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    Jimmy Kimmel on Epstein files congressional vote: ‘Make no mistake – this isn’t over’

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    Late-night hosts celebrated the congressional votes to release the Epstein files and decried Donald Trump’s warm meeting with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.Jimmy KimmelTuesday was “a very big day” in Washington DC, said Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday evening, as both the House and Senate voted near unanimously to authorize the justice department to release investigative files related to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.“Ultimately even [speaker] Mike Johnson voted yes on releasing the files,” Kimmel noted, meaning that the bill now heads to the White House, where it will probably66 be signed by Trump.“The goal was to have the bill pass by such a large margin that Trump can’t put his little orange thumb on the scale and give it the old Cheeto veto,” he explained. “But make no mistake: this isn’t over. He’s not giving up. If anyone thinks he’s going to release all of the Epstein files, I’ve got a beautiful East Wing of the White House to sell you.”That’s because even after the vote, “Trump cronies” in the justice department still have the power to withhold information to “protect ongoing investigations, protect innocent people or for reasons of national security”.“But they would never do anything like that, would they?” Kimmel joked. “They’re sworn to protect the constitution of the United States!“Something is fishy,” he added. “Trump rolled over faster than that dog Ghislaine Maxwell gets to play with in her country club prison.”On that note: “It is amazing the kind of special treatment you get when half of the most powerful people from the last 30 years don’t want to see you testifying in court.”Stephen Colbert“When it comes to Congress, it’s increasingly rare that things happen,” said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s Late Show. Which made Tuesday, when the House voted 427-1 to release the Epstein files, all the more notable.The measure then headed to the Senate, which passed it unanimously overnight, after the Late Show taping. “Tomorrow, we might know everything he and his pervert buddies did,” said Colbert. “Meaning it’s Epstein Rockin’ Eve – stay up for a ball drop you’re gonna want to miss.”The vote marked “a huge loss for Trump, make no mistake”, he continued. “For going on four months now, Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson fought the release of the Epstein files with every congressional tool they had, and keep in mind: Congress is loaded with some major tools.”“But when it looked like Republicans were defecting en masse and they were going to lose big, they were suddenly all in, like they always were – right, Mike?”Colbert then played a clip of Johnson claiming that “Republicans support maximum transparency. We always have. The president of the United States supports maximum transparency.”“Yes, the president has always supported maximum transparency, a healthy diet of leafy greens and the understated androgynous sensuality of a flat-chested woman,” Colbert mocked. “The president would be here, but he can’t talk right now as he’s jogging to Bible study.”Colbert also criticized Trump’s chummy White House visit with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. And when a reporter brought up the murder of the journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence concluded was authorized by the crown prince, Trump reacted angrily. “Things happen, but he knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that,” he said. “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”“Yes, how dare you embarrass our guest!” Colbert mocked. “Now he’s going to feel all self-conscious when he tries to chop up somebody like you.”Seth MeyersAnd on Late Night, Seth Meyers returned to a meeting earlier this month between Trump and representatives from Switzerland, in which they gifted the president a special Rolex desktop clock and a 1kg personalized gold bar. “So now foreign officials are just openly giving him gold?” he wondered. “Trump’s turning into a live-action political cartoon. Next time, someone’s going to give him a big sack with a dollar sign on it.”In a new interview with a British rightwing news channel, Trump said that people will ask him: “What do you recommend for growing your children?”“I don’t know if I want advice on raising children from someone who doesn’t even know it’s called ‘raising children’,” Meyers said, laughing.In the same interview, Trump said: “I’ve never had a drink in my life, and I don’t take drugs.”“Maybe one of the best endorsements I’ve ever heard for drinking and doing drugs,” Meyers quipped. More

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      Jon Stewart on Trump’s Epstein files flip-flop: ‘This dude is flailing’

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      Late-night hosts tore into the next chapter of Donald Trump’s never-ending Jeffrey Epstein scandal.Jon StewartJon Stewart ripped into Trump on Monday evening after the president abruptly changed tack and called on House Republicans to authorize the justice department’s release of files related to Epstein, a convicted sex offender – files which Trump himself could order to be released.“If he had nothing to hide, he could have declassified and released these files himself at any time,” the Daily Show host explained. “How do I know this? A legal expert named Donald Jurisprudence Trump said so.”Stewart then played footage of Trump from 2022 in which he insisted that the president can declassify anything, at any time, just by saying so or “even by thinking about it”.“Is it possible that Trump’s whole bullshit facade is crumbling?” Stewart wondered. “I mean, right now, all he can do is distract from one lie with what is clearly another lie.”Stewart then rolled a clip of Trump attempting that move, telling reporters: “All I want is I want for people to recognize a great job that I’ve done on pricing, on affordability.”“What planet do you live on?” Stewart responded. “Great job on affordability? My Taco Bell order is now $72!”“This dude is flailing,” he later added. “The normally reliable Trump is even struggling to deliver on his greatest gift: the cutting nickname.”Over the weekend, he took to Truth Social to call his former ally Marjorie Taylor Greene “Marjorie Taylor Brown”, explaining in parentheses that green grass turns brown when it rots.“You know, I’ve always said that the best nicknames are the ones you have to explain in parentheses,” Stewart joked.Jokes aside, Stewart concluded: “Epstein was a convicted sex offender at the time of these emails. And of course, mentioned in these emails more than anyone else, more than 1,600 times, is Donald Trump.”“Is that evidence of his guilt? No,” he continued. “But it shows that he’s a part of that world and certainly the circumstantial evidence points to his understanding of what was occurring.”Stephen ColbertOn the Late Show, Stephen Colbert homed in on one specific email from Epstein, in which the late pedophile claimed Trump “knew about the girls”. The line prompted Republicans to accuse Democrats of cherrypicking. “Let’s pause there,” said Colbert. “Guys, for this one, let’s maybe go with a different fruit.“So to prove that the Democrats were, let’s say, pineapple-choosing,” he continued, “House Republicans released 20,000-plus pages of other Epstein documents.“They did it to show that they were way more transparent than the Democrats, who they say released just enough to make Trump look bad,” said Colbert. “And they were right because the Republicans’ additional release of documents made him look awful.”In the new batch of documents, Trump’s named appeared more than 1,500 times.“These are not casual mentions, either,” Colbert noted. In one email, Epstein wrote: “i have met some very bad people ,, none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body.”“It’s gotta hurt when Jeffrey Epstein calls you a bad guy,” said Colbert. “That’s like an airport muffin accusing you of being dry.”Seth Meyers“This weekend, Trump sought to quell the Maga furor by ordering an investigation, but only into Democrats,” Seth Meyers explained on Monday’s Late Night. “Which even some Republicans fear could be another delay tactic.”As Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky put it: “If they have ongoing investigations in certain areas, those documents can’t be released. So this might be a big smokescreen, these investigations, to open up a bunch of them as a last-ditch effort to prevent the release of the Epstein files.”“How dare you accuse the president of setting up a smokescreen,” Meyers laughed. “For one thing, I don’t think he’s nimble enough for that. If Trump threw down a smoke pellet, he wouldn’t run away. He would just stand there coughing until the smoke cleared.”Reporters asked Trump about Massie’s statement on Sunday night, and “all Trump had to do was make clear that he was sincerely interested in getting to the truth”, said Meyers.Instead, Trump claimed “fake news” and said the media “kept bringing [Epstein] up to deflect from the tremendous success of the Trump administration”.“Nailed it!” Meyers joked. “Everyone knows the least suspicious thing you can do when someone asks you about a scandal is to say ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ and then immediately insult. Try that next time your spouse asks why you got home so late.”And then Trump flip-flopped again, telling House Republicans to vote for a discharge petition for the justice department’s release of the Epstein files, after he spent months opposing the measure. “But the whole point of the House vote was to force you to release the files, which you can do on your own. So if you’re in favor of releasing the files, then just do it,” said Meyers. “This new position makes even less sense.”Jimmy KimmelAnd in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel looked ahead to a House vote, possibly as early as Tuesday, to authorize the release of the files, with dozens of Republicans expected to break ranks. “Which has forced Trump to now claim that he’s for the files being released,” Kimmel noted. “After almost a year of saying he didn’t want them released, after a year of stalling, hedging, browbeating members of his own party, last night, all of a sudden, Trump reversed course completely.”Trump posted on Truth Social: “As I said on Friday night aboard Air Force One to the Fake News Media, House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide.”“We have nothing to hide?” Kimmel laughed. “There’s no ‘we’. ‘We’ have nothing to hide. It’s just you.“If you have nothing hide, why even have the vote?” he added. “Why not just have the Department of Justice release the files now?“After 10 months of fighting tooth and nail, doing everything he could to keep the files secret, he’s now asking for a full release,” Kimmel continued, “which is what got all these guys in trouble in the first place.“So his plan now is hurry up and release the files so I can start saying they’re fake.”Trump also instructed Pam Bondi, his attorney general, to investigate prominent Democrats’ ties to Epstein. “Which is like Diddy ordering an investigation into why there were so many bottles of baby oil in his house,” Kimmel joked. More

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      Mahmood Mamdani on Zohran, Uganda and forced expulsion: ‘Who is part of the nation and who is not?’

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      The night before Mahmood Mamdani was expelled from Uganda in 1972, a senior professor from the university where he had been employed as a lowly teaching assistant wandered into his family home, looking for spoils. The rest of the family had already left – for the UK, the US and Tanzania – but 26-year-old Mamdani had decided to remain until the final day of the three-month period that Idi Amin, the Ugandan president, had designated for all Asians to leave the country. Passing over the furniture and other remnants of decades of family life, the professor hit upon a carton of Johnnie Walker Red, which Mamdani invited him to take home.The next day, reunited with his parents at a transit camp in London, Mamdani learned that the bottles had in fact held nothing but cooking oil, and he amused himself imagining the professor serving them at a party to celebrate the forced departure of tens of thousands of south Asians. It was only later that the “loneliness, anxiety [and] depression” of expulsion set in. Mamdani would go on to join the vibrant intellectual community in Dar es Salaam, where his superfluity of study groups was populated by a who’s who of pan-African scholars and politicians; his parents settled in Wembley, in north-west London, where for several years their “favorite pastime” was greeting the weekly flight from Uganda to Gatwick airport in hopes of meeting a former acquaintance.“Every place we lived in after the expulsion, we lived as if we were guests, our houses or rooms stamped with the feeling of being transients,” Mamdani writes in his book Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, published this October. “With the loss of Uganda, we lost a sense of belonging, and of rootedness.”The question of who belongs in a political community has animated Mamdani’s scholarship ever since. Now a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Mamdani has gained recent notoriety (alongside his wife, film director Mira Nair) as the father of Zohran Mamdani, the New York City political phenomenon and mayor-elect. But his long career and extensive bibliography attest to a lifetime interrogating the colonial categories that continue to define and divide postcolonial politics: race, tribe, Indigeneity; citizen, settler, subject.View image in fullscreenIn Slow Poison, Mamdani turns his attention back to the nation that he has always considered his home, even when it wouldn’t have him. The book combines memoir, history and political theory to reassess two men who have defined Uganda since it achieved independence from the UK in 1962: Amin and Yoweri Museveni. It also grapples with big questions with contemporary relevance: who chooses our global villains, and why? How do notions of Indigeneity operate in a world where people always have migrated – and always will? Who gets to decide which people belong, and deserve rights, in a given country?Amin is primarily known to westerners as a brutal dictator and rumored cannibal, but he enjoyed significant popular support in Uganda from the time he took power in a 1971 coup until he was overthrown in 1979. Mamdani attributes this in part to his expropriation and expulsion of the country’s 80,000 Asian people – most of them the descendants of Indian immigrants who arrived during British colonial rule – in an act of racial nationalism that helped unite Uganda’s disparate ethnic groups and tribes in a shared Black identity.Museveni, a onetime Marxist and devotee of Frantz Fanon who frequented the same intellectual circles as Mamdani in Dar es Salaam, took power in 1986 and has yet to relinquish it. His increasingly authoritarian regime has been characterized by extreme corruption, regional conflicts and human rights violations, Mamdani argues, but “whereas the British propaganda machine turned Amin into a monster and Asians his global victims, Museveni became a Washington poster boy”.The disparate treatment is a result of the two men’s stances toward the west, Mamdani argues. Amin seized power with the backing of the UK and Israel – the UK maintained a strong interest in its former colony, while Israel sought an ally that would allow it to build a military base to the south of Egypt – but turned on them soon after taking power. This about-face saw Amin align himself with Muammar Gaddafi to support Palestinian rights and the boycott of apartheid South Africa, and thumb his nose at the west. By contrast, Museveni acceded to the neoliberal demands of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and signed on to the US’s “war on terror”, providing it crucial regional support in east Africa.View image in fullscreenBut Mamdani’s larger concern is with Museveni’s “continuous fragmentation of the subject population” of Uganda into ever smaller tribal divisions, with people designated “Indigenous” or “non-native” within ever smaller parcels of land. The 1993 Uganda Constitutional Commission defined “Indigenous” groups as those that could trace their presence in Uganda to three or four generations back and could also “indicate ancestral burial grounds and land within Uganda”; Museveni’s program of subdivision saw more and more Ugandans recast as “settlers” if they lived outside their assigned district – a designation that deprived them of the right to own land or hold high political office.Whereas Amin had united Uganda’s ethnic and linguistic groups into one racial category, Museveni has used those differences to fragment the populace and keep any threat to his power at bay. This process is the “slow poison” that Mamdani asserts is killing Uganda’s body politic.There is a clear connection between Mamdani’s appeal for a politics that respects cultural difference while preserving universal equal rights, and the campaign run by his son, who prevailed despite his steadfast refusal to support Israel’s political system, which denies equal rights to millions of Palestinians who are subject to its rule.“The challenge is how to reconcile cultural identity with political belonging, and a common past with a shared future,” Mamdani writes. “Not all who share a common past necessarily share a common future: some may migrate and become part of a diaspora. At the same time, people with different pasts can commit themselves to building a common future in the same place. This is why those who wish to build a future under a single political roof – no matter how different their pasts – belong to the same political community and thus deserve the same political rights.”A week after Zohran’s triumph in the New York City mayoral election signaled a new generation of Americans’ embrace of such universalist values, the elder Mamdani spoke with the Guardian about his history, his politics and his hopes for the future.The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.In your new book, you are asking people to reconsider Amin and the way that he has been portrayed as a kind of Hitler-esque figure. Why was it important to you to return to this history now?The western media in particular has been central to describing Amin as “the cannibal Amin”, etc – and without going to the other extreme of providing an apology [for Amin’s regime], as the Wall Street Journal thinks, I thought it was important to situate Amin in a context and to get a sense of him. Amin is trained as a child soldier by the British. He becomes a specialist in counter-terrorism, which is really a polite term for state terrorism.The worst of Amin’s killings, which are in the hundreds, and you might even say in the thousands, take place in the first year after he takes power. Those killings are informed, guided by the British and the Israelis. The British advise Amin to assassinate [then president Milton] Obote on arrival. The Israelis disagree. They say: “No, [if] you do that you will leave the military power structure intact, and there will be a reckoning down the road.” So Amin follows the Israeli advice and he carries out massacres in barracks. That’s Amin at his most brutal. [Note: estimates of Amin’s death toll range from 12,000 to 500,000; in Slow Poison, Mamdani argues that western sources inflated Amin’s brutality for political reasons.]View image in fullscreenAt the same time, Amin is disturbed at the general lawlessness spreading throughout the country, and appoints a commission of inquiry into disappearances. It’s the first truth commission that I know in the contemporary era. The commission recommends that the police take charge of civil order, and that army control of key institutions be negated.So that’s Amin: a complicated character. The shift between these two phases is informed by Amin’s understanding. After his first visits to Israel and London, it dawns on him that neither the British nor the Israelis take him seriously. They both think that he should be grateful and act as a stooge. That’s his big turning point. The British try to overthrow him. The Israelis try. The important point is that Amin becomes very popular in the country and the attempts to overthrow him from the outside do not work.Why is it important to scrutinize Israel’s role in this history?Israel’s role in Uganda in particular was critical. Israel cultivated Amin right from the beginning. Israel thought he would be their man. They built houses for him. They anointed him in Hebrew. They trained the forces which were central in making the coup. They advised him to use those forces and only those forces. They advised him on how to deal with the Obute military opposition.And then, of course, they were completely surprised when he [switched allegiances]. This is a very central role. This is not singling out Israel. If one didn’t talk of Israel, you would have no explanation of what happened.You describe Uganda under Museveni as a junior version of Israel. Can you explain what you mean?What I mean by junior version of Israel is a state which carries out, in particular, military missions in the region, in one country after another at the urging of or with the approval of the US, and in return gets a clean pass on everything else, and is guaranteed impunity. That’s Israel on a larger scale, and that’s Museveni on a regional scale.Many of us are accustomed to thinking of “Indigenous rights” as an important counterweight to the legacy of colonialism, but you have long questioned the meaningfulness of the distinction between “Indigenous” and non. Why is it important to you to interrogate the concept of Indigeneity as you think about who belongs in a political community?I first encountered this question in a book I wrote several decades ago called Citizen and Subject. I was puzzled by the political architecture that Britain created in its colonies to govern. The census tagged every person living in a colony as belonging either to a race or to a tribe, and I was curious: what’s the distinction? I realized that a race was anybody who had come from outside, who was not Indigenous, and a tribe was anybody who was Indigenous. So I asked myself: “What difference does it make?” Well, it made a difference in how they were governed under the law. All races, whether they came from Europe or from south Asia, anywhere, were governed under the same law, civil law. To be governed under the same law meant that you were supposed to have a common future.Tribes were not governed under the same law. First of all, there was the fiction that each tribe had a homeland. I call this a fiction because it’s not true. Before colonialism, not only Africans, but humans have been migrants. You cannot peg humans to a particular piece of territory over centuries and millennia. You can’t. They’ve moved. This fiction that every tribe had a homeland was extended so that every homeland had a customary authority. Cultural authorities were turned into political authorities. And then the British created something called customary law, which could be enforced by customary authorities with British power standing behind them. This made for a separate future for the tribes, unlike the races. I understood this to be the political, legal essence of what we normally call “divide and rule”.When I went to South Africa in 91, I was writing a book on Africa. Every chapter was written, except one chapter on south Africa, because south Africa was supposed to be the exception. Apartheid was supposed to be the exception. And after just a very little time in South Africa, I realized that I’d been totally mistaken. I’d been misled. South Africa was not an exception. I knew this beast. I had grown up under it in Uganda, although you may call it an informal version of apartheid. It was the same thing where the state used law to divide the population into different groups and privileged one section of the population at the expense of the other. I began to come to a conclusion that every modern colony was an apartheid state.The book deals with your personal history and how your identity cuts across the lines that have been drawn to divide groups for various reasons, whether as an Asian within Uganda or a Muslim from Gujarat in India. The policing of those lines was brought home in a particularly personal way this summer, when the New York Times ran an article seeking to scandalize the fact that your son had attempted to reflect his identity as African and Ugandan on his college application.I was pretty shocked to see that the Times had contacted you to ascertain whether you had any ancestry from Black Africans. It seemed to invoke the “one drop” rule of Blackness, which is very American, as well as Amin’s view that Asians are not really Ugandan. What did you make of that controversy? How do you see the policing of identity categories in the US compared to Uganda and other post-colonial states?In 2013 we formed an organization in Kampala called the Asian African Association. We said in our opening declaration Asian Africans are people whose past is Asian, but whose future is African. They are Africans of Asian descent. We said that in the past we had always lived as visitors, or even worse, as refugees, which meant that we had neither rights nor responsibilities. We were permanently on vacation or permanently entrepreneurs.The formation of this organization was part of a much larger quest which runs through African nationalist struggles, which was: who belongs? Who is part of the nation and who is not? The whole South African conception which ends with the notion of a non-racial South Africa – obliterating the boundary between Indigenous and non-Indigenous – is a fruit of that struggle, and it’s a legacy that we embraced.Now the New York Times – it was scandalous to me that they were resurrecting this dividing line between the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous, and that that line could only be crossed through miscegenation, blood mixing. It was shocking. I didn’t have to have any African ancestry, and yet, I thought of myself as a man from Africa. I was an African.I remember Thabo Mbeki’s speech in parliament defining who is an African. And I remember Afrikaner politicians standing up, one after another, each one saying, “I’m an African.” “I’m an African.” That was the fruit of the anti-apartheid struggle. The Times was so narrowly preoccupied with marginalizing one candidate that it seemed to have forgotten everything else.You wrote in the book that despite having been raised in a pretty segregated society in Kampala that your political awakening occurred in the US. What was it that you saw in the US that changed how you understood where you had come from?The big highlight was the civil rights movement and my going to the south, to the march on Montgomery. Then the anti-Vietnam war movement, and indirectly, through my girlfriends, the feminist movement. It was not an individual experience. There was a cultural revolution happening in the US. There was a wholly different mindset which was being born. Everybody I knew, more or less, shared this anti-racist orientation.When I went to Dar es Salaam, I was involved in an intellectual environment which gave me reasons for understanding this transformation and informed me of the larger anti-colonial movement, beginning with the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam Revolution, the Cuban Revolution.Today in New York – the New York experience keeps changing, and now with the election of my son as mayor, it’s changing even more. The sense of possibilities is broadening. I was quite surprised to see Zohran embrace where he came from openly and directly. “I’m a Muslim. I was born in Africa. I’m of south Asian descent,” and so on and so forth. New York continues to be a lived experience.At the same time we are seeing calls on the national level for mass deportation and efforts to carry out the expulsion of disfavored groups from the US. Do you see parallels with the expulsion of Uganda’s Asians?All the threads which led to the Asian expulsion in 1972 and, before that, the expulsion of the Luo [people], are present in the US now: birthright citizenship, Indigeneity. There are resonances, even similarities, but they’re not the same.The big difference, I think, is that there is a counterthrust here, and it’s just beginning. I think this election in New York City is a possible beginning. I don’t want to be too optimistic, but it’s a possible beginning because it’s had resonances, not just throughout the country, but even outside the country.View image in fullscreenCan you say a little bit more about that? My perception of Zohran’s campaign was that he spoke about universal values even as he celebrated in a very specific way his own identity and the identities of his supporters. It was a very different kind of politics than what we get from the Democratic party these days, which often seems to shy away from openly embracing immigrants or Muslims.I understand the contemporary situation in the US as being a product of decades-long encounters, which we call cultural wars, that were played out in the academy, in the intelligentsia. The key cultural war was around the notion of affirmative action. Should affirmative action be a temporary phase, or should it be a permanent phase? If it becomes a permanent phase, does not the quest of justice turn into revenge? Are you not holding children responsible for the deeds of their ancestors? If the children are going to be beneficiaries of the deeds of their ancestors, do they carry a measure of responsibility? I don’t think there is any clear-sightedness on whether affirmative action in the US should be permanent or not, but it’s a big issue, and it’s now coming to the fore.One of the ideas in the book that I was drawn to was the idea of federation – a system that “bases the notion of political belonging on where one lives rather than where one comes from”.My first encounter with the notion of federation was in the thinking of Abraham Lincoln and the amendments which changed the notion of citizenship. Before the civil war, you were a citizen of the state in which you were born. After the Civil war, you could be born in Alabama and move to California, and you would have the same rights as somebody born in California. This federal arrangement – a common citizenship, but not a centralized order – is under threat now. Both parts of it are under threat. Common citizenship is under threat and a federated [non-centralized] order is under threat, with Trump occupying cities with the national guard.In the African context, federation was always seen as a colonial maneuver. Federation was a name for emasculating the newly born independent governments and for empowering erstwhile privileged groups. But now federation is increasingly being embraced as part of an agenda against authoritarian regimes, dictatorial regimes, regimes like Musaveni’s.One theme of the book is how neoliberalism challenged and damaged Uganda’s university. How would you compare what happened there with the turmoil at Columbia in recent years? What do you make of the school’s capitulation to the Trump administration?There’s a definite connection. On the surface – not just superficially, but immediately – it is seen as an ideological confrontation, not as a confrontation about the structure of the university. But the background to 7 October 2023 and Minouche [Shafik’s] administration at Columbia was the [Lee] Bollinger era [from 2002 to 2023]. Bollinger brought about structural changes at Columbia. By the end of it, we got a bloated bureaucracy at the heart of which was the financial bureaucracy. That bureaucracy understood Colombia as a business enterprise with pluses and minuses, gains and losses. It was not really interested in Colombia as an academic institution.Minouche was brought here from the World Bank to [lead] that bureaucracy. She had no understanding of American academia. She had no experience in a large university. Poor Minouche comes and finds herself facing an encampment for which she was completely ill prepared.At the time we were blaming Minouche as the central character in what happened here. I now think that her lack of experience, her ignorance, was taken advantage of by others. She was more or less locked up in her office, and she resigned as an honorable way out, in a sense.She’s like an Idi Amin character; I’m trying to understand her. I’m not apologizing for her. If you print this, the Wall Street Journal will come back.Are you planning to return to campus to teach, given the systems that have been put in place to police the academic content of scholarship at Columbia?I’m definitely planning to come back and teach. I want to be involved in the kind of future we craft. I’m not willing to give up now.You were asked by Museveni to take an active role in his government on multiple occasions and declined. I was looking at the hardcover of Slow Poison last night and realized that you had added a final paragraph that wasn’t in the galley that addresses some of the complications that arise when intellectuals interact with power – the potential for corruption, the desire for “clean hands”. You end on an ambiguous note: “For now at least, we explore for an answer in the realm of practice.”Your son is going to be in power in New York City. Are you interested in playing a role in or influencing his administration?We have been very close as a family: Mira, Zohran and I. This book would have been like one of my other books, which is me standing at a distance and narrating what happened to others, not to me, but both Zohran and Mira kept telling me: “You have to insert yourself as a character in this. You were alive. You were involved. Take responsibility, but tell us. Tell us the part of the story which nobody else will be able to tell us.” So different versions of the book insert me more and more and compel me to understand the difference between the claim to objectivity and an understanding of positionality – that you are a limited witness who is looking at events from a particular vantage point, and that vantage point is both your strength and colors you.That ambiguity is an admission that I haven’t found an answer to the question. I don’t believe one should just stay away from power, but I don’t think we should embrace it. Power is a fatal thing for intellectuals. It corrupts intellectuals. I’ve seen many, many, many a friend get corrupted in the process.As to how I will relate to Zohran’s administration: I think initially at least both Mira and I will have the relationship we did during the campaign, which is to stay at an arm’s length but always be available. Always be available for discussion, for sharing our point of view, but not mistaking ourselves for being him. More

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      Welcome to the great unwokening of Hollywood! Shame no one can be bothered to turn up | Jason Okundaye

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      I was on a walk around my local area in London when I was stopped in my tracks by a young man sauntering past me, wearing stone-wash jeans, a pair of shades and a “Reagan-Bush ’84” T-shirt. He gave off an incredibly smug air but, to be fair, he did look good. It’s a nice T-shirt, not like those garish Reform-branded football kits, so I could see why it might be appealing. A quick search informed me that for gen-Z rightwingers in the US, it has become the “conservative take on a band shirt or the once-ubiquitous Che Guevara tee”.That casual display of conservative aesthetics reminded me of something else too: a much discussed cover of New York magazine from earlier this year, after Trump 2.0’s inauguration, which showed young rightwingers celebrating as they “contemplate cultural domination”.“Conservatism – as a cultural force, not just a political condition – is back in a real way for the first time since the 1980s,” the journalist Brock Colyar wrote. Perhaps, given the way the British and American cultural spheres seem more enmeshed than ever, it was only a matter of time before I happened upon a Republican T-shirt in my back yard.View image in fullscreenThe US right has long had designs on controlling culture – frustrated by the idea that, despite many political successes, the arts remain in the grip of a liberal-left orthodoxy. (It’s neatly echoed in Britain by debates about BBC “wokeness”.) If there is anything members of the Maga movement want more than their guys in office, it is to feel that their worldview is reflected back to them whenever they turn on a screen or head into a gallery. That is what lies behind Donald Trump’s attacks on the Smithsonian museum, which he seeks to purge of “improper ideology”, and his threatened imposition of 100% tariffs on non-US-made films.But as we draw to the close of the year, what has come to pass from this prediction of a conservative seizure of culture? There were early claims of victory. In the Atlantic, after the latest season of The White Lotus came out, the commentator Helen Lewis wrote that it was “the first great work of art in the post-woke era”. The critic Kevin Maher in the Times proclaimed simply that “woke is dead” and that “middle-aged white men” are back in – he cited the return of Mel Gibson, who has been repeatedly accused of bigotry, and his forthcoming follow-up to The Passion of the Christ.What caused the biggest stir, however, was the trajectory of Sydney Sweeney, the breakout Euphoria actor who fronted an advertising campaign by American Eagle that played with the idea of her having “great jeans/genes”. Some critics saw the advert as flirting with white supremacist eugenics. Meanwhile, Sweeney, who was reported to have registered as a Republican voter in Florida a few months before Trump’s election, has been hailed as representing a return to more “traditional”, white-centric beauty standards in the culture.View image in fullscreenEarlier this month, when addressing the controversy in an interview for GQ, the journalist Katherine Stoeffel said the criticism centred around the idea that “in this political climate, white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority”, offering Sweeney the opportunity to clarify. With startlingly empty eyes, Sweeney answered: “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.” For this, rightwing zealots see her as leading the great unwokening of Hollywood: stars, rejoice! You need no longer kowtow to cancel culture. Perhaps she simply thinks the furore is silly and doesn’t want to entertain it. But presented with the chance to distance herself from such a divisive narrative that’s been projected on her, why would she not?If there is a great popular desire for fewer woke cultural figures, the verdict is still decidedly out: Sweeney’s latest film, Christy, in which she portrays the boxer Christy Martin, has recorded one of the worst opening weekends in box-office history. (It follows on from her box-office bombs of Eden and Americana, which opened in the US this year.) A few flops don’t tell us everything. But as Sweeney is perhaps the most talked about star of the year, it raises a question: the right may be determined to disrupt Hollywood and the arts, but does it actually care enough about it to consistently show up? Buying a political T-shirt is an easy commitment; having to sit through a two-hour biopic to prop up the conservative-leaning lead star, less so.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhatever electoral successes, and no matter how much it attempts to reorder institutions, the right will not enjoy cultural domination because you cannot so easily manufacture popularity. It may cry out for the Super Bowl half-time show to feature a Nashville-approved conservative singer, but it will have to get on Duolingo in time to understand record-breaker Bad Bunny’s 2026 performance, in which he’ll most likely cuss out Trump and ICE entirely in Spanish.Contemporary conservatism has failed to become cool because its instincts are more about edgy provocation than any serious appreciation of art and culture. Great art will always be about expanding our worlds, not making them smaller. Even Kelsey Grammer, arguably Hollywood’s most prominent conservative, knows this: despite being an open Trump supporter, he has affirmed his decades-long commitment to diversity, which includes executive-producing the 2000s sitcom Girlfriends, about four Black women in Los Angeles.Those predictions about a post-woke Hollywood also look laughable considering some of the great woke film successes of the year: take Sinners, an African-American horror film scored with southern Black music, or One Battle After Another, about an ex-revolutionary and his mixed-race daughter fighting against explicitly racist US state authorities. Both have garnered critical success (the former doing very well at the box office) and have Oscars buzz. The young mixed-race actor Chase Infiniti looks in much better stead than Sweeney.In the end, people will queue up for what they want to watch and listen to. When most people ask for culture recommendations, they don’t ask “Is it diverse?” or “Is it conservative?”, they ask, “Is it any good?” So perhaps Sweeney should spend more time letting us know why her films are worth watching rather than what colour her eyes are.

      Jason Okundaye is an assistant newsletter editor and writer at the Guardian. He edits The Long Wave newsletter and is the author of Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain More

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      Colbert on Trump ‘building a massive compensation for his weird tiny penis’

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      Late-night hosts spoke about the controversial behavior of a small group of Democrats and Donald Trump’s continued destruction of the White House.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert spoke about the vote to end the federal government shutdown which has seen some Democrats choosing to cave to Republican demands without restoring the healthcare subsidies which were initially threatened.Chuck Schumer told his party he would give the deal neither a blessing nor a curse and would give no steer on how to vote.Colbert joked that this was “bold leadership” and commented on Schumer’s “failure” in the situation.The shutdown has caused major chaos at airports as air traffic controllers were being unpaid for so long that many of them stopped coming to work.On social media, Trump attacked them, saying they would be “substantially docked” and he would hold “a negative mark” at least in his mind against their record.“A negative mark in that mind?” Colbert quipped. “You know what, I’ll take my chances.”He also wrote that he wanted them to be “quickly replaced by true patriots” to which Colbert responded: “Maybe I’m alone, but I don’t care if the guy landing my plane is a true patriot.”He called Trump “an old nepo-billionaire who simply does not understand how hard it is for regular people to survive these days”.This week also saw that regular people are not happy with the state of living, with a consumer satisfaction survey falling to 52.3%, the worst ever score dating back to 1951.“Consumers have not felt this bad since we fed our babies cigarettes,” he said.This week also saw Trump tout a 50-year mortgage in a supposed bid to help those struggling to afford home ownership, yet a study showed that interest would almost double from the standard 30-year mortgage.Colbert called it “a big dumb policy that fixes nothing”.He also warned that a new 107% tariff could lead to Italian pasta disappearing from shelves. “We are officially in a pasta-mergency,” he said.Colbert joked that Trump’s destruction of the White House’s East Wing was “to build a massive compensation for his weird tiny penis” before moving on to his latest addition: labelling the Oval Office.The host claimed that the font being used was called “luxury assisted living” before showing that when you Google it, the same font that comes up.Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers started by talking about the House speaker, Mike Johnson, ordering Congress to return to Capitol Hill for the vote.“I’m sure they would if only the flights weren’t all grounded,” he said.This week also saw Trump write “Less crime more Trump” on social media. “Less crime sounds great but how could there be more Trump?” Meyers asked, before adding: “We’re maxed out on Trump.”Last week saw Joe Biden speak for 30 minutes at a fundraising dinner. Meyers expressed surprise that it was so short, joking that “he usually speaks that long to the valet”.Transportation secretary and former Real World contestant Sean Duffy warned Americans that ongoing issues over flights might mean that many will miss celebrating the holidays with their families.“Oh no, I was so excited to discuss that Zohran win with my uncle,” Meyers said. More

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      ‘Most horrific death you could imagine’: the truth behind Netflix’s Death By Lightning

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      The descendants of James Garfield, the 20th US president, were proud of his life but rarely spoke of his death. “We knew what had happened, that he was shot in a train station,” says James Garfield III, his great-great-great grandson. “We read about the story in books but, in one way or another, we just glanced over it.”That changed in 2011 with the publication of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, a book by Candice Millard that revived interest in Garfield’s unfinished life. Her work has now inspired a Netflix drama, Death By Lightning, starring Michael Shannon as the president and Matthew Macfadyen as the drifter who gunned him down.The series promises to shine a light on Garfield, who rose from poverty to the presidency in the Gilded Age only to fall victim to its toxic political divisions. His tenure was cut short after only 200 days not only by the assassin’s bullet but by medical malpractice – an event now forgotten as surely as the killings of Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy continue to fascinate.That tragedy set the table for one of US history’s great “what ifs” with Garfield’s lost potential felt most acutely in the area of civil rights, where his commitment to equality for African Americans might have altered the nation’s post-Reconstruction trajectory.James Garfield III, 58, an athletic trainer and professor from Cleveland, Ohio, adds: “You can’t help but be proud of what he did. He was like a multi-threat: he was a lawyer, he was a preacher, he was a farmer. He was all of these things which also shaped who he was and how he was and everything that we know about him the family carries down with us.”Garfield was the last president born in a log cabin, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in 1831. His father died when he was 18 months old, leaving his mother, Eliza, to raise five children in difficult circumstances. An insatiable reader, Garfield worked on canal boats to earn money for an education.He studied law, was ordained as minister, became president of Hiram College in Ohio and was a state senator. In 1858 he married a former classmate, Lucretia Rudolph, with whom he would have seven children. An ardent Unionist, Garfield viewed the civil war as a holy crusade against slavery and advanced to the rank of major general.Speaking via Zoom, Millard says: “When I started researching him, I couldn’t believe it. He was absolutely brilliant. He was incredibly brave. He was very progressive for the time. He was kind. He was a decent human being and would have been one of our great presidents had he lived.”Garfield was persuaded by Lincoln to resign his military commission when he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he would serve as a Republican for 17 years. He was strong supporter of black suffrage, viewing it as a matter of justice and the fulfillment of a wartime covenant.Millard continues: “The speech he gave on the floor of Congress will tear your heart out. He was an incredibly powerful orator and this issue was very important to him.“He wrote an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem while he was in Congress. He was this incredible classicist; he spoke Latin and Greek and knew huge lengths of the Aeneid by heart in Latin. He was an extraordinary mind.”At the 1880 Republican national convention in Chicago the party was deeply divided between the “Stalwarts”, led by Senator Roscoe Conkling, who supported a third term for Ulysses S Grant, and the “Half-Breeds”, who supported James G Blaine. Garfield attended as a supporter of his friend and fellow Ohioan John Sherman.When the 15,000-person convention was deadlocked between Grant and Blaine, delegates began looking for a compromise. Garfield’s impassioned speech nominating Sherman impressed them. During the speech, he reportedly shouted, “And now, gentlemen of the convention, what do we want?” to which a voice from the crowd unexpectedly replied: “We want Garfield!”On the 36th ballot, a stampede of delegates made Garfield the surprise nominee. To placate the Stalwart faction, Chester Arthur, a Conkling loyalist from New York, was chosen as his running mate. In the general election Garfield defeated the Democratic nominee to become the only sitting member of the House ever to be elected president.Millard says: “What would have made Garfield great and what is extremely rare and maybe unique to the American presidency is he didn’t want the job. It’s not that he had never thought about it but he was thrust into it.“He used to call it presidential fever because he would watch people he admired change drastically because they wanted the office so much that they were willing to give up their own values, set aside their own morals in order to get this position, and he was never willing to do that.”She adds: “When he found himself president, he was in this uniquely powerful position because he didn’t owe anyone anything, which never happens. To degrees people lose a little bit of themselves along the way and he didn’t because he wasn’t hungering for it. He was like, well, there’s some good I want to do and here I am so I can do it. Then unfortunately he didn’t have the chance to.”View image in fullscreenThe defining conflict of Garfield’s short presidency was his confrontation with Conkling over the “spoils system”. Conkling demanded control over federal patronage in New York, particularly the powerful and lucrative post of collector of the Port of New York. Garfield refused, stating the issue was “whether the president is registering clerk of the Senate or the executive of the United States”. He nominated a political foe of Conkling to the post.The confrontation escalated into a public battle but Garfield outmaneuvered Conkling in the Senate. Facing a humiliating public defeat, Conkling and his junior senator resigned their seats in protest. The next day, Garfield’s nominee was confirmed. It was a landmark victory for the power of the presidency over the party machine and for the cause of reform over “boss rule”.But even as Garfield battled the titans of his party, he was being stalked by a disturbed and delusional man who embodied the dark side of the patronage system. Charles Guiteau was a drifter with a history of professional failures, mental instability and physical and psychological abuse in his childhood. He had failed as a lawyer, bill collector, preacher and member of the Oneida free-love commune.Millard explains: “He was mentally ill and his particular brand of madness was delusion. He always believed that God had chosen him for greatness. He actually had financially a better start than Garfield but where Garfield achieved and rose, Guiteau failed at everything.“He tried to be a lawyer and failed; he tried to be a journalist and failed; he tried a free love commune and they nicknamed him ‘Charles Get Out’. He was the only one not able to partake in what they had to offer at the free love commune, partly because he refused to do any manual labor. He thought it was beneath him.”But Guiteau believed he had finally found a pathway to success: politics. Swept up in the drama of the 1880 election, he wrote and delivered an insignificant speech, “Garfield against Hancock”, and became convinced in his own mind that he was single-handedly responsible for Garfield’s victory.Under this logic, Guiteau reckoned he had earned a high-level government job. He travelled to Washington and relentlessly pestered Garfield, Blaine and other officials, demanding to be made the US consul in Paris — a post for which he had zero qualifications. He became such a nuisance that he was eventually banned from the White House.As he followed the dramatic Garfield-Conkling feud in the newspapers, Guiteau’s rejection curdled into a fanatical delusion. As he later described it, he woke one night with an “epiphany” he believed was a message from God: if Garfield were removed, the party’s internal conflict would be solved and he would be hailed as a hero.On 2 July 1881, just four months into his presidency, Garfield was leaving Washington for his college reunion. As he walked through the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station, Guiteau stepped from the shadows, pulled an ivory-handled British Bull Dog revolver from his coat pocket and shot the president twice in the back.View image in fullscreenGarfield cried out: “My God, what is this?” and collapsed on the station floor. When a police officer seized Guiteau, he declared: “I did it and I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be president.”One bullet had grazed Garfield’s arm; the other lodged behind his pancreas. Modern medical historians agree that the wound was not mortal. Had Garfield been left alone, he probably would have survived, as many civil war soldiers did with similar injuries. However, what followed was a catastrophic case of medical malpractice.Millard laments: “Can you imagine a more germ-infested environment than the floor of a train station? That’s where he fell and was immediately examined. People were coming off the streets where there was horse manure everywhere, inserting their fingers in his back, putting him in this horse hair and hay mattress.“At that time, the hospitals were so bad, you only went there to die so they took him to the White House, but the White House itself was falling apart at that point. It was rat-infested.”A doctor with a controversial past named Dr Doctor Willard Bliss (confusingly, his first name was Doctor) took charge of Garfield’s care. He repeatedly probed Garfield’s wound with unsterilised fingers and instruments, introducing massive infection. He invited Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, to find the bullet with his self-designed metal detector but without success.Millard says: “Bliss saw in this national and personal tragedy an opportunity for personal fame and achievement. He was very worried about taking what he thought were risks with the the newfangled medicine, including sterilising and cleaning antiseptic.For 79 days Garfield suffered immensely as the infection spread, developing sepsis and blood poisoning. He lost nearly a hundred pounds, becoming a skeletal figure. One of the last things he wrote was “strangulatus pro republica”, or “tortured for the republic”.Despite the president’s obvious decline, Bliss issued rosy reports to the press, driven by what historians describe as immense hubris. On 19 September Garfield finally succumbed to the infection his doctors had caused.Millard adds: “It was the most horrific death you can imagine. He was riddled with infection and, when they did the autopsy, there were huge gouges. The fingers had created these burrowing holes through him and they were filled with pus and infection. He lost so much weight and was horribly dehydrated. He almost certainly would have survived had it not been for his doctors.”As for Guiteau, he pronounced himself the happiest he had ever been because he was now a celebrity. Millard says: “He’s doing every interview he can. He’s having his portrait taken. He’s polishing off his memoirs that he had written before.“He writes a letter for the New York Herald to publish offering himself to any young woman who would like to marry him but she has to be younger than 30 and wealthy. He thinks he’s quite a catch now and he’s waiting for Arthur, whom he assumes is very grateful to him, to free him and then he expects to run for president himself.”Guiteau’s trial was a spectacle. His defence lawyers argued he was not guilty by reason of insanity and, more pointedly, that the president’s doctors, not Guiteau, were responsible for Garfield’s death. Both defences failed. Guiteau was convicted and hanged, his brain and enlarged spleen preserved by a museum.View image in fullscreenThe nation feared that Arthur, the ultimate machine politician, would entrench the spoils system. Instead, rising to the gravity of the office, he became an unexpected champion of reform. In 1883 he signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which established a merit-based system for federal employment and stands as Garfield’s most direct legacy.Garfield was the second of four US presidents who have been assassinated. The shootings of Lincoln and Kennedy have spawned countless books and conspiracy theories; those of Garfield and, in 1901, William McKinley are little remembered. It was not until 2018 that a marker was erected on the National Mall close to the spot where Garfield was shot.Millard hopes that Death By Lightning will inspire fresh curiosity or renewed interest, especially among young people, and impress on viewers what America lost. She visited the set in Budapest, Hungary, during filming and is thrilled by the finished product. She credits Mike Makowsky, its creator, writer and executive producer, for doing his own research and offering a faithful portrayal of Garfield.“When we were talking early on six years ago, I told him I understand you’re going to take some creative licence and that’s fine. The one thing I really care about is Garfield’s character. It needs to stay intact because not only do people not know much about him; think there’s nothing interesting to know. You can’t understand the weight of this tragedy unless you understand who he was. Mike succeeded spectacularly with that. You understand who Garfield was.”Speaking via Zoom from Los Angeles, Makowsky says: “Garfield was truly a Renaissance man. He was fiercely intelligent and empathetic and was so ahead of his time on the prevailing questions around civil rights and reforms within his own government.“He believed in universal education at a time where that was not at all a popular notion. He exhibited genuine leadership and I hope that the show is able to successfully make the case for Garfield as one of the great tragic what-could-have-beens in our history. I can only speculate the positive effects that a full Garfield presidency would have had on our country.”

      Death By Lightning is now available on Netflix More

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      Olivia Rodrigo condemns Trump administration’s use of her music for ‘racist, hateful propaganda’

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      Olivia Rodrigo has criticized the Trump administration after one of her songs was featured in a government video promoting deportation efforts.A clip posted on the official Department of Homeland Security and White House Instagram accounts encouraged undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the US. The video used a segment of Rodrigo’s song all-american bitch as its soundtrack.Rodrigo, who is Filipino American, reportedly condemned the use of her music in a comment on the post, writing: “don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda.” The comment was later taken down, but not before screenshots were captured and circulated widely.The video, uploaded Tuesday as Americans voted in several states, opens with the loud intro of the track as ICE agents are shown detaining people, accompanied by the caption: “IF ICE FINDS YOU.” It then transitions to scenes of immigrants seemingly choosing to self-deport, underscored by the song lyrics: “All the time/I’m grateful all the time/I’m sexy and I’m kind/I’m pretty when I cry.”The caption concludes with a warning: “LEAVE NOW and self-deport using the CBP Home app. If you don’t, you will face the consequences.”After Rodrigo’s response went viral on Friday, Instagram removed the soundtrack from the clip. An error message, reading “This song is currently unavailable”, is currently displayed.In a statement shared with the Guardian, a DHS spokesperson said: “America is grateful all the time for our federal law enforcement officers who keep us safe. We suggest Ms. Rodrigo thank them for their service, not belittle their sacrifice.”The department did not confirm whether they had removed the original comment by Rodrigo from the post.Rodrigo joins a growing list of artists who have objected to Trump or his administration using their music without consent, with others including Beyoncé, the Rolling Stones and the singer Jess Glynne.Glynne voiced her anger when one of her songs was similarly used, writing on Instagram: “This post honestly makes me sick. My music is about love, unity, and spreading positivity – never about division or hate.”This isn’t the first time Rodrigo has spoken out against the Trump administration. She publicly condemned ICE raids that took place in Los Angeles earlier in the year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe singer, 22, wrote on Instagram: “I’ve lived in LA my whole life and I’m deeply upset about these violent deportations of my neighbors under the current administration. LA simply wouldn’t exist without immigrants. Treating hardworking community members with such little respect, empathy, and due process is awful.”Rodrigo previously collaborated with the federal government under very different circumstances. In 2021, she visited the White House wearing a vintage pink Chanel suit to meet then-president Joe Biden and Dr Anthony Fauci, recording a video to encourage youth vaccination during the Covid-19 pandemic.From the White House podium, she said: “I am beyond honored and humbled to be here today to help spread the message about the importance of youth vaccination. I’m in awe of the work President Biden and Dr Fauci have done and was happy to help lend my support to this important initiative.” More

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      Washington National Opera may move out of Kennedy Center due to Trump ‘takeover’

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      The Washington National Opera (WNO) is considering moving out of the Kennedy Center, the company’s home since the US’s national performing arts center opened in 1971.The possibility has been forced on the company as a result of the “takeover” of the center by Donald Trump, according to WNO’s artistic director, Francesca Zambello. The president declared himself chair of the institution in February, sacking and replacing its board and leadership.Leaving the Kennedy Center is a possible scenario after a collapse in box office revenue and “shattered” donor confidence in the wake of Trump’s takeover, said Zambello.“It is our desire to perform in our home at the Kennedy Center,” she said. “But if we cannot raise enough money, or sell enough tickets in there, we have to consider other options.“The two things that support a company financially, because of the takeover, have been severely compromised,” she said.Ticket sales were about 40% unsold compared with before Trump declared himself chair, said Zambello. Many have decided to boycott the center. Every day she receives messages of protest from formerly loyal members of the audience, she says.“They say things like: ‘I’m never setting foot in there until the “orange menace” is gone.’ Or: ‘Don’t you know history? Don’t you know what Hitler did? I refuse to give you a penny,’” she said.“People send me back their the season brochure shredded in an envelope and say: ‘Never, never, will I return: while he’s in power.’”Before February’s coup, the opera performances were running at 80%-90% of capacity. Now, Zambello said, they were at 60%, with at times the appearance of fuller houses created by the distribution of complimentary tickets.Philanthropic giving to the company – an important source of its funding – was down, she said. “Donor confidence has been shattered because many people feel: ‘If I give to the Kennedy Center, I’m supporting Donald Trump,’” she said.“The building is tainted,” she said. It had been “politicized by the current management”.Previously, the board of trustees “was always a mix of Republicans and Democrats. It did not matter that someone was a Republican or a Democrat. What mattered was that they were leading a big, important institution.”She said that the new management of the institution “do not have experience in the arts”. Richard Grenell, the Trump-appointed president of the center, has previously served in various foreign policy roles, including US ambassador to Germany.In addition, staffing in key areas such as marketing and development had been hollowed out, both in terms of experience and numbers, she said. “There was a promise from the new management that they would help us find new donors, increase contributions – which they have not done for our benefit,” she said.The new management of the center had not vetoed any of Zambello’s programming choices, but “they have suggested that we produce more popular operas”, she said. “This season, we are producing The Marriage of Figaro, Aida and West Side Story … I don’t see how we can get more popular than that.”Zambello said that when she joined the company in 2012, she committed to 50% non-white casting.“The management has questioned some aspects of it, and we have explained these are the best people for the roles,” she said, adding: “America is an incredibly diverse country, and so we want to represent every part of this country on our stage.”They had also questioned, she said, singers’ fees: “They have said: ‘Could we consider less expensive artists?’ We’re a feeding ground for bigger companies in this country. So we’re already hiring people who are on the rise and whose fees will get a lot more expensive later.”Grenell had, said Zambello, issued an edict requiring all shows to be “net neutral”, that is, with costs fully covered by box-office returns and donor contributions. But, she said, “We’re at the point where now we can’t present a net-neutral budget without an epic amount of outside funding, or knowing that our patrons would come back.”The slump in ticket sales was reflected across the board at the center, including for its concert seasons and theater, according to an analysis published by the Washington Post last week, which showed the box office down by 40% compared with a 2018 baseline.According to Zambello, box-office figures have now ceased to be internally circulated among the center’s creative teams as part of the standard system of daily show reports.The president declared his intention to become chair of the institution on 7 February, firing its bipartisan board of trustees. He replaced them with those of his own choosing; they elected him unanimously to the position days later. The president of the center was removed and replaced with Grenell.The moves were widely condemned. Weeks later, when JD Vance and the second lady, Usha Vance, who was inserted on to the Kennedy Center board by Trump, attended a concert given by the National Symphony Orchestra in March, patrons booed them.Usha Vance was already a trustee of the WNO, which has an independent board and its own endowment. “She was a supportive board member when she was a senator’s wife, and she has been a supportive board member as second lady, and we are grateful to have her patronage,” said Zambello.“I believe that she is someone who is an equalizer,” she said. “We can’t turn our backs on half this country. We have to find a way to all communicate and function together. I don’t believe in ‘us’ and ‘them’.”Artists have by and large remained loyal to WNO, Zambello says. However, in March, the creative team behind the opera Fellow Travelers, a love story set amid Eisenhower’s purge of gay employees from federal jobs in the 1950s, withdrew their work from the programme.The show was replaced by a production of Robert Ward’s opera The Crucible, an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s allegory on the anti-communist witch-hunts of McCarthyism.WNO is an independent company, but it has an affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center, meaning that it agrees to produce a certain number of shows in the building; shares back office functions such as marketing and development; and receives a subsidy from the center of about $2m-$3m per year.The affiliation agreement was made in 2011, soon before Zambello became artistic director, in order to stabilise the finances of the company. It was renewed shortly before Trump declared himself chair of the Kennedy Center.WNO is understood to be looking at alternative venues in DC for its forthcoming season, which runs from October 2026 to May the following year. Theaters of the scale required to produce main-stage opera are scarce, though auditoriums used by the city’s Shakespeare Theater Company could potentially be taken from time to time for smaller-scale works.The Kennedy Center declined to comment. More

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      Seth Meyers: ‘Trump has no idea what regular people are going through and he doesn’t care’

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      Late-night hosts discussed Donald Trump’s out-of-touch comments on grocery prices, the longest-ever government shutdown and a dramatic White House press conference on Ozempic.Seth MeyersSeth Meyers continued to analyze the results of Tuesday’s elections on Thursday evening, examining what fueled major victories for Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey. “If you do look inside the numbers, you’ll see that it wasn’t just anti-Trump backlash that fueled Democrats’ wins,” the Late Night host said. “Voters are also furious about the economy,” especially record-high grocery prices.“So the same thing that we were told was an issue in the last election was still an issue in this election because nothing has been fixed,” Meyers continued. “And voters are right – grocery prices are going up, everything from coffee to bananas to beef.” In fact, beef prices have never been higher. “Soon it’s going to get so bad that Trump’s going to start pushing Americans toward vegan options,” Meyers joked.But “don’t worry, Republicans, Trump is in touch with the common man,” he added. “That’s his gift. He knows what it’s like to go to the grocery store and feel the pain when you open your wallet and hand the cashier your ID and – wait, what?”Speaking from the White House, Trump claimed that “all we want is voter ID” at the grocery store. “You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID.”“Yeah, everyone knows you get carded at the grocery store,” Meyers deadpanned. “Trump has no idea what regular people are going through and he doesn’t care.”In fact, Trump insisted that grocery prices were going down in his recent interview with CBS News’s 60 Minutes. “You can lie about immigration, you can lie about the stock market, you can even lie about what wars you ended because most Americans will say ‘I didn’t even know that Thailand and Finland were at war,’” said Meyers. “But you can’t lie about the prices people see with their own eyes at the grocery store.”Stephen ColbertOn the Late Show, Stephen Colbert checked in on the government shutdown, now the longest in US history at 38 days. “The shutdown has already wreaked havoc on air travel, and that havoc is about to get even reekier,” he said, as air traffic controllers aren’t being paid and many aren’t showing up to work.So many, in fact, that the Federal Aviation Administration has directed airlines to cut 10% of their flights at the busiest airports. “So unfortunately it may be time to try your new favorite airline: the bus,” Colbert joked. “If you’re traveling for Thanksgiving, you might want to leave now.”Colbert also touched on the major victories for Democrats on election day, which Trump referred to in a press conference as “an interesting evening and we learned a lot”.“That sounds like what you’d say after a Tinder date where someone had to go to the hospital,” Colbert laughed.In other news, Fifa – “whose job, you’ll recall, is to take bribes and regulate soccer”, Colbert joked – announced a new peace prize to be awarded at the World Cup draw in Washington. “Yes, the Fifa peace prize: it’s given exclusively to world leaders who stop wars using only their feet,” Colbert said.“So it really looks like a made-up award just to give Trump something,” he noted, though when asked to confirm that Trump would be given the award, Fifa president Gianni Infantino demurred, saying: “On the 5th of December, you will see.”“Man, it is going to be hilarious when they give it to Obama,” Colbert laughed.The Daily ShowAnd on the Daily Show, Jordan Klepper recapped a dramatic White House press conference in which Trump announced a plan to cut the price of Ozempic and other pharmaceutical weight-loss drugs. “It’s all part of his campaign promise and his one consistent principle of ‘no fatties’,” Klepper joked.The press conference was “an event that turned into a major Hipaa violation”, as Trump announced the price cuts by singling out members of his administration who did or did not take weight-loss drugs.“Joking aside, obesity is a serious issue,” Klepper said. “So, this could be a benefit. Dr Oz, you’re a doctor, theoretically. Give us a reasonable expectation of success here.”Oz, the TV doctor turned Trump’s administrator for Medicare and Medicaid Services, boasted that Americans would “lose 135bn pounds by the midterms”.“Why the midterms?” Klepper wondered. “Did they add a swimsuit competition to those?“Look, I’m no mathematician,” he continued. “But 135bn pounds divided by 340 million Americans means we each have to lose … 400lb by the midterms. And I know that sounds like a lot, but remember: that’s just the average! Some people will lose 300lb, while other people will lose 500lb. Some of us will lose no pounds at all, which will be offset by everyone losing 800lb.“The point is, regardless of how much you lose, Donald Trump will be tracking it and announcing your personal results at a press conference.” More