US Politics

In today’s newsletter: As Trump’s business and diplomacy fuse, critics warn that his approach risks trading stability – and US democracy – for leverageGood morning. There are two Donald Trumps: the candidate, and the president.Donald Trump the candidate spent much of his campaign presenting himself as a champion of peace, arguing that his opponents had delivered a world of “death and destruction”. He vowed to restore order, promising to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine on his very first day in office. Continue reading… More

Donald Trump says ‘one or two tough’ issues could lead to negotiations breaking down – key US politics stories from 28 December at a glancePresident Donald Trump says Ukraine and Russia are “closer than ever before” to a peace deal, but he acknowledged negotiations could still break down and leave the war dragging on for years.After a two-hour meeting in Florida with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump conceded “one or two tough” issues – over territory and how the war might end – still needed to be resolved, an indication of progress made but no breakthrough. Continue reading… More

Kash Patel claims $250m scheme that stole Covid aid is ‘tip of iceberg’ and alleges state’s Somalia population is to blameThe FBI has deployed additional personnel and investigative resources to Minnesota to “dismantle large-scale fraud schemes exploiting federal programs”, director Kash Patel said on social media on Sunday.The FBI director said the agency had already dismantled a $250m fraud scheme that stole federal food aid meant for vulnerable children during the Covid pandemic in a case that led to 78 indictments and 57 convictions. Continue reading… More

Republican senator Katie Britt also proposes AI companies be criminally liable if they expose minors to harmful ideasUS senator Bernie Sanders amplified his recent criticism of artificial intelligence on Sunday, explicitly linking the financial ambition of “the richest people in the world” to economic insecurity for millions of Americans – and calling for a potential moratorium on new datacenters.Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic party, said on CNN’s State of the Union that he was “fearful of a lot” when it came to AI. And the senator called it “the most consequential technology in the history of humanity” that will “transform” the US and the world in ways that had not been fully discussed. Continue reading… More

House armed services committee’s Mike Turner denied that military strikes showed new Trump approach to US forcesUS warns of more Nigeria strikes as Abuja talks of ‘joint ongoing operations’A senior Republican on the US House armed services committee has said that the country’s recent military strikes in Nigeria and Syria are consistent with American foreign policy to combat Islamic extremism that have existed across Donald Trump’s two presidential terms.Mike Turner, an Ohio congressman, said on Sunday that the strikes are a “continuation of our conflict with [the Islamic State]”. Continue reading… More

The public is looking for relief from terrorism and violence. But Donald Trump’s words bolster narratives of foreign ‘crusader’ aggressionThe response of Nigerians to the airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) targets in Sokoto state, north-western Nigeria are complicated. The rationale behind them has been widely opposed, but the strikes themselves have been welcomed.The airstrikes were framed as a response to what have been described as genocidal attacks on Christians in the country. But the Nigerian authorities have consistently rejected this narrative, arguing that armed groups in the country do not discriminate based on religion, and that Christians and Muslims largely coexist peacefully. Ironically, it was Trump’s redesignation of Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” in November that deepened Muslim-Christian tensions. Many northerners, who are predominantly Muslim, blamed southern Nigerians for championing a narrative that ultimately resulted in US sanctions and international stigma.Onyedikachi Madueke is a security analyst at the University of Aberdeen Continue reading… More

The California Democrat believes common ground does not only lie in the center – and has the successes to prove itIt was mid-December, and Ro Khanna was watching the calendar. The 19 December deadline for the justice department to comply with a new law the California representative wrote was ticking closer – and his bill was already forcing sealed documents about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation into full view.In the weeks leading up to the deadline, three federal judges in Florida and New York had reversed years of secrecy, releasing grand jury testimony they had previously kept sealed. And when the deadline arrived, while the justice department didn’t release everything, thousands of new files, connections and photographs began to complete the picture on what Khanna calls “the Epstein class … rich and powerful men who still have buildings named after them, who still are on corporations, are still in positions of prestige, who engage in heinous conduct. Continue reading… More

Take this hopeful thought into 2026: the tyrants we endure always falter, and their ‘seismic’ upheavals are usually false dawnsFor those who lived through the cold war, the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, was an unforgettable moment. The sinister watch towers with their searchlights and armed guards, the minefields in no-man’s land, the notorious Checkpoint Charlie border post, and the Wall itself – all were swept aside in an extraordinary, popular lunge for freedom.Less than a month later, on 3 December 1989, at a summit in Malta, US president George HW Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that after more than 40 years, the cold war was over. All agreed it was a historic turning point.Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator Continue reading… More