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      ‘Protest can shape the world’: Rebecca Solnit on the fight back against Trump

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      On 5 April, millions of people rallied against the Trump administration and its campaigns of destruction. In small towns and big cities from Alaska to Florida, red counties and blue (and a handful of European cities), they gathered with homemade signs full of fury and heartbreak and sarcasm. Yet the “Hands Off” protests received minimal media coverage, and the general response was that they didn’t do anything, because they didn’t have immediate and obvious, and most of all quantifiable, consequences. I’ve heard versions of “no one cares”, “no one is doing anything” and “nothing came of it” for all my activist life. These responses are sometimes a sign that the speaker isn’t really looking and sometimes that they don’t recognise impacts that aren’t immediate, direct or obvious. Tracking those indirect and unhurried impacts, trying to offer a more complex map of the world of ideas and politics, has been at the heart of my writing.For more direct impact, at least when it came to the rally I attended in San Francisco, you could have walked six or seven blocks to the Tesla dealership. Weekly protests there since February, like those across the country and beyond, have helped tank the Tesla brand and Tesla shares. They remind Elon Musk that he’s in retail, where the customer is always right – and right now the customer would like him and his Doge mercenaries to stop dismantling the US government the way a hog dismantles a garden.Tesla aside, activists sometimes really do have tangible results and even immediate ones. The protests around the world and in Seattle, where we blockaded the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, encouraged the global south nations inside to stand up and refuse a raw deal from the global north and corporations. At that very meeting that very week. It might be the most immediately and obviously effective protest I ever attended, in fortysomething years of attending protests (even if protesting this version of corporate globalisation under the rubric “free trade” is hard to explain during a catastrophic tariff crisis).View image in fullscreenBut that was an exception. Mostly protests, campaigns, boycotts and movements do a lot, but do it in less tangible and direct ways than these. They influence public opinion, make exploitation and destruction and their perpetrators more visible, shift what’s considered acceptable and possible, set new norms or delegitimise old ones. Because politics arises from culture, if culture is our values, beliefs, desires, aspirations shaped by stories, images – and yeah, memes – that then turns into politics as choices and actions that shape the world.If you want to measure impact you need more sophisticated tools and longer timeframes than the many versions of “where’s the payoff for this thing we just did”. Take the Green New Deal, advocated for passionately by the young climate activists in the Sunrise Movement, starting around 2018. The simple story to tell about it is that, as legislation cosponsored by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and senator Ed Markey, it did not pass. The complex story is that it shifted the frameworks in which we think about climate and economics in consequential ways. In other words, it was very effective, just not directly. It strongly influenced the Biden campaign’s platform in 2020. His administration sought to pass it as Build Back Better and succeeded in doing so with the watered-down but still impactful Inflation Reduction Act, which influenced governments in other countries to amplify their own climate policies. (The Trump administration is dismantling some of it, but some will survive.)The Green New Deal as a proposal and campaign moved us beyond the old jobs-versus-the-economy framing that had plagued environmental activists for decades, making it clear that doing what the climate requires is a jobs-creation programme, and you could care about both. I don’t hear the old framework any more, and one of the hardest things to detect in the department of indirect consequences is the thing that doesn’t happen or the frame that no longer circulates. Jobs v environment is one. Another is the many stereotypes-become-slurs that treated female rape survivors as inherently dishonest and unreliable, deployed to protect countless rapists. This blanket discrediting is not part of the culture the way it was before the feminist insurrections that began in 2012-13. Seeing what’s no longer there or what didn’t happen is also an art, whether it’s seeing the persecution that ceased or the forest that wasn’t cut down.One of the aphorisms I have been coming back to for at least half my lifetime is “everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler”, attributed to Einstein and useful for almost everything. Because we get explanations of how things work – big things such as politics, change, history, human nature – that themselves don’t work when they fail to account for the complexities, ambiguities, uncertainties and indirect and delayed influences and consequences. It’s like hacking off all the limbs of a tree because you’d rather call it a log or because you haven’t quite figured out what leaves and branches do. Or looking at a tree today and saying it isn’t growing, since it hasn’t visibly changed since yesterday. Which, put that way, sounds infinitely ridiculous and yet in speech – which, ideally, reflects thought – people do it all the time.As I write in my forthcoming essay anthology No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, “It’s not that I have anything against the easy, the immediate, the obvious, the straightforward, and the predictable. It’s just that I think much of what we face and endeavour to achieve requires an embrace or at least a recognition of its opposite. So I have chased after the long trajectories of change as both the often forgotten events and ideas leading up to a rupture, a breakthrough, or a revolution, and the often overlooked indirect consequences that come afterward. I’ve celebrated how a movement that may not achieve its official goal may nevertheless generate or inspire those indirect consequences that matter sometimes as much or more than the original goal. I’ve also noticed how often a movement is dismissed as having failed during the slow march to victory, when victory comes. So much activism has, on the sidelines, people telling us we can’t win, who routinely vanish if and when we do.”One of the curiosities of American political life is that Republicans refuse to acknowledge the complexities and interconnections as ideology, but are very good at working with them practically, while the opposite is true of the Democrats. Republicans and the far right famously built power from the ground up, getting their people to run for school board and other low-level positions at the state and local level, working hard on winning state legislatures to pass voter-suppression measures that would help Republicans broaden their power even while they narrowed their support. They played the long game, patiently building power, pushing propaganda, recruiting – and of course did so with hugely wealthy foundations and billionaire donors who could afford to underwrite such efforts and provide the stability for such campaigns.View image in fullscreenIn other respects, Republicans deny that everything or anything is connected to everything else, that actions and policies have consequences, that the shape of a life is not entirely up to that individual but is influenced by economic and social forces, that everything exists in relationship. It’s convenient for rightwing ideology to deny the reality of environmental impacts, be it mining and burning fossil fuel or spreading toxins, because acknowledging the impact of individual and corporate actions would justify the regulations and collective responsibilities that are anathema to their deregulated free-enterprise rugged individual ethos. Likewise, it’s convenient to claim that poverty and inequality are the result of individual failure, that the playing field is level and everyone has equal opportunity, because if you acknowledge that discrimination is real – well, discrimination is itself a system, and they prefer to deny systems exist.Democrats on the other hand have long recognised the existence of systems, including the systems that are the environment and climate, as well as the ugly systems of discrimination that have permeated American life such as racism, misogyny, homophobia and so forth. But they’re remarkably bad at building political frameworks to address this, failing where Republicans succeed when it comes to the long game of building power from the ground up, being on message, having a long-term strategy and sometimes, it seems, any strategy at all.So we live in an environment of conflicting and confusing information, furthered by the way the mainstream media too often see background and context on what just happened as editorialising and bias, so tend to present facts so stripped of context that only those who are good at building context themselves can find meaning in them. Media outlets routinely play down protest and when they cover it often do so dismissively. Media critic and former Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan writes of the thin coverage of the Hands Off rallies: “Organizers said that more than 100,000 demonstrators came to the protests in both New York and Washington DC. Crowd estimates are always tricky, but that certainly seems like a big story to me.” She points out that for many months news outlets have commented on how the public resistance to Trump is so much quieter than in 2017. “But when the protests did happen, much of the media reaction was something between a yawn and a shrug. Or, in some outlets, a sneer.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionProtests against Trumpism in 2017, which were probably sneered at and dismissed at the time, are now being used to dismiss 2025 protests. But the most precise calibrators of these protests, Erica Chenoweth and colleagues at the Crowd Counting Consortium, write: “And since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago … In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017.”The Consortium counted 686 protests on 21 January, 2017, with total participation above 3 million, making the Women’s March the biggest one-day protest in US history. Meanwhile more than 1,300 US rallies happened on 5 April this year. This is part of why it’s hard to recognise the impact of such events; they’re so often written out of the story of change. Mostly the story of change we get is that great men hand it down to us, and we should admire and be grateful to them and periodically implore them for more crumbs.This is built into how history narrows down the civil rights movement and all the crucial work done by women into a few great men, into how the decades of dedicated work by the abolitionist movement are written out of the version in which Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves out of the blue. It’s built into the superhero movies in which problems are solved by musclebound men deploying violence to definitively defeat evil, when the real superheroes of our time mostly look like scruffy stubborn people who build alliances and networks and movements over years, with an occasional burst of drama in the legislatures, courts and streets (but mostly through stuff that looks like office work, even if it’s administration for liberation). The language of “save the whales/children/country” suggests some kind of finality, and so do the plots of action movies. But evil comes back, so you have to keep defending your reproductive rights, your freedom of speech, your marriage equality, your forests and rivers and climate, even though maintenance is not as exciting as conflict.The phrase “theory of change” has become popular in recent years, as in “what’s your theory of change?” Mine is that categories are leaky and anomalies abound. That change happens in complex, sometimes unpredictable ways, that it often unfolds with slow and indirect consequences, and that what ends up in the centres of power often begins in the margins and shadows. That stories have profound power and changing the story is often the beginning of changing the world.Something the current crisis in the US demonstrates is that power is rarely as simple as it’s supposed to be. We see those who are supposed to be immensely powerful – captains of industry, prestige law firms, Ivy League universities – cringe and cave in fear while ordinary people (including lawyers and professors) stand on principle and judges mete out the law without intimidation. As for the unpredictability, I find hope in the fact that we’re making the future in the present, and while you can’t predict it with the certainty too many self-anointed prophets seem afflicted with, you can learn a lot from the patterns of the past – if you can remember the past and view events on the scale of those patterns that spread across decades and centuries.Places popular with tourists often put out maps that oversimplify the terrain on the assumption that we visitors are too dumb to contend with the real lay of the land, but those maps often mislead, literally, so you wander into a sketchy neighbourhood or a marsh that’s not on the map. What I’ve tried to do as a writer is give people maps adequate to navigate the rocky, uneven territory of our lives and times. More

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      Seth Meyers on looming recession: ‘We all knew Trump was bad with money’

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      Late-night hosts pondered a possible recession under Donald Trump, as the US economy contracted during the first quarter of 2025.Seth MeyersThe US economy officially contracted during the first quarter of 2025, with -0.3% growth that seemed to surprise even newscasters. “It’s very sweet that the news anchors are acting so surprised,” said Seth Meyers on Wednesday evening, “but come on – we all knew Trump was bad with money. He bankrupted casinos, lost a billion dollars and he dresses like a guy selling watches in a dark alley. Also everyone said what Trump was doing was bad for the economy, and it was bad for the economy.“We’ve seen recessions before,” the Late Night host continued, “but we haven’t seen this specific confluence of factors – rising prices, negative growth – in a long time. And what makes it so much worse is that just a few months ago, we had an economy that was considered the strongest in the world.“But who cares about the economy?” he added. “Trump is doing the important stuff anyway, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, not that anyone could afford new maps with these tariffs.”During the now-halcyon days of the Biden presidency, Trump took credit for the booming economy, attributing stock market gains to expectations that he would win the election. But now, Trump is blaming Biden for a possible oncoming recession. “I get it now – when the economy is good under Biden, it’s because of you. But when the economy is bad under you, it’s because of Biden,” said Meyers. “You know, Harry Truman had a sign on his desk at the Oval Office that said, ‘the buck stops here,’ which let people know the value of taking responsibility. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump had one that says, ‘get that fucking buck away from me! I’ve never seen that buck before in my life!!!’“Thanks to Trump’s policies, we’re now staring down the prospect of rising prices and possibly even barren shelves, and his team is basically just shrugging and hoping for the best,” Meyers summarized. When asked about 145% tariffs on China, which will raise prices for most products for American consumers, Trump simply answered without merit: “China will have to eat those tariffs.“China will not eat those tariffs. We will eat them,” said Meyers. “Literally, we will have to eat tariffs because we won’t be able to afford the mangos.”Jimmy Kimmel“Sixty per cent of economists who were polled believe there is a high or very high chance of a recession, so the president now is distancing himself from himself,” said Jimmy Kimmel.On Truth Social, Trump posted: “This is Biden’s stock market, not Trump’s … our country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang.’” He also added: “BE PATIENT!!!”“What happened to the guy who promised it would all happen on day one?” Kimmel laughed. “What happened to the guy who less than 100 days into his first presidency crowed” about $3.2tn in gains just because he won the election.“The buck stops wherever he wants it to stop,” he added. “And consumer confidence is at its lowest level since May of 2020. You remember what happened in May of 2020? We were fighting old ladies for toilet paper in May of 2020.”Kimmel also talked about Trump’s frightening interview with ABC, which Kimmel called “the most disturbing moment yet” of his presidency. “Trump says crazy stuff every day. But most of the time, you know he’s full of it – he’s bragging, lying or whatever, just throwing crap on to his vision board.” But the ABC interview on Tuesday “went off that rails” when Trump showed the interviewer a mock-up image trying to justify the unlawful and erroneous deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García to a prison in El Salvador.“This couldn’t look worse even if Trump had written it in a Sharpie himself,” said Kimmel. “Our president is falling for Facebook memes.”Stephen ColbertAnd on the Late Show, Stephen Colbert reacted to the report that the US economy contracted in the first quarter of 2025, shrinking 0.3% – much worse than economists projected. “And that’s saying a lot, because economists did not have high expectations,” said Colbert. “This is like your girlfriend’s review of the Phish concert: I didn’t know any of the songs going in and I don’t like that kind of music, and once I got there I actually hated it.”On Truth Social, Trump tried to deflect blame, posting: “This is Biden’s stock market, not Trump’s.”“OK, but when Biden was president and the market was good, back then Trump posted ‘this is the Trump stock market, because my polls against Biden are so good that investors are projecting that I will win,’” said Colbert.“It’s Freaky Friday rule,” he mocked. “When Biden is president, it’s actually me and when I’m president, it’s actually Jamie Lee Curtis.” More

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      ‘100-year timeframe’: how Project 2025 is guiding Trump’s attack on government

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      David A Graham doesn’t say he read Project 2025 so you don’t have to, but it might be inferred.The Atlantic staff writer’s new book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America, is a swift but thorough overview of the vast far-right plan for a second Trump administration that achieved notoriety last year. Over just 138 pages, a passing dream next to the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page doorstop, Graham considers the origins of Project 2025, its aims and effects so far.There’s a reason Project 2025 came out so long.“They’re looking at a 100-year timeframe,” Graham said. “They’re looking at things from the New Deal and saying, ‘This is where the government went wrong, and we need to fix these things. We need to change them permanently and reframe what the government does and what its relationship with every American is.’”The New Deal is the name given to the vast expansion of the federal government under Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s, in response to the Great Depression and laying the foundation of the modern US state.Project 2025 was published in 2023. As the 2024 election loomed, Democrats raised alarms about its hardline policy recommendations on issues including climate, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive healthcare and more. Incendiary rhetoric raised awareness too. Kevin Roberts, Heritage president and author of the Project 2025 foreword, said he and his allies were “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”, then peppered his own book with images of fire and destruction. In praise of Roberts, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, said it was time to “load the muskets”.To Graham, such bellicose rhetoric was “terrifying” but also, in retrospect, a clear signpost to things to come. “To say that publicly before the election is really a strange public relations choice. It’s such a chilling thing to say. But you know, it told us what they wanted.”Amid controversy, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and its authors. But then he won the election. At the outset of his second term, he duly unleashed slashing cuts to federal staffing and budgets and a barrage of executive orders advancing policies directly linked to Project 2025 or firmly in its spirit.Graham is an award-winning reporter, used to working fast. He started writing The Project “at the very end of November”, weeks after Trump defeated Kamala Harris, “and turned the book in in mid-January”.He wrote the book, he said, because “we the press, we the American public, had talked a lot about Project 2025 during the election, and it felt like it had kind of gone away – but it remained really relevant. And I felt like there was a lot in it that I didn’t understand, and a lot that had been missed.”During the 2024 election, experts did indeed advise that such policy plans for possible administrations have existed for decades but have rarely been enacted. The sheer size of Project 2025 might also have lulled some into a false sense of security. Like many reporters, Graham “had dabbled in parts of it”. Unlike many, he found “it was a different experience to read the whole thing altogether.“I think it is both more radical in some ways than it came across – like, when you’re just reading atomized policies, you don’t get what a social program it is – [but] one of the other things that I think is interesting is how there are ideas that I think are either [only] fairly objectionable or might have widespread appeal, right next to ones that are totally out in right field. You’ll be in the same paragraph or in the same chapter.“And the third thing I think is interesting is the way there are disagreements within the text, either between the authors or between the authors and Donald Trump. Those cleavages within the right I think are worth paying attention to now.”Trump opponents looking for cleavages will not find them in the influential office of management and budget, now directed by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist, advocate of “traumatizing” political enemies, and Project 2025 co-author. The original director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, fell victim to political necessity in 2024, forced out of the Heritage Foundation as Trump came under pressure – but remains a true believer, recently declaring Trump’s actions in office to be beyond his “wildest dreams”.But there is also Elon Musk. The world’s richest man has led Trump’s so-called department of government efficiency, or Doge, in attacking federal agencies and departments with startling speed and recklessness.“This is one of the places I have been most surprised,” Graham said, “because I think the methods that they lay out [in Project 2025] are really important. I thought that an important part of this was going to be how deeply people like Russ Vought had thought about, ‘OK, how can we work within the bounds of the law to achieve these things? How can we rework the bureaucracy?’ And in fact, Musk came in and just blasted right through it and made it a lot easier for them, and a lot faster. I certainly didn’t expect that. It’s not contemplated in the book or in the original document.”Nor are Trump’s beloved tariffs much loved by Project 2025 and its free-trade-loving authors.Graham said: “There are these big differences within Project 2025. The most obvious place is the chapters on tariffs … they [also] disagree with Trump on Ukraine. They’re much more hawkish on Ukraine, and anti-Russia. You have this sort of standard, ‘We stand up for Israel, We oppose Iran,’ sort of thing, but foreign policy is barely mentioned. It’s all about China. And Trump talks the talk on China, but then many of the things he’s doing, like tariffs, which are discussed in Project 2025 but not as a major priority, are alienating the rest of the world, which makes it very hard to take on China.“But then, even something as small as how to handle childcare, you have different people having different views [within Project 2025]. One of the things that jumps out at me is they did a really good job of figuring out how to meld these longstanding social and religious conservative priorities on to Maga. They find places where they can work with Trump.Trump is very interested in talking about trans rights and Democrats, and men are very interested in fighting back much more broadly on gender norms, LGBTQ+ rights, and so … Project 2025 becomes sort of like a tip of the spear to get Trump’s attention. They care about “wokeness”, and DEI, maybe for different reasons than he does, but they’ll attack that, and it gets him onboard.On another key issue of Trump’s second term, Graham sees the White House and the ideologues of Project 2025 much more closely aligned.Project 2025 is “very focused on illegal immigration, but also on legal immigration. Overall, the point is to have fewer people who are born overseas in the US, by whatever means necessary. And so they talk about mass deportation, and they talk about detention centers, but they also talk about reducing the number of visas that people get and trying to … find people who have lied on their citizenship applications, to revoke citizenship, denaturalization.“There are things where you see maybe not a direct correlation but the same spirit. So we see in Project 2025 an argument that we need to crack down on student visas from quote, unquote, unfriendly countries, and use student visas as a sort of tool of political warfare.”Trump may not be implementing Project 2025 word for word but its authors have much to delight them. Conversely, Graham’s book is sprinkled with lines that prompt grim laughter.Consider the case of James Sherk, a Trump adviser on civil service and labor issues in the first term who drafted “Schedule F”, a proposal to reclassify about 50,000 civil service jobs as political, thereby allowing a president to fire such people at will. Under Joe Biden, Schedule F was shelved. Ahead of Trump’s second term, Project 2025 advocated putting it swiftly to use.Last year, Sherk spoke to ProPublica. “The notion we’re going to can 50,000 people is just insane,” he said. “Why would you do that? That would kneecap your ability to implement your agenda.”Under Trump, more than 260,000 government workers have been fired, taken buyouts or retired early.

      The Project is published in the US by Random House More

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      Jimmy Kimmel on Hegseth bringing his wife to meetings: ‘Maybe she’s his designated driver’

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      With several hosts still on holiday, Jimmy Kimmel reacts to reports of a screaming match at the White House and Pete Hegseth bringing his wife to meetings.Jimmy KimmelThursday was Bring Your Child To Work Day, and indeed, “there’s been a lot of childish behavior at the White House as of late,” said Kimmel. For example, Axios reported that Elon Musk had an expletive-filled, chest-to-chest shouting match outside the Oval Office with treasury secretary Scott Bessent over who would run the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).Bessent reportedly confronted Musk in a hallway, and “the F-bombs started to fly – or at least, that’s what Pete Hegseth texted his wife and brother,” Kimmel quipped.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, “put her own spin on it”, Kimmel noted. In a statement, Leavitt said: “It’s no secret President Trump has put together a team of people who are incredibly passionate about the issues impacting our country.”“Really? Because this is Scott Bessent,” Kimmel said next to a photo of a very corporate looking, grey-haired white man. “This is a guy who is incredibly passionate? Looks like the only F-word he’s used before this is fiber. Scott Bessent looks like Will Ferrell playing George Bush playing Janet Reno.”The argument was allegedly so loud that it interrupted a meeting between Trump and the prime minister of Italy. “They say no one has screamed that loud in the White House since the time Eric got his penis caught in the resolute desk,” Kimmel joked.The host then turned to another beleaguered Trump official: Hegseth, the defense secretary, under fire this week for sending more sensitive information in a second Signal group chat that included his wife and other family members.Additionally, numerous officials were reportedly annoyed when Hegseth brought his wife to meetings they assumed were one-on-one. The Pentagon denied the reports; according to Sean Parnell, the chief spokesperson for the Pentagon, Jennifer Hegseth “never attended a meeting where sensitive information or classified information was discussed”.“Of course she hasn’t – she doesn’t need to. If there’s anything exciting, he catches her up on a text,” Kimmel retorted.“Maybe there’s a good reason for her to be at the meetings. Maybe she’s his designated driver,” he added.Kimmel also mocked reports that Hegseth had a makeup booth installed at the Pentagon for on-camera interviews, which the defense secretary denied; instead, according to a spokesperson, Hegseth does his own makeup.“The good news is, when he gets booted from the Pentagon, he’ll be able to get a job at Sephora,” Kimmel joked. “The defense secretary has a makeup room, the vice-president wears eyeliner, and yet somehow this administration spends all day every day complaining about trans women ruining sports.” More

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      Bill Maher calls Larry David’s satire of his Trump dinner ‘kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews’

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      Bill Maher has responded to Larry David’s satirical essay in the New York Times that compared Maher’s glowing account of having dinner with Donald Trump to dining with Adolf Hitler.Maher, a vocal critic of Trump in the past, had dinner with the US president and a group of his high-profile supporters, including their mutual friend Kid Rock, on 31 March. On an episode of his talkshow Real Time on 11 April, Maher described Trump as “gracious” and “much more self-aware than he lets on”, saying: “Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was – I swear to God – absent, at least on this night with this guy.”The New York Times then published a satirical piece written by the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator, a first-person account from a critic of Hitler who accepts a dinner invitation from the Führer and ends up deciding “we’re not that different, after all”.“I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship,” David wrote.“But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side – even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.”Appearing on Piers Morgan’s talkshow Uncensored on Thursday, Maher said: “First of all, it’s kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews … It’s an argument you kind of lost just to start it. Look, maybe it’s not completely logically fair, but Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil.”Maher told Morgan he considered David a friend, and didn’t know about the piece until his publicist told him it had been published. “This wasn’t my favourite moment of our friendship,” he said.“Nobody has been harder, and more prescient, I must say, about Donald Trump than me. I don’t need to be lectured on who Donald Trump is. Just the fact that I met him in person didn’t change that. The fact that I reported honestly is not a sin either.”Maher told Morgan he didn’t want to “make this constantly personal with me and Larry”, saying: “We might be friends again.”“I can take a shot and I can also take it when people disagree with me. That’s not exactly the way I would’ve done it.“Again, the irony: let’s go back to what my original thing was. There’s got to be a better way than hurling insults and not talking to people. If I can talk to Trump, I can talk to Larry David too.” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel on Pete Hegseth: ‘Our secretary of defense is defenseless’

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      With several hosts still on Easter holiday, Jimmy Kimmel talks the search for a new pope and Pete Hegseth’s ongoing Signal scandals at the Department of Defense.Jimmy KimmelKimmel kicked off his show Tuesday by acknowledging Earth Day – and for the occasion, the US Environmental Protection Agency fired or reassigned hundreds of employees. “I can’t help but wonder how different things might be if Donald Trump’s father had taken him camping even one time,” he joked.He then turned his attention to the top global story of the week: the search for a new pope after Pope Francis died on Monday morning at the age of 88. “Nobody is going to be more insufferable this week than your friend who saw the movie Conclave and now knows everything about how it works,” said Kimmel. “I’ll tell you how it works: over the next few weeks, 135 flamboyantly dressed cardinals will gather to pass judgment on a series of aspiring candidates and in a lot of ways, it’s the Catholic version of RuPaul’s Drag Race.”Kimmel had a personal favorite: an Italian cardinal long stationed in Jerusalem named Pierbattista Pizzaballa.“Is he qualified? Honestly, we have no idea,” said Kimmel in a prayer for the very Italian-sounding Italian cardinal to be named pope. “Is he made of pizza? Also unclear. Is he round like a balla? We also don’t know. But his name is so funny, please grant the other cardinals the strength to give us a Pope Pizzaballa.”Kimmel also mocked Trump’s defense secretary, Hegseth, who is once again in hot water over using unsanctioned messaging apps to discuss sensitive military operations. Earlier this week, it was reported that Hegseth used a second Signal group chat, this one including family members, to discuss planned strikes in Yemen.Appearing on Fox News, Hegseth tried to dismiss furor as misguided: “Then and now, however you characterize it, was informal, unclassified coordinations … that’s what I’ve said from the beginning.”“Right, but it was bullshit from the beginning, too,” Kimmel responded. “You texted the exact time and place the secret bombing would begin before the secret bombing to your wife on an easily hackable phone. And is defense for this is ‘who told you? And how dare they tell you!’”“This is like your wife catching you in bed with another woman and your response is ‘well, why did you come home so early?’” he continued. “Our secretary of defense is defenseless, but it’s not his fault! The ones who get the blame for this is the leakers.”Kimmel then played a supercut of Hegseth complaining about “leakers” – “I don’t have time for leakers,” he said during the same Fox News interview.“You don’t have time for leakers? You are the leaker,” said an exasperated Kimmel. “You leak so much, you should be wearing Depends to work.” More

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      The America I loved is gone

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      View image in fullscreenThe first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.You felt the meaning of America the moment you entered. In Canada, wilderness is wilderness. The northern forests I come from resist interpretation; that is their power. But when you cross the border from, say, Quebec into Maine, you can feel myth accruing around the bark of the trees. You are in the haunted forests of New England, redolent with burned witches and ghost stories. Further south, the foggy murderous oaks loom gothically. Out west, the deserts beg for cowboys to cross them. Canada is a country that disillusions you. America is one illusion after another, some magnificent, others treacherous or vicious.Every landscape in America is setting, and you have to pose inside them. In my 20s, I drove Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. An older and wiser friend told me to rent a convertible, and I laughed the suggestion off, since it felt like something you would do in the movies. Huge mistake. That drive down the California coast – cows by the big-wave Pacific, condors in the clefts of Big Sur – demands an open roof.I learned then: when you go to America, always pick the option that feels like what you would do in the movies.In San Francisco, right by the Yahoo offices on Mission Street, was a small homeless encampment. I could just see inside one of the tents through an open flap, where a boy – he would have been about 10 years old – was playing with little treasures on a small tray – a ring, a toy car, a key chain. Even the tents of the homeless were little bubbles.In Malibu, at a sushi bar, elegant Japanese surf bums lounged between orders, watching Game 7 of the World Series, languidly curling out cucumber spirals the chefs used instead of seaweed. That was their thing – cucumber-based rolls. That restaurant is ash now.View image in fullscreenSometimes, you can see the bubbles better from the air. Flying into Palm Springs, the desert circumscribed, encroaching, revealed the furious machinery working to push it away. Palm Springs is pure delight on the ground: the misted pools, the cocktails filled with the exactly the right ice shapes, the street names hanging on to the faded glamour of the tacky talkshow guests from half a century ago.The airport has no roof; that’s how crazy a city it is. A glistening shivering bubble, effortless once inside.The sheer prosperity of the country could be breathtaking. I had just come back from Senegal when the Guardian sent me on assignment to rust belt Ohio, during the first stirrings of Trumpism, back in 2015. I was there to report on the growing swell of populism by way of the postindustrial immiseration of middle America.I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99. The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.It was more than money and grandeur, though. The openness, the generosity of ordinary people, floated free over the country.When I was researching my book The Next Civil War, the far-right people I met, the militia folks, in Oklahoma and in Ohio, at gun shows and Trump rallies and prepper conventions, were, without exception, polite in person – no doubt because I’m white, with blond hair and blue eyes, so I can pretend to be a good ol’ boy when required. They lived in dark bubbles, bubbles of serpentine paranoia and weird loathings and strange fantasies of breakdown.They welcomed me into their bubbles as equably as concierges. Militia pie is delicious; the crusts are richer, flakier. I think they use lard. Anyway, they talked to me about their hopes for the destruction of their government cheerfully and frankly, because they were living the movies playing in their minds and they wanted me to witness the projection.At one prepper convention I remember, a vendor was selling gluten-free rations for bunker survival. That was America in a bucket to me: even at the end of the world, don’t let a gluten allergy interfere with your active lifestyle.View image in fullscreenMuch later, for another publication, I attended a human-fairy congress in rural Washington state. Both humans and fairies were welcome to attend but only humans could enroll in the courses on fairy gardening and fairy marriages. They were the residue of the hippies, I suppose. The final event was a big dance where the fairies joined them and parlayed a message from the spirit realm. A young man dressed in Tibetan shaman robes ran into the luscious meadow set between ponderosa pines shouting “I! Feel! Better!” He was a definitive American type – a seeker who just went with his seeking.In America, one bubble was as good as another: the next week, many of the human-fairy enthusiasts were headed to a cosmic Sasquatch festival.On the other side of the state, in the Olympia forest, I interviewed illegal lumber poachers who cut a cord of firewood a day from the dead trees on public lands for meth and food and gas money, a primitive existence not that far from stone age tribes or medieval peasants. As I approached their compound, a coagulation of wrecked cars and rotten RVs and driftwood lean-tos with hanging tarps, a turkey strutted out to defend their ad hoc architecture of detritus. They had a guard turkey. The guard turkey was the shine of their bubble, like something in a dream.The American dream. For technocrats, a dying breed in the US, the term was shorthand for each generation doing better than the one before, for generally upward social mobility. There was more to it than that. There was an idea, an assumption really, that if you had enough talent and worked hard and did the smart thing, with a little luck you could live life just as you wanted. The country’s founding promise, after all, is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.That promise is why success in America does not lead to gratitude but to an intense sensation of loss. The elite take any deviation from their fantasy existence as a broken contract. They’ve been ripped off. That is a big feeling among the most successful people in America: the sense of being ripped off.The country clubs are rife with men and women, in incredible luxury, complaining bitterly about the state of the country. The richest and most powerful, the Americans who have won, who have everything, are still not happy, and why? Their answer is that the American dream must be broken. There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man. Why else do you think he’s out there with a chainsaw?The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences. That’s what the techlords dream of today.The truly frictionless world they seek eludes them exactly because it is a dream, because it is unreal. The ultimate truth of bubbles is that they pop.Another bubble: when I was teaching Shakespeare in Harlem, at the City College of New York, I had a homeless student who slept in his car and never missed my seminar on revenge tragedy. You can only live that way if you live in a bubble buoyed by dreams.I, too, have floated in American bubbles. I have inhabited its intoxication. If it were not for America, I would be working part-time in a coffee shop.In the early 2010s, I was a writer stuck between Toronto and New York, and I had written my attempt at the great Canadian novel, about Alberta and Quebec and the unspoken fascination between them – between Montreal, with its wild heart, and the wild prairies filled with longing for a distant recognition. Nationalism was completely out of fashion then. No one in Canada would even look at the manuscript. My friends at small presses stopped accepting my invitations for drinks. You can be a loser and you can be a nag, but nobody wants both at the same time – even in Canada.View image in fullscreenI had been sitting on the book for a year when David Granger, my editor at Esquire, invited me down to New York, rented out a room at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, and threw a party for me, just to give a speech to the gathered editors of Hearst about what a great writer I was. I returned to Canada, asked myself what the hell was I thinking trying to tell the stories of people who didn’t care if their stories were told, rewrote the novel so it was set in New York, and sold it in a few weeks for six figures.People used to say, about New York: “If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point of New York was that it was the city that wanted you to make it. David Granger blew a bubble around me, and the David Grangers on this planet are all American; that’s the fact of the matter.You work hard, you play hard. So many Americans will do whatever it takes to prevent their bubbles from bursting. The second Trump administration has clarified this national trait. As the authoritarian impulse strips America of any motivating ideals, the only -ism surviving is careerism.The past decade has demonstrated that there is nothing that will cause an American politician to resign. There is no line they won’t cross. To keep the bubble from popping, they will drink their own blood until there’s nothing left but a husk. There are currently people in America who are racist, not because they actually think other races are inferior, but because they think it will advance their careers, just as there were people pretending to be civil rights activists when they thought it looked good on a résumé.At the same time as there can be a terrible indifference to those outside the bubbles, there is no other group of people, in the world, happier to see others succeed than Americans. In Florida, there was a private poker room I used to go to, under a dog track in Sarasota, where you could meet the full spectrum of the Floridian population – grill-fronted southern bubbas, Jewish grandmothers, tweakers.They were just so much fun to sit playing cards with, discussing whether life had any purpose or discernible order. I remember, cancer had struck one of the dealers, who was in her mid-20s, and, to help with the medical bills, the house gave all the profits from a night over to her. It wasn’t just the rake, either. They held a silent auction, old customers forked over fistfuls of dollars straight up, and it was magnificent, a sheer festival of generosity.View image in fullscreenBut my little Canadian heart reserved an obvious thought: “You don’t have to do all this.” You don’t have to live this way. No other industrialized country in the world has to throw parties to raise money for its sick people. They could not see their own strangeness. Their bubbles reflect themselves back to them as the world.But it was a hell of a fun night.Fun. America was fun.Other countries do pleasure or luxury or celebration. America did fun. The Beatles were fun because they played American music. McDonalds conquered the world because they put a fun-for-five-minutes piece of plastic in with the fries and called it the Happy Meal. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol once wrote. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”Everyone drinks the drink of bubbles, the fun drink.The bubbles by which they lived were the subject of their greatest works of art. In the great one-hit wonder paintings, like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth or Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, you can feel the souls pressed up against their bubbles or sinking back in them. This year is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, and obviously it is the great American novel, the novel of the careless people who smash up the world and retreat into their money and their supreme indifference, the novel of bubbles.But the definitive work of American art isn’t Gatsby; it’s the roadrunner cartoons. If Coyote keeps running, he can run over air. It is only when he looks down that he falls.In Judaism, it is forbidden to throw out sacred books. They keep the shreds of exhausted texts in a storage room called a genizah.View image in fullscreenThe American text is exhausted. I am going to keep my memories of America in a genizah in my mind, the ones I have written here but also: dawn over the Shenandoah seen from the flatbed of an F-150; Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Modrian in the MoMA; a New Orleans band that must have played When the Saints Go Marching In 10,000 times playing it as if it were the first time; the smell of tacos al pastor in a Tulsa parking lot; low-limit craps in Vegas; a western oriole strutting in pine needles; the stump of the “Tree of Hope” in Harlem; the Siesta Key Oyster Bar, where the walls were covered with Iraqi money stapled there by returning soldiers; the sausages at the Wrigley Field ballpark in Chicago; the New York hustler who went down the A train selling his romance novels out of a box; that wave at the border I may have half-imagined.Countries fall out of the free world. They fall back in, too. These memories are not yet dead. They are only closed.But for now, a great foam is lifting, drifting, blowing through unsettled air, and all I can hear, in the distance, is the sound of bubbles popping.View image in fullscreen

      Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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      Stephen Colbert on potential alien life: ‘Take us to your leader, we don’t have one anymore’

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      Late-night hosts spoke about the Easter weekend, potential alien life and Donald Trump’s recent meeting with the Italian prime minister.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert pointed out that this year’s Easter Sunday also falls on 4/20, the unofficial holiday for weed enthusiasts.He joked that it would be “the Sunday he is risen and you is high”.This week saw Trump meet with the rightwing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. Some had hoped she might “ease the tariff tension” as she is often referred to as a “Trump whisperer”.He then played footage of Meloni speaking in Italian to Trump who complimented her directly after. “I’ll have the same thing she ordered but double meatball, double parm,” Colbert joked.Meloni has now made an offer to Trump to make an official visit to Italy, a place Colbert said he would feel at home as he “looks like a pile of prosciutto with a little spaghetti on top”.Due to massive cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA might have to stop inspections at food facilities. Colbert joked that we would know get to enjoy Tyson’s tangy buffalo beaks and thumbs.The administration is “actively trying to make health officials dumber” with halted efforts to collect data on many issues. It will now lead to “TLC’s sexy new reality show Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea Island”.This is all “just the tip of the cutberg” with the weather service also in trouble, seeing 300 employees let go as severe storm season ramps up, “when we need the weather people the most”.Colbert said that Twisters “will soon be the only programming on the weather channel”.He said that some are scrambling to make major discoveries “before science ends forever” such as this week’s reveal that there is possible signature of life on a distant planet.Officials have said that further studies are needed but Colbert expressed excitement, saying: “Please aliens take us to your leader, we don’t have one anymore.”Conspiracy theorists have also claimed that this week’s controversial all-female Blue Origin space stunt was faked. “Oh, I don’t know if I believe that,” he said. “Maybe Kubrick could fake the moon landing but you could never fake Gayle King’s sheer terror.”Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host also spoke about Easter. “If Jesus comes back and sees what’s going on, we are in deep trouble,” he said.Kimmel noted that he was “not sensing a lot of Easter spirit this year” and that Easter Sunday falling on 4/20 will lead to “some very long and confusing egg hunts”.Egg prices remain high, which has seen an “outpouring of tips for other stuff you can colour instead” such as potatoes and marshmallows, but Kimmel said Jesus would only come back for “boiled eggs”.In response to the sky-high prices, he asked: “Is anyone else tired of all the winning yet?”Meanwhile, Trump has given the White House an “extreme makeover” with plenty of gold added. His press secretary called it “the golden office for the golden age”, which Kimmel called “quite the spin”.He joked that for someone anti-DEI, he has the “same taste as Liberace” before asking: “Do you think Donald Trump understands that the story of King Midas is a cautionary tale?”He also spoke about the Meloni visit, joking that Trump probably took her to an Olive Garden to “make her feel at home” before airing a clip of him showing off “his vast knowledge of other lands”.Trump referred to the Congo and said: “I don’t know what that is.” Kimmel asked: “When is someone gonna show that man a map?”He said the government is running like a “well-soiled machine” before moving on to the alien planet news, detailing that researchers have found an equivalent of sea scum. Kimmel joked that we “may have found a new home for Ted Cruz”.The planet is 120 light years away, so Kimmel said “off you go Elon and Jeff, time to climb into those space dildos and boldly go away”.He also joked that we have a “better chance of being visited by aliens than Canadians” with tourism rates down post-tariffs. More