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Environmental groups alarmed as Doug Burgum picked for US interior secretary
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2024, 18:57
Donald Trump’s nomination of North Dakota’s Republican governor, Doug Burgum, as the interior secretary has prompted swift backlash from environmental advocacy groups alarmed at the incoming administration’s plans to use federal lands for oil and gas drilling.Trump also announced in a statement on Friday his intention to make Burgum chair of a National Energy Council he intends to form to “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE” and to focus on “the battle for AI superiority”.Burgum, a former businessman, has been governor since 2016 of North Dakota, which is the third largest oil and natural gas producer in the country. Burgum, if confirmed by the Senate, would manage US federal lands including national parks and wildlife refuges, as well as oversee relations with 574 federally recognized Native American tribes.Major concerns have loomed over the country’s wildlife refuges and public lands as Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term. Throughout his campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly said “drill, baby, drill” and has vowed to carve up the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska’s northern tundra for oil and gas drilling.The Sierra Club, the country’s largest non-profit environmental organization, said: “It was climate skeptic Doug Burgum who helped arrange the Mar-a-Lago meeting with wealthy oil and gas executives where Donald Trump offered to overturn dozens of environmental rules and regulations in exchange for $1bn in campaign contributions.”The April meeting at Trump’s club earlier this year prompted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the country’s top ethics watchdog, as well as House Democrats, to investigate the dinner over constitutional and campaign violations.“If that weren’t disqualifying enough, he’s long advocated for rolling back critical environmental safeguards in order to let polluters profit. Doug Burgum’s ties to the fossil fuel industry run deep and, if confirmed to this position, he will surely continue Donald Trump’s efforts to sell out our public lands to his polluter pals. Our lands are our nation’s greatest treasure, and the interior department is charged with their protection,” the Sierra Club continued.Similarly, the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation policy organization focused on land and energy issues across the western states, said: “Doug Burgum comes from an oil state, but North Dakota is not a public lands state. His cozy relationship with oil billionaires may endear him to Donald Trump, but he has no experience that qualifies him to oversee the management of 20% of America’s lands.”It went on to add: “If Doug Burgum tries to turn America’s public lands into an even bigger cash cow for the oil and gas industry, or tries to shrink America’s parks and national monuments, he’ll quickly discover he’s on the wrong side of history.”The Center for Biological Diversity equally condemned the nomination, saying that Burgum would be a “disastrous secretary of the interior who’ll sacrifice our public lands and endangered wildlife on the altar of the fossil fuel industry’s profits”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBurgum was not always aligned with Trump’s extreme climate agenda. He has said he believes that climate change is real and in 2021 had called for North Dakota to be carbon neutral by 2030, advocating for a plan that retained the state’s fossil fuel industries while investing in carbon capture and storage technologies to offset emissions.At the time, environmental groups supported Burgum’s pledge, but noted the impracticality of relying on unproven carbon capture technology rather than a transition away from fossil fuels.“Could be worse for sure,” said Jared Huffman, a progressive Democrat of California and senior member of the House natural resources committee who has championed climate action. “I look forward to trying to work productively with him.”Burgum’s views on matters outside of climate and energy, however, have long been reactionary. He signed a number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ people in North Dakota, including ones that banned gender-affirming care for minors, restricted drag shows, and banned trans people from using bathrooms and shower facilities that match their gender identity in prisons, domestic violence shelters or state university families. More
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RFK Jr could have disastrous global impact on public health, experts fear
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2024, 17:07
The appointment of a US health secretary with anti-vaccine views could cause deaths and have profound consequences around the world, global health experts fear.Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s pick for the position, has a history of spreading misinformation on vaccines and questioning the science of HIV and Aids.His nomination has been greeted with bemusement and alarm. One global health activist, speaking on background, said the move was akin to making the disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield, who falsely claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism, the UK’s health secretary.Prof Sir Simon Wessely, a regius professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, said of the move: “That sound that you just heard was my jaw dropping, hitting the floor and rolling out of the door.”Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said there was real concern that Kennedy might use the platform “to pursue the same anti-science positions on life-saving public health interventions that he has advanced previously”.He added: “If this makes families hesitate to immunise against the deadly diseases that threaten children, the consequence will be fatal for some.”Prof Beate Kampmann, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said the measles vaccine had averted more than 60m deaths worldwide in the last 25 years.“Progress will be rapidly lost in societies where vaccine hesitancy is promoted – as I fear will be the case in the US if Kennedy is appointed,” she said. Beyond US shores, the influence “could swing either way”, she said. “My worry is that polarisation on the topic will further increase.”The US is a huge force in global health as the largest funder and the home to many big pharmaceutical companies and leading health research institutes. The decisions of its regulators, such as the Food and Drug Administration, are closely watched by their equivalents elsewhere.Some of those institutions are likely to be disrupted by Kennedy’s pledge to “clear out corruption” at US health agencies and potentially eliminate entire departments. But the impact of a Trump administration on global health will be broader than any policies pursued by Kennedy alone. Trump could reinstate plans to withdraw from the World Health Organization and is almost certain to cut funding to UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency that works in many poorer countries.As under all Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan, NGOs expect there to be a “global gag rule” banning recipients of US health funding from performing or promoting abortions anywhere in the world, which will potentially expand to cover even recipients of humanitarian aid.Kennedy’s stance on vaccination is being watched warily. Globally, routine vaccination coverage has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. Lower immunisation rates led to a 20% annual increase in measles cases in 2023.Kennedy has previously made common cause with anti-vaccine groups overseas. In June 2019 he visited Samoa, where the measles vaccine was being blamed for the deaths of two babies a year earlier. It later emerged that the deaths had been caused by incorrect preparation of the vaccine mixture.Immunisation rates halved to 31% and not long after his visit a measles outbreak ended up infecting more than 57,000 people and killed 83, including children. Even as the outbreak raged, Kennedy wrote to the Samoan prime minister suggesting it might have been caused “by a defective vaccine” rather than inadequate coverage. Kennedy said previously he bore no responsibility for the outcome.His nomination was greeted with cautious civility in Berlin, where Kennedy made a name for himself as a coronavirus sceptic during the pandemic. The health minister, Karl Lauterbach, a qualified doctor, offered his congratulations but couched it in language that made his scepticism clear. “Here’s to a constructive collaboration. Will certainly not be just easy. But the choice of the voters is to be respected,” he wrote on X.Kennedy managed to enter Germany in 2020 despite tight travel restrictions in order to address coronavirus sceptics at a rally in the capital. He became a hero of the so-called Querdenker anti-coronavirus conspiracy theorist group, speaking to a demonstration attended by about 18,000 people.Kennedy drew parallels between his presence in Berlin, as a “fighter against totalitarianism”, and his uncle John F Kennedy’s appearance there in June 1963 during the cold war when he said the city had previously been a front against totalitarianism.On Friday, individuals and groups linked to the Querdenker movement welcomed the appointment, with some claiming Kennedy would “save the rest of the world”.The Hartmannbund association of German doctors voiced its concern about the overall effect a Trump presidency could have on Germany’s healthcare system. Its chair, Klaus Reinhardt, warned of the potential impact of any trade war between the US and Europe on the supply of medicines, saying issues over tariffs could greatly increase health costs and the individual contributions currently required by Germany’s health insurers.Scientific leaders say another pandemic is inevitable and that while during the Covid-19 pandemic Trump’s Operation Warp Speed aided the development, approval and mass manufacture of vaccines in record times, similar US leadership under Kennedy appears less likely.On other issues, experts are waiting for more detail on Kennedy’s plans. He has pledged to tackle chronic diseases and address the issue of overly processed foods. Leadership in those areas could be welcome in a world where diabetes rates have doubled in the past three decades.Many global health activists said they would agree with Kennedy that big pharma has questions to answer, but that companies should not be falsely accused of making vaccines that harm people; rather, they should be asked why so much of the world does not have access to affordable medicines. More
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Mike Pence urges Senate Republicans to reject RFK Jr for US health secretary
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2024, 17:05
Mike Pence, the former vice-president, urged Senate Republicans on Friday to reject Donald Trump’s choice of Robert F Kennedy Jr as health secretary – although he cited Kennedy’s support for abortion rights, while other critics are most outraged at his stance against vaccines.Pence’s comments came as public alarm mounted among Democrats and in health circles about Kennedy, while there were bipartisan warnings that another of Trump’s choices, the far-right congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general, faces “an uphill battle” to win confirmation in the US Senate, despite Republicans winning the majority in the upper congressional chamber.Pence cited his conservative views on abortion for his opposition to Kennedy’s elevation to secretary of health and human services (HHS).“The Trump-Pence administration was unapologetically pro-life for our four years in office. There are hundreds of decisions made at HHS every day that either lead our nation toward a respect for life or away from it, and HHS under our administration always stood for life,” Pence said in a statement released by his conservative non-profit, Advancing American Freedom.“I believe the nomination of RFK Jr to serve as Secretary of HHS is an abrupt departure from the pro-life record of our administration and should be deeply concerning to millions of Pro-Life Americans who have supported the Republican Party and our nominees for decades.”Prominent medical professionals have joined leading Democrats in speaking out against Kennedy, who has embraced a multitude of debunked health-related conspiracy theories, and whose proposed elevation to the government’s top health job represents “a clear and present danger to the nation’s health” and “a catastrophe”, according to some critics.“I think this is an extraordinarily bad choice. He does not plan to lean on evidence and rigorous analysis to make decisions but instead to use his own ideas,” Dr Ashish Jha, Covid-19 coordinator for the Biden White House and dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, told CNN.Dr Richard Besser, former acting director of the powerful US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told the network that Kennedy’s views criticizing childhood vaccines, including the false claim that they cause autism, were “dangerous”.“Frankly, I find it chilling. He has done so much to undermine the confidence that people have in that incredible intervention,” he said.Trump has been assembling a cabinet for his second term in office, making announcements this week from his residence in Florida, and on Thursday named Kennedy to lead HHS and its associated agencies.He praised the politician, a former independent presidential candidate and outcast from the Democratic Kennedy political dynasty, at a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday night.“If you like health and if you like people that live a long time, it’s the most important position,” he said. Directly addressing Kennedy, who was in the ballroom of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private resort club, he added: “We want you to come up with things and ideas, and what you’ve been talking about for a long time.”Democrats were quick to express outrage. The California representative Robert Garcia called it “fucking insane” and described Kennedy as “a tin foil hat conspiracy theorist”.The Massachusetts representative Jake Auchincloss promised to “fight back in Washington to protect the integrity” of federal public health agencies if Kennedy is confirmed by the Senate.“RFK Jr is a conspiracist & quack who threatens the health of Americans. He’s not simply angling for more sunshine & exercise (no one disagrees with that). He seeks to overturn evidence-driven, peer-reviewed research on medicines & more,” Auchincloss posted to X.Shares in several of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies and vaccine manufacturers, including Moderna, AstraZeneca and GSK, plummeted on Friday in reaction to the news.Kennedy has previously said “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” but told NBC in a post-election interview that he “won’t take away anybody’s vaccines”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump on Thursday nominated a vocal ally of his to be interior secretary – Doug Burgum, the Republican North Dakota governor. The role would put him in charge of national parks and public lands, and he has strong links to the fossil fuel industry, where many companies have strong appetites for government permits to drill and mine on federal land.Republicans will have a majority of at least 53-47 seats in the chamber during the next Congress, but even so, two other of Trump’s picks are already receiving bipartisan pushback: Gaetz and the former Democratic congresswoman turned Republican Tulsi Gabbard, named for director of national intelligence. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton once described her as a “favorite of the Russians”.Gaetz resigned as a US representative for Florida on Wednesday, in effect suspending the planned release on Friday of a report by the House of Representatives ethics committee into allegations of sexual misconduct, including that he had sex with a 17-year-old girl, which he has denied. His nomination as the nation’s leading law enforcement officer was seen by some as a direct challenge by Trump to the incoming Republican Senate majority to defy his authority.“For me the message to the administration is simply that Matt Gaetz has a very long, steep hill to get across the finish line and it will require the spending of a lot of capital,” North Dakota’s Republican senator Kevin Cramer told the Washington Post.“That ethics report is clearly going to become a part of the record.”On Friday, Joni Ernst, Republican senator for Iowa, also said the report was expected to feature prominently in a confirmation hearing. “We’ll talk about it for certain, but I know he’s going to have an uphill battle [for confirmation],” she told NBC News.Other Republicans demanded the release of the report, including Washington congressman Dan Newhouse and Texas senator John Cornyn.Meanwhile former defense secretary and Republican US senator Chuck Hagel published an opinion piece in the New York Times challenging Trump’s controversial nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, as a potential “danger” to political independence, good ethics and progress towards equality in the US military. He also questioned the potential for Trump to sidestep Senate confirmations.Trump has signaled he could resort to rare recess appointments, the archaic process allowing a president to install his nominees while Congress is not in session. More
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Biden now has his best opening to end Israel’s war on Gaza – and won’t use it | Mohamad Bazzi
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2024, 17:04
When the histories of his administration are written, it will be clear that Joe Biden held on to his callous disregard for Palestinians until the end of his presidency. How else to explain why Biden would refuse a final chance to stop Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and save Palestinian lives, when he has nothing to lose?On Tuesday, the Biden administration quietly ignored its own deadline for Israel to increase the minuscule amount of humanitarian aid it allows to enter Gaza. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, imposed the 30-day deadline in a letter sent to Israeli officials on 13 October, which warned that they must take “concrete measures” to ensure that Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza have access to food, medicine and other necessities. The administration said it could suspend US military support to Israel if conditions did not improve. Despite the US ultimatum, the amount of aid reaching the besieged territory in October had dropped to its lowest level in 11 months.As the deadline passed, the Biden administration did what it has done for more than a year: it caved and continued sending weapons to the government of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the devastation and famine Israel has inflicted on Gaza. And Washington sheepishly told the world that it would not impose any consequences on Israel, even though the US is legally bound to stop arming an ally that blocks humanitarian aid in a conflict zone.It’s the latest in a long series of decisions by Biden over the past 13 months that show his disdain for Palestinian lives. But his lack of action this week is especially egregious because Biden is politically unrestrained: the presidential election is over, and Donald Trump won. Biden can do whatever he wants without incurring a political cost. He doesn’t even have to worry about a transition to his fellow Democrat and vice-president, Kamala Harris. If there was ever a time for Biden to use his considerable power to save Palestinians, this was it. Yet he squandered this final opportunity to make the right and moral choice – and help end the Gaza war before leaving office.Biden’s decision to keep supplying weapons to Israel reinforces his legacy as the primary enabler of the slaughter in Gaza, and Netanyahu’s campaign to expand the war into Lebanon. While Biden and his allies have done a lot of hand-wringing about Trump’s disregard for the rule of law, the Biden administration failed to uphold US law and its own policies – and it has undermined US credibility around the world even before Trump takes office once again.Biden has been fully complicit in Israel’s destruction of Gaza, in which more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed, although the true figure is probably much higher. One estimate published by researchers in the Lancet, a medical journal, found that the death toll could eventually reach 186,000. That accounts for “indirect casualties” of war, such as widespread hunger, a cholera epidemic, unsanitary conditions and the destruction of Gaza’s health system.Following a relentless Israeli military assault that started after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, nearly all of Gaza’s 2.1 million people have been displaced at least once, and are now living in makeshift tents or in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. Last week, a UN-affiliated group of experts warned that famine is imminent, or may already be unfolding, in northern Gaza – and that the enclave’s entire population faces acute food insecurity, which is one step below a full-blown famine.Days after Biden decided to continue arming Israel into the twilight of his presidency, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a devastating 154-page report that contradicted most US and Israeli assurances that Israel is not violating international law. The report, issued on Thursday, concluded: “Israeli authorities have caused the massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023 and are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.” HRW urged western governments to impose sanctions and suspend their arms shipments to Israel.The US has provided Israel with nearly $18bn in weapons and other military assistance since October 2023, according to a report released last month by Brown University. Washington spent another $4.8bn on its own military activities in the Middle East due to the conflict. Overall, the Biden administration spent at least $22.7bn in US taxpayer funds to enable Netanyahu and his government to prolong the Gaza war.But the US administration did not have to become so deeply complicit in Israel’s war crimes. Biden and his aides had the leverage, policy tools and legal mechanisms to restrain Israel, end the conflict, and save thousands of Palestinian lives. For months, Biden, along with his secretary of state, squandered any influence they could have exerted over Netanyahu by refusing to enforce US law and their own administration’s policies on weapons transfers.In February, as Biden faced pressure from a handful of Democrats in Congress critical of his unwavering support for Israel, he issued a new national security memo which required the state department to certify that recipients of US weapons would allow the delivery of humanitarian aid during active conflicts and abide by international law. Biden’s memo did not set new policies for arms transfers to foreign countries, but instead used provisions of existing US laws, especially under the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWashington can suspend shipments if it suspects that a foreign military will use US weapons to carry out violations of international law, or to countries that block the delivery of humanitarian aid – as Israel has done throughout its war in Gaza. By May, the state department sent a 46-page report to Congress full of bureaucratic double-speak to justify Biden’s decision to flout US and international laws to protect Netanyahu.Long before the administration’s report, the UN and human rights groups had amply documented that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war – a violation of international law – and deliberately blocking food and other supplies from entering Gaza.Yet the report avoided concluding that the Israeli military had obstructed humanitarian aid, or violated international law while using US weapons. Such findings would have forced Biden to suspend most weapons shipments to Israel under the policies outlined in his own national security memo. But instead of upholding US law and using the suspension of military support to force Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire, Biden sat by and enabled Israel to kill thousands of Palestinians since May.Back then, Biden was still running for re-election and could have feared political repercussions for breaking with Netanyahu. But this week, the US president was as free from politics as he’s ever been in his entire career. He simply decided that Palestinians don’t matter – and sealed his legacy as the enabler of Israel’s war crimes.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian center for Near Eastern studies, and a journalism professor at New York University More
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With these outrageous appointments, Trump is showing us exactly how he intends to rule | Jonathan Freedland
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2024, 16:42
He wasn’t kidding. Donald Trump really does want to rule as an extremist strongman, with contempt for the planet, for America’s allies and for the rule of law. He’s made that crystal clear this week, announcing one bombshell appointment after another, each one a declaration of intent. Few things tell you more about a president than their hires – personnel is policy, as they used to say in Ronald Reagan’s White House – and Trump is telling us exactly who he is.The latest name added to the roster is a storied one: Robert F Kennedy Jr, now lined up for the role of health secretary. You may have known of Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy may be a hero of yours. But, boy, his son is no Bobby Kennedy. Once an admired environmental campaigner, now he is an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who promotes treatments that don’t work – such as hydroxychloroquine for Covid – and rails against those that do, spreading the long-debunked claim that childhood vaccines are linked to autism and opposing fluoridation of water to prevent tooth decay. Apparently unchastened by the pandemic, Kennedy believes US public health officials have been too focused on infectious diseases. Or as he memorably put it: “We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” If deadly pathogens could lick their lips, they would.At least the RFK nod was not a surprise: Trump had long said he wanted to let Kennedy “go wild” with the nation’s health. More of a jawdropper is the new president’s choice for attorney general, the most senior law enforcement officer in the land: Matt Gaetz. For two years, Gaetz was under federal investigation for child sex trafficking and statutory rape. (No charges were brought.) Until this week, his fellow members of the House of Representatives were running their own ethics committee inquiry into Gaetz – handily halted, thanks to his resignation just days before they were about to report – examining, besides the allegations of underage sexual abuse, accusations that he engaged in illicit drug use, displayed to colleagues, on the floor of the House, nude photos and videos of previous sexual partners, converted campaign funds for personal use and accepted gifts banned under congressional rules.Some wonder if naming such a man as head of the US justice department is a diversionary tactic, designed to distract attention from the clutch of other nominations that are scarcely less outrageous, in the hope that those will look reasonable by comparison. In this view, Trump knows that Gaetz will never be attorney general, that his nomination will be blocked in the Senate where, even though the Republicans have a majority, too many will balk. Gaetz is chum, thrown into the water to satisfy the piranhas, so that Trump can quietly ensure his other nominees get through. And what a rum bunch they are.As director of national intelligence, overseeing 18 separate intelligence agencies including the CIA and NSA, Trump has turned to Tulsi Gabbard, a fringe Democratic congresswoman before she defected to the Republicans, best known for meeting Bashar al-Assad while the Syrian dictator was busy slaughtering hundreds of thousands of his own people, and for parroting Kremlin talking points.When Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard was swift to blame the west, even repeating the Moscow propaganda line that the US had stationed secret biolabs across Ukraine. One of Vladimir Putin’s mouthpiece TV channels took to referring to Gabbard as Russia’s “girlfriend”. When asked if she was, in fact, a Russian agent, the talking head on the Kremlin-backed network replied: “Yes.” Now consider that at the core of the US relationship with its allies – including Britain – is intelligence-sharing and ask yourself whether the likes of MI6 could in all conscience share what they know with such a person.Her proposed counterpart over at the Pentagon, set to be in charge of the mightiest, richest military in human history, is the weekend host of Fox News’s breakfast show, Pete Hegseth. Admittedly, he served in Iraq and Afghanistan – and as a prison guard in Guantánamo Bay – but Hegseth has never run a whelk stall, let alone one of the world’s biggest organisations, employing close to 3 million people. His rank inexperience would be worrying enough, until you become familiar with what he believes.He’s covered in tattoos, including symbols favoured by the Christian nationalist far right, among them the slogan Deus Vult and the Jerusalem cross, which celebrates the medieval Crusades when Christians earned their spurs slaughtering infidel Muslims and Jews. These days, he backs the ultra-right Jewish fundamentalists who seek to rebuild the ancient temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the site revered by Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, a move so incendiary it’s a byword for triggering holy war.Hegseth will find company in Trump’s choice of ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor and evangelical Christian Mike Huckabee. Like Hegseth, Huckabee is against a two-state solution, insists on calling the West Bank by its biblical Hebrew name – Judea and Samaria – and is adamant that “There’s no such thing as an occupation.” In 2008 he said, “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian”.All of which makes you wonder how those many Arab and Muslim American voters in Michigan and elsewhere, persuaded that Trump had to be a better option for the Palestinians than Kamala Harris, feel now.We’ve barely got to Lee Zeldin, Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, despite having repeatedly voted against clean water and clean air legislation, and having expressed doubts over whether climate breakdown is “as serious a problem” as people say it is. Or to the self-confessed puppy killer who will head the Department of Homeland Security. Or indeed the man who will lead the new department reviewing government contracts, including, in an arrangement open to spectacular corruption, contracts with his own companies: namely, Elon Musk.Still, you get the picture. How, then, to make sense of these choices? Some hope it’s no more than an opening bid by Trump, the arch-negotiator: offer the Senate something obviously unacceptable, then haggle from there. Others wonder if it’s part of a dark, deliberate strategy, by which Trump, the agent of chaos, appoints those who are not so much disruptors as wreckers, men and women who can be relied on to make the agencies they lead collapse in failure. When the federal government is a smoking ruin, then all power will have to reside in the single man at the top.My own view is simpler. At the heart of it is the quality all would-be strongmen value most: loyalty. Trump knows that a character as tawdry as Gaetz, despised by his own colleagues, would owe everything to him. As attorney general, he would do whatever Trump asked, working his way through Trump’s enemies list, prosecuting whoever had crossed his boss, delivering the retribution Trump yearns for.What’s more, Gaetz and the rest are a kind of test, one that Putin deploys often. You push your allies to defend what they know cannot be defended, to make concessions they would once have considered unpalatable. As the analyst Ron Brownstein put it this week, “Each surrender paves the way for the next.” It is, he says, “a cardinal rule of strongman dominance”.So now it is up to the Republicans in the Senate. Will they abase themselves yet further, and nod through this parade of ghouls and charlatans? Or will they at last find their backbone and say no to the would-be autocrat who has taken over their party and now looms over all three branches of the US government? After all we’ve seen these last eight years, what do you think is the answer?
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More
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To the stars vowing to flee Trump’s America: maybe your excruciating endorsements were part of the problem | Marina Hyde
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2024, 14:31
I wish celebrities would learn the art of the French exit. But they can’t, which is why Eva Longoria has announced she no longer lives in America. “I get to escape and go somewhere,” she explained. “Most Americans aren’t so lucky – they’re going to be stuck in this dystopian country.” What’s brought this on, apart from the obvious? “Whether it’s the homelessness or the taxes … it just feels like this chapter in my life is done now.” Great to learn that Eva dislikes both homelessness and taxes. America’s loss of this major political thinker is some other country’s gain – and this highly called-for intervention reminds us why celebrities should speak their brains even more often. If only into a pillow, or an abyss.As always in these moments of the silly voters making a silly mistake, many stars have pledged to follow her. We’ll see. Either way, celebrities seem totally unaware that these high-handed statements of first-class migration are not the admonishment to the lesser orders that they are meant to be, and may even encourage them.But then, stars have always been totally unaware of how very little they bring to this particular party. The last few days of the Harris campaign were an increasingly excruciating riot of celebrity bandwagonning. Did the Kamala campaign ask man-born-in-Pennsylvania Richard Gere to make his video for her – or did the actor freelance one out of fear of not having “used his platform”? It was certainly Richard’s most critically misunderstood electoral outing since his address to the Palestinians before their 2005 elections. “Hi, I’m Richard Gere,” that one began, “and I’m speaking for the entire world …”If anything good were to come out of the wreckage of the Harris campaign, let it be the final death of the idea that showbiz endorsements can help swing elections. They can’t. Not one bit. Not even if it’s Taylor Swift in the 2024 US presidential election, not even when it was Russell Brand in the 2015 British general election, and not even if they have tens of millions of followers. (It does move the dial, however, if you own the platform.) Election issues and politicians swing elections.The minuscule amount of positive data we have on celebrity endorsements suggests they might have some effect in getting their fans to register to vote and volunteer for campaigns. I suspect these days that is more than offset by the perception of elitism that actively harmed the Harris campaign and others before it. If anything could turn you hard Maga, it’s watching Lady Gaga sing Edge of Glory at Kamala’s eve-of-polling-day concert – the worst thing she’s been in since Joker II – and then discovering that Oprah, who also appeared, had billed the Harris campaign $1m via her company. This week, Winfrey insisted she wasn’t paid personally, with the Harris campaign simply required to pay for “production costs” on an earlier “townhall” featuring her, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ben Stiller, Chris Rock and Jennifer Lopez. Hmm. If only there was some billionaire – but the good kind! – or even just some mega-rich folk involved in said event, who could perhaps have picked up the wage bill herself/themselves, rather than siphon it off the campaign.Meanwhile, it is easier to leave Twitter than America, as I think Marcus Aurelius once remarked. In the week the Guardian exited X – though not in the French style – you couldn’t move for people informing you they were herding with almost impossible dignity over to Bluesky.And it does feel slightly hilarious that huge numbers of people who have spent the past decade-plus shrieking about the evils of social media – usually on social media – have been “liberated” from one platform, only to promptly rush and enslave themselves to another. Really? You can see it all stretching ahead of you – fun period, emergence of Blueskyocracy, the first Bluesky cancellation of someone, the exponentially intensifying purity spiral, followed by legacy titles or legacy humans announcing an exit from that one too. It’s all such a predictable timesuck. Bluesky might be the new email.Speaking of which, when people ask me for my email, I have to tell them very truthfully that I am so old-fashioned that I only have one – my Guardian one. I always used to follow this up by saying something along the lines of “I know, it’s ridiculous. If I ever stopped working there, no one would be able to contact me.” But now I keep thinking – oh my God! No one would be able to contact me via email! THE MODERN DREAM!This has felt particularly desirable since the election, when I’ve been drowning in emails from the multiple liberal publications I already subscribe to, stagily rending their garments and assuring me that “we do this for you”. It seems like every cloud has a silver lining – ideally a gold one, with all sorts of titles dreaming of the Trump subscription bump they got last time around. Again: we’ll see.My unfashionable view is that the world would benefit from less partisan media, not more. Over in the US for the election, I mistakenly kept turning on CNN for news, and was genuinely shocked at the offering since the last time I seriously paid attention to it (admittedly some years ago now). It didn’t really even have headlines on the hour, let alone coverage of “news”, and appeared to be a talking shop that saw itself purely as an active agent for the Harris campaign. To this outside observer, it didn’t seem to be doing anything different from Fox News, except that it was doing it for the other side.And it doesn’t even work. Retreating into ideas of “resistance” is a big part of how we got here. People hate on Trump for cashing in with his merchandise, but isn’t rather a lot of the current liberal media convulsion just another form of Trump merchandise? Off-brand, yes. But still Trump merchandise – and as tacky, intentionally commercial and likely to lead to regret in the end as the official stuff.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
A Year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live More
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This weekend, Atticus Sparks plans to attend a six-hour concealed weapons permit class. He’s not a gun person, but as an 18-year-old trans man, he’s concerned he might someday need to own one, “just in case”. Since Donald Trump’s election, Sparks has faced online threats of violence and sexual assault from the president-elect’s supporters.View image in fullscreen“Hopefully I won’t ever need a gun,” Sparks, who lives in South Carolina, said. “But everyone here is so pro-gun. I work across from a gun store, and I always see people carrying around loaded rifles.”Along with taking his concealed carry class, Sparks faces the more banal tasks of making sure all of his documentation is in order. This week, he met with an advocate about getting his name legally changed but was told that due to the sluggish pace of family court, he probably won’t get a court date until next summer.An existential threat, and a bureaucratic nightmare: for trans people across America, Trump’s victory represents a terrifying acceleration of the discriminatory policies that conservative lawmakers have already put in place in states across the country.Republicans spent almost $215m on anti-trans ads this election. (Sample line: Kamala Harris “is for they/them – not you”.) Trump’s official platform, Agenda 47, promises to “cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports”, a reference to trans women and girls playing on teams that correspond to their identity.The president-elect has also proposed a ban on federal funding for gender-affirming care, and said he would push schools to “promote positive education about the nuclear family” – shorthand for an emphasis on conservative Christian gender roles and values in public classrooms.Experts and advocates warn that Republican control in Washington DC could roll back LGBTQ+ rights decades, threatening trans healthcare, marriage equality and the overall safety of the queer community.Facing this new reality, Alex, a teacher in Texas, reached out to a crisis hotline three times in the past week. “It’s sort of the most depressed I’ve been in a long time,” he said. “It’s like you get used to tolerating a certain amount of not OK, and having to hide and sort of being pushed down, but it feels like it’s hit a level where it’s almost intolerable.”Though some of Alex’s co-workers know he is trans, his students do not. He considers himself “stealth” at work, which means he conceals his trans identity to fit in with cisnormative standards. (Because of this, Alex used a pseudonym in this piece.)“The big thing people don’t recognize is that they most likely have interacted with a trans person without knowing,” Alex said. “I use the men’s locker room at the gym every morning, and no one gets hurt or upset. I guarantee for every single person, [Trump’s victory] is going to impact someone they love, or the loved ones of someone they love, and they just don’t know it.”View image in fullscreenThe Trevor Project, a non-profit focused on suicide prevention efforts for LGBTQ+ youth, reported a 700% increase in calls, texts and messages to its crisis hotline after election day. Youth experiencing thoughts of depression, self-harm and suicide are encouraged to contact the organization – though, according to 19th News, there are “long hold times at an especially vulnerable time for LGBTQ+ people”.Corinne Goodwin, executive director of Eastern PA Trans Equity Project, wrote in an email that since the election, the non-profit had seen a 600% increase in calls to its infoline for people seeking resources and support. Attendance at peer-led support groups rose by 200%, and requests for assistance with gender or name change markers increased by 1,000%.The day after the election, Goodwin said, the group received a call from a transgender person who lives in a very rural part of Pennsylvania. The caller said that four of their neighbors had come to their house the night before, pounding on their front door and threatening to assault them for being transgender. The person called the police, who refused to investigate, citing no proof of an incident.“This is an example of what many transgender people fear, that not only will their rights be reduced or taken away, but that the most reactionary elements in our society will feel emboldened to harm them,” Goodwin wrote.In Rochester, New York, Javannah J Davis leads Wave Women Inc, a non-profit supporting underserved Bipoc trans and gender non-conforming individuals. “The challenges are going to get worse before it gets better,” she said. “People are scared. That’s the main feeling going through the community: fear.”Davis says her goal is to help as many trans people as possible navigate the serpentine process of legally changing their names before the end of the year.Mike, a trans man in his 60s, leads support groups in Pennsylvania. “People talk about moving to another country, but the reality is that’s just not realistic,” he said. (Mike used a pseudonym and did not want his exact age printed to prevent being identified by his employer.)Sparks, the 18-year-old, plans to move to a state that allows greater access to gender-affirming care. This year, South Carolina banned access to care for trans youth, also prohibiting public funds such as Medicaid from being used to provide healthcare for transgender people of any age.View image in fullscreenSouth Dakota also restricts access to gender-affirming care for trans youth. So, in some ways, the morning after the election was “just another day for them”, says Morgan Peterson, a 25-year-old administrative assistant at Transformation Project, which serves trans people in the state.Peterson, who is non-binary, says many clients decided to move next door to Minnesota, a state with better healthcare options. “For me, I’m not on hormones, and I’m very fortunate, so I’m pretty determined to stay here and fight for people,” they said.Zaya Perysian, a 22-year-old content creator from Los Angeles, renewed her passport this week. She has no plans to leave the country and considers herself somewhat buffered by her state’s blue status. But she wants to be prepared, just in case.“It seems like we’re in the early stages of something much darker for the future of this country when it pertains to minority communities,” Perysian said. “The last time Trump won, we were like, ‘It’ll all be fine,’ and it mostly was. But this time, it’s different. There’s something that feels so sinister behind it. A lot of us just want to be prepared because you never know what type of legislation they are going to try to pass to erase us from public society, or history.”Kendall, a 47-year-old from Pennsylvania, planned to marry her partner next summer. They imagined a big, fairytale wedding, maybe in Europe. But as the election approached, the couple, both trans women, decided they didn’t want to take their chances. They feared a Trump presidency could signal the end of marriage equality. They eloped in September.“We had a few people over to our apartment and did it,” Kendall said. (She asked to use a pseudonym due to fears for her safety.) “We did it in our living room. People asked, ‘Was it nice?’ We tried to play it off like we wanted something intimate, but the real reason is we needed it to be legal.”Now, Kendall wonders: “God knows how long we’ll be allowed to be married.”Shane Whiteside, who is 30 and lives in South Carolina, also hopes to make it legal with his fiancee before Trump’s election. “I told her, I know we didn’t want to rush this, but I’m absolutely terrified that if I don’t get married to you right now, the state is not going to let me, because they’ll take away same-sex marriage,” he said.View image in fullscreenIn the days after the election, some lawmakers and pundits scapegoated transgender people for Kamala Harris’s loss. Such messaging echoes past retrograde thinking from John Kerry’s failed 2004 bid: at the time, politicians on both sides blamed the loss on the senator’s support for civil unions.The US representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told the New York Times: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”Trans individuals are already more likely to experience gender-based violence, poverty, and housing insecurity than cis Americans. Comments like Moulton’s add to the pain they feel as they prepare for a hostile administration.“It’s really a bunch of bullshit coming from both sides when it pertains to trans people,” said Perysian. “We’re just exhausted. We’re just trying to find our own American dream here, and unfortunately our future in this country has become less and less bright. I’ve heard a lot of trans people say that after this election, it feels like our best days are behind us.”Now, trans individuals cling to any shreds of hope they can find. Alex felt it when his co-workers hugged him the morning after Trump’s win. Mike feels it at his trans support group. Kendall feels it when she watches old clips of Mr Rogers being a good neighbor.Sparks relates to a quote he saw on social media this week: “For every bigot, there’s going to be an ally.”“Community and trans people don’t just go away,” Sparks said. “They may take it out of schools and stuff, but it’s not like we’re going to disappear. We just won’t have a word for what we’re feeling because they won’t teach it to us.”For Perysian, though, “It’s not about hope. It’s more about waiting and seeing.” More
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A ‘gut punch’: Trump’s alleged sexual assault victims and their advocates on his win
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2024, 11:00
When Donald Trump was elected to a second term last week, women who say he sexually assaulted them, and other victims of sexual abuse, voiced disappointment that a man repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct could once again become president, with one of them describing this win as a “gut punch”.More than two dozen women have made such claims against Trump, including E Jean Carroll, who was awarded nearly $90m total in two civil trials after jurors found that Trump sexually abused and defamed her. She said on X: “I tried to tell you.”Several survivors of sexual assault interviewed by the Guardian, as well as advocates for persons who have suffered abuse, said they were not surprised by Trump’s win. They felt it was another example of how sexual abuse is not taken seriously, or pointed to the fact that powerful people who perpetrate abuse seem to be able to avoid repercussions.Stacey Williams, who said she met Trump through Jeffrey Epstein about three decades ago, and told the Guardian that the now president-elect groped her at Trump Tower in 1993 in what seemed to be a “twisted game” with the late sex predator, is among the many processing election results.“I think what we were all hoping was that [the] truth would come through and the stories would affect people’s vote once they had [them] in front of them.”But, she said: “Disinformation won this election at the end of the day, and if we don’t figure out an answer for that, I don’t have a lot of hope for this country.”Emails to Trump’s camp did not receive an immediate response. Trump has previously denied all allegations of misconduct.Williams said that she was in Pennsylvania canvassing for five days. “Some of the women would say: ‘Will you please tell my husband your story?” she recalled.One woman even brought Williams into the house, so she could tell the woman’s brother her account. Williams did and “I saw him just kind of like, sink.” To her, the reaction suggested that he had not heard this account before.“I didn’t get the impression he even knew that Trump was an offender.“I had never wanted to tell my story, I knew it was going to be sort of a big media firestorm and blow up – that’s a lot to take on, let alone all the backlash and the misogyny,” she also said. “I was bracing myself for that, but it was worth it if I could get my message out there.“None of it mattered. All he had to do was say: ‘Eh, she’s lying,’” Williams said, prompting his followers to take the same tack. “Everyone’s like: ‘OK, let’s move on.’ That’s a lot to stomach.”Among the women who have come forward with allegations against Trump is Amy Dorris, a former model, who told the Guardian that he sexually assaulted her at the US Open tennis tournament in 1997. Dorris alleged that Trump forced his tongue down her throat, groped her body and kept her in a grip from which she could not escape, in an incident that made her feel “sick” and “violated”.Two other prominent accusers include Natasha Stoynoff and Jessica Leeds, who testified in court for Carroll’s civil proceedings against Trump. Stoynoff said that Trump assaulted her in a room at Mar-a-Lago about 20 years ago, when People magazine had sent her there to interview him about his first year of marriage to his third wife, Melania Trump.Leeds came forward in 2016 claiming that Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt when they were seated next to each other on an airplane in the 1970s. At a campaign rally, Trump responded by saying: “Believe me, she would not be my first choice. That I can tell you,” and a campaign spokesperson said her allegation was “fiction”.Marissa Hoechstetter, who successfully pushed for New York’s watershed Adult Survivors Act, among other extensive advocacy, following her abuse at the hands of a now convicted obstetrician, said Trump’s win underscored that many people don’t see sexual violence as a problem.“It reaffirms that sexual violence is tolerated and it’s not disqualifying,” Hoechstetter said. “I don’t think it’s whether or not we proved that he did these things – I feel like it was [proved] – we’ve proved that people still don’t care.”“I’m not shocked by it; it’s a good reminder for us all that sexual violence is not an issue that people are willing to make big decisions on. There are other factors that are more important to them.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHoechstetter believes that Trump’s victory could have a “chilling effect down the line”. His win doesn’t take away survivors’ advocacy efforts, but “it negates all of the work that went into trying to hold him accountable in a court of law,” potentially deterring accusers from coming forward if they see that nothing will happen – especially given the immense personal toll that comes with speaking out.Erica Vladimer, co-founder of the Sexual Harassment Working Group, said she wasn’t surprised that Trump won despite his reported behavior towards women. (The Sexual Harassment Working Group is comprised of former New York city and state legislative staffers who have experienced harassment, abuse, and retaliation by officials, and seeks to change laws and policies to protect workers.)“I have never been under this illusion that the fact that Trump is a serial sexual harasser and a sexual abuser was top of mind for most voters – that it was a priority when it came to who they were going to vote for as president,” Vladimer said. “And yet, that does not make this gut punch any easier to stomach.”“Until our institutions, the people who hold that power, are willing to say this is not OK, I think we’re going to see men like Trump continue to amass power and enable this permission structure that has really been there for a long time,” Vladimer said.Trump’s second win prompted questions about why a president’s character does not appear to matter to voters – as well as about the character of those he surrounds himself with. The Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, who has been investigated for alleged sexual misconduct and trafficking, is Trump’s attorney general pick. Gaetz denies any wrongdoing.Weeks before the 2016 election, a hot mic recording from the Access Hollywood television show emerged. In this recording, Trump boasted that he could sexually assault women due to his fame, saying: “Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”Following Trump’s win, the phrase “your body, my choice” – which had circulated in far-right circles for several years – gained momentum on social media. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a thinktank that studies extremism, identified “a 4,600% increase in mentions of the terms ‘your body, my choice’ and ‘get back in the kitchen’ on X”.Gloria Allred, who in her decades as an attorney has advocated for survivors, including five Trump accusers, said: “a theme of the former president’s recent campaign appeared to be male chauvinism” and referred to the American Psychological Association guidance that recognizes “traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful” to men and boys.But, “I believe that women and girls will also suffer from this version of toxic masculinity, and they are endangered by it. Evidence of this is now seen online where some young men seem comfortable saying ‘your body, my choice’, which could be the mantra of rapists, sexual harassers and child molesters,” Allred said in a statement.“I wonder how these young men would feel if other men decided that they had a right to rape, beat or abuse the bodies of the young men’s mothers, sisters, aunts or grandmothers,” Allred’s statement continued. “My guess is that when these young men get older and have daughters they will regret their words.”Mariann Wang, an attorney whose practice focuses on survivors who has also represented Trump accusers, said his win was “devastating”.“It is an expression, yet again, that millions of people do not prioritize the safety of their mothers, their sisters, their daughters or their friends,” she said in a statement.“That said, I’ve also seen the enormous courage and power of so many women willing to keep fighting for their rights and for equality all these years,” Wang said. “And as devastating as this is, I know all those women and men who support them will keep fighting.” More

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