuously placing a tape recorder between him and his interviewee, Wright tries to remind both parties “that there is a third party in the room, the eventual reader”.

Outstanding journalists

When I began teaching journalism, especially feature writing, at RMIT in the 1990s, I found myself drawn more and more to The New Yorker and to its history. The “comic paper” Ross originally envisaged had travelled a long way since 1925. The second world war impelled Ross and Shawn, then his deputy, to broaden and deepen the scope of their reporting.

Most famously, after the dropping of two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing the Japanese to surrender in 1945, they commissioned John Hersey to return to Japan, interview survivors and, as Hersey later put it, write about “what happened not to buildings but to human beings”. Ross set aside the cartoons and devoted the entire issue of August 31 1946 to Hersey’s 31,000-word article simply headlined “Hiroshima”.

The mushroom cloud photographed from the ground during the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum

I still remember being deeply moved by “Hiroshima”, which I first read half a century after publication and half a world away while on a summer holiday in the bush. The backstory behind the article (ranked number one on the Best American Journalism of the 20th Century list), and its impact on journalism and the world, is well told in Lesley Blume’s 2020 book, Fallout.

By the 1990s, when Tina Brown became the first woman to edit The New Yorker, it definitely needed a makeover. It still did not have a table of contents, nor run photographs. And, beyond a headline, it gave readers little idea what a story was about! She eased up on the copy editors’ notorious fussiness. As E.B. White, a longtime contributor, once said: “Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”

Brown lasted only marginally longer than her predecessor, Robert Gottlieb. Her editorship has been given a bad rap by New Yorker traditionalists, but she gave the magazine a much-needed electric shock, injecting fresh blood.

A list of outstanding journalists she hired who remain at the magazine three decades later is illuminating: David Remnick (who followed her as editor, in 1998), Malcolm Gladwell, Jane Mayer, Lawrence Wright, Anthony Lane and John Lahr, among others.

There’s going to be a lot of celebrating of the magazine’s 100th anniversary, including a Netflix documentary scheduled for release later in the year.

Not many magazines reach such a milestone. One of The New Yorker’s early competitors, Time, which began two years before, was for many years one of the most widely read and respected magazines in the world. It continues today but has a thinner print product and a barely noticed online presence. (I say that as someone who once worked for three years in Time’s Australian office.)

Time is far from alone in this. Magazines, like newspapers, have struggled to adapt to the digital world as the advertising revenue that once afforded them plump profits was funnelled into the big online technology companies, Google and Facebook.

Yet The New Yorker has not only adapted to the digital age but thrived in it. It is one of few legacy media outlets whose prestige and influence have actually grown in the past two decades.

As the internet arrived, the New Yorker’s paid circulation was 900,000. It exceeded a million, for the first time in the magazine’s history, in 2004. As of October last year it was 1,161,064 (for both the print and electronic edition). Subscribers to the magazine’s electronic edition have increased five-fold since it began in 2016 and now stand at 534,287. Yes, advertising revenue remains challenged, recently forcing some redundancies at the magazine, but nothing compared to other parts of the media industry.

Apart from the weekly edition, a daily newsletter was introduced around 2015. The magazine has also expanded into audio, podcasting and documentary film, runs a well-attended annual festival, invites readers to try their hand at devising captions for cartoons and does a line of merchandising. All the astute branding on the part of the magazine and its owners, Condé Nast, would have Shawn rolling in his grave, but the core of the magazine’s editorial mission remains true.

Why it succeeds

The key reasons behind The New Yorker’s current success, in my view, are twofold. First, as the internet made a cornucopia of information available instantly anywhere, the magazine continued to produce material, especially journalism, that was distinctive and different.

Journalist Jane Mayer.
goodreads

Think, for example, of the extraordinary disclosures made by Seymour Hersh and Jane Mayer during George W. Bush’s administration (2001–2009) about the torture by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison and how rules about what constituted torture were changed to make almost anything short of death permissible.

Both journalists later published their work in books: Hersh’s Chain of Command: the road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004) and Mayer’s The Dark Side: the inside story on how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals (2008).

A detainee in an outdoor solitary confinement cell talks with a military policeman at the Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, in 2004.
John Moore/AAP

Alongside the investigative journalism have been many examples of deep, productive dives into seemingly unpromising topics such as the packaged ice cube business (Peter Boyer, The Emperor of Ice, February 12 2001) and a movie dog (Susan Orlean, The Dog Star: the life and times of Rin Tin Tin, August 29 2011).

In a world of information abundance, what remained scarce was the ability to make sense of chaotic events, knotty issues and complicated people, in prose that is almost always clear, alive to irony, elegant and sometimes profound. In other words, while most of the legacy media was dumbing down, The New Yorker was dumbing up.

The second reason for the magazine’s continued success is that even as the internet’s information abundance has curdled into the chaos and cruelty of social media’s algorithm-driven world, The New Yorker has not wavered in its editorial mission.

Just as Donald Trump doubled down on the Big Lie surrounding the 2020 election result and the January 6 2021 riots at the Capitol, so the magazine doubled down on reporting his actions since then and into his second presidency.

Other media outlets, even The Washington Post, which did so much excellent reporting during the first Trump presidency, have kowtowed to Trump, or at least its proprietor appears to have. Jeff Bezos decided the newspaper should not run a pre-election endorsement editorial last year. The Amazon owner was placed front and centre with other heads of the big tech companies at Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

Guests including (from left to right), Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, arrive before the 60th presidential inauguration in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool/AAP

By contrast, The New Yorker has published a steady stream of reporting and commentary about the outrageous and shocking actions of the Trump administration in its first month.

The new administration has moved so quickly and on so many fronts that the import of its actions have overwhelmed the media, making it hard to keep up with reporting every development in the detail it might deserve.

To take one example, The Washington Post reported that candidates for senior posts in intelligence and law enforcement were being asked so-called loyalty questions about whether the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” and the January 6 Capitol riots an “inside job”.

Two individuals being considered for positions in intelligence “who did not give the desired straight “yes” answers, were not selected. It is not clear whether other factors contributed to the decision”.

The report prompted media commentary, but not enough of it recognised the gravity of an attempt to rewrite history every bit as egregious as Stalinist Russia.

The New Yorker has made its own statement, in response, by reprinting Luke Mogelson’s remarkable reporting from January 6 2021, with photography by Balasz Gardi and alarming footage from inside the capitol with the rioters.

David Remnick, now in his 27th year as editor, was among ten media figures asked recently by The Washington Post how the second Trump administration should be reported. He said:

To some degree, we should be self-critical, but we should stop apologizing for everything we do. I think that journalism during the first Trump administration achieved an enormous amount in terms of its investigative reporting. And if we’re going to go into a mode where we’re doing nothing but apologizing and falling into a faint and accepting a false picture of reality because we think that’s what fairness demands, then I think we’re making an enormous mistake. I just don’t think we should throw up our hands and accede to reality as it is seen through the lens of Donald Trump.

Remnick’s argument is clear-eyed and courageous. You would hope it is heard by other parts of the news media that have long ceded editorial leadership to what was for many years categorised simply as a “general interest magazine”.

Failing that, they could look at the cartoons. On February 14, the magazine published one by Brendan Loper featuring a drawing of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster standing outside the Cookie Company factory where a spokesman said,

Let me assure you that as an unpaid “special factory employee” Mr. Monster stands to personally gain nothing from this work.

Here’s looking at you, Elon. More

The United States’ steadfast allegiance to Ukraine during that country’s three-year war against Russia appears to be quickly disintegrating under the Trump administration. President Donald Trump on Feb. 19, 2025, called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator” and falsely blamed him for the war that Russia initiated as part of a land grab in the countries’ border regions.

Zelenskyy, meanwhile, said on Feb. 19 that Trump is trapped in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “disinformation space.”

The intensifying bitterness comes as the U.S. and Russia started talks in Saudi Arabia, without including Ukraine, on how to end the conflict.

The U.S. and Russia have long been adversaries, and the U.S., to date, has given Ukraine more than US$183 billion to help fight against Russia. But that funding came when Joe Biden was president. Trump does not appear to be similarly inclined toward Ukraine.

Amy Lieberman, a politics editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Tatsiana Kulakevich, a scholar of Eastern European politics and international relations, to understand the implications of this sudden shift in U.S.-Russia policy under Trump.

Kulakevich sees Trump’s moves that could be perceived as self-interested as instead part of a calculated strategy in preliminary discussions.

An airplane passenger reads a Financial Times article about U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 19, 2025.
Horacio Villalobos Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

Can you explain the current dynamic between the U.S., Ukraine and Russia?

People should not panic because the U.S. and Russia are only holding exploratory talks. We should not call them peace talks, per se, at least not yet. It was to be expected that Ukraine was not invited to the talks in Saudi Arabia because there is nothing to talk about yet. We don’t know what the U.S. and Russia are actually discussing besides agreeing to restore the normal functioning of each other’s diplomatic missions.

People are perceiving the U.S. and Russia as being in love. However, Trump’s Russia policy has been more hawkish than often portrayed in the media. Looking at the record from the previous Trump administration, we can see that if something is not in the interests of the U.S., that is not going to be done. Trump does not do favors.

He approved anti-tank missile sales to Ukraine in 2019. That same year, Trump withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, an agreement with Russia that limited what weapons each country could purchase, over Russian violations.

In 2019, Trump also issued economic sanctions against a Russian ship involved in building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. These sanctions tried to block Russia’s direct gas exports to Germany – this connection between Russia and Germany was seen by Ukraine as an economic threat.

Based on Trump’s talks with Russia and remarks against Ukraine, it could seem like the U.S. and Russia are no longer adversaries. How do you perceive this?

There are no clear indications that Russia and the U.S. have ceased to be adversaries. Despite Trump’s occasional use of terms like “friends” in diplomacy, his rhetoric often serves as a tactical maneuver rather than a genuine shift in alliances. A key example is his engagement with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, where Trump alternated between flattery and threats to extract concessions.

Even if the U.S. is meeting with Russia and the public narrative seems to say otherwise, strategically, abandoning Ukraine is not in the United States’ best interests. One reason why is because the U.S. turning away from Ukraine would make Russia happy and China happy. Trump has treated China as a primary threat to the U.S., and China has supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also still saying that everyone, including Ukraine, will be at the table for eventual peace talks.

The allegations that Russia was holding some information over Trump and blackmailing him started long before this presidential term and did not stop Trump from imposing countermeasures on Russia during his first term. The first Trump administration took more than 50 policy actions to counter Moscow, primarily in the form of public statements and sanctions.

What does the U.S. gain from developing a diplomatic relationship with Russia?

Trump is a transactional politician. American companies could profit from the U.S. aligning with Russia and Russian companies, as some Russian officials have said during the recent Saudi Arabia talks with the Trump administration. But the U.S. could also benefit economically from the Trump’s administration’s proposed deal with Ukraine to give the U.S. half of Ukraine’s estimated $11.5 trillion in rare earth minerals.

Zelenskyy rejected that proposal this week, saying it does not come with the promise that the U.S. will continue to give security guarantees to Ukraine.

Historically, since the Cold War, there has been a diplomatic triangle between the Soviet Union – later Russia – China and the U.S. And there has always been one side fighting against the two other sides. Trump trying to develop a better diplomatic relationship with Russia might mean he is trying to distance Russia from China.

A similar dynamic is playing out between the U.S. and Belarus’ authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, a co-aggressor in the war in Ukraine. Lukashenko is close with both Russia and China. The U.S. administration is looking to relax sanctions on Belarusian banks and exports of potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer, in exchange for the release of Belarusian political opposition members who are imprisoned. There are over 1,200 political prisoners in Belarus. This U.S. foreign policy strategy is aimed at providing Lukashenko with room to grow less economically dependent on Russia and China.

A worker clears snow from a cemetery in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Feb. 17, 2025. More than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in combat since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Pierre Crom/Getty Images

Is this level of collaboration between the U.S. and Russia unprecedented?

While U.S.-Russia relations are often defined by rivalry, history shows that pragmatic cooperation has occurred when both nations saw mutual benefits – whether this relates to arms control, space, counterterrorism, Arctic affairs or health.

Moreover, the U.S. has always prioritized its own interests in its relationship with Russia. For example, the U.S. and its allies imposed sanctions on Russia’s uranium and nickel industries only in May 2024, over two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This was due to the United States’ strategic economic dependencies and concerns about market stability if it sanctioned uranium and nickel.

Even after Russia invaded Crimea – an area of Ukraine that Russia claims as its own – in 2014 and provided support for Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbass region, the U.S. and other Western countries imposed largely symbolic sanctions. This included freezing assets of Russian individuals, restricting some financial transactions and limiting Russia’s access to Western technology.

We should also notice that Trump in January 2025 promised to sanction Russia if it does not end the Ukraine war. The U.S. still has not removed any existing sanctions, which signals its commitment to a tough stance on Russia, despite perceptions of a close relationship between Trump and Putin.

Given Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy, his tough rhetoric on Zelenskyy could be a deliberate negotiation strategy aimed at pressuring Ukraine into making greater concessions in potential peace talks, rather than signaling abandonment. More

A few weeks ago, word started to come out that the newly minted United States Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had acquired unprecedented access to multiple US government computer systems.

DOGE employees – tech billionaire Elon Musk and his affiliates – have been granted access to sensitive personal and financial data, as well as other data critical for national security. This has created a national and international outcry, and serious concerns have been raised about data security, privacy and potential influence.

A group of 14 state attorneys-general attempted to have DOGE’s access to certain federal systems restricted, but a judge has denied the request.

Questions of trust

What are the deeper reasons behind this outcry? After all, Musk is far from the first businessman to gain political power.

There is, of course, US President Donald Trump himself, alongside many more on both sides of politics. Most of them kept running their businesses at arm’s length and went back to them after a stint in Washington.

So why are so many people alarmed now, but not before? The key word here is trust. Surveys suggest many people don’t trust Musk with this kind of access.

Does that mean we trusted the others? The foundation of modern cyber security is not to trust anything or anybody in the first place.

So while a lack of trust in Musk is one reason for disquiet, another is a lack of trust in the current state of cyber security in US government systems and procedures. And for good reason.

An insider threat

The situation in the US raises the spectre of what cyber experts call an “insider threat”. These concern cyber security incidents caused by people who have authorised access to systems and data.

Cyber security relies on controlling the so-called “CIA triad” of confidentiality, integrity and availability. Insider threats can compromise all three.

Authentication and subsequent authorisation of access has traditionally been an important measure to prevent cyber incidents from occurring. But apparently, that is not sufficient any more.

Perhaps the most famous insider incident in history is Edward Snowden’s leak of classified documents from the US National Security Agency in 2013. Australia too has had its share of insider breaches – the 2000 Maroochy Shire attack is still a textbook example.

Musk and his DOGE colleagues have now become insiders.

How to reduce the risk of insider threat

There are plenty of strategies organisations can follow to reduce the risk of insider threats:

more rigorous vetting of employees
giving users only the bare minimum access and privileges they need
continuously auditing who has access to what, and restricting access immediately when needed
authenticating and authorising users every time they access a different system or file (this is part of what is called a “zero trust architecture”)
monitoring for unusual behaviour regarding insiders accessing systems and files
developing and nurturing a cyber-aware culture in the organisation.

In government systems, the public should be able to trust these procedures are being rigorously applied. However, when it comes to Musk and DOGE, it seems they are not. And that’s where the core of the problem lies.

Clearances and a lack of care

DOGE employees without security clearance reportedly have access to classified systems which would normally be considered quite sensitive.

However, even security clearances offer no iron-clad guarantees.

Security clearances assume someone can be trusted based on their past. But past performance can never guarantee the future.

Not all Americans are happy with DOGE access to government computer systems.
John G. Mabanglo/EPA

In the US, obtaining and holding a security clearance has become a status symbol. A clearance may also be a golden ticket to high-paying jobs and power, and hence subject to politics rather than independent judgement.

And it seems little care has been taken to keep users’ access and privileges to a minimum.

You might think DOGE’s employees, tasked with seeking out inefficiency, would only need read-only access to the US government IT systems. However, at least one of them temporarily had “write” access to the systems of the treasury, according to reports, enabling him to alter code controlling trillions in federal spending.

It all comes down to trust

Even if all possible access control and vetting procedures are in place and working perfectly, there will always be the problem of how to declassify information.

Or to put it another way: how do you make somebody forget everything they knew when their clearance or access is revoked or downgraded?

What Musk has seen, he can never unsee. And there is only so much that can be done to prevent this knowledge from leaking.

Even if all procedures to protect against insider threats are followed perfectly (and they aren’t), nothing is 100% secure.

We would still need a certain level of public trust that the obtained data and information would be dealt with responsibly. Has trust in Musk and his affiliates reached that level?

According to recent polling, public opinion is still divided. More

In the four weeks since he was inaugurated for his second term as US president, Donald Trump has issued dozens of executive orders – many of which are now the subject of legal challenges on the grounds they exceed his authority under the US constitution. As a result, some will inevitably end up in front of the US Supreme Court.

What the court rules – and how the Trump administration responds to its judgments – will tell us a great deal whether the separation of powers still works as US founding fathers intended when they drafted the constitution.

The concept of separation of powers is incorporated into just about every democratic constitution. It rests on the principle of the separation of powers between the three fundamental branches of government: executive, legislature and judiciary.

It’s what enables the political ecosystem of checks and balances to create the conditions for democracy to exist and freedom to flourish. But if one of the three branches of government dominates the other two, the equilibrium is shattered and democracy collapses.

We owe this idea of constitutional democracy as a tripartite division of power to an 18th-century French political philosopher, Charles de Montesquieu. He was the author of one of the most influential books to come out of the Enlightenment period, The Spirit of the Laws.

Published in 1748, this work gradually reshaped every political system in Europe, and had a powerful influence on America’s Founding Fathers. The 1787 US constitution was drafted in the spirit of Montesquieu’s recommendations.

Modern democracies are more complex than those of the 18th century – and new institutions have developed to keep up with the times. These include specialised tribunals, autonomous regulatory agencies, central banks, audit bodies, ombudsmen, electoral commissions and anti-corruption bodies.

What all these institutions have in common is that they operate with a considerable degree of independence from the three aforementioned arms of government. In other words, more checks and balances.

Notwithstanding his immense influence, the idea of a separation of powers at the heart of democracy predates Montesquieu by many centuries. One of the earliest formulations of this idea can be found in Aristotle’s work, the Politics. This includes the argument that “the best constitution is made up of all existing forms”. By this Aristotle meant a mixed government of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.

But it was the Romans who developed a working model of checks and balances. The constitution of the Roman republic was characterised by the separation of powers between the tribune of the plebs, the senate of the patricians, and the elected consuls.

The consuls held the highest political office, akin to a president or prime minister. But since the Romans did not trust anyone to have too much power, they elected two consuls at a time, for a period of 12 months. Each consul had veto power over the actions of the other consul. Checks and balances.

The greatest advocate of the Roman republic and its constitutional mechanisms, was the Roman philosopher, lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero. It was Cicero who inspired Montesquieu’s work – as well as influencing John Adams, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in the US.

The Roman republic had lasted for approximately 500 years but came to an end following the violent death of Cicero in 43BC. He had devoted his life resisting authoritarian populists from undermining the Roman republic and establishing themselves as sole despots. His death (on top of the assassination of Julius Ceasar the previous year) are seen as key moments in Rome’s transition from republic to empire.

Democracy under threat

Today our democracies are facing the same predicament. In many different parts of the world this simple institutional mechanism has come under increasing attack by individuals hell-bent on curbing the independent power of the judiciary and the legislative.

In Europe, following in the footsteps of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the Italian far-right premier Giorgia Meloni has been pushing for constitutional reforms that reinforce the executive branch of government at the expense of the other two branches.

Checks and balances: the three branches of government.
TREKPix/Shutterstock

The assault on the system of checks and balances has also been identified in Washington. The use and abuse of presidential executive orders is an indication of this growing political cancer.

During his time as 46th US president, from January 2021 to January 2025, Joe Biden signed 162 executive orders – an average of 41 executive orders per year. By comparison, during his first term Donald Trump’s annual average was 55 executive orders. Barack Obama before him was 35.

In his first 20 days since returning to the White House Donald Trump has already signed 60 executive orders. This has included pardoning some 1,500 people who were involved in the January 6 insurrection at the US capitol.

But of much greater concern is the Trump administration’s veiled threats to overturn the landmark decision of the US Supreme Court from 1803, Marbury v. Madison, the case that established the principle that the courts are the final arbiters of the law.

In recent weeks Trump has openly criticised federal judges who have tried to block some of his most executive orders. He’s been supported by his vice-president, J.D. Vance, who has been quoted as saying that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”.

Meanwhile the president’s senior advisor, Elon Musk, accused a judge’s order to temporarily block the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency from accessing confidential treasury department data of being “a corrupt judge protecting corruption”.

So democracy’s delicate balancing act is under serious pressure. If the separation of powers does not hold, and the checks and balances prove to be ineffective, democracy will be threatened.

The next few months and years will determine whether the rule of law will be displaced by the rule of the strongest. At the moment the odds don’t look good for Cicero, Montesquieu and Madison.

It takes a brave person to bet on democracy to win this contest, but we live in hope that America will remain the land of the free and the home of the brave. More