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    Stephen Colbert on Trump’s second term: ‘The last five weeks have been shock and awful’

    Late-night hosts took aim at Donald Trump’s disastrous start to his second term as president and looked at the rising cost of food.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert spoke about his expectations versus his reality of Trump’s comeback, saying that the president has done “every terrible thing I could imagine” but that “I just never imagined he’d do all of them at once.”He said: “The last five weeks have been shock and awful.” Things have got so bad, he added, that even those within the Maga-verse have been getting “buyers’ remorse”, with reports of unhappy Trump voters.Colbert said it was “kinda hard to feel a lot of sympathy” for them, though. “They ordered the turd soup then said: ‘Waiter, there’s turds in my soup’ and then they came back four years later and asked: ‘Do you still have that turd soup?’” he joked.While Trump had promised that prices would go down on day one, his supporters “still think things are too expensive”.The last few weeks have seen “Elon slice through the federal government like a drunk raccoon with a samurai sword”.Colbert moved on to the soaring price of eggs, which may still go up even further by 41%. “This year’s Easter egg hunt is going to be The Purge,” he said.Stores in New York have been selling loose eggs for those who can’t afford a full pack and customs agents have stopped at least 90 people from smuggling them into the country.Colbert said that the head of the smuggling operation is “Pablo Eggs-cobar”.Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live! the host also spoke about how bad things have quickly become under Trump, joking that he was “tired of all the winning”.He said that “no one seems to know what the hell is going on” with Elon’s ongoing “chainsaw massacre of the federal workforce”.He spoke about an email sent to federal workers asking them to share five things they accomplished last week or face job loss while also talking about Republican senators demanding a meeting with the White House chief of staff to complain about cuts.The Department of Veterans Affairs has seen 1,400 jobs cut, which is a “tricky situation for Trump” as “we know he doesn’t think much of veterans but he loves affairs”.He said that Elon had been “just about as efficient as a Cybertruck in 2in of snow”.This week has seen the far-right Republican Lauren Boebert tweet that she didn’t realise how much “distain” she had for many of these departments. “Maybe let’s not get rid of that Department of Education just yet,” Kimmel said.The Federal Aviation Administration also cancelled its major contract with Verizon to instead sign with Starlink, a company owned by Elon Musk. “Nothing shady about that at all,” he said.Giving Musk government contracts is “like putting Pac-Man in charge of fruits”.The Trump administration also claimed it would release the full list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients and flight logs this week but instead just released “binders full of information everyone already had”, which led Kimmel to say: “Everything these people do is screwed up.”He remarked that the craziest thing is that Trump was “good friends” with Epstein, something his followers have chosen to ignore. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel on Trump: ‘Somehow, he’s managed to make everything disgusting’

    Late-night hosts talk Donald Trump’s proposed “gold card” visas, Trump’s first cabinet meeting and confusion over who leads the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).Jimmy KimmelTrump announced another disquieting idea on Wednesday – to allow foreigners to purchase new “gold card” visas for $5m apiece – and Jimmy Kimmel was not happy about it. “What a good idea – I’ve always said our immigration system should run more like the customer rewards program at a casino in Atlantic City,” he joked on Wednesday evening.“Somehow, he’s managed to make everything disgusting,” Kimmel continued. “This is basically what he does at Mar-a-Lago. He’s selling memberships to a country club, but this club is actually our country. The land of the free, and by free I mean $5m bucks.”Trump also said he would consider selling the visas to Russian oligarchs: “I know some Russian oligarchs who are very nice people, it’s possible.”“Let me tell you something: he may know oligarchs, but not as well as they know him,” Kimmel quipped.Kimmel also mocked Elon Musk, who tried to defend Doge’s slash-and-burn approach to civil servant layoffs as an organization that owned up to mistakes. During Trump’s first cabinet meeting, Musk conceded that Doge “accidentally” canceled USAid’s Ebola prevention program, but “restored it immediately”.“Oh, well, that’s fine then,” Kimmel joked. “He only canceled our Ebola prevention for a couple of days, calm down, everybody.“That’s not an excuse,” he added. “Just ask the doctor – ‘As soon as I realized I unplugged my mother’s life support to charge my iPhone, I immediately plugged it back in.’”Stephen ColbertOn Wednesday, Trump held his first full cabinet meeting of his second term, “and everybody was there”, said Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. “It was a who’s who of why them?”“As commander in chief, Trump made it immediately clear who is in charge: Elon Musk,” Colbert continued. Musk, who attended the meeting, introduced himself as “humble tech support” because “that is almost a literal description of the work that the Doge team is doing”.“Well, of course. I mean, we’ve all had that call with tech support,” Colbert mocked. “Hello? Yes, you’re computer’s frozen? Have you tried turning it off and then firing 4,000 people with an email.”Trump rambled on in nonsense fashion about Doge, somehow landing on the topic of circumcision. “That long, rambling response actually reminds me of circumcision, because somebody really should have cut that dickhead off,” Colbert quipped.While Musk is supposedly head of Doge, the White House continues to insist that he’s not in court filings and through its press secretary. Finally, on Tuesday, for reasons that remain unclear, the White House stated the agency is led by the career civil servant Amy Gleason. “Why Gleason? We don’t know for sure!” said Colbert.At the time of the announcement, Gleason was on vacation in Mexico. When reached by reporters, she declined to comment. “I am not surprised,” said Colbert. “It’s really hard to speak clearly when you’re under a bus.”The Daily ShowAnd on The Daily Show, Desi Lydic mocked Trump’s proposed “gold card” visas, which he described as “green card privileges plus”.“Oh? Green card privileges plus? See, I was still getting America with ads,” Lydic joked. “Quick question: if I’m unhappy with America, can I cancel my subscription after seven days?”According to Trump, the gold card visas will be “a route to citizenship, and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card. They’ll be wealthy, and they’ll be successful and they’ll be spending a lot of money.“Did this guy just put a cover charge on America?” Lydic wondered. “It’s $5m to get in, but he’ll waive it if you bring three hot girls with you.“I mean, I guess this beats the old way of becoming a citizen? Which was to marry Donald Trump,” she added.“Now you might be thinking, wait a second, if the US is just going to put citizenship up for sale, doesn’t that mean can any monster can buy one as long as they’re rich? Well, according to Trump, yes,” she continued, pointing to Trump’s comment that he knows Russian oligarchs who are “very good people”.“Seems like Trump watched Anora, and his takeaway from that movie was ‘we need to do more to help out that rich Russian teenager. He’s so good at sex!’” Lydic joked. More

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    Culture wars: Trump’s takeover of arts is straight from the dictator playbook

    In 1937, leaders of Germany’s Third Reich hosted two simultaneous art exhibitions in Munich. One, titled the Great German Art Exhibition, featured art viewed by the regime as appropriate and aspirational for the ideal Aryan society – orderly and triumphant, with mostly blond people in heroic poses amid pastoral German landscapes. The other showcased what Adolf Hitler and his followers deemed “degenerate art” (“Entartete Kunst”). The works, chaotically displayed and saddled with commentary disparaging “the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or pencil”, were abstract, profane, modernist and produced by the proclaimed enemies of the Reich – Jewish people, communists or those suspected of being either.The Degenerate Art exhibition, which later toured the country, opened a day after Hitler declared “merciless war” on cultural disintegration. The label applied to virtually all German modernist art, as well as anything deemed “an insult to German feeling”. The term and the dueling art exhibitions were part and parcel of Hitler’s propaganda efforts to consolidate power and bolster the regime via cultural production. The Nazis used culture as a crucial lever of control, to demean scapegoated groups, glorify the party and “make the genius of the race visible to that race”, argued the French scholar Eric Michaud in The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Political control and suppression of dissent were one thing; art, said Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was “no mere peacetime amusement, but a sharp spiritual weapon for war”.Earlier this month, Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of naming himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, one of the nation’s premier cultural centers, after purging the board of Biden appointees and installing a slate of unqualified donors and loyalists. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA”, the US president wrote on Truth Social. (The center hosted a nominal amount of acts with drag elements.) Days later, Trump was formally voted in by the board – “unanimously”, he noted on Truth Social in a Putin-esque flourish. “There’s no more woke in this country,” he told reporters.The move drew outcry from performers, artists and more, but still went through. The Kennedy Center’s trustees are presidential appointees, so technically it is vulnerable to such flexes of control, as are other federally supported institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and DC’s consortium of national museums. Some of Trump’s cultural decrees trend ridiculous, such as an executive order calling for a “national garden of American heroes”, or the continued presence of Kid Rock. Others are more insidious – after long threatening to defund the National Endowment for the Arts during his first term, Trump has imposed restrictions on its terms, barring federal grants for projects concerning Maga’s favorite targets – diversity and “gender ideology”.View image in fullscreenWhile the takeover of the Kennedy Center may seem less dire and court less furor than, say, his dismantling of the civil service, Trump’s efforts to exert control over art typify the strategy of a dictator. Comparisons of the Trump presidency to Nazi Germany may be overdone and easily dismissed – even with Republican efforts to ban books in schools deemed “inappropriate”, among many other parallels, Maga and the Third Reich are not the same – but the new administration’s cultural decrees are very much a part of the authoritarian playbook to suppress dissent, scapegoat select groups and seize power.Pick your oppressive regime throughout time and you will find efforts to control the arts. Some of the most renowned artefacts from ancient Rome, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Trajan’s Column, were commissioned by emperors to vivify their divine right to power, celebrate military conquests and cement preferred narratives. The Stalinist regime in the 1930s Soviet Union abolished all independent artistic institutions, required cultural production to exist in absolute allegiance to the party, and systemically executed all of the country’s Ukrainian folk poets. Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution identified “old culture” as one of the four threats to be eradicated as part of his reshaping of Chinese society, which killed more than a million people. After Augusto Pinochet took over Chile in 1973, the regime arrested, tortured and exiled muralists. In her 2012 book Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship, the art historian Claudia Calirman recalls how the museum director Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt hid artworks and advised artists on how to leave the country after officials from the country’s military regime entered her museum and demanded the removal of “dangerous” images – a claim not far removed from the Trump administration’s fearmongering around “gender ideology” and “threats” to children.These tactics continue in the present, carried out in some cases by Trump’s expressed allies. The same Brazilian dictatorship that overtook and blocked art exhibitions between 1968 and 1975 is today championed by the Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, who worked during his time as president to rewrite the regime’s reputation. On his first day in office in 2019, Bolsonaro dissolved Brazil’s ministry of culture. He also halved funding for the Rouanet Law, a measure that publicly supports artists, and appointed rightwing cultural figures with little relevant experience to prominent cultural positions. In Poland, the rightwing Law and Justice party has tried to rewrite history at the second world war museum in Gdańsk and dismissed its director, Paweł Machcewicz; in recent years, Italy’s rightwing minister of culture, Alberto Bonisoli, threatened to not renew the contracts of non-Italian museum directors. Much ado was made in the western press when Cuba jailed the performance artist Danilo Maldonado for criticizing the Castro regime in 2017, or when China’s ruling party placed the renowned artist Ai Weiwei under house arrest.View image in fullscreenBut perhaps no one models what Trump aspires to be, and hopes to do, more than Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who since his election in 2010 has rewritten the constitution, changed electoral law to favor his Fidesz party, positioned allies as heads of most media outlets and overhauled the justice system. And as part of his consolidation of power into full dictatorship, he has taken control of the country’s cultural institutions, managing their output and enshrining censorship. Starting when Fidesz first gained municipal power in 2006, the party has purged the boards of local theaters and installed Fidesz loyalists. In 2010, Orbán took over public institutions via appointment of governing bodies that could grant or withhold funds according to the organization’s willingness to heed demands. In 2013, he dismissed the artistic director of the National Theatre in Budapest, Róbert Alföldi, on account of his resistance to political interference and his sexuality, viewed as offensive by the homophobic regime.By 2019, Orbán could feasibly declare an era “of spiritual order, a kind of prevailing mood, perhaps even taste … determined by cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs. This is the task we are now faced with: we must embed the political system in a cultural era.” His government subsequently banned funding for gender studies at universities and passed a “culture law” tying funding of theaters to their ability to “actively protect the interests of the nation’s survival, wellbeing and growth”, a censorship measure that significantly chilled the country’s art scene.Such a measure is not dissimilar, in intent and execution, from Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, nor his new mandates on the National Endowment for the Arts, which has already been subject to decades’ worth of US culture wars. Those wars are heating up – if history and very recent precedent are anything to go by, then Trump and his party’s efforts to chip away at US cultural autonomy, at individual and institutional creative expression, will be one of his most corrosive and anti-democratic legacies. More

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    Stephen Colbert on Trump: ‘With this guy, every troll is a trial balloon’

    The Late Show host delves into New York City’s congestion pricing and Bigfoot maybe becoming California’s official state cryptid.Stephen ColbertOn Thursday evening, Stephen Colbert took on a topic close to his professional home at New York’s Ed Sullivan theater: congestion pricing, a toll on most vehicles entering Manhattan’s central business district between 5am and 9pm to cut traffic and emissions.The new tax was introduced at the beginning of this year, “and it’s working”, Colbert explained, as January saw a 7.9% reduction in traffic, and the governor’s office noted that foot traffic to local businesses spiked. “Or, as the New York Times put it, ‘Ay! People are walking here!’” Colbert joked.“This seems like a good thing,” he continued, “so Donald Trump ruined it.” On Wednesday, Trump posted on Truth Social: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”“Yes, the classic domain of an all-powerful king, what all kings do: regulate local toll roads,” Colbert laughed. “So the president of these United States has called himself a king. Which is the thing presidents are not supposed to do.” And then the White House social media posted an image of Trump wearing a crown.“You know he’s trolling us and we shouldn’t take the bait, but with this guy, every troll is a trial balloon. So here we go: Mr Trump, America will never bow before any king … not named Burger,” Colbert joked before donning a crown from the fast food chain.Meanwhile, New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, did not back down on congestion pricing, tweeting simply: “The cameras will stay on.”The new model seems likely to survive the president’s attack – the federal government already approved it last year, and it cannot unilaterally terminate a program once it’s begun. “To put that in layman’s terms: we are already said yes to the dress!” Colbert explained. “Kleinfeld doesn’t get to have it back. We’re wearing it to the wedding, dancing all night in it and then saving it for our daughter, who will hate it.”In other news, “we live in truly paradigm-shattering times,” said Colbert. “Which is why I was not surprised to be shocked by how startled I was” when this week, California introduced a bill to recognize Bigfoot as the state’s official cryptid, a creature that people believe exists without proof that it does.“Well, that’s strange and unnecessary,” said Colbert. “California already has a mystical furry creature: Randy Quaid.”If the bill passes, it will open the door for other states to officially celebrate their own cryptids, such as New Mexico’s Jackalope, the New Jersey Devil, “and of course the most hideous beast of all: the New York Giuliani”, Colbert joked. More

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    Chrisette Michelle sang for Trump in 2017. The backlash lasted years: ‘I thought they’d never stop hating me’

    The Grammy-winning singer Chrisette Michele keeps her phone switched off, a habit that stems from her long stint in cancellation purgatory. Her brother barely got through last month to relay the news that Snoop Dogg had been DJing at a party for Donald Trump’s second inaugural, and many in the Black community were irate. Longtime fans were calling Snoop a sellout, she learned, and were unfollowing him online by the hundreds of thousands.Snoop remained defiant in the face of this controversy, which really peeved the hordes who well remember when Snoop was regulating Maga support in the music industry. That defiance “was the thing that resonated with me”, says Michele when I initially reach her the week after Trump’s second inauguration. “We live in a different era where you can say what you think and not feel like you might die.”In 2017, Michele performed at a Trump inauguration in a shocking break from the music industry’s anti-Maga stance. She was met with considerable backlash from fans and from industry peers including Questlove, the Roots drummer and Tonight Show bandleader. Despite Michele’s extensive success working with rappers Nas and Jay-Z, the decision to perform for Trump cost her future gigs and more opportunities to collaborate with industry heavyweights.Now that some music stars have hopped on the Maga bandwagon, she can’t help reflecting on the price she paid for making the worst decision of her career. “I just remember sitting in a hotel lobby next to my manager, who was my husband of two years at the time, in tears, thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just become a professor,’” she recalls. “The constant gnawing and chewing and shouting at me was so difficult.”You wonder if the outcome might have been different if Michele had a catalog to rival Snoop’s, or even a song as big as Drop It Like It’s Hot. A native of Long Island, New York, Michele, now 42, came to prominence during the neo soul movement of the mid-noughties, following Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and India Arie. Michele’s satin voice, jazzy vibes and overall versatility made her a sought-after hip-hop balladeer by everyone from the Roots to Rick Ross – the latter of whom appeared at last month’s inaugural Crypto Ball alongside Snoop and Soulja Boy. In 2009, Michele earned a performance Grammy for her third single, Be OK, which also featured will.i.am. All the while Michele remained open about the pressures she felt around her body image, becoming a champion of the #BlackGirlMagic movement.View image in fullscreenMichele didn’t enter the political arena; it landed on her in 2014, when Michelle Obama turned up for one of her shows outside Washington DC. She was not Michelle Obama that night, Michele recalls, “she was my homegirl. She came backstage and asked for a selfie with her mom and her aunt. She wore pink lipstick – like, happy, girlie pink lipstick. She knew all the words. She was a fan.”In 2016 Barack Obama added If I Have My Way, a groovy ballad from Michele’s debut album, to his summer playlist. Michele sang for the president at that year’s Democratic national convention and at his final White House state dinner, when the Obamas hosted Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. She takes patriotic duty seriously and eagerly. “When it comes to singing overseas for the troops or at the DNC, I don’t take it for granted,” says Michele. “I’m proud to be an American, always have been since I was a kid – and that’s a very difficult thing to say as a Black woman.”When Trump’s team invited her to perform at a 2017 inauguration event, Michele accepted – somewhat naively, as it turns out. She doesn’t support or particularly like the guy and was aware of the potential career ramifications. But she saw the gig as an opportunity to confront Trump and see if he kept the same racist, misogynistic energy in person. Even though there seemed to be some cover on the inauguration event’s performance lineup, which also included the gospel music stars Travis Greene and Tina Campbell (of Mary Mary fame), Michele, because of her more mainstream appeal, became the focus. Michele’s longtime supporters begged her to reconsider the gig. In response to reports that she was receiving at least $250,000 for her appearance – the true fee was closer to $75,000 – Questlove and Talib Kweli, both former collaborators of Michele’s, volunteered to pay her not to perform – which hurt. “Honestly, I had to stop paying attention after a while,” she says.The music industry was in no mood to party with Trump when he ran in 2016. Eminem openly criticized his policies. Queen’s Brian May condemned his use of We Are the Champions at the Republican national convention. Elton John turned down an invitation to perform at his 2017 inauguration. But few artists were as stridently anti-Trump as Snoop, a social justice advocate who once characterized the gang violence he grew up around in Los Angeles as a trickle-down effect of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Snoop set the rules of engagement, pre-emptively denouncing the Black artists who would perform for Trump’s inaugural as “Uncle Toms” and “jigaboos” – derogatory terms that insinuate a deeper racial betrayal. His 2017 music video for the song Lavender, a heavy-handed Trump allegory, features a society of clowns that is ruled by a character named Ronald Klump, whom he shoots with a toy gun. The video outraged Marco Rubio and other Maga Republicans and had Trump musing about the reaction Snoop might have gotten if he had made a similar video about Barack Obama.View image in fullscreenBut Snoop’s tune changed in 2021 after Trump pardoned Michael “Harry-O” Harris, co-founder of the Death Row Records label that launched Snoop’s music career. (Harris had been serving a 25-years-to-life sentence for drug trafficking and attempted murder.) “I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump,” Snoop said last year. “He has done only great things for me.”At the Crypto Ball, Snoop was photographed throwing up hand signs with Bo Loudon, a young Maga influencer who is close with Barron Trump; Loudon captioned the picture: “Welcome to Maga, Snoop!” The endorsement effectively consolidated Snoop’s metamorphosis from Murder Was the Case gangsta rapper to ubiquitous pitchman to all-American mascot. Reacting to the Crypto Ball gig, The View’s Ana Navarro likened Snoop to a “trained seal”. Other rappers who have performed for Trump have suffered backlash even as Carrie Underwood and other music industry standard-bearers have capitulated to Maga. (After Nelly performed at a separate inauguration event, the administrator of a popular Instagram page dedicated to his wife, the R&B singer Ashanti, stepped down, citing disappointment with the Hot in Herre rapper – who is also unapologetic.)Michele processed the scenes of Snoop with Rick Ross and Soulja Boy at last month’s inauguration ball with wonder. “My initial reaction was, ‘Isn’t it nice to see Black men dancing in America so unapologetically?’” she says. When she faced criticism for her own performance, “I guess I wasn’t so masculine in my way of saying, ‘You don’t get to tell me what to do,’” she adds. “I just did what I thought was right. I didn’t shout at anybody and tell them not to say what they think.”In the main, the reputational damage to these men has been mostly cosmetic. For Snoop, the controversy has simply presented yet another occasion for him to play the part of America’s lovable scamp. Weeks after raising hackles at the inauguration event, he was back on stage for the NFL’s year-end awards show and for a television PSA that ran during the Super Bowl calling on viewers to “stand up to hate,” reigniting criticism of his inauguration appearance. Michele remembers arriving at a Super Bowl party at the Fountainebleau resort in Las Vegas as the ad was airing. “I’m still processing that commercial,” she jokes.Sometimes Michele thinks an overtly militant defense might have shortened her time in purgatory. “That was the most uncomfortable realization,” she says. “Like, if I’m not shouting and throwing my fist in the air, then it’s quite possible that I get ignored because I’m Black and soft. Look at Amber Rose. She spoke at the RNC, people were hard on her – and she just said, ‘Screw you,’ with that big, beautiful smile on her face. And people just backed up. The funny thing is: I don’t agree with her! I just watched it like, ‘OK, girl …’”Michele hoped to make a statement through the inauguration performance itself, but her messages were mixed. She sang a gospel song called Intentional, which calls for an unwavering belief in a divine plan – an argument evangelicals use to justify Trump support. She wore a maxi skirt replete with images of Black torture and subjugation by Jean-Michele Basquiat. In the end Trump didn’t make the performance, and she never got to meet him. By the time she walked off stage after the four-minute gig, “the death threats were starting,” Michele says. “I was afraid.”She thought she could make them stop if she just took a moment to explain herself – although, she admits, her first instinct was “to be completely silent and just go somewhere and mind my business for four years”. In an open letter pushed on social media, she said she intended her performance to serve as a “bridge” between Trump supporters and opponents. During an appearance on the Breakfast Club, Michele emphasized her Basquiat skirt again while reviewing the other rebellious nuances of her performance. But her attempts at subtlety were ultimately lost on the masses. “That was me overanalyzing everything, overthinking everything,” she says. “Because my parents are teachers, I want everybody to understand all the angles. My shouting came from insecurity, from needing people to believe that I did this for the right reasons.”By then the blowback against Michele was already fierce and unrelenting. She was dropped by her record label and by Spike Lee – who had one of her songs, Black Girl Magic, slated for the Netflix reboot of She’s Gotta Have It. Industry friends kept their distance. Her marriage eventually fell apart under the strain. The sneaker preacher Jamal Bryant called for a boycott of her music. He’d later apologize, but Trump’s camp never reached out to check on her. “Can you put a note in there asking them to reach out to Chrisette?” she asks me, laughing. “My team is waiting on a follow-up phone call.”View image in fullscreenBut it was the constant stream of death threats coming through her phone that really pushed Michele into depression and suicidal ideation. “We had security guards at my hotel doors,” says Michele, who also recalls being heckled on stage. “I wasn’t going to the grocery store by myself for years.” In October 2017 she shared that the fallout from her inauguration performance had caused her to suffer a miscarriage – and was further vilified for punctuating the news with a picture that was not of her actual miscarriage. “That was me at my most panicked, the point where I came close to doing anything to get people just to be nice to me for one second,” she says. “I thought people were never going to stop hating me. I didn’t think this would go on for years.”In a 2018 Facebook post, a year into Trump’s first term and just before the midterm elections, Michele posted a picture of herself between the Obamas and the Singaporean prime minister at the state dinner while calling on voters to rebalance the scales. (“When I look back at this moment it reminds me of what this country’s leadership should look like,” she wrote. “Diplomacy. Civility. Compassion. Love. Integrity. Gangsters don’t run this country. The people do.”) But it just became a reason for critics to come at her harder.Michele started treating her phone like a landline, switching it on every now and then for friends and family. “As a person in the public space, you think it’s your job to be connected all the time,” she says. “But it’s incredibly easy to disconnect.”But even as Black America disavowed Michele, many industry peers rallied around her. “Anita Baker was very vocal about making sure I had her number and about calling her if I needed anything,” she recalls. “India Arie did an entire interview explaining how I should be spoken to as a person, pulled me backstage and shook [the sense back into] me. Kirk Franklin was like: ‘The Black community owes you an apology.’ But Stevie Wonder was the most adamant to me about continuing in this music space because he’s been through so many things himself. These are the people who really wanted to make sure that I knew they were there for me.”She carried on quietly for years – performing around the country and even launching a podcast called Inner Peace Examination, dedicated to self-reflection – until a curious thing happened: the political winds shifted. Trump stormed back from his 2020 defeat to win re-election, this time with backing from tech billionaires. Corporate America rushed to scrap its DEI programs in a fit of anticipatory obedience. Just last month Obama and Trump were observed chatting warmly to each other while sitting together at Jimmy Carter’s state funeral – as if they hadn’t been mortal enemies for the past 17 years.Ultimately, Michele wishes she could have been like Snoop and told her critics to kiss off, and she also wishes she had never taken the inauguration gig in the first place. It’s another nuanced position that could threaten her ongoing career recovery and land her in hot water all over again – but at least now Michele knows she’s built for tough times. “For about four or five years, I hated the word resilient,” she says, “because it meant I got cancelled and got back up. But now I embrace it because it means you kept going, and people stuck with you and you’re here now.” More

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    JD Vance and those threats from within | Letters

    Among the justified furore around America’s new position in the world, one part at least triggers a bit of nostalgia (JD Vance stuns Munich conference with blistering attack on Europe’s leaders, 14 February). JD Vance’s description of the “threat from within” brings back memories of Margaret Thatcher’s designation of those who disagreed with her as “the enemy within”. I still have a badge with that somewhere. Maybe it’s time I dusted it off.Steve TownsleyCowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan As JD Vance lectures European leaders about freedom of speech, Louisiana is banning health officials from promoting vaccinations and libraries across the US are having to purge their shelves of any books that make mention of subjects that Republicans dislike. No hypocrisy there, then?Tony GreenIpswich, Suffolk Britain thought it had a special relationship with the US. Seems we got dumped on Valentine’s Day.Emma TaitLondon Your report (‘Guess who’s back?’: the inside story of Nigel Farage’s quest for power, 15 February) confirmed what I already suspected: Reform is basically a party run by millionaires, for the benefit of millionaires, with a good dollop of nativism added to the mix.Alan PavelinChislehurst, Kent Re remarks in school reports (Letters, 14 February), my favourite is from around 1971, courtesy of a great history teacher: “Intelligent answers, a mastery of the facts would help.” I’m sure CP Scott would have agreed with him.Kevin McGillPrestwood, Buckinghamshire More

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    ‘The greatest propaganda op in history’: Trump’s reshaping of US culture evokes past antidemocratic regimes

    Bigger than the Super Bowl, claimed Donald Trump, sitting in a big leather chair beside a big map. Then came an announcement over the public address system. “Air Force One is currently in international waters,” declared the flight crew of the US presidential jet, “for the first time in history flying over the recently renamed Gulf of America.”As his aides clapped and whooped, Trump gloated: “Isn’t that nice? We’re about ‘Make America Great Again’, right? That’s what we care about.” He proceeded to sign a proclamation declaring 9 February “Gulf of America Day” as Air Force One flew over the body of water previously known as the Gulf of Mexico.It was classic Trumpian showmanship from the highest perch in the world. It was also the latest salvo by the 47th president and his allies to control language, influence media narratives and reshape cultural institutions in ways that some compare with the Soviet Union or other authoritarian regimes from history.Long a master of branding, Trump is making propaganda a core element of his strongman presidency. This comes as little surprise to critics who regard it as an extension of last year’s election campaign in which he sold himself as a champion of the forgotten people and victim of a weaponised justice department.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Donald Trump’s re-election is the greatest, most successful propaganda op in history. Propaganda is why Donald Trump is president again and they know this, which is why they undermined the press, expertise and science.”Since taking office, Trump has outpaced his predecessors by signing 64 executive orders and 27 memos and proclamations in less than a month. His blitz on immigration, trade and the federal bureaucracy was expected. But the president’s aggressive approach to reshaping national identity through symbolism and language has taken opponents by surprise.When Trump used his inaugural address to assert his vision of US dominance by promising to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton burst out laughing. But the switch came with a sinister edge.This week, the White House banned the Associated Press, one of the world’s biggest news outlets, because it has not changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America (the AP serves numerous countries that do not recognise the new name). The punitive measure prompted CNN to invoke “newspeak” from George Orwell’s novel 1984, in which language is a tool of control and can be narrowed to limit thought.In a similar vein, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, signed an order restoring the name of a special operations forces base in North Carolina back to Fort Bragg, reversing a Joe Biden effort in 2023 to remove names that honored Confederate leaders (Hegseth swerved past that association by this time recognising Roland Bragg, an obscure veteran of the second world war).The White House is also redefining terms to cast opponents in a negative light – for example, by referring to fired federal employees as “deep-state activists”. The National Park Service erased references to transgender people on its webpage for the Stonewall national monument.As the AP discovered, the media – long derided by Trump as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” – is now subject to a system of rewards and punishments. The owners of the Washington Post and major social media platforms such as Facebook and X had the best seats in the house at his inauguration.At least 10 of the 18 reporters that the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called on during her briefing this week work for partisan rightwing outlets. Officials at the Pentagon decided to “rotate” eight major news outlets from their workspaces, replacing them with more Trump-friendly media, and invited a far-right activist, Jack Posobiec, to take part in Hegseth’s first trip overseas.In addition, Trump is pursuing lawsuits against media outlets by using novel legal theories to circumvent established first amendment protections, while his allies are using the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to target broadcast news networks whose content they deem unfavorable.View image in fullscreenThere are concerns that the intimidatory tactics are working. Setmayer, who now leads the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee, said: “The mainstream American media has failed. What is happening is not a normal transition; it’s a constitutional crisis. That’s the way the American media should be covering this and they’re not.“They’re parsing their words. They’re whitewashing and sanewashing what Elon Musk has been allowed to do and what Donald Trump is telegraphing he plans to do more of. They’ve made a business decision to obey in advance. It’s not an accident that Trump went after the FCC licenses and sued these media conglomerates for them to bend their knees to him, so they won’t cover him honestly.”Trump is also making a surprise foray into arts and culture with a hostile takeover of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, a living memorial for the 35th president that, with a $268m budget last year, hosts classical music, dance, hip-hop, opera, theatre, touring productions and educational arts programming.Trump has installed himself as chair, stacked the board of trustees with his loyalists and replaced president Deborah Rutter with his former acting director of national intelligence, Ric Grenell, a disrupter who has no prior experience in arts administration.“We know the importance of the arts in telling stories and keeping the truth out there and in being part of the resistance, so it is no accident that Trump is coming for the arts, similar to other fascists in history,” Setmayer said.The president admitted he has not been to the Kennedy Center but felt the overhaul was necessary because of drag shows that are “specifically targeting our youth” as well as other “anti-American propaganda”. He told reporters: “We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country.” In response, several stars have dissociated themselves from the centre.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt the same time, the National Endowment for the Arts, the biggest national funder of the arts and arts education with a budget of $207m in 2024, has cancelled grants aimed at marginalised groups and posted updated guidelines stating that grant recipients should “not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)’” or “use federal funds to promote gender ideology”.The changes fueled concerns about the politicisation of the arts, with critics pointing to examples of dictators in history who suppressed and censored artists.Olivia Troye, a former adviser to then vice-president Mike Pence, said: “There’s a lot of things I expected from Trump, having worked with his circle of people, but I have to say that it was striking to me when he decided to insert himself and take over the Kennedy Center because that to me was a sign that it is him wanting to fully control all narratives.”Trump is exhibiting an authoritarian streak and seeking to curb dissent, Troye added: “The arts is a significant pillar of watching what happens in nations that are facing the potential failing of their democracy and that’s concerning. People need to be paying attention to these types of thing.”“They may seem frivolous: why do I care what he did to the Kennedy Center? Well, let’s look at the history. Who has ever done that as president? Why is he doing that? It’s all part of the overarching effort by this individual who wants to control every narrative there is.”Like past authoritarians, Trump understands the power of symbols such as Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, which is carved with the faces of former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna of Florida proposed legislation adding Trump to the monument, explaining: “President Trump’s bold leadership and steadfast dedication to America’s greatness have cemented his place in history.”Trump has issued an order to revive a “National Garden of American Heroes”, an attempt to curate a version of history that reinforces ideas of national exceptionalism. The representative Buddy Carter of Georgia has introduced a bill to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”, as Trumpseeks to acquire the island territory.Trump has also called for “patriotic education”, attempting to control what is taught in schools and instil a conservative vision. The administration is pushing to restrict what teachers can teach about gender and race and has threatened to withhold funds from schools that fail to comply.Above all, the 47th president is dominating the nation’s attention, filling news cycles and social media 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Last Sunday, he became the first sitting US president to attend the Super Bowl, the crown jewel of US sport, which drew a record 127 million viewers and “a Caesar-at-the-Colosseum air,” according to New York Times critic James Poniewozik.Then, when Trump hosted ally Elon Musk and his son X in the Oval Office, there was saturation coverage. White House communications director Steven Cheung tweeted an image of eight news networks simultaneously broadcasting the meeting and boasted: “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”Reed Galen, president of the Union, a pro-democracy coalition, said: “With dictators throughout history, it’s all spectacle. The idea of propaganda is not necessarily to lie about things but to keep the attention focused where you want it, and he’s a master of that.”Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history and Italian studies professor at New York University and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, describes Trump as “one of the most successful propagandists in all of history”, as skilled as the former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in his use of images, symbols and repetition.She said: “The cult of personality is that you must be omnipotent but you’re also omnipresent, you’re everywhere. It’s not just old-school dictatorships like North Korea today or communist China where the face of the leader is everywhere.“Nowadays, for example, Modi in India is the most followed leader in the world. He’s a genius at Instagram. When he ran for office in 2014, he used holograms so he could be in a hundred places at the same time. Being everywhere and inescapable is part of making the population depend on you and on no one else.” More

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    Seth Meyers on Trump and Musk: ‘They’re trying to rip you off’

    Late-night hosts took aim at Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s too-close relationship and how one is clearly in control of the other.Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers spoke about how voters have been most concerned about grocery prices yet Trump has been “easily distracted by silly stuff” and placed his attention elsewhere.This week saw him elected chair of the Kennedy Center, which led to Meyers joking that the next round of honors would include “Kid Rock, Lee Greenwood and Big Mouth Billy Bass”.It’s meant that he’s had less time to help Musk in his project of “dismantling the government”. Meyers joked that it’s “fun sometimes to pretend bad things might be good things”.In audio from a call about the Kennedy Center, Trump said he was going to make it “hot” again like he had also made the presidency. “You didn’t make the presidency hot unless you mean hot like a low-grade fever,” he said.Another “frivolous distraction Trump is obsessed with” concerns him renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has led to Associated Press journalists being banned from official press events as they refuse to obey. “At least give people like a week to process it!” Meyers said.He also said that “we should stop waiting for tech companies to be part of the pushback” with both Google and Apple following the change on official maps.Meyers played a clip of Trump trying to explain Musk’s dismantling, which was a ramble about magnets, tractors and planes. “Every time Trump speaks I feel like a guy who started season two of Severance without watching season one,” he said.He said they want to avoid talking about what’s really happening as “the reality of what they’re doing is unpopular and illegal” and Musk essentially wants “direct control of the government” by taking over the regulatory group that would otherwise be able to stop his business practices.He said that there is “a lot of bad stuff happening right now” and “they’re trying to rip you off and they hope you’ll be distracted by all the nonsense going through Trump’s head”.Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host spoke about the nationwide shortage of eggs with grocery stores hiking prices and limiting the number of eggs customers can purchase.He said that regular eggs are now “more valuable than Faberge”.For Valentine’s Day, he joked that Trump has “got a little something for his sugar vladdy” after a call with Vladimir Putin in which the Russian dictator was given essentially everything he wanted out of the negotiation.Kimmel said it is “honestly amazing the guy only bankrupted three casinos” while saying that “if you attack and murder our allies, it will make no difference at all”.Trump’s rambling explanation led Kimmel to say that we are “one weird press conference away from Trump saying he wants to move Ukraine to Gaza”.Then, “as if we don’t have enough to worry about”, Kimmel said that “measles and wide-leg jeans are back”, joking about Kendrick Lamar’s outfit choice at the Super Bowl.He reassured us that “Bobby Brainworm is on the job” to fix measles with the outspoken anti-vax crusader confirmed as the new head of health and human services.In a press conference, Robert F Kennedy Jr said that God sent him Trump. “Next God is gonna send us diphtheria,” Kimmel joked.The clip saw Kennedy engage in “triple-A ass kissing”, which Kimmel said would have aroused Trump. “Melania couldn’t turn him on like that the first night they met,” he joked. More