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      JD Vance’s home town is bouncing back – and it’s largely thanks to immigrants

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      When Daniel Cárdenas from Coahuila, Mexico, first arrived in Middletown, a post-industrial city of 50,000 people in south-west Ohio, he was immediately enamored.“It’s a small town with friendly people. You have shops, big stores; there’s no traffic,” he says.“I really fell in love with Middletown. It’s awesome.”A pastor at the First United Methodist church since 2022, Cárdenas is one of a growing number of immigrants from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Honduras who have moved to the home town of Vice-President JD Vance in recent years. And while Vance has been at the forefront of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US, the story of immigration’s impact on Middletown is one of rebirth and success.Dominated for decades by a huge steel plant on the south side of town, Middletown has felt the effects of the decline of American manufacturing more than most. A 2006 lockout at the steel plant that lasted for more than a year saw AK Steel lay off nearly a thousand workers. The ramifications of the Great Recession that followed in 2008 can still be felt, fueling a population decline of more than 10% between 2010 and 2020.But today, the city is bouncing back, with immigrants such as Cárdenas playing a central role. Nearly all of its population growth since 2010 can be attributed to its foreign-born population, which stands at more than 2,000 people.Its Hispanic communities have helped turn Middletown into one of the few regional cities in the state with a growing population. Homes and commercial spaces on the city’s south side have been revitalized, creating new sources of property and income tax revenue for city authorities. Mexican food trucks dot the city’s street corners and Spanish chatter fills its local chain restaurants.In November, Middletown’s mayor, Elizabeth Slamka, was elected without having any political experience, and is the daughter of an immigrant mother from Colombia.“After the pandemic, everything was closed,” says Cárdenas. “And now we are having a kind of boost in our community, and the Hispanic communities are helping with that.” Many, he says, work in construction and landscaping jobs – industries that have suffered chronic staffing shortages since the pandemic and which represent a wider midwestern trend.The midwest is set to be one of the regions most affected by population decline in the decades ahead. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan currently make up four of the 10 most populous states in the country, but all four are expected to experience population decline by 2050.Shrinking populations for communities in the industrial midwest mean fewer resources for infrastructure, maintenance and other basic needs.Vance, however, has made criticizing immigrants a central theme of his political career.Since before his election win last November, he has claimed immigrants undercut American workers, and in recent weeks has claimed that uncontrolled immigration is the “greatest threat” to the US.And he’s not alone.For decades Middletown’s Butler county sheriff, Richard Jones, who sports a Stetson hat, has been known for taking an anti-immigrant stance. The same week Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House, Jones installed a sign outside the county jail that reads: “illegal aliens here.” Recently Jones, who has had a grip on the sheriff’s office for more than 20 years, began renting out jail cells to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency at a rate of $68 per person a day and $36 an hour for transportation, or in his own words for “as much as I can get”.This month, the sheriff’s office and a city neighboring Middletown were ordered to pay a $1.2m settlement for the wrongful detention of about 500 people over a two-year period beginning in 2017.The anti-immigrant rhetoric from Vance, Jones and Trump has hit home.After mass, some people have approached Cárdenas expressing fear of Ice raids, following one such incident that saw two people detained 20 miles north of Middletown just days after Trump took office in January.“People are saying they are seeing undercover police cars; people are afraid, they don’t know what to believe; there are a lot of rumors,” he says. “In my sermons, I try to give some hope.”Two years ago, Alexandra Gomez established the Latinos Unidos de Middletown Ohio organization to serve as a venue for Latino immigrants to find education, housing and employment resources. “At our first festival in 2023 we had about 1,500 to 2,000 people,” she says.But statements from the new administration in recent weeks have fueled concern.“It was real here; people were scared, they did not want to go out. They were afraid to go to work,” she says.“And it isn’t that people were afraid that Ice would show up [at their gatherings] but that someone who felt the right to be rude shows up. The biggest concerns people have are: ‘How do I go to work?’”One of the biggest effects of the recent rise in immigration has been seen in the city’s schools.Over the last 15 years, the number of students taking English language classes has more than doubled. Today, nearly one-in-five students are Hispanic or Latino, their presence helping to keep the wider school system funded and operating. The winner of last year’s Middletown Community Foundation’s volunteer of the year award was a high school teacher originally from Colombia.Gomez and Cárdenas say a source of comfort for immigrants has come from a surprising source: the local police force.Cárdenas says his and other churches recently had a meeting with the city police force and was told that it wouldn’t be working with Ice to request visa documents or detain suspected illegal immigrants. “They said: ‘We are not going to profile anybody; we are just going to do our job.’”That was echoed by Gomez.“They reached out to us and basically said: ‘We’ve got other things to do. It’s not our job to be chasing paperwork.’”Such has been the growth in Middletown – about three-fourths of the city’s foreign-born population are from Latin American countries, according to the US Census Bureau – that Roberto Vargas from Guadalajara, Mexico, saw on opportunity to open the Cancun Mexican restaurant on the city’s eastern edge in December 2023.“I have good people working for me; I haven’t heard anyone have issues with [deportations or Ice activity],” he says.For him, it’s the state of the economy that is the major concern.“Restaurants all over the place are closing down. It’s scary,” he says. Since Trump took office, the US economy has been on unsteady ground, with the stock market losing 7% of its value.“I don’t know what’s going on.” More

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      So many souvenirs for JD Vance to take home from Greenland: oil, gas, minerals – and that’s just the start | Marina Hyde

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      There’s a Gerard Butler movie called Greenland, which – via a series of cataclysmic events handled incredibly Butlerishly – ends with Gerard cocooned in a remote secure bunker in Greenland. As the week has worn on, this has increasingly become the mood of today’s supposedly super-fun tourist trip to Greenland by the second lady of the United States, Usha Vance, and her husband, the vice-president, JD Vance. Who, come to think of it, does actually look like the Cabbage Patch Gerard Butler.Anyway: Greenland. Like I say, the trip has evolved this week both in style and substance. Originally, it was announced that the second lady was going to take one of her sons, immerse herself in various local events – she’s apparently simply fascinated by Greenland’s culture – and attend the famous Avannaata Qimussersua dog sled race. No more. Now, it’s her husband instead of her son, and the Vances are only going to a military facility. This is a little bit like announcing you’re travelling to Kyoto to see the blossoms, then “recalibrating” your trip so that all you’ll actually be taking in is a tour of the storage facility where they keep the most boring documents from the signing of the 1997 climate protocol. Extremely important, no doubt – and extremely, extremely boring. Or as the White House has chosen to characterise this shift in emphasis: “The Second Lady is proud to visit the Pituffik Space Base with her husband to learn more about Arctic security and the great work of the Space Base.” It is unclear at time of writing if Pituffik has spa facilities. Presumably it’s got something of a year-round après-ski vibe.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, the Vance kid now has to stay at home and go to school, instead of skipping it to enjoy a taxpayer-funded trip to a country his dad and friends are openly trying to annex. Still, the good news is that Mike Waltz should still be going. Yes! The second lady was in fact always slated to go on her little tourist jaunt accompanied by the national security adviser to the US president – and there’s nothing weird about that. Personally, I never minibreak without one. And it goes without saying that the travelling party will be joined in spirit by whichever journalists/Russian assets/assorted randos that Mike has added to the groupchat “Greenland Annexation Brunch With The Girls”.Alas, it seems that the sheer obnoxiousness of the Vances’ trailed visit was the thing that fatally repulsed the locals, leaving US organisers with no choice but to commute the trip down to just one secure base visit. It’s reported that advance-party administration officials went door to door in Greenland trying to find a local family who would be pleased to welcome Usha and her large adult son Mike Waltz into their humble dwelling – presumably in order that they could say something like: “Wow, what a beautiful humble home you have. Be a real shame if anything happened to it …”Strangely, no such family was forthcoming. It’s almost as if people in Greenland have the internet, and are able to read or watch the constant and intensifying statements on their country’s potential annexation by the covetous US president, Donald Trump. “It’s an island … that we need,” observed Trump with chilling mildness earlier this week. “And we’re going to have to have it.” Further matter-of-fact justifications have been repeatedly forthcoming. “We need greater national security purposes [sic],” ran another. “I’ve been told that for a long time, long before I even ran [for president]. People really don’t even know that Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security.” Spoken with all the kindly rationale of the school bully explaining you should give up your lunch money because he needs it.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, a series of proxies are emerging to push America’s case – or, in the case of Vladimir Putin, to not argue with it in a way that is tantamount to cheerleading. “In short, America’s plans in relation to Greenland are serious,” the Russian president observed this week. “These plans have deep historical roots. And it’s clear that the US will continue to systematically pursue its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Аrctic.” On Friday morning, Stephen Moore – a former Trump economic adviser-turned-Heritage Foundation wingnut – explained cheerfully to the BBC that the Greenlanders were “the people who would benefit the most from this … let’s call it a sale, or acquisition.” Let’s not, but go on. “They could, overnight, turn into millionaires.” This somehow reminds me of that old statistic suggesting that instead of going to an expensive war to protect them, the British government could instead have just made every Falkland Islander a millionaire to soften the unwanted blow of having been taken over by Argentina. After all, what else do people want in life, except for money?“There could be trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals and oil and gas and other types of … precious minerals that could be of value to the United States,” speculated Moore, adding, almost by way of an afterthought about the Greenlanders, that there’s “essentially a treasure chest right below their feet”. Mm. The trouble with the nakedly rapacious hawks of Trumpworld putting it that way, of course, is that it’s only a very short hop to seeing the Greenland people as the obstacle. If only they, and their feet, could just be dug through, then the treasure chest could be rightfully – or wrongfully – claimed.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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      What is ‘abundance’ liberalism, and why are people arguing about it?

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      Is progressive public policy in America broken? Do many left-leaning laws actually make life more expensive for struggling people? Is regulatory red tape hindering growth and innovation? Have Democratic-run cities, such as New York and San Francisco, become giant billboards against liberal governance?These arguments wouldn’t sound out of place in a policy paper from a conservative thinktank. Yet their newest champions are two of America’s best-known left-leaning journalists, the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson – and they believe the left is overdue for a reckoning of sorts.Klein and Thompson make their case in a new book simply called, with no subtitle, Abundance. The authors put forward a positive pitch for “abundance liberalism”: a vision of the US where policymakers spend less time fighting over how to apportion scarce resources and more time making sure there’s no scarcity to start with.View image in fullscreenAbundance has received a mostly positive reception so far, but also sparked debate, with critics arguing that the book ignores the effect of corporate power, downplays Republicans’ role in the crises that the US faces or overstates the effectiveness of its policy prescriptions. A writer in the left-leaning magazine American Prospect accused the “abundance agenda” of being “neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world”.The book opens with a striking image of a US, in the year 2050, that is close to utopia. Americans’ electrical needs are powered by sustainable energy “so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill”. AI breakthroughs, labor rights and economic reforms mean that most people can do their jobs in a shorter workweek. Vertical farms provide cheap and fresh vegetables, desalinated water from the ocean is used as drinking water, and lab-grown meat has replaced animal slaughter.This near-future America – less the gritty neon smog of Blade Runner than a hi-tech Copenhagen – is entirely achievable, the authors argue. It just requires political vision and a willingness to reconsider certain assumptions.Despite being the richest country in the world, the US has a problem of scarcity, particularly in Democratic-run metropolitan areas, where the costs of housing and other basic needs have spiraled out of control. This is exacerbated by the traditional progressive solution of giving people money or vouchers to help them pay for finite resources such as housing, healthcare and food, the book argues, which increases demand and merely makes those things even more expensive.“The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing,” Klein has said. He and Thompson have described themselves as “supply-side” progressives, borrowing a term usually associated with conservative economic theories.What the US badly needs to do is build, they argue – build more houses, public transportation, power plants and other infrastructure – but that isn’t happening.One obstacle is nimbyism, the tendency of people to support public works and development in the abstract but fight them when they affect their own neighborhoods. Another is “everything bagel” logrolling that complicates what should be narrowly focused legislation by layering it with other social and political objectives, such as diverse hiring requirements or climate crisis goals, in order to appease interest groups or political constituencies.In an example Thompson recently discussed on a podcast, then president Joe Biden signed legislation in 2021 providing $42bn of funding to expand access to broadband internet in rural America. As of this December, according to Politico, the program had “yet to connect a single household”. Critics told Politico that this was partly because of a “suite of federal conditions” that required states “accepting the money to make sure providers plan for climate change, reach out to unionized workforces and hire locally”, as well as guarantee affordable broadband plans for people with low incomes.“I don’t want the state of Virginia taking, say, federal money to build broadband internet and then charging poor rural folks, like, $200 a month to go online,” Thompson said. “But by holding those values so closely … we accidentally built just about nothing.” A “confusion of process versus outcomes” meant that “very little was actually done on behalf of the Americans for whom we wanted to raise their living standards”.Another example is California, which in 1982 began studying the idea of implementing a high-speed rail system across the state. The idea was, and is, extremely popular with voters, and billions of dollars were budgeted for the project. Four decades later, almost none of it has been built. A “vetocracy” of regulatory, legal, environmental and political considerations have caused endless delays and continually narrowed the project’s ambition.“In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system,” Thompson and Klein write, “China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.”The solution to these problems, Abundance argues, is a combination of techno-optimism, ambitious and clearly defined policy goals, and political leadership that is willing at times to say no to progressive pressure groups.Klein and Thompson favorably cite what happened when a bridge collapsed in Pennsylvania in 2023, crippling an essential highway. To fix it would typically take months of planning, consultation and reviews; Governor Josh Shapiro instead declared a state of emergency that allowed the reconstruction of the bridge with union labor but free from many normal processes. The highway reopened in 12 days, instead of the 12 to 24 months that it might have taken.Abundance makes clear that it is a book written for the left, and isn’t really interested in elaborating the ways that Republicans and conservatives have contributed to these problems, though Klein and Thompson acknowledge that they have. Yet within the left the book has proved controversial.“[I]t would be a huge mistake,” Matt Bruenig, a policy analyst, wrote in Jacobin, “to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction.”He continued: “Indeed, we have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform and then the government.”While agreeing with some of Abundance’s aims, the journalists Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, writing in the Washington Monthly, argued that the book’s prescriptions wouldn’t necessarily bring the kind of sweeping changes that Klein and Thompson believe. For example, according to examples they cite, areas of the US that have reformed zoning laws to make it easier to build apartment buildings and multifamily homes have seen only modest reductions in the cost of housing.Thompson and Klein have argued that the abundance agenda is bigger than any individual policy proposal, and more about the Democratic party and other left-leaning institutions rethinking their own ambitions and how they conceive of success and failure.“Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California!” they write. “Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! … What has gone wrong?” More

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      Donald Trump moves to end union rights for many government agency employees – US politics live

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      Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and will be bringing you all the latest news lines through this morning.We start with news that president Donald Trump has signed an executive order limiting numerous federal workers from unionising and ordering the government to stop engaging in any collective bargaining.A memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) references an order from Trump but also provides a fact sheet, setting out the rationale for such a move, The Hill reports.It reads: “President Trump is taking action to ensure that agencies vital to national security can execute their missions without delay and protect the American people.”The Hill reports today:
      The order targets agencies it says have a national security mission but many of the departments don’t have a strict national security connection.
      In addition to all agencies with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of State, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, the order also covers the Treasury Department, all agencies with Health and Human Services (HHS), the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the General Services Administration, and many more.
      In total the OPM memo references 18 departments while also including numerous component agencies. The OPM memo instructs agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreement.
      “Consequently, those agencies and subdivisions are no longer required to collectively bargain with Federal unions,” OPM states in its memo.
      Because the statutory authority underlying the original recognition of the relevant unions no longer applies, unions lose their status as the ‘exclusive[ly] recogni[zed]’ labor organizations for employees of the agencies.
      The memo also says “agencies should cease participating in grievance procedures after terminating their CBA [collective bargaining agreements].”It has been condemned by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) in an email to members, which said the Trump administration was “illegally strip[ping] collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers”.The AFGE added:
      Let’s be clear. National security is not the reason for this action. This is retaliation because our union is standing up for AFGE members – and a warning to every union: fall in line, or else.
      AFGE is not going anywhere. We are fighting back. We are preparing legal action.
      In other news:

      Lawmakers sent a bipartisan letter to the Pentagon’s inspector general asking for an investigation into the Signal group chat in which the defense secretary texted attack plans on a non-secure device.

      Fearing the loss of her seat in the House, Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the UN.

      Judge James Boasberg ordered all relevant government agencies to retain the Signal group chat messages tat are now the subject of litigation.

      Asked about reports that 300 student visas had been revoked, US secretary of state Marco Rubio replied: “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

      Attorney general Pamela Jo Bondi directed the justice department’s civil rights division to ensure that four California universities – Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of California, Irvine – are not using “illegal DEI policies” in admissions.

      Trump signed an executive order directing his vice-president, JD Vance, to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

      A Russian scientist working at Harvard has been detained by Ice and threatened with deportation back to Russia, where she faces jail for protesting the war on Ukraine. More

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      Trump news at a glance: judge orders now-infamous Signal chat be retained as tariff fallout deepens

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      A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to preserve all Signal messages exchanged in the now-infamous group chat in which officials organised a high-level military operation in Yemen that inadvertently included a journalist.The temporary restraining order compels defense secretary Pete Hegseth, secretary of state Marco Rubio, treasury secretary Scott Bessent, CIA director John Ratcliffe and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to save their texts from 11 to 15 March.Judge orders retention of all Signal group textsJames Boasberg, the chief US district judge in Washington, ordered all messages in the group chat be preserved, adding that his decision was aimed at ensuring no messages were lost and not because he decided the Trump administration had done anything wrong.Boasberg is set to decide at a later stage whether the disappearing message function of the Signal chat violated federal records retention laws.Read the full storyEnd of an era for Canada-US ties, says Carney, as allies decry Trump’s car tariffsCanada’s prime minister has said the era of deep ties with the US “is over”, as governments from Tokyo to Berlin to Paris sharply criticized Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on car imports, with some threatening retaliatory action.Mark Carney warned Canadians that Trump had permanently altered relations and that, regardless of any future trade deals, there would be “no turning back”.Read the full storyHegseth’s Arabic tattoo stirs controversyThe US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth has a tattoo that appears to read “infidel” or “non-believer” in Arabic, according to photos on his social media account.In photos posted on Tuesday on X, the former Fox News host had what appears to be a tattoo that says “kafir”, an Arabic term used within Islam to describe an unbeliever. Hegseth appears to have also had the tattoo in another Instagram photo posted in July 2024. A pro-Palestinian activist said Hegseth having the tattoo was a “clear symbol of Islamophobia”.Read the full storyStefanik’s UN bid axed to protect House majorityUS House representative Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the US ambassador to the United Nations was pulled by Donald Trump on Thursday, a stunning turnaround for his cabinet pick after her confirmation had been stalled over concerns about Republicans’ tight margins in the House.Read the full storyRubio boasts of 300 cancelled visasThe US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, boasted on Thursday that he has cancelled more than 300 visas for people he labelled “lunatics” in connection with pro-Palestinian university campus protests.The US state department is undertaking a widespread visa-review process, revoking hundreds of visas and placing hundreds more under scrutiny, targeting mostly foreign nationals engaged in pro-Palestine activism, according to official statements.During a visit to Guyana, Rubio said: “We do it every day, every time I find one of these lunatics.”Read the full storyTrump lawyers defend sending student to detention centreLawyers for the US government defended their transferring of doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk from Massachusetts to immigration detention in Louisiana because they did so before a court ordered she not be removed from without prior notice.Ozturk, a 30-year-old student from Tufts University, was sent to detention in the south on Wednesday after being snatched off the street by masked Ice agents outside her home on Tuesday.Read the full storyFossil fuel firms can email Trump to skip pollution rulesDonald Trump’s administration has offered fossil fuel companies an extraordinary opportunity to evade air pollution rules by simply emailing the US president to ask him to exempt them.Read the full storyThe Vances head to Greenland The vice-president, JD Vance, and his wife, Usha Vance, are due to touch down in Greenland on Friday in a drastically scaled down trip to the Arctic island after the original plans for the unsolicited visit prompted an international diplomatic row.The visit to Pituffik, a remote ice-locked US military base in northwestern Greenland, will be closely watched by leaders in Nuuk and Copenhagen, both of whom have aired their opposition to the contentious trip amid ongoing threats by Donald Trump to acquire Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark.Read the full story.What else happened today:

      Airline travel between Canada and the US is “collapsing” over Trump tariffs, with flight bookings between the two countries down by over 70%.

      Robert F Kennedy Jr said the nation’s health agencies will cut 10,000 jobs from their 82,000-person workforce – an enormous reduction the US health secretary characterized as streamlining federal bureaucracy amid internal resistance to the administration’s agenda.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 26 March 2025. More

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      Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for ‘improper ideology’

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      Donald Trump revealed his intentions to reshape the Smithsonian Institution with an executive order on Thursday that targets funding to programs with “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology”.The president said there has been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite US history by replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”.He signed an executive order putting JD Vance in charge of an effort to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.Trump’s order specifically names the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Women’s history museum, which is in development.“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn – not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” the order said.Representatives for the Smithsonian did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education and research complex. It consists of 21 museums and the National Zoo. Eleven museums are located along the National Mall in Washington.The institution was established with funds from James Smithson, a British scientist who left his estate to the United States to found “at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge”.On Thursday, Trump also created the “DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force” by executive order. It will be chaired by Stephen Miller, the US homeland security adviser.According to the order, the task force will coordinate with local officials on such things as enforcing federal immigration law, including deporting people living illegally in the city, boost the law enforcement presence, and increase the speed and lower the cost of processing applications to carry concealed weapons.The order also calls for removing graffiti and taking other steps to beautify the city.Trump has talked often about his desire to make the city safer and prettier. More

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      Trump is interested in joining the Commonwealth. It’s not up to him – or even the king

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      It seems Britain has one key inducement to offer US President Donald Trump: a state visit hosted by King Charles.

      One can only imagine what the king thinks of this, but he will undoubtedly maintain a stiff upper lip and preside over several lavish dinners.

      Following reports of this offer, which would make Trump the only US president to be twice hosted by a British monarch, stories surfaced that the US might become an associate member of the Commonwealth.

      Read more:
      The king has a tricky diplomatic role to play in inviting Trump for a state visit

      There has been no official confirmation of this, but the story has been floated in several British newspapers.

      What is the Commonwealth?

      The Commonwealth came into existence as a means of retaining links with former British colonies, so there is a certain historical justification for the idea.

      Almost all of Britain’s former colonies are now members of the Commonwealth of Nations, with Ireland and the US notable exceptions.

      The Commonwealth is an organisation that ties together 56 countries, including a few in Africa that have been admitted despite not having been British colonies.

      Of the 56, only a minority recognise the British king as their head of state, a point local monarchists are reluctant to acknowledge.

      Indeed, some members of the Commonwealth, such as Malaysia, Brunei and Tonga, have their own hereditary monarchs.

      In theory, all members are democratic, and several, such as Fiji, have at times been suspended from membership for failing on this count.

      Whatever doubts we might have about the state of US democracy, it is hard to argue the US would fail to meet a bar that allows continued membership to states such as Pakistan and Zimbabwe.

      The Commonwealth is largely seen as less important than other international groupings, and its heads of government meetings are often skipped by leaders of the most significant members.

      Other than turning up to the Commonwealth Games, few recent Australian prime ministers have paid it much attention, compared to our membership of the G20 or the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).

      Nonetheless, the Commonwealth does include a remarkable range of countries ranging from significant states such as India, Canada and South Africa to the many island states of the Pacific and the Caribbean.

      While its work is largely unreported, it does provide a range of international assistance and linkages that otherwise would be out of reach for its smaller and poorer members.

      Why is Trump interested in joining?

      Trump, it can be assumed, has no interest in the Commonwealth as a means of better working with states such as Namibia and Belize.

      The attraction seems to be linked to his strange reverence for royalty and a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the British sovereign.

      King Charles is head of the Commonwealth through agreement of its members, probably in recognition of the extraordinary commitment his mother showed as the Commonwealth developed out of the old British Empire. Indeed, she clashed several times with her British ministers because of her loyalty to the Commonwealth.

      But unlike the king’s British – and Australian – crown, this is not a position that belongs automatically to the British monarch.

      So, while inviting Trump to Windsor Castle may be the gift of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, admission to the Commonwealth would require the agreement of all its members.

      Given Trump’s demands to acquire Canada and to punish South Africa for recent land expropriation law, it is hard to imagine unanimous enthusiasm.

      Read more:
      Donald Trump is picking fights with leaders around the world. What exactly is his foreign policy approach?

      Most member states are cautious about being too closely linked to either the US or China, although Australia might end up the last true believer in US alliances. Others, such as Ghana and Pakistan, depend considerably on Chinese aid.

      In a world dominated by increasingly autocratic leaders, a middle power like Australia needs as wide a range of friends as possible. Most of us have only a vague sense of what the Commonwealth entails.

      Like all international institutions, the Commonwealth often seems more concerned with grand statements than actual commitment.

      But there is value in a global organisation whose members claim to be committed to:

      democracy and democratic processes, including free and fair elections and representative legislatures; the rule of law and independence of the judiciary; good governance, including a well-trained public service and transparent public accounts; and protection of human rights, freedom of expression, and equality of opportunity.

      Would Trump’s America meet those demands? More