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      ‘He’s taking a sledgehammer to it’: how do Trump voters view his whirlwind start?

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      Estefany Frost still gets calls from people who heard her talk to Donald Trump at a campaign stop in Georgia last year about how difficult running her restaurant had become in an era of inflation.One month into the new administration, she and other conservatives here are still absorbing the whirlwind pace of change. While she remains supportive of Donald Trump’s agenda, she said she’s wrestling with some of the implications.“A lot of people might agree or disagree with what he’s doing, but I would say that he’s done a lot of things very quickly,” she said. “I like that, as the president, he’s doing things he promised people, because that’s what people voted for.”But she can’t quite square the effect of a lightning-fast change on immigration and tariffs with Trump’s pledge to her to lower prices. She’s still looking for answers there. “I mean, he’s the president now. He can work something out for us,” she said.Trump visited Zebulon, Georgia, in October to hold a “faith voters’ forum” at Christ church, an expansive local congregation here. “I think it’s the most important election in the history of our country,” he said then. “I really believe that. I think most of the people here do, too.”Four months later, on an overcast Sunday morning, construction workers Sam Whatley and Jeff Clay were waiting for their clothes to dry at a laundromat down the street from the church and about an hour south of Atlanta, far enough outside of the city’s ring of political moderation where Whatley’s “Let’s Go Brandon” trucker cap remains relevant.For Kamala Harris voters, the headlines of the last few weeks reflect unfolding chaos. For Trump voters, it’s just Sunday morning.“He’s coming at everything just a whirlwind,” Clay said. “You don’t know what he’s going do next. I mean, he’s basically covered about everything he said he was going to do, or he’s trying, and I’m sure there’s more that could be done. He needs to drain the swamp up there at the Capitol.”Whatley doesn’t expect Trump to accomplish all of his campaign goals – “but he’s taking a sledgehammer to it”, he said. “He’s pretty much exposed things. That’s his main mission, I think. He knows he’s not going to get everything he wants to do, but he’s going to expose it all.”The “department of government efficiency” group working for Elon Musk is facing court challenges for violating the law by directing agencies to fire federal employees, and facing questions of illegally accessing computer systems at several government agencies.In the view of conservative voters around Zebulon like Whatley, Musk is simply a “good businessman” who should be trusted to do the work Trump has asked him to do.“They’re saying he’s not an elected official and he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing,” Whatley said. “But, I mean, the Democrats done it too, but it was OK when the Democrats done it.” He likened Musk’s overarching influence over government policy to that of Anthony Fauci’s broad direction of the response to the pandemic.Up the street, Justin Raines, his wife Katie and two children were shopping at Freshway Market before the 11am service. His wife finds what’s happening in Washington frightening, he said. She said she doesn’t vote, though. Justin is still measuring.“Me personally, I don’t get into politics,” he said. “I mean, I just look at the good and the bad for whatever president. I’m kind of in between right now. He had a lot of ideas before the campaign took place. Don’t get me wrong, he still got a lot of good ideas. He just hasn’t put them in place yet. I mean, he’s going to be president for four years. You’ve got to give him a chance.”The couple corralled their kids in the dairy isle and pointed out the high prices of milk, meat and eggs. “We’re in a supermarket,” he said. “As far as groceries, gas, cars, homes … I mean, people are struggling to pay for their homes … Lower prices. That was one of his big things that I paid attention to.”For conservatives watching the Trump administration violate norms – and perhaps the law – as it fires government employees and folds government programs, the longterm goal of spending reduction is more important than the short-term pain inflicted on people they believe have been gaming the system.“I think he’s opening up something that shows the American people what needs to be done,” Clay said. He argued that inflation and government spending were connected, and that Musk’s budget slashing and firings – and Trump’s tariffs – would reverse consumer price increases.“I’d like to see some of the prices – especially food and stuff – come down,” Clay said. “And I think eventually, once he goes through there and gets some of the non-necessary spending that they’ve been doing, I think some of that will come down.”Frost suggested Trump could lean on food suppliers such as Sysco to lower prices for small businesses, or negotiate deals with other countries to counteract the effect of tariffs on Canada and Mexico. She said she understands that increasing enforcement on immigration may end up driving up prices.But Frost is also the child of a legal Mexican immigrant.“My mom has done it the right way,” Frost said. “She has her paperwork and everything.” She said she wants Trump to create a program for undocumented immigrants who have been in the US for decades and “have done nothing bad”.The prospect of this approach, given Trump’s public pledge of mass deportation, seems unlikely.“I mean, I understand that,” she said. “I understand there’s a process for different things, but it would be, you know, amazing.” More

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      Trump singled me out for ruining women’s sport. This is my response to him | Austin Killips

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      Earlier this month, Donald Trump singled me out. In fact, I was the first example he gave of someone ruining women’s sport.“Last year”, he said while announcing his Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports executive order, “a male cyclist posing as a woman competed in the 800-mile Arizona Trail Race – a very big deal in cycling – and obliterated the women’s course record by nearly five and a half hours.”He’s right: I did snag the record from Alex Schultz (a man) who had previously bested the record held by Lael Wilcox (a woman). A few months after my effort, all of our paces were shattered by a Lithuanian ultra-distance phenom.You see, my interest in this event was spurred by its co-ed leaderboard. Events like the Arizona Trail Race are not bound by governing bodies in any traditional sense. The rules boil down to little more than “pedal alone and in good faith under your own power”. An event that involves riding across the length of Arizona and traversing the Grand Canyon with a bicycle on your back is as much a competition as an actualizing exercise for the masochists who choose to sublimate through sport.View image in fullscreenNot that it got me anywhere, financially. My fleeting record run was the talk of two niche cycling publications, a few subreddits, and generated enough clout for an REI cashier to grant me a full refund on a pair of absolutely destroyed shoe gaiters. It failed to secure me anything meaningful like industry sponsorships – tangible support that would have made my pursuits in sport tenable.Instead, my wins only served to generate more artifacts for the right’s culture wars, while I remained unable to garner even a sliver of the institutional recognition that friends and fellow competitors with similar palmares have found.Transgender people lost the inclusion battle in sport ages ago. International governing bodies for competitions in running, cycling, chess, swimming, darts and more have repeatedly caved to pressure and helped shift the Overton window to exclude trans people from public life more broadly. The world’s least gracious winners insist on kicking sand in our eyes.Trump’s executive order is a perfect scam: he and his acolytes get to talk endlessly about the fake specter of trans athletes “invading” women’s sports, while never putting any of their attention, immense political cache and funding access towards things that would meaningfully elevate the state of women’s sports. Instead, they get to fixate their hate and attention on every transsexual woman who dares show up to a rec T-ball league with her friends.Meanwhile, the women who simply want to compete and labor as athletes are left in the cold.In my field of cycling, conditions haven’t been this dire in ages if you’re a woman in the US trying to progress to the vaunted European peloton. Last year saw the shuttering of two institutions: the Joe Martin Stage Race went from postponed to falling off the calendar after 46 years, and the longest-running women’s professional team, DNA Pro Cycling, closed up shop after 12 years of being the premier pipeline for American women hoping to advance to the international peloton. For women looking for a team or a race that could potentially catapult their career forward, things are the worst they have been in the last decade.View image in fullscreenConsider this: when you watch a professional race, it’s common for an announcer to regale spectators with the resumes of the women on the start line. Many of them are record-shattering athletes and also hold full-time jobs as doctors, researchers or investment bankers. These remarks always come in good faith, but as a means of contrasting us against the men – who usually have enough money and support thrown behind them to make a living as athletes – they speak to the sad state of affairs in women’s sport. And soon, things for women’s sports will get even worse. Because it bears repeating, as clearly as possible: their project contains no measures that help female athletes at the professional level as laborers, and certainly nothing that even gestures towards new investment opportunities for girls pursuing their dream. It’s a free market that devalues women’s labor at every turn.In fact, the only action items referencing funding simply establishes a precedent for rescinding money from organizations investing in women and girls who have given their lives and bodies to sport. In this new reality, all women lose. In fact, everyone loses – except for the people cashing checks and amassing political power.They found a scapegoat, and all they have done is enrich themselves with five-figure speaking fee tours, while taking the oxygen out of the room. The only lane they’ve made is one that encourages women to quit competing for a life of news appearances and college campus speaking tours.They are, for lack of a better word, cowards who don’t want to do the actual work of empowering and supporting athletes.So my argument is quite simple. Maybe you take umbrage with trans people in sports, and in turn me (whatever, you won that battle). But if you purport to care about women’s sports, about girls getting a fair chance at competing, you need to ask yourself why, at the height of a historic moment of sweeping and unchecked austerity measures, the loudest and wealthiest people in the room have built a movement that culminated in this: an executive order that establishes a precedent to strip funding away from women in sport. More

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      Civil servants are leading the American resistance – with GameStop as a guide | Virginia Heffernan

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      The most ferocious response to Elon Musk’s coup in the US is also the most disciplined. It’s a sustained act of civil disobedience by the civil service. Amid the malignant lies of the current regime, federal workers are steadily telling the truth.This strategy is more methodical than it at first seems. Yes, the distress and anger among federal workers is palpable. But the more anarchy Donald Trump’s executive orders and Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) operation loose upon the world, the firmer the federal employees are standing. Their protest might even be seen as a political short squeeze.Starting on 28 January, federal employees refused to leave their posts in spite of Musk’s campaign to bully them out. On the subreddit for federal employees, they exhorted each other not to quit. Their rallying cry soon became: “Hold the line, don’t resign.” Although 2 million workers were pressured to quit, only 75,000 of them took what looked like a sketchy “buyout” deal.Then, this past week, when on the job mass firings started, staying at work became impossible. Thousands of employees, many of them with excellent performance reviews, were terminated on the hollow pretext that their “performance has not been adequate to justify further employment”.But as these employees cleared out their desks, a vocal group refused to vacate their faith in the civil service’s excellence. They have, in short, opposed the lie that they and their colleagues are being fired for cause. In this way, they’ve converged on the policy that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident, called “personal non-participation in lies”.On Reddit, one poster encouraged federal employees to think with a view to the public record. They should write letters, the poster urged, on behalf of the “trashed colleagues”. It was imperative to put on paper that these colleagues “did indeed have good performance despite the firing”.The poster offered a list of reasons to write these letters, among them that references help workers get new jobs. But the biggest reason to praise colleagues who have been fired under false pretenses is that, as the poster wrote, “it’s the truth.”This campaign to tell the truth is not the work of to-the-barricades types. Those being harassed, demonized and fired are middle-class workers in agencies established by elected officials in Congress. Their remit includes conducting cancer research, preventing fires and supporting veterans. By refusing to let Doge distort their service as wasteful or inadequate, they have taken a stand that the rest of us should emulate.Solzhenitsyn believed ideology itself was built of lies – the delusion that human society can be remade, from the top down, by social engineers serving an autocrat. This is exactly the kind of program spelled out in Project 2025 and being enacted by Trump’s increasingly totalitarian executive orders.“Our path is not to give conscious support to lies about anything whatsoever,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in a 1974 essay called Live Not by Lies. “Though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me.”In more 2025 terms, the civil service appears to be initiating a kind of short squeeze on the broligarchy. This is a maneuver akin to the so-called Gamestop affair of 2021, in which tiny-dollar investors banded together to put the screws to major hedge funds.During the pandemic, funds like Melvin and White Square were selling GameStop short – betting on it to fail. Keith Gill, a young financial educator, believed they were wrong, and he put his money on the company. Others wanted in. Not only was the video game store a fan favorite, but, in bleak Covid days, there was something inspiring about being believers in solidarity as opposed to friendless fatalists.Sound familiar? To stand with the US’s civil service today – to continue to believe in a government of, by, and for the people – is a risk. Not only will your wise-guy friends sneer at you, but you could miss out. If the big payouts are in nihilistic plays like crypto or Maga or Project 2025, you’ll feel like a jerk for putting your chips on dippy stuff like making roads and helping the poor.View image in fullscreenBut keeping faith is not as stodgy a project as you might think. With the GameStop short squeeze, everyman investors developed a boisterous lexicon of populist solidarity and above all tenacity. They enjoined one another to hodl the GameStop stonk with diamond hands.Their dominant slogan was just like that of the federal workers: “Hold the line.” And it worked. When they held, they kept the price of GameStop high and the hedge funds couldn’t afford to cover their short bets. Melvin Capital broke down, as did White Square.But back to the federal employees. The second they received the 28 January “Fork in the Road” email trying to drive them out, thousands did what the GameStop apes had done four years earlier: went to Reddit. It was electric. A campaign to save America from Trump-Musk crystallized. “When Tyranny becomes Law, Rebellion becomes Duty,” posted one anonymous federal worker.“Who knew that the fight against tyranny was me looking at some spreadsheets and trying to make Americans healthier?” another said. It was on. “They just created the imaginary deep state they convinced everyone they were fighting against.”And then it came: “Diamond. Fucking. Hands.”The GameStop words. “You made me double check which sub I was in,” someone said, with laughing-crying emoji. Here was the ethic of holding fast to something you believe in, even while tyrants conspire to destroy it.The feds held on. And even now, even among the jobless, they are refusing to lose faith in the American project. “Take up space, put a face to the stories,” said a recent poster to the fednews subreddit. “Make it uncomfortable for them. Let them know the human toll it takes.”Right now, it’s hard to imagine Musk or Trump will ever go bust. But emperors rise and fall. Those two have now bet against America. If the rest of us stay steadfast, they very well might, like those hedge funds, hit a bruising kind of margin call.Musk could have to answer for Tesla’s recent precipitous losses. There have been international boycotts of Tesla and creative, energized and widespread campaigns against it. Steve Bannon, one of the marquee Maga influencers, recently savaged Musk as anti-Maga, calling him “a parasitic illegal immigrant” who “wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions”.Trump, for his part, may have to face his 34 felonies one day, and pay the more than $500m he owes. Axios recently reported on a mounting revolt against Doge among Republicans in Congress. Then there are the people.In icy temperatures on Monday, thousands took to the streets, shouting: “No Kings on Presidents Day.” The goal of the organizers was to protest against “anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration and its plutocratic allies”. And the legal actions against the Trump administration are piling up – more than 75 opposing his executive orders, with more being filed every day.Even people without conscience can be brought up short by realities like the erosion of their fortunes, their standing and their bases of support. The GameStop apes used to say: “I like the stock” when people asked them why they wouldn’t sell. If you like the civil service, hold the line. Keep the faith. The Trump-Musk administration wants the American people to shut up, pack up our desks and resign our roles as citizens. Don’t take the deal. More

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      Hold your breath and look to Germany: its election could decide the fate of Europe – and the UK | Martin Kettle

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      Even in less stressed times, Britain always pays too much attention to the US and too little to Germany. In today’s torrid circumstances, that imbalance is perhaps excusable. After all, Donald Trump, it now turns out, really means it. He is more interested in US plunder and profit from places like Gaza, Ukraine and Greenland than in upholding a just peace or good order.Even so, the inattention towards Germany needs to end. Britain’s politicians, like German politicians, are rewiring their worldviews amid a political gale. But Germany, though no longer a great power, is nevertheless a great nation. Indeed, it may be more than ever the essential European nation now, after the Trump administration’s very public trashing of the entire Atlantic alliance seemed to leave Europe to its own devices.The German general election, this coming Sunday, is an event with consequences. Primarily, of course, those consequences will be felt in Germany itself, with its extended economic stagnation, its anxieties about migration and borders, its traditional fears about borrowing, its nervousness about military commitments, and its sudden lurching anxiety that the US is ready to allow Russia to threaten the lands on its eastern frontier.Germany’s inherent importance, though, means the election will also help determine whether Europe – not just the EU – is able to cope with Trump’s second term. Will that Europe be able to deliver the defence and security to protect not merely Ukraine, a daunting enough task, but the Baltic republics, Poland and the other former Soviet satellite states too? Can it reform its faltering economic model? These are reverberations that Britain cannot avoid, even if it wants to.Needless to say, the German election has received only a fraction of the attention that this country’s political class lavishes on a US election. Equally predictably, much of that very limited amount of attention is absorbed by a fixation – one that is shared to a degree by the German media – with the populist anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. As a result, however, the likely victor on Sunday, the centre-right CDU-CSU coalition under the probable next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has barely been scrutinised at all.This contest is occurring against a backdrop of economic failure, not success. The German economy shrank in 2023 and again in 2024. It seems likely to stay in recession again this year. It adds up to the longest period of economic stagnation since the fall of Hitler in 1945. Whoever emerges as chancellor after Sunday will face choices very similar to those confronting Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.The reasons for Germany’s decline are not hard to understand. Germany’s dependence on Russian energy meant prices soared after the invasion of Ukraine. Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition government, in power since 2021, has scaled back that dependence – renewables now produce 60% of German energy – but not eliminated it. German car exports have become more expensive, while China has surged ahead in the production of cheaper electric vehicles. A tariff war with the US now looms.All this has provided a system shock to a country still strongly conditioned by its craving for postwar stability. “We have used up our old success, and not invested in new things,” the commentator Theo Koll told the UK in a Changing Europe podcast this week. “We have for a long time lived in a kind of ‘Gore-Tex republic’ … we wanted it nice and cosy inside and all the unpleasant things had to be outside.”The rise of the AfD, amid the perception that irregular migration is out of control, is the single most visible sign that the old political era has ended. It has been quickened by violent killings where migrants are suspects during the election campaign in Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and, last week, Munich. The latest Politico poll of polls puts the AfD on 21%, double what it secured in the previous federal election in 2021, running second to the CDU-CSU on 29%, but ahead of Scholz’s SPD on 16% and the Greens on 13%.By that token, though, a victory for Merz’s CDU-CSU on 23 February would be genuinely significant. It would be significant even though 29% would be a decline from the 42% that the parties took under Angela Merkel in 2013. It would show, in Europe’s heartland, that the line can be held against populism of the right. This is not a trivial lesson, especially after the debacle of the French assembly election last year.It would also be a vote of confidence, albeit a relatively weak one, for one of Europe’s few remaining big parties of the centre right. Once-powerful parties like the French Gaullists can only look on with frustration and envy – to say nothing of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives. Not least, it would also be a rebuke to those like Elon Musk and JD Vance who have actively promoted the AfD from abroad.Yet it would also pose two big questions. The first, and more immediate, would be the coalition that Merz would construct and the content of its programme. Everything here depends on which parties qualify for the Bundestag and on how many seats each wins. Merz has repeatedly ruled out governing with the AfD, so his main coalition partner could be Scholz’s diminished SPD or, less likely in view of Merz’s commitment to growth, the Greens.If the polls are right, however, whatever Merz comes up with is likely to be a weak coalition. This would give him relatively little leeway to drive reforms of the kind he advocates – familiar themes to UK readers, like benefit cuts, ending business red tape and raising defence spending. He is, though, open to loosening the constitutionally enshrined “debt brake”, which is blocking much-needed public investment. It is likely to take until Easter before we know the full coalition picture.The other, intimately related, question would be about Germany’s borders. Merz triggered huge protests when the AfD backed his bill allowing Germany to turn asylum seekers and other migrants back at the border. This prompted a rare rebuke from Merkel, that Merz had abandoned a historically resonant firewall against far-right support. Yet border controls matter for any state that seeks to ensure the security, including the social welfare, of its citizens, and Germany is not the only country where voters are demanding greater effectiveness.Sunday’s election is a critical European moment, and would be even if Trump did not exist. The key question is not, at least at this stage, about the rise of the extreme right. It is about the continuing viability of the centre right, or the adaptability of what Merkel, from early in her career as party leader, dubbed “the new social capitalism”. The current recession has put this vision to an unforgiving test. Merz will be judged by the outcome, if he wins power. It is a moment that matters for Germany – but also for us.

      Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump signs executive order targeting ‘benefits for illegal aliens’

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      Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at ending federal benefits for people in the country illegally, his latest in a blizzard of moves to crack down on immigration.The White House said the order seeks to end “all taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens” but it was not clear which benefits will be targeted. People in the country illegally generally do not qualify except for emergency medical care. Children are entitled to a free K-12 public education regardless of immigration status under a 1982 supreme court ruling.The order notes that a 1996 welfare overhaul denies most public benefits to people in the country illegally but says that law has been gradually undermined. “Over the last 4 years, in particular, the prior administration repeatedly undercut the goals of that law, resulting in the improper expenditure of significant taxpayer resources.”Trump’s words appear directed at former president Joe Biden’s extensive use of parole authority to allow people into the country temporarily, including more than 900,000 through an online appointment app called CBP One used at border crossings with Mexico, and more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who flew to the US at their own expense with a financial sponsor. Trump immediately ended both programs.Biden also granted parole to nearly 300,000 people from Ukraine and Afghanistan.People granted parole for at least a year are considered “qualified non-citizens”, making them eligible for some income-based benefits, but only after five years. They include Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides coverage to children in families that earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid, according to the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.Some states have shortened the five-year wait.Trump’s order appears to have other targets, some already subjects of earlier edicts and Justice Department lawsuits. It directs all departments and agencies to identify federal benefit spending that is inconsistent with the 1996 welfare law. It also seeks to ensure that state and local governments are not using federal funds for policies that support “sanctuary” policies or encourage illegal immigration.Trump signed 10 executive orders on immigration on his first day in office. They included ending automatic citizenship for people born in the United States and asylum at the southern border. The birthright citizenship order has been temporarily halted in court.In another order on Wednesday, Trump instructed the heads of every agency to undertake a review of all regulations, working with members of Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency. Any regulations that are deemed inconsistent with the administration’s policies will be rescinded or modified, the order said.The action aims to bolster Musk’s sweeping government-slashing effort, which is facing numerous court challenges over its lawfulness.Trump also targeted a number of advisory committees and agencies for elimination, part of his broader campaign to assert control over independent executive agencies.Among the agencies set to be disbanded are the United States Institute for Peace, which promotes conflict resolution around the world; the Inter-American Foundation, which funds community development programs in Latin America and the Caribbean; and the US African Development Foundation, which invests in community development efforts in Africa.With Associated Press and Reuters More

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      US politics briefing: Trump rails against Zelenskyy and derails Senate Republicans’ budget proposal

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      The Guardian is tracking Donald Trump and his administration’s latest moves with several stories, features and analyses each day. Here are some of the biggest stories in US politics that happened Wednesday, 19 February.Trump calls Zelenskyy a ‘dictator’The US and Ukraine appear to be heading towards an irreconcilable rift after Donald Trump escalated his attacks on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling the Ukrainian president “a dictator” and warning that he “better move fast” or he “won’t have a country left”.The US leader’s comments on Wednesday, which were rife with falsehoods, came after Zelenskyy said Trump was “trapped” in a Russian “disinformation bubble,” following Trump’s claims that Ukraine was to blame for Russia’s 2022 invasion, remarks that echoed the Kremlin’s narrative.Read the full storyGuardian reporters also fact-checked Trump’s claims about the war in Ukraine – including blaming Zelenskyy.Read the full storyTrump endorses House budget planDonald Trump has derailed Senate Republicans’ budget strategy by endorsing a competing House option, leaving GOP leaders scrambling to save their agenda just weeks before a potential government shutdown.The president’s surprise intervention came just hours after Senate Republicans moved to advance their own two-track proposal, as he declared instead that he wants “ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL” through the House’s reconciliation process.Read the full storyTrump orders DoJ to fire Biden-era US attorneysDonald Trump has said that he has instructed the justice department to fire any remaining US attorneys installed by the previous administration, in an apparent move to stamp out political appointees of Joe Biden who might resist having Trump’s agenda guide prosecutorial decisions. Writing on Truth Social, Trump said: “We must ‘clean house’ IMMEDIATELY, and restore confidence.”The dismissal of US attorneys after a change in administration is typical, although the Trump administration has been unusually aggressive in pushing for mass firings across the boardRead the full storyTrump expands independent regulators’ powerDonald Trump has extended his power over independent regulatory agencies – by signing an executive order making agencies established by Congress accountable to the White House. Some experts said the move clashed with mainstream interpretations of the constitution.Read the full storyTrump group sues Brazil justice involved in Bolsonaro caseTrump’s media group and the video platform Rumble have jointly filed a lawsuit against a Brazilian supreme court justice, claiming he violated the right to free speech of a far-right Brazilian influencer residing in the US.The suit against justice Alexandre de Moraes was filed in Florida hours after the indictment of Brazil’s ex-president Jair Bolsonaro for leading a plot to cling to power after losing the 2022 election.Last year, Moraes was involved in a months-long confrontation with Elon Musk, after ordering Musk’s social platform X to block accounts sharing far-right misinformation and anti-democratic content.Read the full storyJudge refuses to block Doge’s access to US dataA federal judge refused to immediately block Elon Musk and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) from accessing government data systems or participating in worker layoffs. The US district judge Tanya Chutkan found there were legitimate questions about the billionaire’s authority but said there was not enough evidence of grave legal harm to justify a temporary restraining order.Read the full storyTrump moves to fast-track fossil fuel projectsEnvironmentalists were outraged on Wednesday after the Trump administration moved to fast-track fossil fuel projects through the permitting process, with activists describing it as an attempt to sidestep environmental laws that could harm waterways and wetlands.Read the full storyState department orders media subscriptions cancelledThe state department has reportedly ordered its outposts around the world to cancel all subscriptions to news and media outlets that are supposedly “non-mission critical” in another extraordinary Trump administration crackdown on normal information channels.Read the full storyTrump calls himself king to widespread backlashThere was backlash from Democrats after Trump likened himself to a “king” on social media following his administration’s decision to rescind New York City’s congestion pricing program. On Wednesday Trump wrote on Truth Social: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” The White House then proceeded to share Trump’s quote on social media, accompanied with a computer-generated image of Trump grinning on a fake Time magazine cover while donning a golden crown, behind him the skyline of New York City.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative, a global finance conference in Miami organized by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, Trump said the United States is “back and open for business” and that the “dark days of high taxes, crushing regulations, rampant inflation, flagrant corruption, government weaponization … and total incompetence will be gone for ever.”

      Illinois governor JB Pritzker delivered a searing state-of-the-state address, likening Trump’s stunning power grabs to the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany.

      In a blistering statement after asking a federal judge to dismiss the corruption case against New York mayor Eric Adams, the acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove invited justice department officials and prosecutors who disagreed with the decision to quit.

      The Internal Revenue Service will fire 6,700 people as early as Thursday, kicking off mass layoffs just as tax season begins. Further reductions in the size of the agency are expected. More

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      Doubts raised over US travel system during 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics

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      The United States is unprepared for the burdens placed on its air travel system when the country hosts the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, according to a report released on Wednesday.The US Travel Association, a non-profit that represents the travel industry, commissioned a report written by former government officials and industry experts. The report raises concerns about visas, creaking infrastructure and poor security technology.The report says that the World Cup, Olympics and Paralympics, 2025 Ryder Cup and celebrations for the US’s 250th birthday could draw in an estimated 40 million visitors to the country.“We’re not ready to host the upcoming mega decade of events that will draw millions of domestic and international travelers. This poses risks to our national security and hampers economic growth,” the report says.While the Trump administration has made significant cuts across the government, the US Travel Association said there needs to be investment in visa processing and airport security.“The president has been outspoken about making this the gold standard of World Cups, the best Olympics that has ever been held,” Geoff Freeman, the US Travel Association’s CEO, told ESPN. “To do those things, to achieve those goals, you’ve got to make some of these investments.”Freeman said he had met with White House officials in the last week. He highlighted visa wait times as a particular problem area, with approval times for some countries that may reach the World Cup – such as Colombia – currently running at nearly two years.“People want to come, but they’re not coming,” Freeman said. “It gets down to these visa wait times. It gets down to the customs inefficiencies. It gets down to a perception in instances that people aren’t welcome. We’re very concerned.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US will co-host the World Cup with Mexico and Canada, although most of the game will take place in the US. Concerns have also been raised about extreme temperatures players could face during the tournament. More