US Politics

The US army secretary, Daniel Driscoll, was an unlikely envoy for the Trump administration’s newest proposal to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine – but his ties to JD Vance have put a close ally of the Eurosceptic vice-president on the frontlines of Donald Trump’s latest push to end the war.Before his trip to Kyiv last week, Driscoll was not known for his role as a negotiator or statesman, and his early efforts at selling the deal to European policymakers were described as turbulent.His close ties to Vance, with whom he studied at Yale and shares a close friendship, indicate the resurgence of the isolationist vice-president in negotiations to end the Ukraine crisis.It was Vance who stepped in during Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s disastrous first trip to the Trump White House in March and demanded he show Trump more “respect” – now Ukraine is once again resisting pressure from the US to cut a quick deal that local officials have described as a “capitulation”.After a tumultuous first year in office, foreign policy decisions in the White House are said to be shaped by a handful of Trump’s top advisers – including chief of staff Susie Wiles, rightwing adviser Stephen Miller, envoy Steve Witkoff, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and finally Vance.Vance has been a vocal booster of the latest proposal, which was developed by Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner together with the Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev.Vance’s early efforts at hammering out a peace deal with Russia – while also seeking to renew relations with Moscow – were unsuccessful, and left his camp feeling frustrated with their Russian interlocutors. European officials, meanwhile, were angered by his early speeches in which he accused them of “running from their voters” – who Vance said had anti-immigration and conservative positions close to those of Trump’s own constituency.But the new peace deal published last week closely resembled his positions, and he has been one of the most forceful spokespeople for the deal in the administration while the US has been under fire for accepting a peace framework that largely resembles Vladimir Putin’s maximalist demands.In posts this weekend, Vance argued that a peace deal would have to produce a ceasefire that respected Ukrainian sovereignty, be acceptable to both sides, and prevent the war from restarting.“Every criticism of the peace framework the administration is working on either misunderstands the framework or misstates some critical reality on the ground,” Vance wrote. “There is a fantasy that if we just give more money, more weapons, or more sanctions, victory is at hand.”“Peace won’t be made by failed diplomats or politicians living in a fantasy land,” he added. “It might be made by smart people living in the real world.”It was also Vance who followed up on the presentation of the peace plan in a phone call with Zelenskyy. Trump had mainly tasked his team with bringing a signature on the peace deal before Thanksgiving this Thursday in the United States.That was a notably more full-throated endorsement of the plan than that given by the secretary of state and national security adviser, Marco Rubio, a more traditional hawk in the administration who has gone from a shaky stature inside the administration to more firm footing.Rubio was part of a US delegation that traveled to Geneva this weekend to meet with Ukrainian officials to help moderate the initial 28-point peace plan in order to make it more acceptable to leaders in Kyiv.But his initial response to the deal was lukewarm: “Ending a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas,” Rubio wrote over the weekend before the conference. “And achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict.”In private, he was said to be much more doubtful of the plan. The Republican senator Mike Rounds said last week at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia that Rubio had called lawmakers to explain that the deal was just a preliminary offer from the Russians and not an initiative pushed by the administration.“Rubio did make a phone call to us this afternoon and I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” said Rounds. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan.”Rubio moved quickly to fall in line. “The peace proposal was authored by the US,” he later wrote. “It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.” More

The Pentagon says it is investigating the Arizona senator Mark Kelly for possible breaches of military law after the federal lawmaker joined a handful of other Democrats in a video calling for US troops to refuse unlawful orders.It is extraordinary for the Pentagon to directly threaten a sitting member of Congress with investigation. Until Donald Trump’s second presidency, the institution in charge of the US military had usually strived to appear apolitical.In a statement on Monday on social media announcing the investigation into Kelly, a veteran, the Pentagon cited a federal law that allows retired service members to be recalled to active duty on orders of the defense secretary for possible court martial or other measures. Kelly served in the US navy as a fighter pilot before going on to become an astronaut. He retired at the rank of captain.The Pentagon’s statement suggested that Kelly’s statements in the video interfered with the “loyalty, morale, or good order and discipline of the armed forces” by citing the federal law that prohibits such actions.“A thorough review of these allegations has been initiated to determine further actions, which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures,” the statement said.In the video that was posted last Tuesday, Kelly was one of six lawmakers who served in the military or intelligence community to speak “directly to members of the military”.Kelly told troops “you can refuse illegal orders” – and other lawmakers said that they needed troops to “stand up for our laws … our constitution.”A statement on Monday from Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary, said Kelly was the only video participant who remained subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).“The video … was despicable, reckless and false,” said the statement from Hegseth, whose defense department has rebranded itself the war department. “Encouraging our warriors to ignore the orders of their commanders undermines every aspect of ‘good order and discipline’.“Kelly’s conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately.”A statement issued by Kelly said he learned of the investigation into him when the Pentagon posted about it on social media.“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work,” Kelly’s statement said. “I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the constitution.”Kelly’s statement alluded to having experienced combat during his military career as well as having served as an astronaut for the US space agency, Nasa.“I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets,” his statement said. “At Nasa, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died” during the 2003 Columbia space shuttle explosion.“I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.”The US Manual for Courts-Martial states that the military requirement to obey orders “does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime”.Nonetheless, Trump reacted furiously to the video in question, writing on his Truth Social platform that Kelly and the others had engaged in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH”. The president also reposted another Truth Social user who wrote, in part, “HANG THEM”.Active military members in the US – whose oath is to the constitution rather than the president – can indeed face execution for the crime of sedition. Civilians, meanwhile, can be fined and imprisoned for up to 20 years if found to have engaged in seditious conspiracy.Generally, Republican allies of Trump have supported his response while his philosophical opponents have condemned it.Kelly has since said Trump’s accusation of sedition made him fearful of his family’s safety, especially after his wife, Gabrielle Giffords, narrowly survived an attempted assassination while she was in Congress and meeting constituents in 2011.“This kind of language is dangerous, and it’s wrong,” Kelly said on Friday on MS NOW’s Morning Joe, when he also alluded to a number of instances of deadly political violence across the US in recent months.On Sunday’s edition of Face the Nation, Kelly added: “We’ve heard very little, basically crickets, from Republicans in the United States Congress about what the president has said about hanging members of Congress.” More

It is said that by 328BC, having made empires kneel to him, Alexander the Great wept … for there were no more worlds to conquer.Similarly, having solved the Middle East and Ukraine issues with only a couple of technicalities to iron out and put an end to so many other wars as well, Donald Trump may also be tempted to sob at having run out of important tasks. And yet, just as he is about to kneel in anguish on the Oval Office carpet, he is apparently perking up at the thought of one more mighty challenge.He can revive the Rush Hour movie franchise!Larry Ellison, the largest shareholder of Paramount Skydance – which, earlier this year, as Paramount Global, settled a lawsuit with Trump not dissimilar to the one he’s recently threatened the BBC with – has reportedly been leant on by the commander in chief to revive the affectionately remembered Rush Hour films – the knockabout buddy cop adventures starring Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan.A fourth Rush Hour film is reportedly a central part of Trump’s second-term project – a dream of reintroducing some old-fashioned masculinity into Hollywood culture and it would moreover create some employment for that unlovely Tinseltown hombre who directed the first three Rush Hour films – Brett Ratner.Ratner was accused of sexual assault in 2017, allegations which he denied. But, with privileged access, has now directed a $40m documentary about Melania Trump – the kind of film that can only be described as “soft-hitting”.Does the world really need or want Rush Hour 4? If it did, surely we would have it by now? Market forces in the brutally commercial Darwinian jungle of franchise cinema would have created Rush Hour 4. Or at the very least rebooted it for streaming TV with a younger cast and maybe David Harbour as the glowering police chief.The idea of the Rush Hour series is a quirky odd-couple pairing of two cops: Chris Tucker’s James Carter from the LAPD and Jackie Chan’s Yan Naing Lee from the Hong Kong Police Force. They both get to play “fish out of water” comedy – the water being each other’s culture – with some very broad and arguably problematic sexual comedy. And, of course, there are plenty of fights, with Tucker giving us some all-American punch-ups and Chan busting out some uproarious martial arts moves.It’s all very undemanding, stereotypical stuff and Donald absolutely loves it. Could it be that Rush Hour 4 will feature one of his wooden cameos, or something more? Or it could be that the president is – like Arnold Schwarzenegger – starting to envision a post-political return to the glamorous world of show business. Perhaps he will wish to produce as well as star.But there is another possibility. Recently, Trump played host to New York’s Democratic socialist mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani; the meeting that many thought could only end in the kind of tongue-lashing that the president notoriously gave Volodymyr Zelenskyy on their first encounter. But no. It was all smiles. A very unexpected bromance seemed to be in the offing. Could it be that Trump likes the idea of Rush Hour because it’s so … inclusive? A black guy and an Asian guy united under the American banner. Has Mamdani finally softened Trump’s worldview? If so, and if Rush Hour 4 is the result, well, it could have been worse. More

Just a few months ago, it seemed that the political landscape was changing permanently, with young people shifting right – especially young men. Democrats spun up a vortex of efforts to win them back, but they often appeared to be flailing. This month’s elections, however, told a different story.Young men in the US face a political identity crisis. It should not be controversial to say that the world that many were promised as children has not come to fruition. Two decades of war and a turbulent economy have combined with a massively changing workforce. Young men’s disaffection should come as no real surprise.An entire ecosystem of hucksters has emerged to take advantage of these young people, peddling a dark vision that offers violence and control as a response to a changing world. Meanwhile, the Democratic party failed to imagine a political future that included these young men. In Democrats’ parlance, anyone who took one step in that direction was hopelessly lost, unable to see the beautiful egalitarian future that we could create together.There is a fine line here. I am not arguing for the redemption, welcome, or whitewashing of the people who have peddled this bleak reality. But we can and should build a political coalition that includes this generation, that doesn’t leave them out in the cold, only to find a home in the most bleak fringes of a political movement that tells them that a lust for control over other people, especially women, is the only way to find meaning.On the left, we tell ourselves the story of our own vaunted sympathy, and yet we assign only blame to the young men who do something similar, looking for community and only finding it among the most opportunistic and dangerous political movements. We have done little to welcome them in.And while Democrats had solid policies and economic plans, Republicans, backed by an army of digital content, were able to take the mantle of running on the economy and framing the left as cultural warriors out of touch with the majority of Americans.But the good news is that this month’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City show Democrats have learned a lesson.The three marquee campaigns of this year were all remarkably similar, despite coming from different parts of the ideological spectrum. Their messaging was relentlessly focused on affordability – how expensive and difficult life has become for the working and middle-class people of their communities. Their solutions covered a wide ideological range, but the focus remained the same.Most young men, like most trans people and Black people and immigrants and everyone else, are dealing with housing that has skyrocketed in price, especially compared with our parents’ generations. Instead of having one career in our lifetimes, we now have to continually seek new jobs. Living independently as an adult is much more expensive and complicated now than it has been. These affordability campaigns gave young men something to do about those pressures rather than ceding that frustration to the most cynical actors.Undoubtedly this conversation is easier to have when Donald Trump is taking three steps every day to dismantle the economy. There’s a real sense that the economy is getting worse. That it’s more difficult to pay bills and keep food on the table, especially when Republicans are, quite literally, ensuring that 42 million people cannot afford to keep food on their table by refusing to fund Snap during their government shutdown.Republicans got distracted, trying to defend Trump and also trying to repeat his playbook of tying Democrats to the culture war of the moment. But without Trump’s singular ability to control a media narrative, Republicans with far less political talent and capital floundered, making themselves look weak and silly in the process.The political miracle is that this ruthless focus on affordability and cost of living may have brought in many of those same young men who had followed Trump a year ago. In Virginia and New Jersey, men under 30 broke for their new Democratic governors, with about six in 10 supporting Spanberger, according to the AP. In New York, young men went for Zohran Mamdani over Andrew Cuomo by a margin of nearly 40 points, according to a Tufts Circle analysis.It turns out that these young men are not completely lost to us. We just failed to imagine a reality where they could be in our camp.Affordability broke through amid the longest government shutdown in US history, as consumer prices were rising ever higher thanks in part to Trump’s tariffs. For all of his bluster, eventually the economic reality becomes an unavoidable political crisis for anyone not far gone in his cult of personality who has to pay their bills.Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, and Mamdani in New York City showed us that the frustration that every working and middle-class person feels could be directed into a political coalition that sees marginalized people as people also affected by the greed and corruption that has made life unaffordable for so many.Young men, like everyone else, are looking for a politics that can make life a little better. Democrats are finally figuring out how to offer them that chance.

Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He served in the Biden-Harris administration for three years More

As the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has once again become a millstone around the neck of the Trump administration and forced a rare split between the US president and his Maga base, one group has gained little attention for its steadfast commitment to keeping the story alive beyond politics: Epstein’s victims.Despite the frequent efforts of lawmakers to harness the scandal for political purposes, the victims of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation have been a strong voice in keeping the focus on the impact of sexual abuse and on Epstein’s wide circle of allies across all sides of the US political and cultural landscape.Their effort was clearly on display last week when more than a dozen women visited the US Capitol to advocate for a vote to release the federal government’s files on the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender. Trump had opposed the vote but reversed position in the face of a rebellion in his own party.In a video from World Without Exploitation, they held up photos of themselves as young women. Some recited their ages when they first met Epstein. “It’s time to bring the secrets out of the shadows. It’s time to shine a light into the darkness,” they said, adding in a text message: “Five administrations and we’re still in the dark.”In the event, the measure passed both houses of Congress and was quickly signed into law by Trump, giving the justice department 30 days to make all of its unclassified records, documents, and communications related to Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell publicly available.But, despite the efforts of the victims, politics is still being played with the issue.Some Epstein survivors who spoke at the Capitol were unconvinced that Trump’s turnaround to support the Epstein Files Transparency Act was genuine. “I can’t help but to be skeptical of what the agenda is,” Haley Robson said. “So with that being said, I want to relay this message to you: I am traumatized. I am not stupid.”Faced with a rebellion on the release issue by congressional Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, the president soon returned to the theme that Epstein is an issue that should scare Democrats. “The Democrats were Epstein’s friends, all of them,” Trump said prior to the vote. “And it’s a hoax, the whole thing is a hoax.”In a video announcing her surprise decision to leave Congress, Greene explicitly referred to the Epstein drama as an example of entrenched political forces that shaped her decision. “ Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked and used by rich, powerful men should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States,” she said, referring to Trump.There have emerged dissenting voices on whether either political party can be trusted on the Epstein issue and if either truly serves the purpose of exposing and preventing the exploitation of women, including the politically active Epstein victims. When one Democrat in Congress was revealed to have been texting with Epstein during a hearing, she escaped censure as her party strongly opposed any measure to punish her.“All you have to do is close your eyes, wake up, the wind blows in the other direction, and suddenly it’s the other party that claims to the party of women that cares about abuse,” said Wendy Murphy, a former sex crimes prosecutor who serves as a professor of sexual violence law at New England Law Boston.“There is zero consistency because we know it’s across party lines where the abuse comes from. This is really a male problem and not party or political problem. Neither party actually cares about women and neither party actually cares about victims.”Epstein victim Rina Oh, who attended the Capitol gathering last week, said: “I feel stuck in the middle. Everyone is pulling me from each side and I refuse to side with anyone.“I just want criminals who prey on children brought to justice, and that’s apolitical, because I don’t think predators pick out victims based on what political party they belong to,” she added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a post on X last week, Murphy stated it plainly: “Anyone who thinks this is a left-right issue is a fool.”After all, one of the main consequences of a recent release of an Epstein document trove was that former Bill Clinton treasury secretary Larry Summers was forced to step back from board positions and teaching at Harvard after damaging correspondence with the sex abuser was released.And, of course, misogyny crosses party lines very easily.Murphy points to incidences including the Anita Hill hearings when Democrats, under committee chair Joe Biden, worked to smear her during confirmation hearings for then supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991.In the ongoing partisan political morass of the Epstein case, there is a political benefit to keeping the pot boiling because both sides are in trouble, Murphy says.When the government-held documents are released sometime over the next month, she predicted, “the odds of the public getting what it thinks it’s getting are effectively zero. Continuing to boil the pot should make all of us wonder what’s actually going on behind the scenes.”She added: “We’ll probably never know. Anyone who thinks they know is just naive.” More

For the last two months, US forces have amassed outside Venezuela and carried out a series of lethal strikes on civilian boats. The Trump White House has ordered these actions in the name of fighting “narco-terrorists” – a label apparently applicable to anyone suspected of participating in drug trafficking near Latin American coastlines. More than 80 people have already been killed in these pre-emptive strikes, and war hawks are calling for expanded military action to depose the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro.Watching this play out, I am reminded of a passage from the geographer Stuart Elden’s award-winning 2009 book, Terror and Territory. In discussing how to study the “war on terror”, Elden observed that it did not make sense to study terrorism as something unique to non-state actors.“States clearly operate in ways that terrify,” Elden said. “The terrorism of non-state actors is a very small proportion of terrorism taken as a whole, with states having killed far more than those who oppose them.”A large body of research supports this claim.Researchers with Brown University’s Costs of War project, for example, have found that US-led interventions in the “war on terror” from 2001 to 2023 killed over 400,000 civilians in direct war violence. They also show evidence that when considering indirect deaths – for example, people in war zones dying from treatable medical conditions after clean water or medical infrastructure was destroyed – death toll estimates rise to at least 3.5m. Moreover, even beyond direct war zones, a recent study in the Lancet found that sanctions during the same period were also extremely deadly, causing as many as 500,000 excess deaths per year from 2010 to 2021.In short, we have already spent decades terrorizing civilian populations around the world in the name of fighting terror. This is well known, and yet the Trump White House is reinvigorating the “war on terror” anyway. Still more, it is trying to do it with even less oversight on the president’s license to kill than has been exercised in the past.While on the surface Trump’s second term has been characterized by a disorienting barrage of executive orders and culture war polemics, the administration has in fact been running a cohesive authoritarian playbook aimed at conferring near limitless powers to the presidency. These concerted efforts have played out in numerous policy arenas from immigration, to higher education, to economics, to even determining who is a citizen.Consistent with this pattern, Trump is asserting the same unchecked authority over the violent capacities of the US military.As I have written previously, a key tactic of the Trump White House has been eviscerating the oversight of the courts, making it impossible to impede the executive branch from continuing to break the law, even when it gets caught red-handed. However, another frequent strategy – perhaps less visible, though equally anathema to a system of limited government – has been to simply sidestep oversight by asserting that, even when law in theory places limits on presidential power, the exercise of this power is still “unquestioned”; according to this thinking, the executive branch apparently has the prerogative to interpret what those limits are.Of course, in a serious constitutional system, this would be preposterous. In practice, there would be no limits to presidential powers, rendering the constitution moot. Nonetheless, this is exactly the type of power that Trump is asserting over the military, both at home and abroad.The court case related to Trump’s efforts to suppress protests in Chicago using troops sheds critical light on how this strategy works. Federal law allows a president to deploy troops domestically if there is a “rebellion” that is making it impossible to “execute the laws of the United States”. Accordingly, some lower court judges have reasonably blocked the deployment of troops, finding that the administration has been unable to prove that these conditions were met. Just look at the facts: protests had on average only been about 50 people at a time, and they have clearly not made law enforcement impossible since ICE – the federal agency being protested – has vastly increased arrests during this time.True to form, however, Trump’s lawyers have argued that these details are irrelevant. In their view, there is actually no need to prove a rebellion is happening because the president has the authority to define rebellion anyway. In other words, the law might impose limits on how the president can use the military, but the president gets to decide what those limits are.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile lower courts have so far prevented this nakedly authoritarian legal theory from taking hold, the argument itself is still massively consequential: first, because an extremely Trump-friendly supreme court will hear the case soon and could very well endorse these claims; and second, because this is essentially the same logic that the Trump administration has used to justify killing civilians off the Latin American coast. Indeed, just as the Trump administration is asserting the exclusive right to define “rebellion” regardless of the facts on the ground – thus eliminating any real limits on the power to deploy troops domestically – the Trump White House is similarly asserting the unencumbered right to define “terrorist”, along with the corresponding right to take deadly action with virtually no outside oversight.In public statements, Trump has defended treating drug smugglers as terrorists by citing the harm done by drug overdoses, in effect suggesting that drug traffickers are directly killing US citizens. Ignoring the fact that Venezuela doesn’t produce fentanyl, the main driver of overdoses in the US, Trump has even gone so far as to float the mathematically impossible claim that each boat strike has saved 25,000 lives. Of course, officials have provided zero public evidence that the boats attacked were carrying drugs at all, much less tried to explain how blowing up boats would have any impact at all on drug abuse in the US.But again, why would they? The whole point of the argument is that such facts don’t matter because Trump simply has the unchecked authority to use lethal force. In fact, the justice department has suggested that officials do not even have to publicly list which foreign organizations are classified as killable terrorists, much less provide evidence to support this designation.Ultimately, Trump’s actions in and around Venezuela are best understood as a new phase in the “war on terror” – an ongoing tragedy that has already had deadly consequences for millions – though now with even fewer guardrails. The bottom line: Venezuela is not just some chess piece in an abstract game of geopolitics, and we are doing a disservice to humanity if we let war hawks in government and media spin it this way. We are talking about real people, and as very recent history shows, countless lives are at stake.

Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College More

Facing dire approval ratings and Republican discontent, Trump is fuming – and threatening political violence. More

Everyone knew that once Congress passed legislation requiring the Justice Department to release all the Jeffrey Epstein files, US President Donald Trump would go on a tear to “flood the zone” with other distractions so he could command the agenda.

And that’s exactly what he did. Over the next four days, Trump met with FIFA President Gianni Infantino in the Oval Office to announce expedited visas for fans at next year’s World Cup (though, pointedly, not for all).

He hosted Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with an effusive news conference, where he attacked a journalist for asking a “horrible, insubordinate” question about the killing and dismemberment of a journalist at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. The crown prince was then feted at a White House state dinner with tech giants from Apple to Nvidia.

Trump also lashed out at his political opponents with dangerous, vengeful rhetoric that was shocking, even by his standards.

On Thursday, the president posted on Truth Social to trash a video produced by six Democratic members of Congress, who had all served in the military or intelligence services. They accused the Trump administration of attempting to pit the military and intelligence services against the American people. In a direct address to military and intelligence leaders, they said:

Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders; you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.

Trump went ballistic. He called the message “seditious behaviour at the highest level” and said the Democratic lawmakers should be punished “by death”.

By the end of the week, the Epstein affair had faded to the background – by design.

Dire poll numbers

So, what’s going on behind the scenes that’s driving this vitriol? Put simply, Trump is under pressure like at no other time in his second term.

For one, his poll numbers – and those of the Republicans – have hit rock bottom.

A Fox News poll last week had Trump’s favourable rating at just 40% – even worse than Joe Biden’s rating at the same point in his presidency. And three quarters of respondents viewed the economy negatively.

Moreover, the Democrats’ sweep in elections in Virginia and New Jersey on November 5 has given them a major boost ahead of next November’s midterm elections that could determine the control of Congress.

Another poll has the Democrats up 14% over Republicans when respondents were asked who they would vote for if the election was held today. This is the largest gap since 2017, which presaged the Democrats taking back control of the House of Representatives in 2018.

The driver in all this is a growing lack of confidence in Trump’s ability to resolve the affordability crisis in food, rent, insurance, health care and other basic items. Trump’s message that the US economy is the “hottest” on the planet is not resonating with voters.

As was obvious during the US government shutdown, Trump has no interest in meeting with Democrats, much less negotiating with them. He wants to destroy them. And, at a time of heightened political violence, he’s publicly saying he wants some of them executed.

In Trump’s mind, there are almost no limits to his exercise of power. He has deployed the National Guard to patrol US cities, which a judge last week said was illegal, and he has ordered the killings of people in small boats in the Caribbean. He does not tolerate dissent to his exercise of power as commander in chief.

That is precisely the fear the Democrats expressed in their message last week – that the military could potentially be used against American citizens, particularly if Trump feels his power is starting to weaken.

Cracks emerging in Trump’s loyalist base

The other thing that has Trump worried is his stranglehold over the Republican Party. There are signs this may be starting to crack. And given his second term has been boosted by loyalists – both in the party and in his appointments – this could be a cause of significant concern for the president.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is a case in point. For a decade, the Georgia congresswoman has been one of the most vocal Trump and MAGA cheerleaders. But this year, she has increasingly spoken out against Trump for reneging on his commitment to put “America first” with all his foreign policy focus and travel overseas.

Her break with Trump over the Epstein files was the last straw. In recent days, he called her “Marjorie Traitor Greene” and threatened to back a candidate to challenge her in a Republican primary next year.

On Friday, Greene announced she would resign from Congress. She said what she stood for “should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States.”

Trump has made clear his intention to destroy more of his enemies and others who stand in his way. This is what Trump feels he must do to survive.

But how long Trump manages to ward off other Republican challenges remains to be seen, especially if Republicans up for election next year become really worried about their chances. They could start creating distance between their priorities and how Trump is preforming as president.

With all this pressure mounting on Trump – not to mention a looming showdown with some Republicans over his Ukraine peace plan – he may be heading for a winter of discontent. More