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      Construction appears to start on Trump’s $250m White House ballroom

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      Construction crews appear to have started demolishing part of the East Wing of the White House to make way for Donald Trump’s planned ballroom, prompting widespread criticism on social media and beyond.One former lawmaker even called the renovation an “​​utter desecration”.The Washington Post, which obtained and published photos of the demolition activity and cited two eyewitnesses, reported on Monday that demolition is under way and shared an image showing construction in progress and parts of the exterior ripped down.Other images, including ones seen in the New York Post, also show demolition of parts of the East Wing.The White House did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.On his Truth Social platform on Monday, Trump said that “ground has been broken on the White House” to build the new ballroom.“I am honored to be the first President to finally get this much-needed project underway — with zero cost to the American Taxpayer! The White House Ballroom is being privately funded by many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly,” he added.Earlier, at a ceremony in Washington DC celebrating the NCAA champion Louisiana State University baseball team on Monday, Trump said his administration plans to build “the most beautiful ballroom in the country”.“I didn’t know I’d be standing here right now because, right on the other side, you have a lot of construction going on, which you might hear periodically,” he said during the White House event.Plans to build an enormous $250m ballroom addition to the White House – one of the largest projects at the White House in more than a century – emerged in July. At the time, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the renovated space would span 90,000 sq ft (8,300 sq meters) and seat up to 650 people. Officials said that it would be paid for by Trump and unnamed donors.View image in fullscreenOf the renovation, Trump said in July: “In the White House, for 150 years, they’ve wanted to have a ballroom,” adding that “there’s never been a president that was good at ballrooms.“I’m good at building things and we’re going to build quickly and on time” he said. “It’ll be beautiful, top, top of the line.”Reports broke in August that work would begin in September. It’s expected to be completed before the end of Trump’s second term, in January 2029.Trump previously claimed that the new structure would not “interfere with the current building”, according to the Washington Post.View image in fullscreen“It’ll be near it but not touching it – and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” Trump said during an executive order signing in July, according to the Post. “It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”Earlier this month, Trump hosted a dinner at the White House for donors funding the ballroom. During the event, he reportedly opened the curtains of the East Room to show where construction on the ballroom had started. He told the guests that the new venue would feature bulletproof glass, accommodate 1,000 people and be capable of hosting a presidential inauguration.Guests at the dinner reportedly included representatives from Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Palantir and Lockheed Martin.Concerns and criticisms over Trump’s renovation plans have cropped up from lawmakers and on social media.Democratic representative Mark Takano of California proposed a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds for any construction or renovation at the White House during a government shutdown, unless the work is directly related to health or safety. Monday marked day 20 of the ongoing government shutdown.Joe Walsh, a former Republican member of Congress, called the renovation an “​​utter desecration”.“If I ran for President in 2028, I’d run on taking a bulldozer to Trump’s ballroom, an utter desecration of the peoples’ house,” Walsh said in a post on X on Monday, reacting to a picture showing part of the White House being demolished.“In fact, I’d invite the American people one weekend to bring their own sledgehammers & crowbars to the White House to help tear that abomination down.”“Wealth & income inequality is at record highs in America, but glad we’re spending $250M on a vanity project,” said human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid. More

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      Trump nominee reportedly boasted of ‘Nazi streak’ in group chats

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      A Donald Trump nominee who is scheduled for a confirmation hearing this week told other Republicans he “has a Nazi streak” and that holidays commemorating Black people should be “eviscerated,” according to a report based on a private group chat.Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to serve as special counsel of the United States, a role charged in part with safeguarding federal whistleblowers from retaliation. His confirmation hearing is set for Thursday.Politico reported on Monday that Ingrassia told other Republicans in a group chat that the Martin Luther King Jr holiday, which celebrates the civil rights icon, should be ended.“MLK Jr was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” Ingrassia wrote in the messages from early 2024, Politico reports. He also wrote that holidays commemorating Black people, such as Black history month or Juneteenth, should all be “eviscerated”, though he used an Italian slur for Black people.His comment about a “Nazi streak” came amid a discussion of a Trump campaign staffer who wasn’t being deferential enough to the founding fathers being white, Politico reported. Another participant said Ingrassia “belongs in the Hitler Youth”, to which Ingrassia responded: “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.”Ingrassia’s attorney, Edward Andrew Paltzik, told the outlet that the texts could have been manipulated or lacking context, though that if they were real, they “clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor making fun of the fact that liberals outlandishly and routinely call Maga supporters ‘Nazis’”.Ingrassia, 30, has had several roles in the second Trump administration. He was a White House liaison to the justice department, then moved to the Department of Homeland Security. He was nominated in May to lead the office of special counsel, but his appointment was postponed. His critics have drawn on his public comments and inexperience for the role, as well as his support of white supremacist Nick Fuentes.Ingrassia was also accused of sexual harassment earlier this year, Politico reported. He has called the report about the alleged harassment a “vexatious political attack” and said it should be retracted.Politico reported last week on a trove of 2,900 pages of leaked chats from a Telegram group with young Republicans, in which the participants made racist comments, praised Hitler and celebrated rape.“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr,” said Bobby Walker, who was recently made chair of the New York division.The New York Republican state committee suspended the authorization of their young Republicans chapter after its members were implicated in the chat. More

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      Comey asks judge to dismiss criminal charges claiming selective prosecution

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      Former FBI director James Comey formally asked a federal judge to dismiss criminal charges against him, arguing he was the victim of a selective prosecution and that the US attorney who filed the charges was unlawfully appointed.“The record as it currently exists shows a clear causal link between President Trump’s animus and the prosecution of Mr Comey,” Comey’s lawyers wrote in their request to dismiss the case, calling a 20 September Truth Social post in which he disparaged Comey and called for his prosecution “smoking gun evidence”. “President Trump’s repeated public statements and action leave no doubt as to the government’s genuine animus toward Mr Comey.” Comey’s lawyers attached an exhibit to their filing on Monday, which contains dozens of public statements from Trump criticizing Comey.Comey was indicted on 25 September with one count of making a false statement and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding. The charges are related to Comey’s 30 September 2020 testimony before Congress, and are connected to Comey’s assertion he had never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak information. The precise details of the offense have not been made public and Comey has pleaded not guilty and forcefully denied any wrongdoing.The charges were filed against Comey, though career prosecutors in the justice department determined charges were not warranted. Trump forced out Erik Siebert, the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, in September and installed Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide. The Comey charges were filed days later.“In the ordinary case, a prosecutor’s charging decision is presumptively lawful and rests within her broad discretion. This is no ordinary case,” Comey’s lawyers wrote. “Here, direct evidence establishes that the President harbors genuine animus toward Mr. Comey, including because of Mr. Comey’s protected speech, that he installed his personal attorney as a ‘stalking horse’ to carry out his bidding; and that she then prosecuted Mr. Comey—days before the statute of limitations expired, with a faulty indictment—to effectuate the President’s wishes.”Comey’s Monday filing says that the fact that career prosecutors did not believe there was enough evidence to bring a case bolsters his argument that he was selectively prosecuted. They also argue that the indictment mischaracterizes the question Comey was asked that prompted the answer prosecutors say was a lie and the basis of his criminal false statement.According to the indictment, Comey was asked by a US senator whether he “had not ‘authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports’ regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1”. (Comey’s lawyers wrote in their filing on Monday that Person 1 was Hillary Clinton.)The accusation relates to a question from Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. During the 2020 hearing, Cruz noted that in 2017 congressional testimony, Comey denied “ever authoriz[ing] someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton Administration”. Cruz went on to note that Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, had said Comey authorized him to leak information to the Wall Street Journal.In response, Comey said he stood by his prior testimony. Comey’s lawyers argued on Monday the indictment was defective because Cruz’s question had been focused on McCabe, but the government informed them that the person Comey is alleged to have authorized to leak to the media is Daniel Richman, a friend of Comey’s and professor at Columbia University.“The indictment omits Senator Cruz’s words that explicitly narrow the focus of his questions to Mr. McCabe and misleadingly implies that the questioning related to Mr. Richman. In fact, Mr. Comey’s September 2020 exchange with Senator Cruz made no reference whatsoever to Mr. Richman, who ultimately appears in the indictment,” they wrote. They also note that Cruz asked about the “Clinton administration” and not “Hillary Clinton”.Career prosecutors interviewed Richman as part of their investigation into Comey and found him not helpful to making a case, according to the New York Times. John Durham, a special counsel appointed to investigate the FBI’s inquiry into Russian meddling, also told investigators he did not uncover evidence to support charges against Comey.Comey’s lawyers also argued on Monday that the case should be dismissed because Halligan was not lawfully appointed.“The United States cannot charge, maintain, and prosecute a case through an official who has no entitlement to exercise governmental authority,” they wrote.US attorneys must be confirmed by the Senate and can only serve for 120 days on an interim basis unless their appointment is extended by the judges overseeing their district. Siebert, Halligan’s predecessor, served for the 120-day limit and Halligan does not appear to have met other exceptions that would allow her to continue to serve.“The period does not start anew once the 120-day period expires or if a substitute interim U.S. Attorney is appointed before the 120-day period expires,” Comey’s attorneys wrote.Halligan has also overseen criminal fraud charges against New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, in connection to allegations she lied on mortgage documents. James has said she is not guilty. Legal experts have said that case does not appear to be strong. More

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      The Guardian view on Ukraine peace talks: Europe must ensure Zelenskyy can resist Trump’s bullying | Editorial

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      It wasn’t quite the calamity of February, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy was publicly humiliated in the Oval Office by Donald Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance. But the Ukrainian president’s latest visit to the White House on Friday was, by all accounts, a disquieting experience. Mr Trump’s public musings before the meeting suggested that his stance had hardened towards Vladimir Putin, to the strategically significant extent of being willing to sell long-range Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv. But by the time Mr Zelenskyy arrived in Washington, the US president had changed his mind, instead lecturing his guest on the need to make territorial concessions to Russia.So far, so familiar. Since being re-elected, Mr Trump has repeatedly resiled from following up tough talk on Russia with meaningful action. Faux deadlines for Mr Putin to make substantive steps towards peace have come and gone, treated with indifference by the Kremlin. Last week, the US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, stated that Washington was ready to “impose costs” if Russia continued the conflict. But a two-hour phone call at Mr Putin’s request was enough to defuse that threat, and for Mr Trump to once again position himself as a neutral arbitrator between two warring parties.The return of that insidious and amoral framing signifies a moment of diplomatic peril for Mr Zelenskyy. In language that is more suitable for describing a contested real-estate deal than an illegal invasion costing hundreds of thousands of lives, Mr Trump told Fox News that Mr Putin was “going to take something … he’s won certain property”. Should a planned meeting in Budapest take place between the US and Russian presidents – to be hosted by Hungary’s Putin-friendly leader, Viktor Orbán – discussion of a potential carve-up will dominate the agenda, as it did in the failed Alaska head-to-head.That prospect should concentrate minds ahead of a EU leaders’ summit later this week in Brussels. In the wake of the signing of the Gaza peace agreement – in relation to which Mr Putin was careful to offer fulsome congratulations – Mr Trump has taken to describing himself as “the mediator president”. In grimly paradoxical fashion, there is every possibility that he will try to bully Mr Zelenskyy into an unacceptable deal that rewards Russia’s aggression, in order to burnish his supposed credentials as a supreme peacemaker.It is critical that Europe provides Ukraine with the resources and staying power which allow it to resist such pressure. Progress is reportedly being made on proposals backed by the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, which would use frozen Russian assets to secure an interest-free £122bn loan to Kyiv. Such money, however it is sourced, will be fundamental to supporting Ukraine’s defence effort into next year. At a more symbolic level, there are also signs of a new determination to find ways to circumvent Mr Orbán’s opposition to advancing Ukraine’s bid for EU membership.As Mr Trump pursues his mercurial path, guided only by vanity, mercantilism and admiration for the exercise of brute force, EU leaders will need to be creative and determined in ensuring that Ukraine’s interests are adequately defended in the weeks and months to come. Mr Putin is playing the US president again, exploiting the absence of a moral compass in Washington. More than ever, a robust counterweight is required on the other side of the Atlantic. More

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      Trump says China ‘doesn’t want’ to invade Taiwan and reaffirms trust in Xi

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      Donald Trump has expressed doubt on Monday that China would invade Taiwan as he voiced confidence in his relationship with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, whom he will meet later this month.Trump was asked about an earlier Pentagon assessment that Xi could in the next six years attempt to seize Taiwan, a self-governing democracy claimed by China.“I think we’ll be just fine with China. China doesn’t want to do that,” Trump told reporters as he met the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese.Speaking of Xi’s designs on Taiwan, Trump said: “Now that doesn’t mean it’s not the apple of his eye, because probably it is, but I don’t see anything happening.”Without explicitly saying he would authorize force to defend Taiwan, Trump said that China knows that the United States “is the strongest military power in the world by far”.“We have the best of everything, and nobody’s going to mess with that. And I don’t see that at all with President Xi,” Trump said.“I think we’re going to get along very well as it pertains to Taiwan and others,” he said.Trump will hold his first meeting with Xi of his second term when the leaders of the world’s two largest economies visit South Korea later this month for an Asia-Pacific summit.Trump said his priority was reaching a “fair” trade deal with China. He declined to answer a question on whether he would sacrifice US support for Taiwan as part of an agreement with Xi.“I want to be good to China. I love my relationship with President Xi. We have a great relationship,” Trump said.The United States recognizes only Beijing and not Taiwan, where the Chinese mainland’s defeated nationalists fled in 1949 after losing the civil war to the communists and which has since turned into a flourishing democracy and technology hub.Under US law, the United States is required to provide Taiwan weapons for its self-defense but Washington has been deliberately ambiguous on whether it would use force to defend Taiwan.Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden repeatedly suggested he would order the US military to intervene if China moved on Taiwan. More

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      The massive No Kings protests may mark a new American political posture | Moira Donegan

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      Over the past week or so, it seemed as if some Republican leaders were hoping that Saturday’s No Kings demonstrations – the marches and rallies hosted by a coalition of liberal groups across the country and worldwide – would turn violent. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, called them “Hate America” rallies, a moniker that was quickly picked up by other Republicans, and described the No Kings protests as a crucible of potential riots, representing “all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the antifa people”. “You’re gonna bring together the Marxists, the socialists, the antifa advocates, the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing of the far-left Democrat party,” he said. Tom Emmer, a representative for Minnesota, described the rallies as a product of the “terrorist wing” of the Democratic party. And Roger Marshall, a senator from Kansas, fantasized that the protests would require action by the national guard. Others, such as the attorney general, Pam Bondi, mused about who might be paying the protesters to show up – an idea that seemed to dismiss the notion that anyone might oppose Donald Trump’s agenda for principled, rather than cynical, reasons.At times they sounded almost wistful. Republicans, the president himself chief among them, have been fervently endeavoring to cast those who oppose their authoritarian consolidation of power as enemies – contemptible un-Americans who lack virtue, common values, or the protection of the law. In a world where it was once considered the height of inappropriate partisanship for Hillary Clinton to refer to a “basket of deplorables” among Trump voters or Barack Obama to mourn the conservatives who “cling to guns or religion”, it barely registered as news on Thursday when the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News: “The Democrat party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”But no matter how fervently and how deeply the Trump regime appears to hate the American people, the No Kings protests that brought millions to the streets on Saturday suggests that the American people hate them even more. In the densely packed streets of cities from New York to Austin to Oakland to St Augustine, Florida, the massive protests took on a tone of jubilant contempt, with Trump and his various lackeys derided on signs and in effigies, with jokes that ranged from the high-minded to the vulgar. At a protest in San Francisco, I saw one man holding a sign that quoted Walt Whitman, walking near a woman making a vulgar reference to Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. A number of people donned inflatable character costumes – I saw a starfish, a teddy bear, two unicorns, a rooster and a pickle. They originated from Portland’s protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and national guard deployments as cheeky ways to mock the Trump administration’s claims that the city was “war-torn” and in need of armed invasion. If the anti-Trump resistance movements of his first administration were characterized by a kind of self-serious righteousness, those of the No Kings era have devolved into irreverence and humor. At times I was reminded of a peculiar feeling I have sometimes had, in the desperate hours after funerals or bad breakups, when I have been crying for so long that I find I’ve started laughing.The No Kings protests have been criticized for their capaciousness and indefinite agenda, and it is true that the demonstrations are the product of several large liberal groups and bring together people whose politics and inclinations would not ordinarily mix. At San Francisco’s protest, I saw the signature red rose of the democratic socialists, the Aztec eagle of the United Farm Workers, and a gold lamé sign held aloft by a largely unclothed man who declared himself a libertarian – in addition to a motley mix of men wearing the powdered wigs and tricorn hats of the founding fathers, women with white feathered sleeves and hoods posing as bald eagles, and a staggering number of people who wrapped themselves in the American flag.The hodgepodge of symbolism might reflect the chaotic and disorganized nature of the anti-Trump coalition – which, containing as it does the majority of the US’s 340 million people, is rife with contradictions. This has long been a problem for the Democrats: the party fears that their tent is too big, their base is too far from swing voters, and the coalitions of Obama and Joe Biden are too fractured and fragile to ever be maintained. But Trump has perhaps created a new kind of glue that can hold together a different kind of political movement: something that vast swaths of the American people hate even more than they hate each other.Amid the density of references and imagery, No Kings might also indicate a new political posture being born: a left-liberal popular front that mixes principle with irreverence. The aspiration of No Kings, in a way, is to abolish itself – to rebuild, perhaps a little sturdier and more honest this time, the kind of constitutional system in which law and persuasion replace Trump’s model of violence and domination. To put it another way: the people at the No Kings rallies all agree that they want to restore the kinds of liberal-democratic conditions that will enable them to disagree with one another.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt any rate, the violence that the Trump regime seemed to long for did not materialize. In San Francisco, an organizer speaking into a megaphone urged attenders to ignore any pro-Trump agitators they might encounter, and to not engage with any federal agents. “If you see uniformed feds outside a building,” he warned the crowd, “it’s bait.” Before the marches, some seemed frightened of what might happen – whether Trump-aligned federal forces might crack down with mass arrests, or whether pro-Trump militias might instigate a fight. But the demonstrations seem to have been remarkably peaceful, even cheerful, avoiding provocations and meeting virtually no violence from Trump-aligned forces. In New York, an estimated 100,000 marchers participated in No Kings events across the five boroughs, and an official Twitter account associated with the New York police department reported that there had been no arrests of protesters.Trump appeared disappointed. On Saturday evening, after the marches had largely disbanded and the millions who had turned out to oppose him went home, he took to Truth Social, his proprietary social media platform, to post an AI-generated video of himself. In the cartoon, Trump – wearing a crown – flies a fighter jet over the No Kings protests, and dumps feces on the protesting citizens. It was a peevish, petulant little display of contempt – the kind of behavior that you would punish in a child but which has become bog standard for the president of the United States. He evidently wanted Americans to know that he hates them. The feeling is mutual.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The right wants Charlie Kirk memorials across the US – but is it just an attempt to capitalize on his killing?

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      Republicans and conservatives are campaigning to quickly build statues and other memorials across the United States for the slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination at a college event in Utah last month.Political leaders in states such as Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma have not only called for construction of memorials but in some cases also threatened to penalize colleges that refuse to publicly honor Kirk, who was killed on 10 September.The heavy-handed push to honor Kirk, who held views that many see as racist and sexist, follows Donald Trump’s moves to restore monuments of Confederate leaders that were removed in recent years, which appear to be part of a broad effort to impose rightwing views on the country.“The way in which you keep the culture war going – or the way that you win it – is to have religious icons like Charlie and use their face and their name and their likeness to further your cause,” said Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia who has studied Christian nationalism.Kirk, who co-founded the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was killed at Utah State University during one of his signature events in which he debated students.Since then, Trump and others in his administration, such as Stephen Miller, have blamed the shooting – without producing any evidence – on a coordinated violent effort by the “radical left” and threatened to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” the left’s “terrorism and terror networks”.Kirk often criticized gay and transgender rights and made Islamophobic statements and once suggested that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake”. However, at the state and local level, Republican lawmakers have described Kirk as a “modern civil rights leader” who stood for “allowing everybody to voice their opinion respectfully”.Just a week after Kirk’s murder, Ohio Republican state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto introduced legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to build a “Charlie Kirk memorial plaza” with a statue “that features the conservative leader sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk “and his wife standing and holding their children in their arms”.A few weeks later, in Florida, Kevin Steele, a state house Republican, also proposed legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to rename roads for Kirk.“The Florida State University shall redesignate Chieftain Way as Charlie James Kirk Road,” the bill states. “Pasco-Hernando State College shall redesignate Mrs Prameela Musunuru Health and Wellness Trail as Charlie James Kirk Trail.”In Florida, if the schools do not establish the memorials by stated deadline, the state would withhold funding from the institutions, and in Oklahoma, the state would fine the schools, according to the legislation.Boedy, the University of North Georgia professor, likened the lawmakers’ threats to withhold state money to Trump’s moves to cut off federal funding to universities unless they met his list of demands.“State funding for education should be based upon students’ interest in majors, in enrollment and in science, in objective criteria, and honoring a single person is not part of that,” said Boedy, who has been on Turning Point’s watchlist of “professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”.Jett, Prieto and Steele did not respond to requests for comment.Kirk was critical of higher education and wrote a book titled The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth.“I find it really ironic that the state of Oklahoma is demanding that every public university have a Charlie Kirk memorial plaza,” said Erika Doss, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.While the states have not approved the legislation requiring the memorials, at least one Florida county has installed a sign for a Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway, despite some public opposition.And less than a week after the murder, New College of Florida, a liberal arts university that has been the subject of a conservative takeover, also posted on X an AI-generated image of a bronze sculpture of Kirk at a table and stated that it would build the statue on campus “to defend and fight for free speech and civil discourse in American life”.That may not be easy. After events like 9/11, the Vietnam war, and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, public monuments were often not built for years, sometimes decades.Quickly sharing a fake image of a Kirk memorial “is a lie”, Doss said. “It matters because it doesn’t tell the truth about how complicated and necessarily complicated making public art should be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy waiting years to build a memorial, you can see how time really changes the “emotional tenor and the perspective on the event”, said Gabriel Reich, a professor of history and social studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied collective memories of the US civil war and emancipation.“How people feel about [Kirk’s killing] five years from now may be different, and it may depend on what happens between now and then,” said Reich. “Does the political violence escalate and continue? Does it get tamped down?”It’s not a foregone conclusion that the schools will build the monuments.In Michigan, the Mecosta county board of commissioners wanted Ferris State University to build a statue for Kirk and offered to split the funding, but the school president declined, citing a “a longstanding practice that limits statues on campus to individuals who have made significant, direct contributions to Ferris State University itself”, according to the Detroit Free-Press.At New College, alum William Rosenberg sees the proposed statue as an attempt by the administration to distract from problems at the school, which was once a highly ranked institution considered among the most liberal in the country.“New College was a welcoming environment for people who were motivated and wanted to learn and wanted to do it on their own terms,” said Rosenberg, who graduated in 1980 with a degree in medieval studies.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has tried in recent years to transform the school by appointing political allies such as the conservative activist Christopher Rufo to its board of trustees, firing its president and revamping its curriculum.Since then, the school has seen its national ranking and graduation and retention rates plummet, while the state now spends significantly more on each student than those at its other public universities, according to Inside Higher Ed.After posting the AI image of the statue, New College’s president, Richard Corcoran, touted the public response in a weekly email.“In the first 72 hours of the announcement, New College of Florida was mentioned nearly 3 billion times (including traditional media in the graph below, and reposts on social media),” the email stated. “Normally, New College receives about 100 million impressions a month. In 72 hours, New College received about 2 1/2 years of media coverage.”A New College spokesperson, James Miller, declined an interview request.Rosenberg, a semi-retired computer engineer, doubts the school will actually build the statue because of Corcoran’s “history of promising the world and delivering nothing”.“A lot of alumni feel it was a gross PR move to capitalize on Charlie Kirk’s murder,” Rosenberg said. “New College of Florida has now become a political pawn whose real mission is about making political headlines while the on-the-ground education has nosedived.” More

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      Troops on the streets, Ice thuggery – and prices still climbing: welcome to Trump’s ‘golden age’ | Steven Greenhouse

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      In his inauguration speech last January, Donald Trump bombastically declared: “The golden age of America begins right now.” Our braggadocious president has stuck to that theme ever since, telling the United National general assembly in late September: “This is indeed the golden age of America.”With the federal government shut down for more than two weeks, the nation more polarized than at any time since the civil war, political violence growing and the job market slowing, it doesn’t feel remotely like a golden age, unless one focuses on Trump’s Louis XIV-like effort to gild as many things as possible in the Oval Office.Decoration spree aside, it in no way feels like a golden age when Trump sends the national guard into Los Angeles and Chicago to fight “the enemy within” or when he says the governor of Illinois and mayor of Chicago should be in jail for opposing his plans to deploy troops to Chicago. I doubt that the 27 Chicago police officers who were accidentally teargassed by Ice agents think it’s a golden age and ditto for the growing number of US citizens Ice has arrested.Nor does the US seem like the shining city upon a hill when Ice agents slam a 79-year-old US citizen to the ground in Los Angeles. Nor when Trump’s Department of Homeland Security posts thuggish videos of stormtrooper-like Ice agents – videos that seem more like Germany in the 1930s than any golden vision of the US as it approaches its 250th birthday.Only a huckster would boast of a golden age when his public approval ratings are deep underwater. According to a CBS/YouGov poll in early October, 58% of the US public disapproves of Trump’s performance, while 42% approve. Another poll found that 62% of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.As part of his golden vision, Trump promised good times for working-class Americans, but 74% of the US public says the economy is in poor or fair condition and nearly two-thirds oppose his signature policy of tariffs and more tariffs. In a big thumbs down for Trump, 53% of the public says his policies are making the economy worse.Candidate Trump promised that prices would begin falling on his first day back as president, but prices have continued to climb since he returned to office, partly because of the tariffs he’s imposed. What’s more, Trump’s tariff mania has created so much economic uncertainty that job growth has slowed hugely under Trump compared with under Joe Biden. According to Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, there was “essentially no job growth” in September.Trump promised blue-collar Americans he would increase manufacturing and the number of factory jobs, but factory activity has declined for seven straight months, and factory employment has fallen since April, too. There’s nothing golden about any of that.Showing Americans’ increased pessimism under Trump, a Wall Street Journal-Norc poll found in September that the share of Americans who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living has fallen to just 25%, a record low in surveys taken since 1987.The 10 million Americans who will lose health coverage because of Trump’s One Big (Not So) Beautiful Bill Act probably don’t consider this a golden age. Likewise with the 22 million Americans whose health insurance premiums will double on average, often soaring by thousands of dollars, unless Trump and congressional Republicans extend subsidies for the Affordable Care Act.Scientists complain that Trump is singlehandedly ending America’s golden age of scientific research with his deep, myopic cuts – cuts that could end US leadership in medicine and other vital fields of research. At the same time, Robert F Kennedy Jr is undermining trust in vaccines, with the US seeing the highest number of measles cases since Bill Clinton was in office and signed a law establishing free universal vaccinations for children.It seems like anything but a golden age for justice when the Department of Justice indicts the former FBI director James Comey and the New York state attorney general Letitia James after Trump in effect ordered prosecutors to get them (or get fired). Nor does one feel golden about the attorney general Pam Bondi not only stonewalling a Senate hearing (especially when asked about Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein), but insulting several senators – she called Adam Schiff of California a “failed lawyer”. In the same crude vein, a White House spokesperson slimed the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, calling him “an incompetent slob”. It doesn’t look like transparency or civility are part of Trump’s golden age.Trump can’t possibly feel golden about an August poll that found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe he is corrupt, with 45% viewing him as “very corrupt”.When Trump spoke at the UN in September, the assembled diplomats must have thought it was a dark age for US diplomacy, not a golden one, when Trump berated them by saying: “Your countries are going to hell.” The next day, Britain’s Daily Mirror ran a front-page photo of Trump with the headline: “DERANGED – World’s Most Powerful Man-Baby.”In his inauguration speech, Trump said: “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.” But people from many countries are giving low marks to second-term Trump. When Pew asked residents of various countries whether they have confidence that Trump will do the right thing in world affairs, in Canada 77% of respondents said they had no confidence, while 22% had confidence. In Mexico, 91% had no confidence. In Germany 81% had no confidence, while 18% had confidence. In the UK, 62% had no confidence to 37% who had confidence.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSince Trump returned to office, many countries’ views of the US have soured substantially and not just because they’re livid about Trump’s tariff war. It’s harder than ever to view the US as a bulwark of democracy and freedom, considering that Trump has embraced Vladimir Putin, deployed troops to major cities, declared war on leading universities, dispatched masked agents to make mass arrests, and pushed to indict his political enemies. In Mexico, the favorability rating of the US has plummeted 32 percentage points since 2024, to just 29%, while in Canada, it has fallen 20 points to just 34% favorable. In Sweden, the US’s favorability rating is down 28 points to 19%, and in Germany it’s down 16 points, to 33%.I’m sure that many rightwing, “don’t tread on me” Americans don’t see this as a golden age. I can’t imagine they like seeing masked agents snatching people off the streets or Black Hawk helicopters descending on apartment buildings or Ice agents bashing in doors and windows. That’s not what freedom looks like.Even the country music star Zach Bryan – a navy veteran who calls himself “confused” politically – is complaining, with a new song saying Ice “is going to come bust down your door” and “the middle finger’s rising, and it won’t stop showing/ Got some bad news / The fading of the red, white and blue.”Trump, the salesman and showman, always feels the need to boast – to brag that things are the best ever under him. But his high disapproval ratings at home and abroad suggest many people think he is ushering in a dark age – an age of disinformation and division, of suppressing critics and indicting enemies, of taking one authoritarian, anti-democratic action after another.For a lucky few, it is a golden age. For the craftsmen hired to gild Trump’s Oval Office and his humongous new ballroom, it’s certainly a golden payday. As they grow ever richer, the country’s billionaires are no doubt basking in this new gilded age as Trump slashes their taxes, strips away regulations and steers deals to his buddies (like Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest person). And Trump no doubt thinks it is a golden age for himself as he grabs ever more power, dominates the headlines, enriches himself further and decorates the White House with ever more gold.But to millions of us it feels like the opposite of a golden age as Trump takes a wrecking ball to truth, democracy and the rule of law. In declaring that it is a golden age, Trump is like the fraudster who says: “I have some wonderful, shiny gold I’ll sell you for $4,000 an ounce.” But in truth it’s just worthless fool’s gold.No one should be fooled by Trump’s delusional boasts.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More