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    Trump administration to review 19 Smithsonian museums to ensure exhibits are ‘patriotic’

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    The Trump administration is evidently extending its control of cultural representation at the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex.In a letter posted on the White House website, the administration told the Smithsonian that it plans a wide review of exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations in 2026.The letter to Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, from Trump administration officials said the White House wants the museums’ program to reflect “unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story” in keeping with an executive order issued in March that ordered the elimination of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums.Museums will have 120 days to replace content the administration finds “divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions”.Donald Trump’s order from March, titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, said the president “aims to ensure that the Smithsonian is an institution that sparks children’s imagination, celebrates American history and ingenuity, serves as a symbol to the world of American greatness, and makes America proud”.Earlier in August, the museum removed and later amended an exhibit on US presidential impeachments that mentioned Trump’s two impeachments during his first term. Officials at the Smithsonian later said museum officials “were not asked by any administration or other government official to remove content from the exhibit”.But Monday’s letter to the institution, which was first obtained by the Wall Street Journal, places the institution under curatorial scrutiny ranging from public-facing exhibition text and online content to internal curatorial processes, exhibition planning, the use of collections and artist grants.“This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” the letter is reported to say.It was signed by Lindsey Halligan, White House senior associate; Vince Haley, the director of the domestic policy council, and Russ Vought; the director of the office of Management and Budget.Halligan was appointed to effectuate JD Vance’s oversight of the Smithsonian. In a statement, she said the review was “about preserving trust in one of our most cherished institutions”.Halligan added: “The Smithsonian museums and exhibits should be accurate, patriotic, and enlightening – ensuring they remain places of learning, wonder, and national pride for generations to come.”The formal review comes as the Trump administration placed Washington DC’s police department under direct federal control and deployed the national guard into the city, citing a public safety emergency related to crime and homelessness, though data shows a sharp decrease in violent crime.In January, Washington DC’s metropolitan police department and US attorney’s office released a report showing that total violent crime in DC in 2024 was down 35% from the prior year, resulting in the lowest violent crime rate in more than 30 years. Meanwhile, data have consistently shown that unhoused people are more likely to be victimized by crimes than commit them.The review will initially focus on eight of the following Smithsonian museums: the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe White House’s letter noted that others will be reviewed at a later date.The Smithsonian’s Board of Regents had previously agreed to conduct a thorough review of all its museum and zoo content to eliminate political influence and bias. That preceded the resignation in June of Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery who Trump said was involved with diversity initiatives he opposed.Separately, figurative painter Amy Sherald cancelled a career review of her work – including a portrait of Michelle Obama, the former first lady – at the Smithsonian over concerns that the institute would not show Trans Forming Liberty, a portrait of a transgender woman with pink hair and a blue dress holding a torch as the Statue of Liberty.Monday’s letter later goes further, however, ordering a review of exhibits planned for the US’s 250th birthday. It also is part of a broader push to assert oversight over a broad swathe of cultural and academic institutions.The White House states that museums should correct “divisive or ideologically driven” language with text that is “unifying, historically accurate”.A team from the White House reportedly plans to conduct observational visits and museum walk-throughs to document themes and messaging. The letter also said that the White House had asked to review organizational charts, visitor surveys, exhibited artists who received Smithsonian grants, outside partners and internal communications related to section and approval processes.The outlet said the White House had given 30 days for requested materials to be turned over and that it expected to complete its review by early 2026. More

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      ‘It felt like a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale’: US comics on the dangers of political satire

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      In April, comedian Jena Friedman had a strange encounter in Vancouver airport. She had just performed a Ted talk about the future of comedy and was heading home to the US, when someone she thought worked for airport security quizzed her about her visit.Thinking he was probing for visa infringements, “I just said I was doing comedy. Then he asked: ‘What do you joke about?’ Stupidly, I lightly flirted with him, and was like: ‘Everything other than airport security!’ He didn’t react at all. Then I realised he was US border control. He asked again: ‘What do you joke about?’”Friedman is a veteran of The Daily Show and The Late Show, and her standup comedy often features excoriating routines at the expense of the political establishment. “I just froze because I am a political comedian and I didn’t know what to say. Then he said: ‘Do you joke about politicians?’”She made it home, but the incident stuck with her. Friedman lives in LA, and the recent actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement “detaining anyone and everyone who looks a certain way” put her on high alert. “It was such a quick, on its face benign, interaction,” she says. “But it did feel like a scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m a blonde, white woman who looks like a Republican’s wife and I have an American passport. But what if I had said ‘Yes?’ Don’t we want to live in a country where we can joke about politicians, where we can joke about anything?”View image in fullscreenFriedman incorporated that moment into her new standup show, Motherf*cker, which she’s performing at the Edinburgh fringe. The show is a change of pace. She’s generally resisted getting personal on stage, resenting the idea that women have to be relatable to succeed in comedy, but this time it felt unavoidable, as she explores the life-changing experience of becoming a parent while her own mother was dying. “It’s about grief, but it’s also political,” she says. “The vibe in certain circles does feel like we’re grieving. So there’s something about my show that’s connecting to the larger moment.”Friedman is among a crop of US comedians with roots in topical comedy appearing at this year’s fringe. Another stalwart of US political comedy, Michelle Wolf, is back, too, while standup and former Saturday Night Live writer Sam Jay is making her festival debut.Wolf earned her stripes on The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Myers, and gained notoriety with her 2018 set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which she roasted Trump and his collaborators. These days, she lives in Barcelona, although returns to the US regularly for comedy work. She’s yet to encounter border trouble but, with reports of people with green cards and citizens being detained, she says: “I’m keeping an eye on it.”Comedians Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres have both said that the state of US politics has forced them out of the country – O’Donnell to Ireland and DeGeneres to England. O’Donnell has written a show on just that, which she performed for the first week of the fringe. Wolf is happy with her move to Barcelona, and feels her comedy has benefited from other cultural perspectives, but returns to the US because “the audiences are great” and there’s plenty of work. While other US comedians have also discussed the idea of moving to Europe, she thinks it won’t happen until there’s “an impetus to go, something I don’t think is far off, like: you can’t talk about this any more, you can’t talk about that any more”.Last month, satirist Stephen Colbert announced that network CBS had cancelled The Late Show after 33 years. Many thought the timing, three days on from Colbert criticising CBS parent company Paramount for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, was suspect. Fellow late-night talkshow host Jon Stewart criticised the move on his podcast and pointed to wider fear across the industry.: “There are a lot of things that will never be made, that you will never know about, that will be killed in the bed before they ever had a chance because of this chilling effect.”Friedman’s glad to see Colbert and Stewart speaking out against Trump and his administration – and agrees there’s a “chill”. “The industry has already been less supportive of political comedy than they were under Biden and Obama. However, “seeing the most prominent comedians taking [Trump] to task, like Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] from South Park, Colbert and Stewart, that gives me hope”.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Michelle Wolf’s standup merges the personal and political and her podcast, Wolf’s Thought Box, tackles current affairs. Her new show, which she’s performing while eight months pregnant at the fringe, explores life and society “through the lens of being a mom now”. There are punchlines on societal pressures for working mothers, home birth, momfluencers, gender inequalities and more. “We’re in an era now where people are talking about motherhood realistically and that’s very refreshing,” she says.Still, political comedy isn’t absent. “I feel like I have to address the whole America and Trump thing … people expect me to say something about it.” She plans to tailor topical jokes to the day’s news but, “I don’t like making it a large part of my set, because it bores me. There’s always something crazy happening, but it’s hard to come up with creative angles other than: can you believe this?”It’s been nine years since she first started writing jokes about Trump and, in that time, her life has transformed – she met her partner, moved abroad, and is about to have her second child. Her main feeling now is: “How are we still talking about him? How are we still in the same spot?”Jay reflects that slow build in her show, We the People, in which she explores the state of America – looking back to the “unconfident whites” who founded the nation. She describes the show as “a fun, risky little ride” as she tries to get to the root of why the US feels so divided, and what we can do to better understand one another. “It’s this broader conversation I’ve been having about America and race,” Jay says.The whole world feels unsettled right now and there’s an inability to consider other perspectives, Jay says. “How did we get here as Americans? Of course, I think race plays a large part in it. And how did these race relations get to the way they are? Not just blaming white people, but exploring the type of white people we’re dealing with, why they might be the way they are, their roots in England.”Trump came up plenty during Jay’s time on SNL and appears in her fringe show as a “braggadocious” fool, unable to keep state secrets, yet smartly appealing to the frustrations of America’s poor white communities. But the conditions that created and elevated Trump are more interesting to Jay: “He’s the symptom of this, not the cause. This is a result of years and years of us doing it wrong … it’s been building for a long time and for a lot of different reasons.”Friedman agrees: “I started working at the Daily Show in 2012, I was at Letterman before that, so I started looking at politics on a daily basis since 2010, and this is a long time coming.” This also means that, among US audiences, not everyone wants political comedy. “They’re always looking for escapism. In the first term, there was definite Trump fatigue,” Friedman says. “As a political comic, I’ve always done better in the UK than the US. It’s the UK audiences who are like: what the hell’s going on over there?” says Friedman.The mood in US comedy is, Jay says, “the mood in America … chaos. There’s no way to keep up. People are also very desensitised. Shit just keeps happening in more extreme ways that people are losing a metric for it.”All three agree that comedy can help share differing worldviews. “Even if it’s people we disagree with, the sign of a healthy democracy is when people can safely be on stage saying whatever we want, ideally in good faith,” Friedman says. “I support all comedians, I support freedom of expression and I want to see more of it. I want to see people more open to people they disagree with. Whenever I do political comedy, the goal is not to preach to the choir, it’s to get people to see things slightly differently.”Jay has said that comedy can be a tool for empathy. “I look at it as a conversation. It can serve a purpose of actual understanding, understanding that we’re all humans trying to figure out a thing that doesn’t make a lot of sense – existing. Everybody is grappling with these things in their own way.”What does the future hold for US comedians? “It’s too soon to tell,” says Friedman. “But I think everybody exercising the US first amendment in a way that’s funny and disarming is really important right now.”Jay says: “Once I’m on stage, I’m gonna say what I’m gonna say. If I can’t come back as a result, I’ll just have to have my girlfriend come meet me in Scotland.” More

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      ‘Looming over the city like gods’: the men who changed New York for better and worse

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      Jonathan Mahler didn’t plan to publish his new book about New York City from 1986 to 1990, tumultuous years culminating in a historic mayoral election, amid a similarly dramatic campaign for city hall. But he’s not unhappy to do so.The Gods of New York tells how the Democrat Ed Koch sought a fourth term as mayor but by election year, 1989, was widely seen as an “incumbent plagued by scandal, just like Eric Adams now”, Mahler said.“We had Rudy Giuliani, the tough guy from the outer boroughs – in Giuliani’s case Brooklyn, now in Andrew Cuomo’s case, Queens. And then we had the candidate of color who was saying: ‘I’m going to take the city back for the people who are getting left out.’ It was David Dinkins then and it’s Zohran Mamdani now.”Wary of generalization, as befits a veteran New York Times reporter, Mahler nonetheless said that as the city “went through a big transformation” from 1986-90, so “it’s going through another now.”The Gods of New York is a sequel of sorts to Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, Mahler’s book about the city in crisis in the late 70s. Turning to the late 80s, Mahler presents a riot of stories from a period beset by racial tensions, the crack epidemic, soaring crime, sensational cases and an economic boom overwhelmingly boosting the rich. Keeping ordinary New Yorkers in mind, Mahler nonetheless presents extraordinary characters.“I will confess I went back and forth on the title, which was suggested by a friend,” Mahler said. “I thought: ‘That’s the perfect title.’ And then a handful of people were like: ‘You can’t possibly call it The Gods of New York. Are you saying Donald Trump is a god? And Rudy?”Forty years ago, no one foresaw the Trump of today: occupying the White House, dividing America, Giuliani a shameless sidekick.“I was like: ‘Well, not gods in that sense. This is much more like the Greek gods. They were kind of on their own tabloid Mount Olympus. Really, what I meant was that [Trump, Giuliani and others] were looming over the city like gods, not necessarily benevolent. Remember, the Greek gods were … wrathful, vengeful and petty. That was definitely what I was going for. Less literal, more figurative. So I stuck with it.”View image in fullscreenReaders could do worse than make The Gods of New York a double bill with Paper of Wreckage, an acclaimed oral history of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post published last year, a chronicle of the gutter press and the stars.“All the characters were operating from the same playbook, in a way,” Mahler said of a cast that contains others still prominent, among them Spike Lee, then shooting his remarkable first films in Brooklyn, and the Rev Al Sharpton, a Black leader through the Howard Beach racist attack, the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and other scandals once boiling, now near-forgotten.“They were all trying to get the city’s attention and use that attention. We now use the term ‘attention economy’ all the time. This was really kind of the beginning of the attention economy and all these characters kind of intuitively understood that.The gay rights campaigner Larry Kramer “was organizing these incredibly in-your-face protests against the city and the country’s handling of Aids [that were] no different, in a way, from what Trump was doing and is still doing, which is trying to get people’s attention and keep it, trying to start a story and keep it going.“I’m not sure that I would have seen that parallel if I hadn’t seen Trump do it in 2016 when … I was working on reporting the [presidential] campaign. It was kind of crazy to watch him get elected, particularly as a New Yorker.”Working on The Gods of New York, Mahler saw Trump “using the same power to its ultimate effect: the insistence that he is never wrong, that you just keep moving forward. You act bulletproof, then you are bulletproof. I don’t know that I would have understood what he was doing in the 80s and what all these guys were doing if I hadn’t seen it play out on the biggest stage in recent years.”Kramer died in 2020, after giving a last interview to Mahler. In 2024, Trump surged back to power. Amid the fire and fury of the second term, reading about Trump in the 80s can feel a little jarring. As Mahler shows, even the Times was once drawn in.View image in fullscreen“There’s a great note in the Abe Rosenthal papers,” Mahler said, referring to the long-serving editor. “A staff member wrote him a note saying: ‘No wonder Donald Trump has such a huge ego: I don’t think anyone’s ever got on the cover of so many New York Times sections in such a short period of time.’“I guess in some ways that’s a failure on the part of the Times to see who Donald Trump was, but I think also the context is important. In that moment, New York was recovering from some really dark days. The city was in a real death spiral for years. And then along comes this guy ready to invest in New York in audacious ways, really doubling down on the city.“And so you can sort of understand why, if you’re an institution like the New York Times that is very connected to New York, much more so then than today … they might feel like: ‘Well, this guy believes in New York, he’s betting on New York,’ and you can see how that might earn him some goodwill.”Mahler also documents Trump’s disastrous fixation with Atlantic City, which he utterly failed to turn into a gambling hub, to his considerable cost; his callous treatment of women; his notorious call for the Central Park Five, Black youths ultimately shown to have been falsely convicted of rape, to be sentenced to death.Crime stories run through Mahler’s book. The so-called Preppy Murder also centers on Central Park, where Jennifer Levin’s body was discovered. Prosecutor Linda Fairstein emerges as a thwarted hero, aghast at suspect Robert Chambers’ protection by the Catholic church and escape from the harshest sentence. And yet Fairstein went on to help subject the Central Park Five to a historic miscarriage of justice.“She was so demonized after the Central Park Five,” Mahler said. “I think it was interesting to see these two cases sort of as a pair, and the way in which Fairstein was so bitter about how the Chambers case played out … and then not even a couple years later, she’s confronted with the chance to sort of make amends. Not that this was a conscious decision, but you could see how maybe she was more zealous than she should have been [regarding the Central Park Five], because she felt … unsatisfied with the resolution of the Chambers case.”A man who held the stage longer than most, Koch, is perhaps Mahler’s central character. At the start, the mayor is riding high. By the end, he’s been brought low.Mahler said: “His third term was pretty clearly a disaster. But I think of him as a really sympathetic character … someone who was so flawed but also so committed to New York … he really cared about the city. I think that’s a good lens through which to see his feud with Trump [over Trump’s real-estate plays], because Trump was in it for Trump and Koch knew that was not in the best interest of New York.”Koch will also be known to history for being gay but not coming out, his mayoralty covering the worst years of the Aids epidemic, campaigners such as Kramer raging.View image in fullscreenMahler tells that story, counting himself “very fortunate that the Times did a big piece a couple years ago about Koch’s sexuality, and kind of outed him. I feel like now … we all know this is how it was.”Was Koch a good mayor?“I think you would have to say yes and no,” Mahler said. “Though I’m not sure he had any other choice, as he had to do something to save the city, he set in motion this transformation, this shift toward private business that I guess we’re now seeing the sort of reaction against, with Zohran.”We’re back to the current campaign. Thirty-six years ago, in the election that ends Mahler’s book, Dinkins beat Koch in the Democratic primary then seized the big prize. Mahler rates the city’s first Black mayor as a good one “dealt a terrible hand”, the same fate that befell Benjamin Ward, the city’s first Black police commissioner. Dinkins served one term, losing to Giuliani in 1993. The city’s transformation continued. It always will, which helps make The Gods of New York such an enthralling read. The city Mahler shows is gone, but its stories remain.

      The Gods of New York is out now More

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      in US Politics

      John Oliver on Ice’s crackdown: ‘Trying to drive up arrests at all costs’

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      John Oliver took a hard look at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on the latest Last Week Tonight, as more and more videos of Ice raids across US cities continue to show a brutal crackdown on undocumented people. “For all the administration’s talk of targeting dangerous criminals, the reality is very different,” Oliver started.The Trump administration has set a goal of deporting one million people a year, “which, it’s worth noting, would be more than double the previous record of 400,000 when Obama was president, which was already very high”, said Oliver. “But notably, they don’t seem to be getting near their target numbers.” As of taping, the administration had deported about 280,000 people, “so getting to a million in just six months seems very unlikely”.“And they have backed themselves into this corner, because ‘promising’ to deport a million criminal migrants is one thing, but once you’re in charge, you then have to find that many of them,” he continued, “which is going to be hard if they don’t exist in the numbers that you’re claiming, which they don’t.“It’s like promising to apprehend 10,000 Fred Dursts a day,” he added. “There just aren’t that many out there, so either you have to admit that your target number was bullshit in the first place or you have to drastically widen your definition of what a Fred Durst is until you’re eventually arresting any gen X-er wearing a hat.“But instead of conceding their numbers were inflated, the administration is trying to drive up arrests at all costs.” The Trump aide Stephen Miller has instructed Ice agents to target Home Depots and 7-Elevens, and the agency has rapidly deputized a record number of local police to function as deportation agents. They have brought in border patrol as well as the national guard; at least a quarter of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s workforce; 80% of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and even members of the US Postal Service.“This mass reallocation of resources means that other crimes are going less policed,” Oliver explained. The FBI, for example, has instructed agents to prioritize immigration enforcement at the expense of white-collar crime and investigations into sexual abuse.“I gotta say: for a guy who pandered so heavily to people convinced pedophiles, sex offenders and traffickers had infiltrated our government, Trump’s sure making the government a lot friendlier to them,” said Oliver. “Ghislaine Maxwell’s in a nicer cell now, Lawrence Taylor’s advising on kids’ physical fitness. Fuck it, at this point, if he’s willing to wear a Maga hat, I really don’t see why Roman Polanski can’t come back.”Nevertheless, “border czar” Tom Homan claimed that 70% of those arrested by Ice were criminals, while the other 30% were national security threats who “don’t have a criminal history because they try to lay low until it’s time for them to do things bad”.“Under his logic, I guess anyone could be a national security threat,” said Oliver. But “Homan’s numbers are also nowhere near Ice’s own data,” which found that only 40% of those arrested had any criminal history, including traffic infractions, and just 7% were convicted of any sort of violent crime. In fact, as of June, people with only civil or immigration violations – no criminal convictions – made up the largest percentage of arrests nationwide. “Maybe the clearest sign that this is more about pushing up numbers than catching violent criminals on the run is that one of the key places where they’re now fishing for arrests is immigration court, where people show up for their hearings,” he added.As numerous videos showed, Ice agents arrested people who showed up to process their situation legally, using a loophole that allows the government to deport people without due process if their immigration case is dismissed. “It is the laziest possible way to juice up your numbers,” said Oliver, “because you’re targeting people who are going through the system ‘in the right way’ and turning them into people you can immediately arrest and deport.”This trap was among “things the administration is doing that sure feel like they’re breaking the law” but “often aren’t”. Oliver took the “dystopian visual” of Ice agents wearing masks, which is actually legal, as no federal law prevents it. “So they can do it, but why are they?” The administration claims that it’s for their own protection, with the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, including videotaping arrests as an act of “violence” against agents.All of this “gets even more worrying” when one remembers that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a huge surge of funding for immigration enforcement – roughly $170bn over the next few years, some of which is set aside for the hiring of 10,000 new Ice agents. “For what it’s worth, massive rapid hiring sprees never tend to work out well,” Oliver noted. Past efforts to bolster Customs and Border Protection under George Bush ended up with hiring drug cartel members and an actual serial killer. “And it’s not a great sign for who Ice is appealing to that they’re currently posting gross recruitment ads, like this fake minivan ad tagged: ‘Think about how many criminal illegal aliens you could fit in this bad boy!’” he added. “And they seem more than a little desperate already, as they’ve already removed age limits for hiring agents.”And this past week, Ice shared a video of their newest recruit: former Superman actor Dean Cain. “You know, there’s an old saying in Hollywood: ‘If all you can get is Dean Cain, you are fucked,’” Oliver joked.“Now, I’m not saying that Ice isn’t finding people,” he continued. “I’m just saying, when you are reduced to pinning a badge on the 59-year-old star of The Dog Who Saved Christmas, The Dog Who Saved Christmas Vacation, The Dog Who Saved the Holidays, The Dog Who Saved Halloween, The Dog Who Saved Easter and The Dog Who Saved Summer, maybe you are in trouble. Although, on the plus side, no need for that guy to wear a mask because the chances of anyone recognizing him are fucking zero.”So what can be done? “As powerless as this can feel, as individuals there are still actions you can take,” said Oliver, such as recording any arrest you witness involving Ice agents. Oliver also advised that if you’re approached by Ice agents, whether or not you’re a citizen, “attorneys told us the only two things you should say to them are: ‘Am I free to leave?’ And: ‘I want to speak to a lawyer.’ That’s it. You have the right to remain silent. And I recognize that in some cases you may be unable to help yourself from saying: ‘Didn’t you used to be Superman?’ ‘I thought you died.’ ‘I can’t believe I’m meeting a film-maker.’ But that really is it.”“We are still in a very grim moment,” he added. “The rightwing narrative is that most people are rabid to punish anyone who wants to become new Americans. But that is just not true,” as new polls found 80% support a pathway to legal citizenship for undocumented immigrants. “Nor are their bullshit claims about who’s being targeted and arrested.“And I’m not saying that everything Ice is doing right now is illegal,” he concluded. “What I’m saying is, a whole bunch of it feels like it really should be. And we need to change that at our earliest opportunity.” More

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      The more James Gunn’s Superman is a hit, the more the right will want its own Dean Cain of steel

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      It’s almost impossible to divide superheroes along political lines. Captain America might seem like a patriotic, commie-bashing lunatic, as he was in the 1950s comics during the McCarthy era, until you remember that he has also spent much of his fictional career telling corrupt government agencies to shove it. And, in the Marvel Comic Universe, at least, he went on the run rather than sign up for an authoritarian superhero registry. Superman was once the square-jawed poster boy for US exceptionalism, cheerfully posing on propaganda comic covers urging readers to buy war bonds, but he’s also been written as a Kansas farm boy so suspicious of concentrated power that in one storyline he renounced his citizenship to avoid being used as a pawn of US foreign policy.Bar a few outliers – Iron Man cheerleading the military-industrial complex in his earliest comics springs to mind – trying to pin a superhero to one side of the political spectrum is like trying to staple fog: most of DC and Marvel’s big beasts will drift wherever the story, or the writer’s mortgage payments, takes them. Which is why it’s been so bizarre watching the right’s disgust as a vaguely woke man of steel drives all before him at the summer box office.James Gunn’s Superman passed the half-billion-dollar mark globally this week, which hardly means we’re looking at a film to mirror the success of the early comic book movie era – Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice somehow made $874m, for chrissakes – but does at least indicate that audiences quite like this new, down-to-earth, kindly and human take on Kal-El. Gunn is now producing next Wonder Woman.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, on the dystopian side of the news cycle, Dean Cain has declared himself primed and ready to join Donald Trump’s Ice agency. Cain (Kal-El in 90s TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) only recently declared his horror at how “woke” the new David Corenswet Supes has turned out to be. Are these two things connected? Is Cain trying to make the point that a real “superman” would be standing at America’s borders, demanding paperwork from asylum seekers and Frisbeeing their lunch into the nearest bin, rather than attempting to stop evil invaders from terrorising a rival nation (as Corenswet does in Superman)?It’s almost as if, in the absence of the kind of superhero movies Cain would like to see muscle their way into multiplexes, the actor sees it as his patriotic duty to bring hard-border fiction into reality. If the 74 million who voted for Trump don’t want these woke Marvel and DC superhero movies, and would really rather see films in which caped crusaders defend gated communities against suspiciously accented delivery drivers, isn’t Hollywood missing a trick? Isn’t there – somewhere – a gap in the market, or perhaps an alternative reality – Earth 45? Earth-Fox News? – where filmgoers queue around the block to watch Captain Constitution and the Stand Your Ground Squad, and the Hollywood trades wax lyrical about a new blockbuster era of paranoia and punitive zoning laws?The right has tried this already, of course. Cain was also pretty upset about Disney’s recent “woke” Snow White remake, perhaps because the princess didn’t spend the runtime pining for a man or whistling while she ironed. And so was conservative media outfit the Daily Wire, which at the height of the backlash against Rachel Zegler’s casting made a trailer for a then-forthcoming rival film titled Snow White and the Evil Queen.Plot details were thin on the ground, but presumably involved the heroine abandoning woodland animals for a concealed-carry permit and learning the value of hard work by running her own small business into the ground without government subsidies. We’ll never really know because the film appears to have been quietly cancelled, leaving a potential audience of millions bereft of the chance to see what happens when you trade magic mirrors for voter ID checkpoints.View image in fullscreenPerhaps the lesson here is that it’s just really difficult to make dreamy-eyed fantasy flicks that double as Breitbart comment threads. And it’s not just superhero movies that would creak under the strain. Imagine Star Wars if rebellions were built not on hope but on stricter border controls and mandatory midichlorian checks. Would The Lord of the Rings have really been quite the same if all those ’orrible orcs and trolls had been replaced on the battlefield by desperate migrants trying to reach the Shire, being enthusiastically biffed by an over-xcited Aragorn and Gimli counting down the number of “illegals” they just tonked?Sooner or later, someone’s going to make a superhero film or TV series that gives the Maga crowd everything: a caped crusader who fights windfarms, sues the Daily Planet for libel and pays for everything in gold bullion or crypto. (The Boys got close at times: Homelander is basically what happens when you cross Captain America with a Trump rally and a gallon of unpasteurised milk, but he was hardly a hero – and perhaps that’s the point.)Until then, the culture warriors will have to settle for grumbling about woke elves and lady Thor while the rest of us watch Superman save the world from the nastiest supervillains in the universe without checking anyone’s passport. More

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      Stephen Colbert on JD Vance’s water level raising: ‘Insane spoiled baby emperor move’

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      Late-night hosts took aim at JD Vance over his unusual birthday demand and Donald Trump over his disastrous tariffs.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert called it “a significant day for our economy” with Trump’s controversial tariffs finally kicking in. He said it’s a day to “set your clocks back to more expensive” with import taxes now the highest they’ve been since the Great Depression.Colbert said it’s “never a great sign to be compared to the worst thing ever”.Tariffs on certain countries are lower if negotiations have been successful or “if the president’s mad at you they can be much higher”.This week saw Apple announce $100bn worth of additional investment in the US, but there is a smaller pool of American workers with the skills necessary to make an iPhone. “I believe America’s children can do anything!” Colbert joked.The company’s CEO, Tim Cook, was filmed this week in the Oval Office giving Trump a gift which was partly made of 24-carat gold. Colbert called it “lavish corporate bottom-smooching”.In the same press opportunity, Trump again slammed Colbert for having “no talent” but did concede that he has better ratings than Kimmel or Fallon, whom he said also had no talent. “We’re all equally untalented,” Colbert said, before adding: “Thank you for watching, sir.”Colbert said that while we are “plunging headfirst into techno-feudalism”, the Secret Service is busy raising the water level of an Ohio river for Vance’s family boat trip to celebrate his birthday. He called it an “insane spoiled baby emperor move”.Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers said that Trump “clearly has no interest in doing the job of president” and doesn’t “know or care what his own administration is doing on a daily basis”.He is too busy renovating the White House with plans revealed this week for a new $200m ballroom decked out in gold. Trump has said it’s important as there hasn’t been a president like him who has been good at ballrooms before.Meyers commented that it’s “never been a problem that our presidents weren’t good at ballrooms”.To show how little Trump knows about the day-to-day, he played a clip just after the US illegally bombed Iran in which he was told by a reporter that the intelligence community said it had no evidence that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, which the president called false.This week when he was asked about Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decision to cancel $500m in contracts for vaccine development, he also appeared confused. “For a guy who watches cable news all day, you sure seem caught off-guard by the news,” Meyers said.There are also plans to put a nuclear reactor on the moon, a decision bragged about on Fox News with claims that “Trump doesn’t play by the rules”. Meyers admitted that this is true as at Nasa, rule No 1 is “don’t blow up the moon”.Ignoring the inflation that’s ballooning thanks in part to Trump’s tariffs, the administration is instead having to deal with the fallout of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump “flew into a rage again” after being asked about it this week.It’s still proving to be “explosive for Trump and his Maga base” and so this week a dinner was planned on Epstein strategy involving high-ranking loyalists. Nothing like a “secretive cabal” of powerful people to settle the conspiracy theorists, Meyers noted.It was reportedly planned by Vance, whom Trump threw under the bus when he was asked about it this week. “No matter how much you try to appease Trump or suck up to him, he’s eventually going to betray you,” he said. More

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      Trump, Sydney Sweeney and the ‘war on woke’ – podcast

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      Archive: Fox News, ITV News, Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, Sky News Australia, the Independent, TikTok @midwesterngothic, WHAS11, NBC News
      Watch The Oath here
      Watch the latest Anywhere but Washington report out of Florida
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Help support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politicspodus More

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      Spike Lee, Adam McKay and over 2,000 writers decry Trump’s ‘un-American’ actions in open letter

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      More than 2,300 members of the Writers Guild of America, including Spike Lee and Adam McKay, have signed an open letter decrying the actions of Donald Trump’s administration that represent “an unprecedented, authoritarian assault” on free speech.The letter, a combined effort from the WGA East and West branches, cites the US president’s “baseless lawsuits” against news organizations that have “published stories he does not like and leveraged them into payoffs”. It specifically references Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16m to settle a “meritless lawsuit” about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The letter notes that Trump “retaliated against publications reporting factually on the White House and threatened broadcasters’ licenses”, and has repeatedly called for the cancellation of programs that criticize him.Additionally, the letter blasts Republicans in Congress who “collaborated” with the Trump administration to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “in order to silence PBS and NPR”. And it says the FCC, led by Trump-appointed chair Brendan Carr, “openly conditioned its approval of the Skydance-Paramount merger on assurances that CBS would make ‘significant changes’ to the purported ideological viewpoint of its journalism and entertainment programming.“These are un-American attempts to restrict the kinds of stories and jokes that may be told, to silence criticism and dissent,” the letter reads. “We don’t have a king, we have a president. And the president doesn’t get to pick what’s on television, in movie theaters, on stage, on our bookshelves, or in the news.”Signees include Tony Gilroy, David Simon, Mike Schur, Ilana Glazer, Lilly Wachowski, Celine Song, Justin Kuritzkes, Desus Nice, Gillian Flynn, John Waters, Liz Meriwether, Kenneth Lonergan, Alfonso Cuarón, Shawn Ryan and many other prominent names in film and television.The letter, released on Tuesday, calls on elected representatives and industry leaders to “resist this overreach”, as well as their audiences to “fight for a free and democratic future” and “raise their voice”.The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced last Friday that it would shut down after 57 years in operation, following the decision by the Republican-controlled House last month to eliminate $1.1bn in CPB funding over two years, part of a $9bn reduction to public media and foreign aid programs.The corporation, established by Congress in 1967 to ensure educational and cultural programming remained accessible to all Americans, distributed more than $500m annually to PBS, NPR and 1,500 local stations nationwide. Despite the federal grants, stations mostly relied on viewer donations, corporate sponsorships and local government funds to stay afloat.The Trump administration has also filed a lawsuit against three CPB board members who refused to leave their positions after Trump attempted to remove them.“This is certainly not the first time that free speech has come under assault in this country, but free speech remains our right because generation after generation of Americans have dedicated themselves to its protection,” the letter concludes. “Now and always, when writers come under attack, our collective power as a union allows us to fight back. This period in American life will not last forever, and when it’s over the world will remember who had the courage to speak out.” More

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      Smithsonian says it will restore Trump impeachment exhibits in ‘coming weeks’

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      The Smithsonian will include Donald Trump’s two impeachments in an updated presentation “in the coming weeks” after references to them were removed, the museum said in a statement Saturday.That statement from the Washington DC museum also denied that the Trump administration pressured the Smithsonian to remove the references to his impeachments during his first presidency.The revelation that Trump was no longer listed among impeached presidents sparked concern that history was being whitewashed to appease the president.“We were not asked by any administration or other government official to remove content from the exhibit” about presidential power limits, the Smithsonian statement said.A museum spokesperson, Phillip Zimmerman, had previously pledged that “a future and updated exhibit will include all impeachments,” but it was not clear when the new exhibit would be installed. The museum on Saturday did not say when in the coming weeks the new exhibit will be ready.A label referring to Trump’s impeachments had been added in 2021 to the National Museum for American History’s exhibit on the American presidency, in a section called “Limits of Presidential Power”. The section includes materials on the impeachment of presidents Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson and the Watergate scandal that helped lead to Richard Nixon’s resignation.“The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a twenty-five year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation,” the statement said. “It was not consistent with other sections in the exhibit and moreover blocked the view of the objects inside its case. For these reasons, we removed the placard.”Trump is the only president to have been impeached twice. In 2019, he was impeached for pushing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden, who would later defeat Trump in the 2020 presidential election. And in 2021, he was impeached for “incitement of insurrection”, a reference to the 6 January 2021 attack aimed at the US Capitol by Trump supporters attempting to halt congressional certification of Biden’s victory over him.The Democratic majority in the House voted each time for impeachment. The Republican-led Senate each time acquitted Trump. More