US Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Ireland prices corporation tax loss from Trump policies at €10bn

      by

      Ireland’s prime minister has said the country could lose €10bn (£8.35bn) in corporate tax if just three US multinationals were repatriated to America under a hostile Donald Trump administration.His remarks come just days after Trump nominated the Wall Street investor Howard Lutnick to lead the Department of Commerce with direct responsibility for trade.While Trump has already warned he would impose tariffs on EU imports, Lutnick has singled out Ireland for criticism saying “it is nonsense that Ireland of all places runs a trade surplus at our expense”.Simon Harris said if he was returned as taoiseach in Friday’s general election, he would immediately seek engagement with Trump. He has also proposed an early EU-US trade summit to avert damage in trade ties with the overall European trade bloc.“If three US companies left Ireland it could cost us €10bn [£8.5bn] in corporation tax,” Harris said on Monday while canvassing in Dundrum, Dublin.“I’m not pre-empting it, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, I’m not predicting it, but that is the level of risk that our economy is exposed to,” he said.Ten multinationals account for 60% of Ireland’s corporate tax receipts, with Microsoft, which books some global as well as EU revenues through Ireland, thought to be the single biggest contributor.Ireland’s goods trade surplus with the US is now a record €35bn with Irish goods exports up by 8% in the first eight months of 2024, boosted by the pharmaceutical and chemical sectors.Goods exported to the US totalled €45.5bn between January and August, according to the government’s Central Statistics Office, compared with imports of €11bn for the same period.Harris said he had no reason to believe that Trump was not “serious about pursuing the policies that he has campaigned on”, which includes repatriating jobs and profits that he believes should be homegrown.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe also referenced the Wall Street Journal article on what it said was the “US tax system blows a windfall into Ireland” fuelling savings into not just one but two sovereign wealth funds, including a €14bn windfall in back tax from Apple on the foot of a European court of justice ruling.“The Wall Street Journal front page gives an indication here” that Trump is intent on action, said Harris.However, he said Ireland would be prepared and would cope just as it did with “Brexit, Covid [and the] cost of living crisis”. More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      We must defend elective abortions, not just the most politically palatable cases | Moira Donegan

      by

      A Kentucky woman known by the pseudonym Mary Poe recently filed a lawsuit against her state, seeking an abortion for what was once a banal reason: because she wanted one.Poe, who was about seven weeks pregnant at the time of the lawsuit’s filing, has since had an abortion out of state. But her attorneys argue that she still has standing to sue to overturn Kentucky’s two abortion bans – a six-week ban and a separate total ban – arguing that the laws violate the state constitution. This much, at least, is typical: lawsuits challenging abortion bans have sprung up across the country since Dobbs, with women and their families seeking to overturn bans, expand exceptions, or get some compensation from the state for the graphic, distressing, disabling or deadly outcomes that the bans have made them suffer.The US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe in Dobbs cited the surge in activist litigation around abortion – a product of conservative investment in anti-choice legal shops – as part of their reason for doing so. Surely this must be a contentious, controversial issue that the federal bench is ill equipped to resolve, the judges from the conservative legal movement reasoned – because look how many complaints the conservative legal movement has filed against it!This rationale was always disingenuous, but it has also been proved flatly wrong: Dobbs has not got the courts out of the abortion business. Instead, lawsuits over abortion have exploded. The anti-choice camp has pounced, seeking to further restrict abortion by banning pills; targeting reproductive rights advocates, abortion funds and sexual health educators; claiming rights for fetuses or embryos; or by asserting that men who father pregnancies have a right to keep women from terminating them.But the pro-abortion rights side has been busy with litigation, too. Women who have been put at great health risk or made to suffer terrible, painful complications as a result of bans brought a class-action lawsuit in Texas. Bans have been challenged over and over again – on religious liberty grounds, on the grounds of state constitutional provisions securing the right to make individual healthcare decisions, under a federal law that guarantees emergency room treatment for patients needing stabilizing care, and under state constitutional clauses guaranteeing liberty, due process and privacy.The Kentucky lawsuit is part of this latter camp. Mary Poe has cited Kentucky’s constitutional guarantees of individual rights to both privacy and self-determination, which she says have been violated by the bans. “I feel overwhelmed and frustrated that I cannot access abortion care here in my own state,” she said in a statement delivered via her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I am bringing this case to ensure that other Kentuckians will not have to go through what I am going through, and instead will be able to get the healthcare they need in our community.”This kind of desire for an abortion – the dignified simplicity of it – has been missing from much of the post-Dobbs abortion rights discourse. After the ruling, as trigger bans shot into effect across the country, clinics shuttered their doors, and scared women tried to discern their options, there was no shortage of tragic stories highlighting the brutality, indignity and gendered bigotry of the laws. But as the dust settled and members of the Democratic party, the major reproductive rights advocacy groups and the liberal legal movement surveyed the national scene, a consensus emerged that the face of the mainstream pro-choice movement would be the patient who experienced a medical emergency.Women who had suffered horrific medical complications became lucid, moving and highly sought after tellers of their own stories, explaining how abortion bans has risked their health: Amanda Zurawski, for example, was denied an emergency abortion at 18 weeks, subsequently went into septic shock twice, and one of her fallopian tubes was so scarred that it is now permanently closed, inhibiting her future fertility. Kate Cox was denied an abortion after discovering that her fetus has trisomy 18, a rare genetic condition which is incompatible with life, and which, because of Cox’s own medical history, also endangered her fertility and life.During her presidential run, Kamala Harris ran an ad featuring a woman identified only as Ondrea, who suffered a miscarriage at 16 weeks and was denied the standard care due to her state’s abortion ban. She developed sepsis and almost died. The ad features a shot of Ondrea in a bathroom, staring at her body in a mirror wearing only a sports bra. Her belly bears the scars of the emergency surgery that eventually saved her life – the surgery that she never would have had to have if it weren’t for the ban.It does not diminish these women’s bravery, their suffering, or the wrongness of what was done to them to say that they are only one small fraction of those who need abortions in America. These are married, middle-class women with wanted pregnancies; Zurawski and Cox are both white. Cox has spoken movingly about her hopes to meet her future child, a girl; in the ad that features Ondrea, she and her husband hold a baby blanket. These are women whose suffering at the hands of abortion bans has nothing to do with a refusal or distaste for heterosexual, married, middle-class life. Their suffering can be made visible precisely because they are so acceptable.Not so with Mary Poe. Poe may well be married, middle-class and white; from her statement, in which she talks about the difficulty of finding childcare, we can infer that she, like most abortion patients, is already a mother. But Poe is not suffering a physical emergency; she is not enduring any pain or medical misfortune that she can use to purchase social license. She is not, in other words, a woman whose claim to an abortion is based on a plea for mercy. She is merely a woman who seeks to be in control of her own life, one who believes that things like privacy and self-determination apply to her, too.“I have decided that ending my pregnancy is the best decision for me and my family,” Poe writes in her public statement. “This is a personal decision, a decision I believe should be mine alone, not made by anyone else.”This was not always a radical proposition. But in the post-Dobbs world, it has sadly become one.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Sarah McBride says Republican attack on trans rights is ‘attempt to misdirect’ voters

      by

      Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, on Sunday condemned Republicans’ latest attack on trans rights as “an attempt to misdirect” voters away from more central issues in communities, such as healthcare costs and economic inequality.Delaware’s incoming Democratic member of the House of Representatives, who will join Donald Trump’s new administration in January, also hit back against bathroom restrictions for trans people announced by the GOP on Capitol Hill last week.In a CBS interview on Sunday morning, the congresswoman-elect said: “I think we are all united that attempts to attack a vulnerable community are not only mean-spirited but really an attempt to misdirect. Because every single time we hear the incoming administration or Republicans in Congress talk about any vulnerable group in this country, we have to be clear that it is an attempt to distract.”McBride added: “Every single time we hear them say the word ‘trans’, look at what they’re doing with their right hand. Look at what they’re doing to pick the pocket of American workers, to fleece seniors by privatizing social security and Medicare. Look at what they’re doing, undermining workers.”McBride’s remarks come in response to Republican House speaker Mike Johnson last week banning trans people from using single-sex bathrooms on Capitol Hill that match their gender identity. This follows a bill introduced by South Carolina Republican representative Nancy Mace, who sought similar bathroom restrictions for all trans people using the Capitol, including congressional members, officers and employees.Last Tuesday, Johnson told reporters: “A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, and a man cannot become a woman. That said, I also believe that’s what [Bible] scripture teaches … but I also believe that we should treat everybody with dignity.”McBride was asked by CBS whether she believes she is being treated with dignity.McBride said: “I didn’t run for the United States House of Representatives to talk about what bathroom I use. I didn’t run to talk about myself. I ran to deliver for Delawareans. While Republicans in Congress seem focused on bathrooms and trans people, and specifically me, I’m focused on rolling up my sleeves, beginning the hard work of delivering for Delawareans on the issues that I know keep them up at night.”She added: “Every bit of time and energy that has been used to divert the attention of the federal government to go after trans people is time and energy that is not focused upon addressing the cost of living for our constituents, and we have to be clear that there is a real cost to the American worker every time they focus on this.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSupporters of McBride and trans equality, including fellow Democrats in congress, have rushed to defend her.Illinois US senator and Democrat Tammy Duckworth told CNN on Sunday that she believes Mace’s position is “disgusting and wrong”, adding: “I think we have a lot more to worry about than where somebody goes to pee.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Republican senator: ‘We’ll have lots of questions’ for Trump’s controversial picks

      by

      A prominent Republican US senator pledged on Sunday that Congress would not give blanket approval to Donald Trump’s controversial cabinet picks ahead of the congressional confirmation process, as a leading Democrat challenged the qualifications of some of them to serve.Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma predicted lawmakers in the upper chamber will have tough questions in particular for the former Democratic congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard, who was chosen by the president-elect as director of national security for his second administration.When asked on CNN on Sunday morning if he will vote for all of Trump’s cabinet nominations, Lankford did not answer directly, pointing to the Senate process of holding public hearings for nominees, beginning on 3 January, ahead of Trump’s confirmation on 20 January.“Everyone is going to get a fair shake,” he said of the president-elect’s list of preferred nominees.Gabbard faces a potentially rough ride during her Senate confirmation over a number of questionable incidents from her career. These include spreading Russian propaganda over the war in Ukraine, prompting critics to ask if she might be a “Russian asset”, as well as her making a clandestine and visit to Syria to meet the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, who has been accused of war crimes, a trip that drew Republican criticism as a shame and a disgrace.“We’ll have lots of questions,” Lankford, the newly-elected vice-chair of the Senate policy committee, told CNN’s State of the Union show.“She met with Bashar al-Assad, we’ll want to know what the purpose was and what the direction for that was as a member of Congress. We want to get a chance to talk about past comments she’s made, and get them into full context.”He added: “So, sure, there’s comments that are floating out there, but we want to be able to know the rest of the story.”Lankford’s comments came at the end of a week that saw Trump’s first pick for attorney general, Florida former congressman Matt Gaetz, fall amid sexual misconduct allegations that prompted pushback from a number of Republican senators and made it unlikely he would win enough votes for confirmation by the incoming-Republican majority.Other Trump choices under scrutiny include Fox TV host Pete Hegseth, the nominee for defense secretary who was the subject of a sexual assault investigation in 2017, and Robert F Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic tapped for health secretary.Lankford also suggested that Pam Bondi, Florida’s former attorney general chosen by the president-elect this week in place of Gaetz, should put aside her promise to seek legal retribution on Trump’s political foes, if she is confirmed.Of the role, Lankford said: “It’s America’s lawyer. It’s not the president’s lawyer. It is very important that we get this role right, and that they’re actually focused on diminishing crime in America.”As well as open hearings, Lankford said of Trump’s nominees: “We’ll sit down with them in our offices, we’ll get a chance to be able to talk.”The Democratic Illinois senator and combat veteran Tammy Duckworth, meanwhile, told CNN’s State of the Union that Hegseth and Gabbard were both unqualified or unsuitable for the roles Trump wants them to fill.“He never commanded a unit, he never commanded a company, let alone battalions, brigades or whole armies. He was a platoon leader,” Duckworth said of Hegseth, a retired major in the army national guard.“He served at a very low level in the military, and we’re talking about an organization of 3 million servicemen, servicewomen and civilians, and a budget of over $900bn. He does not have the experience to run an organization of that size.”Duckworth also vehemently disagreed with Hegseth’s opposition to allowing women to stay in combat roles, after a long-fought battle for greater equality in the US military. She added she was “troubled” by claims Gabbard was a Russian asset.“We have a real deep concern whether or not she’s a compromised person. The US intelligence community has identified her as having troubling relationships with America’s foes, and my worry is that she couldn’t pass a background check,” she said.Oklahoma’s other Republican senator, Markwayne Mullin, a vocal Trump ally, also appeared on State of the Union and gave his unqualified backing to all of the president-elect’s picks.“The president has done this job before. He knows exactly what he needs. He knows who he wants to put in those positions,” he said.“That’s why he’s been able to move fast, because he knows he has four years to reach the mandate the American people said they want, the government going in a different direction. These nominations are going to deliver that for him.”Meanwhile, Republican US Senator Rand Paul said he opposes Trump’s preference to use the armed forces if needed to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants from the US.The president-elect said last Monday that his new administration would declare a national emergency and use the US military for that purpose.Paul told CBS’s Face the Nation: “You don’t do it with the Army because it’s illegal. If they send the Army into New York and you have 10,000 troops marching carrying semi-automatic weapons, I think it’s a terrible image, and I will oppose that.” Federal troops are prohibited by law from being deployed for US domestic law enforcement, except when authorized by Congress. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Hegseth’s views on women in combat ‘flat-out wrong’, Senator Duckworth says

      by

      Democratic US Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both her legs after the army Black Hawk attack helicopter she was piloting was shot down during the US war in Iraq, on Sunday ramped up criticism of Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary who argues women shouldn’t be on the front line.Pete Hegseth is the former Fox News host and soldier tapped by the president-elect to lead the Pentagon and oversee the largest military force in the world, but he is steeped in controversy.Hegseth vociferously opposes the recent hard-won right of US women to be officially allowed into combat. And he is tangled in past allegations of sexual misconduct – while the Pentagon has been struggling for years with how to prevent, deal with and punish sexual assault and harassment in the armed forces.Duckworth called Hegseth “flat-out wrong” on women in combat roles when she appeared on the CBS show Face the Nation on Sunday, and called him “inordinately unqualified” for the job of defense secretary.“Frankly, America’s daughters are just as capable of defending liberty and freedom as her sons,” she said.Hegseth made remarks in a podcast earlier this month arguing for turning back time on equality in the military, saying: “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated.”The final barriers to women in combat were removed in 2015 when the military was ordered to open all jobs to anyone who met standards.But in reality, women had been in combat in substantial numbers, fighting on the front line, winning medals and losing their lives throughout the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDuckworth was shot down with a rocket-propelled grenade over Iraq in 2004. She was elected to the Senate to represent Illinois in 2016.She told CBS: “Women in our military does make us more effective, does make us more lethal. He’s been out there saying women are not as strong [but] the ones who are in those roles have met the same standards as the men and have passed the very rigorous testing. So he’s just flat out wrong.”Duckworth is a member of the senate armed services committee. She noted that these days women serve in the infantry and special forces, such as the Navy Seals.She also appeared in the CNN studio earlier on Sunday, using her wheelchair, and said: “Our military could not go to war without its 223,000 women who serve in uniform.”She said that Hegseth served at a low level in the military and did not command any group larger than a platoon.“Mr Hegseth is not qualified for the position because he doesn’t understand, apparently even after having served, that women are actually vitally important to an effective military.”Hegseth, among the most controversial of Trump’s already contentious cabinet choices was the subject of a sexual assault investigation in 2017 and he reportedly made a payment to a woman at the heart of the case in exchange for her signing a non-disclosure agreement. Hegseth has denied all the allegations and said the encounter in question was consensual.Duckworth said that she hoped the senate committee would speak to the woman during the confirmation process next year, although she suspected it would “roll over for Mr Trump” and not do that once it has a Republican chair when the GOP assumes the senate majority.“Remember we have just fought over a decade of fights and overhauled the military in its treatment of sexual trauma, it’s frankly an insult and really troubling that Mr Trump would nominate someone who has admitted he paid off a victim who has claimed rape allegations against him. This is not someone who you want to lead the department of defense,” she said. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s eldest son emerges as key voice influencing cabinet picks – report

      by

      Donald Trump Jr has emerged as the family’s most influential adviser of the moment as his father builds the most controversial cabinet in modern US history, sources close to Donald Trump’s eldest son say.Trump Jr has in some cases promoted inexperienced loyalists over more qualified candidates for top positions in president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration.During Trump’s first administration, as the 45th president, his elder daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, were top level political advisers, while his sons Don Jr and Eric were assigned mainly to run the family business.Ivanka and her husband took a big step back from politics after Trump lost to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election and during Trump’s subsequent descent into a tangle of civil and criminal cases against him, though have been more present since his victory in the election earlier this month.Now sources have told Reuters that Don Jr is currently the leading offspring voice in his father’s ear and the president-elect has become particularly reliant on his son for advice on White House strategy.But at least two of the more controversial choices championed by Don Jr face tough Senate confirmation challenges – vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr, of the chiefly-Democratic Kennedy political dynasty, for health secretary and former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, who faces bipartisan concern over her Russian interests and lack of experience in the intelligence community.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAppointments planning continued on Sunday, the Washington Post reported, with the likely elevation of Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford-trained physician and economist, as the next director of the National Institutes of Health.Reuters spoke to half a dozen sources, including donors, political allies and friends, who confirmed Don Jr’s influence in pitching names for appointments, including inexperienced loyalists. Don Jr was credited with making JD Vance his father’s vice-presidential pick, helping cabinet contenders sink or rise to the fore and blocking former secretary of state Mike Pompeo from joining the cabinet.“The reality this time is we actually know what we’re doing,” Don Jr told Fox News earlier this month. “And it’s about surrounding my father with people who are both competent and loyal.”Kushner, formerly Trump’s senior adviser who focused on the Middle East, told Reuters that he is briefing real estate investor Steve Witkoff on his new job as special envoy to the region.“I have been working with Witkoff to get him up to speed on Trump’s past efforts,” Kushner said through a spokesperson.One source close to the transition said Trump does not appear to need his family for advice as much as in the past because of aides like Susie Wiles, who helped to run the most disciplined of his election campaigns to date and will be his chief of staff.“Stuff is really buttoned down,” the source said of Trump’s current team. “He may not need the family this time like he used to.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Theatrics, hatred and Linda McMahon: how pro wrestling explains Donald Trump

      by

      Despite her background in professional wrestling, Linda McMahon is not known for bombast. Indeed, she’s terrible at it: in the many years during which the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO would make occasional appearances in her company’s programming as a version of herself, she was always derided by fans for her lack of charisma and wobbly speaking voice.The most notable thing she did in any of the storylines was pretend to be comatose in a wheelchair while her husband, the vastly more explosive Vince McMahon, sexually harassed one of his female wrestlers in a skit. Linda won’t be winning an Emmy anytime soon.That’s ultimately what makes her a threat: she doesn’t seem like one. She is falsely perceived as a “moderate” and will come across as the “good cop” in a collection of awful ones. When she was nominated as director of the Small Business Administration in 2017, under Donald Trump, she was the only cabinet pick who passed with substantial Democratic support – 81 out of 100 senators voted to confirm her. She made it through her two-plus years in the role without drawing attention (despite the fact that her husband was simultaneously making lucrative business deals with the Saudi government). She will almost certainly be confirmed by the Senate again with relatively little difficulty. They have other things to worry about.View image in fullscreenBut senators should be worried about putting McMahon in charge of education policy. Behind her grandmotherly affect beats a cold heart. As I documented in my biography of her husband, Ringmaster, Linda and Vince have presented a united front at all times even amid accusations of sexual assault. She was almost certainly aware of a massive pedophile ring that ran within the McMahons’ World Wrestling Federation (as it was known) from the 1970s to the early 90s.Just last month, five additional men stepped forward in a lawsuit to accuse Linda and Vince of knowingly allowing their childhood sexual assaults. Naturally, the McMahons deny any wrongdoing. (Vince is also under federal investigation for sex trafficking, a fact that Linda has yet to publicly comment on.)So far, Linda hasn’t mimicked Trump’s wild attacks on his opponents or the institutions of the US government. Her first statement since receiving Trump’s nomination was bland: “All students should be equipped with the necessary skills to prepare them for a successful future.” But I would doubt that her tenure will be moderate.She has never spoken or acted in opposition to any of Trump’s extremist policies in the past, and she has been friends with him since the early 1980s. She ran the biggest pro-Trump Super Pac in 2020 and is currently the co-chair of Trump’s transition team. There is no reason to doubt that this lifelong Republican and dedicated Trumpist operative will enact large swaths of the Project 2025 agenda, which calls for slashing school budgets and censoring educational content on race and gender.There is an illusion at play here. McMahon will be held up as a “reasonable” woman. But given that she works for Trump, her reasonableness is nothing more than “kayfabe”.View image in fullscreenEmerging from carnival sideshows in the 1880s, pro wrestling has always been built on a platform of deception. This deception is known in the industry as “kayfabe” (rhymes with “hey, babe”). For wrestling’s first century of existence, kayfabe was relatively simple, if arduous: wrestlers pretended to be violent madmen and performed staged matches “against” each other – but unlike film actors, they had to stay in character at all times, even on their off-hours. To commit to this code was to “stay in kayfabe”; to violate it was to “break kayfabe”. It was a lie, but it was wide and flat, so you could stand on it easily.However, those days are long gone. In the 1980s, Vince and Linda admitted their product’s fakeness in legal proceedings, so as to avoid taxes, regulations and fines. The secret was out, and nobody could credibly claim wrestling was on the level any more. So kayfabe evolved. What emerged was powerful – and often malevolent.In Ringmaster, I coined a term for this new form of misdirection, which still reigns: “neokayfabe”. Instead of insisting to the audience that what they were seeing was real, McMahon allowed fans to see behind the curtain and learn that not all was as it seemed.Wrestlers were encouraged to bring up real-life disputes with fellow grapplers, or even with McMahon himself, when they appeared in the ring. Previously taboo truths were confessed. Salacious teases of people’s personal lives came to the fore: first, it was just revelations of behind-the-scenes business frustrations; then, it graduated to things like a live interview with a wrestler’s widow about his drug overdose, the day after he died. Eventually, you had spectacles like a closeted gay wrestler being forced to sing Boy George lyrics and then get gay-bashed by another grappler. It’s hard to overstate how shocking – and gripping – these neokayfabe developments were for wrestling fans.When neokayfabe fully took hold in the late 1990s, ratings soared. Fans knew for sure that the matches were staged, but they also knew that thrilling revelations were bursting to the surface. The appeal wasn’t about who “won” or “lost” any more. It was about digging up the truth and deciphering it.You’d see a wrestler throw a particularly vicious personal insult at another one and start to wonder if their hatred was real, even if the match result wasn’t. You’d see Vince wrestle as a sadistic owner called “Mr McMahon” and be astonished that a Fortune 500 CEO was risking life and limb by falling 20ft from the side of a steel cage and landing on a table – was he really hurt after that fall, or was it all part of the show? Conversely, when the wrestler Owen Hart fell 70ft in a zipline accident during a 1999 live show and died after hitting the ring, the McMahons’ show went on, leading many in the crowd to assume it had all been staged. On top of all that, McMahon would toss in obscene sexual references and unconscionable bigotry to mock the marginalized.Much like Trump, McMahon was a master at capturing your attention because you couldn’t quite believe he was able to do what he was doing. Yet there it was. And all the while, Linda was the hidden hand behind him, steering the ship through the choppy waters of industry and emerging with a (somewhat) respectable media empire worth over a billion dollars.In her time running the company, she and Vince cultivated relationships with a wide array of people who now find themselves at the top of the Republican food chain. Most notably, Trump hosted two installments of the annual WrestleMania extravaganza in the late 80s, attended many additional shows and even participated in a long storyline where he pretended to be in an explosive rivalry with Vince, back in 2007. Before that storyline, Trump had rarely, if ever, worked up a rowdy and interactive crowd. But he was a quick study, and we can all see what he learned when he addresses his rally crowds.View image in fullscreenBut Trump wasn’t the only key contact. The McMahons were early corporate partners of the mixed martial arts promotion UFC, getting to know its deeply controversial head, Dana White (and, for what it’s worth, missing an opportunity to buy UFC in its infancy, only to watch as MMA dwarfed wrestling in popularity). It was the McMahons who made the wrestler Hulk Hogan (born Terry Bollea) an international superstar in the mid-80s. By 2024, both White and Hogan, as well as Linda, were primetime speakers at the Republican national convention.The reasoning for that prominent placement was easy to suss out: Trump just flat-out loves wrestling, and has since he was a preteen in Queens, watching local shows organized by Vince’s father. Trump did a late-stage campaign interview with the retired wrestler Mark Calaway (better known as the Undertaker), and was so excited that he essentially turned the tables and started interviewing Calaway with childish questions (eg “What stops somebody from going nuts and starting a real fight?”).If you watched Trump’s face throughout the convention, you saw him practically – and sometimes literally – falling asleep during the speeches. Not so when Hogan got up there. Trump was rapt and grinning while Hogan ripped off his shirt and declared that “Trumpamania” would take the former president all the way back to the White House. Hogan proved more prescient than many highly paid pundits, in that regard.The introduction of pro-wrestling culture into mainstream politics has brought a huge dose of chaos. That chaos is, of course, the point. It’s a shock-and-awe tactic: the enemies of pluralistic democracy are attempting to overwhelm us with statements and actions that confuse and unsettle. The Trump team is doing what it does best, which is keep the world off balance by warping our sense of reality. We no longer trust that anything we see or hear from Trump is strictly “real” – he lies as easily as breathing and routinely gets bored with his plans – but nor do we feel certain that he won’t act on his most ludicrous promises. We are immobilized in a state of constant panic and bewilderment.All of which is to say, Trump and his team have learned the most essential lessons of Trump’s favorite art form. If you don’t understand wrestling, you’ll never understand Trump.And you must know wrestling to understand our likely next secretary of education, as well – even though she doesn’t come across as a typical wrestling personality. She will mask herself in neokayfabe and do what her boss tells her to do. She will seek to tear up American education, from starving public kindergartens of cash to crushing protests at universities. She will be the sharp end of the presidential spear, all while seeming more like a kindly southern aunt than an efficient tool of neo-fascist revolution. She, and all of her ilk, will deceive and misdirect us. We must be vigilant. Don’t believe the hype. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s White House is filling with alleged sexual abusers … led by him

      by

      Donald Trump was found civilly liable last year for the defamation and sexual abuse of the writer E Jean Carroll – just one of the more than 27 women who have accused him of sexual misconduct. In January 2025, he will again be president of the United States – the first to take office with a court-adjudicated history of sex crimes.And it seems he’s eager to pack the White House with people just like him.Four of president-elect Trump’s cabinet-level nominees have faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from workplace sexual harassment to assault, and a fifth is embroiled in a sexual abuse-related lawsuit.As Americans brace themselves for Trump 2.0, it’s time to be clear-eyed about the Maga machine: a history of alleged sexual criminality isn’t a bug, it’s a central part of the hardware; an organizing principle that clarifies how Trump and those like him view their power and how they intend to wield it.Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the former representative Matt Gaetz, was concurrently under investigation by the Department of Justice and the House ethics committee for allegedly violating federal sex-trafficking laws and statutory rape. The disgraced representative also reportedly bragged about his sexual conquests and showed nude photos of women to his fellow lawmakers. On Thursday afternoon, Gaetz announced he would be withdrawing his name from consideration to avoid being a “distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition”, just hours before CNN published a report about a second alleged sexual encounter between Gaetz and a 17-year-old. (The age of consent in Florida is 18.)Gaetz’s withdrawal provided a brief moment of relief. But, still, Trump’s would-be cabinet is filled with alleged criminals, all of whom the president-elect has vociferously defended, and all of whom deny wrongdoing.Elon Musk, whom Trump has tapped for the made-up position of “efficiency czar”, reportedly exposed his penis to a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016 and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for sex. Musk’s company SpaceX paid her $250,000 in 2018 to settle the sexual misconduct claim. He was also sued this year by eight former SpaceX employees, who alleged that the CEO treated “women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter”.Then there’s the nominee for secretary of defense, the Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexually assaulting a staff member of the California Federation of Republican Women in 2017.In the police report that was filed at the time, and which was obtained by the New York Times, the unnamed woman told law enforcement that Hegseth had taken her phone and blocked her exit from his hotel room before assaulting her. Though Hegseth was never charged with a crime, he did enter into a nondisclosure agreement with the woman, which included a financial settlement.Robert F Kennedy Jr was accused of sexually assaulting Eliza Cooney, a former family babysitter, in the late 90s. Trump now wants him to run the Department of Health and Human Services.Finally, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, was recently named in a lawsuit alleging that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, failed to stop an employee from sexually abusing children in the 1980s and 90s, when the McMahons were running World Wrestling Entertainment. (An attorney for McMahon told CNN that the lawsuit is “filled with scurrilous lies.”)These picks feel comically brazen, like shots fired directly at the #MeToo movement, which erupted in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Trump, a man who has threatened to sue every one of his accusers and has openly bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent, is attempting to exact revenge on a movement designed to use the collective to force consequences for a handful of powerful predators.#MeToo was just one piece of a slate of shifting gender norms over the last decade. Now, we’re living in the middle of a backlash.Roe v Wade has fallen, a known sexual abuser is re-entering the Oval Office, and the very online far right has found a new slogan: “Your body, my choice.”In Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,she writes that these moments of backlash are not random. They are “preemptive strikes”, which “have always been triggered by the perception – accurate or not – that women are making great strides”.The perception that women were gaining status at the expense of men’s, combined with the real ways in which many men in this country are struggling economically, socially and mentally, has seemingly helped fuel the Trump campaign.Trump sneered at “childless cat ladies”, courted Joe Rogan listeners and crypto-bros, and trotted out Hulk Hogan to perform hyper-macho drag at the Republican national convention. The campaign deployed far-right influencers to wax poetic on X – which Musk owns – about the dangers of “toxic femininity” and mock the peeing habits of men who supported Kamala Harris.On election day, Trump senior adviser and noted white nationalist Stephen Miller tweeted a very particular plea: “Get every man you know to the polls.” After Trump’s win, the far right were out in full force celebrating what they clearly perceived not just as a win for their preferred political leader, but for their gender as a whole; they flooded X and TikTok with the phrases “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” and crafted supercuts of liberal women crying.Perhaps what Trump is counting on is that people who oppose the draconian agenda of his administration will be so exhausted by the piling horrors that they’ll get overwhelmed and give up – that all of the allegations will blend together and the backlash will become the norm. And yet, we know where a backlash brews, so does a resistance to it. More