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      ‘It reminds you of a fascist state’: Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history

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      In a brightly lit gallery, they see the 66m-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. In a darkened room, they study the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the national anthem. In a vast aviation hanger, they behold a space shuttle. And in a discreet corner, they file solemnly past the casket of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in the US south.Visitors have come in their millions to the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s biggest museum, education and research complex, in Washington for the past 178 years. On Thursday, Donald Trump arrived with his cultural wrecking ball.The US president, who has sought to root out “wokeness” since returning to power in January, accused the Smithsonian of trying to rewrite history on issues of race and gender. In an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, he directed the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from its storied museums.The move was met with dismay from historians who saw it as an attempt to whitewash the past and suppress discussions of systemic racism and social justice. With Trump having also taken over the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, there are fears that, in authoritarian fashion, he is aiming to control the future by controlling the past.“It is a five-alarm fire for public history, science and education in America,” said Samuel Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “While the Smithsonian has faced crisis moments in the past, it has not been directly attacked in quite this way by the executive branch in its long history. It’s troubling and quite scary.”View image in fullscreenThe Smithsonian was conceived in the 19th century by the British scientist James Smithson, who, despite never setting foot in the US, bequeathed his estate for the purpose of a Washington-based establishment that would help with “the increase and diffusion of knowledge”. In 1846, 17 years after Smithson’s death, then president James Polk signed legislation calling for the institution’s formation.The Smithsonian now spans 21 museums, most of them in the nation’s capital lining the national mall from the US Capitol to the Washington monument, including the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The National Portrait Gallery, which displays a photo of Trump in its presidents gallery, is in downtown Washington.The Smithsonian also encompasses the National Zoo, famed for its giant pandas, and 14 education and research centres employing thousands of scientists and scholars and offering various programmes for schools.Visitors to the National Museum of Natural History’s FossiLab can see paleobiologists chipping away at rock to uncover bones buried for hundreds of millions of years. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory played a key role in the Event Horizon Telescope project, which produced the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019.View image in fullscreenAbout 60% of the Smithsonian’s funding comes from the federal government, but trust funds and private sources also provide money.The institution has known its share of controversies. In 1995, the air and space museum planned to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, with accompanying text that critics complained was more sympathetic to Japan than the US. The exhibition was cancelled and the plane put on display with no interpretation.Trump visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture a month after taking office in 2017. His reaction to the Dutch role in the global slave trade was: “You know, they love me in the Netherlands,” according to the museum’s founding director, Lonnie Bunch, who subsequently became the first Black person to lead the Smithsonian.Trump paid little attention to the institution during the rest of his first term, although in 2019 his vice-president, Mike Pence, took part in the unveiling of Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit at the air and space museum, marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.View image in fullscreenAs in so many other ways, however, Trump’s second term is a whole different beast. The president believes there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”, according to the White House executive order.He argues this “revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light”. The order also asserts: “Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”It cherrypicks examples, arguing that the African American museum “has proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘white culture’”. This refers to content that was on the museum’s website in 2020 and later removed after criticism.The order points to the exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, currently on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which states that societies including the US have used race to establish systems of power and that “race is a human invention”.It criticises a planned women’s museum for “celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports” and aims to ensure the museum does not “recognize men as women in any respect”.The order stipulates that the vice-president, JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian’s board of regents, work with Congress and the office of management and budget to block programmes that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy”. It calls for new citizen members “committed to advancing the policy of this order”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAll of this is in line with his administration’s efforts to do away with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in government, universities and corporations. The Smithsonian shut its diversity office soon after the president signed a January executive order banning DEI programmes at organisations that receive federal money.It is also of a piece with Trump’s longstanding demand for “patriotic” education. In February, he issued an executive order re-establishing his 1776 Commission, which was a riposte to the New York Times newspaper’s 1619 Project – and he has been a strident critic of renaming or removing Confederate statues and monuments.The order bears the hallmark of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which created the influential Project 2025. The thinktank’s website has an article that describes the 1619 project as “yet another attempt to brainwash you into believing your country is racist, evil and needs revolutionary transformation”. Another warns that the Smithsonian’s proposed Latino museum would be “a woke indoctrination factory”.But progressives say the cultural clampdown will only sow further discord. Tope Folarin, a Nigerian American writer and executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, said in an email: “You cannot ‘foster unity’ by refusing to tell the truth about our history. Ignorance of the truth is what actually deepens societal divides.“These museums are important because they tell the full American story in an unvarnished way. We will only achieve unity when we are able to reckon with the truth about how this country was founded, and acknowledge the heroes who worked continuously to bring us together.”On Friday, the mood at the Smithsonian, which has long enjoyed positive relations with both Democratic and Republican administrations, was rife with uncertainty. Many had been bracing for this moment, but it remained unclear what impact the order will have on staffing levels or current and future exhibitions, including plans to celebrate next year’s 250th anniversary of US independence.David Blight, a historian and close friend of Bunch, the Smithsonian’s secretary, said: “I haven’t talked to him yet. I’m sure he’s trying to decide what to do. I hope he doesn’t resign but that’s probably what they want. They want the leadership of the Smithsonian, the directors of these museums, to resign so they can replace them.”Blight, who is the current president of the Organization of American Historians, was “appalled, angry, frustrated but not fully surprised”, when he read the executive order. “There have been plenty of other executive orders but this is a frontal assault,” he said. “I read it as basically a declaration of war on American historians and curators and on the Smithsonian.”The professor of history and African American studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, continued: “What’s most appalling about this is the arrogance, or worse, the audacity to assume that the executive branch of government, the presidency, can simply dictate to American historians writ large the nature of doing history and its content.“I take it as an insult, an affront and an attempt to control what we do as historians. On the one hand this kind of executive order is so absurd that a lot of people in my field laugh at it. It’s a laughable thing until you realise what their intent actually is and what they’re doing is trying to first erode and then obliterate what we’ve been writing for a century.”Trump’s previous cultural targets have included the Kennedy Center and Institute of Museum and Library Services. This week he urged congressional Republicans to defund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). He has also threatened to cut funding to universities refusing to bend the knee.Blight regards the moves as drawn from the authoritarian playbook: “It’s what the Nazis did. It’s what Spain did. It’s what Mussolini tried. This is like the Soviets: they revised the Soviet encyclopedia every year to update the official history. Americans don’t have an official history; at least we’ve tried never to have.”The sentiment was echoed by Raymond Arsenault, a professor of southern history at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg. He said: “What is written in that order sounds almost Orwellian in the way Trump thinks he can mandate a mythic conception of American history that’s almost Disney-esque with only happy endings, only heroic figures, no attention at all to the complexity of American history and the struggles to have a more perfect union.He added: “It’s so chilling. Everything I’ve worked on in my career is simply ruled out by this one executive order. It’s like the barbarian sack of Rome in the level of ignorance and ill-will and anti-intellectualism.”Arsenault, a biographer of John Lewis, who was instrumental in creating the African American museum, said the late congressmen would be “shocked” by Trump’s order: “It’s totalitarian. It does remind you of a fascist state and makes us a laughingstock around the western world. I have to confess in my worst nightmares I didn’t think it would proceed this far in terms of willful megalomania.” More

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      ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?’ Joe McCarthy and the road to Trump

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      On 9 June 1954, in a Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill, Joseph Nye Welch made American history. With one question, the lawyer prompted the downfall of Joe McCarthy, the Republican Wisconsin senator who for years had run amok, his persecution of supposed communist subversives ruining countless lives.“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch said, as millions watched on TV, as he defended Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in McCarthy’s sights.“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”As Clay Risen writes in his new history, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America: “McCarthy, it seemed, did not.”The public listened. McCarthy was abandoned by those in power. McCarthyism had become McCarthywasm, President Dwight D Eisenhower joked. The senator died three years later, aged just 48, firmly in disgrace.Risen published his book last week, to glowing reviews, smack in the middle of another dramatic Washington moment, full of drama, replete with disgrace, in which many have compared McCarthy and Donald Trump, a Republican president pursuing his own purges and persecutions.Government workers are in Trump’s sights. So are protesting students and anyone or anything he deems representative of progressive values – of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. Trump’s political enemies are best defined as anyone he thinks wronged him in his first term, his defeat in 2020, his four criminal cases and in the election last year.“McCarthy was not a lone wolf,” Risen said, “but he was willing to go and say things. No one knew what he was going to say. There was something Trumpian in that regard.”Asking historians to discuss their subjects in light of modern figures and events is a journalistic cliche. But it seems fair when talking to Risen. He has addressed the question, writing for his employer, the New York Times, about the Trumpist “New Right” in a piece illustrated with a picture of McCarthy in a red Maga cap.Given McCarthy was finally brought down by a simple appeal to decency, could that possibly happen, one day, to Trump?View image in fullscreen“I think that’s been the question since 2015,” Risen said. “I remember when he went crossways with [the Arizona senator] John McCain, and everyone said, ‘Well, that’s the end, because you say something like that about a war hero … ’ But remember, Trump said right around the same time, ‘Look, I go walk out into Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and my supporters will still be with me.’ And it’s funny: so many things he’s been wrong about, or incoherent about, but in that he was right.”Reading Red Scare, it seems inconceivable such hysteria could have lasted so long, stoked by postwar paranoia about agents of the emerging Russian enemy, reaching sulfurous heights in years shot through with nuclear panic. It seems inconceivable ordinary Americans could have allowed it. To Risen, it’s not inconceivable at all.“The way I always explain it is, ‘Look, America is a big place, and most Americans don’t pay any attention to politics. They have no idea. Most of their interpretation at least of national politics is strictly economic.’”The 1950s were boom years. Now, since Trump’s return to the White House, the economy is shaky but the president has not shouldered the blame.“There are ancillary things,” Risen said. “Immigration as an economic issue. Occasionally a cultural element comes in. Abortion is obviously part of that. But most people, when they think about ‘What does the federal government mean to me?’, they think in economic terms.”As the red scare raged, most Americans simply did not care. Now, Risen said, many persist in thinking: “Well, shouldn’t we have a businessman running the country?”“So that raises the question: now the economy’s tanking, or the markets are tanking, and we may find ourselves in recession, do those people move away from Trump? Or do people go with it?”At long last, sir, have you no currency?Could happen.Risen is 48. He worked at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and the New Republic, then at the Times he edited opinion and politics before switching to writing obituaries. Somehow he has written nine books, five on American whiskey and four histories: of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr; of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; of Teddy Roosevelt at war; and now Red Scare.“Postwar American politics and political culture is sort of my lodestone. The red scare seemed a natural fit.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRisen spoke from the Times newsroom in midtown Manhattan. Further uptown, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, protesters rallied for Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student with a green card and an American wife, arrested for his role in anti-Israel protests. Spirited to Louisiana, Khalil was charged with no crime. Instead, he was held under an obscure law – from 1952, the heart of the red scare – that allows for the deportation of anyone deemed a threat to US foreign policy.Many fear Khalil is a test case for purges to come.Risen said: “The way they have gone after him, even the tools they’re using, are one and the same with the way they tried to get Harry Bridges, who was an Australian-born labor leader of the west coast longshoremen” in the early 1950s. “Personally, I think Bridges is a hero … He was detained without cause at the start of the Korean war because he was considered a threat to national security. His case went to the supreme court, he won, and he lived a long time.“Obviously there are some differences but it’s hard not to see the same stories playing out now. The Department of Education recently announced a tip line where if you’re a parent and you think some teacher or some librarian is, I don’t want to use the verb, ‘DEI’ … Essentially, it’s: ‘If you just have a complaint about a teacher, in this vein, let us know.’“The same thing existed during during the red scare. The FBI had the Responsibilities Program, where they would take input from grassroots organizations, veterans groups, concerned parents groups, and then they would share information with PTAs, with local school boards. You know: ‘This teacher has a background that’s kind of suspect,’ ‘Here’s a list of books that you want to remove from your library.’ It’s just the same playbook. It’s terrifying to see it play out. And in fact, in some ways, I think it’s much scarier now.”View image in fullscreenAfter the red scare, Republicans marched ever further to the right. There was Richard Nixon, who cut his teeth questioning suspected communists as a congressman in the 50s, scenes retold in Risen’s book. There was Ronald Reagan, who testified before the House un-American activities committee and flirted with extremists. There was Pat Buchanan, who challenged the establishment from the far right, and there was Newt Gingrich, who polarized and radicalized Congress.But, Risen said, “despite everything, there were safeguards” that had ultimately withstood the red scare.“We had a center-right establishment of the Republican party that tolerated but ultimately moved on from the red scare. We had a fairly established media that was credulous and made a lot of mistakes but ultimately was not taken in by the red scare and was willing to call some of the worst red scarers to account. One of the things that came out of the red scare was a stronger awareness of the importance of defending civil liberties. The ACLU and the American Bar Association did not cover themselves in glory during the red scare. But ever since then, groups like that have been much more present and aggressive in terms of defending civil liberties, and so we see that today.“Hopefully it’s enough. I think a lot remains to be seen whether what we’re going through now will be worse than the red scare, but I’m not at all hopeful.”In that fateful hearing in 1954, Joe McCarthy’s own counsel sat at his side. It was Roy Cohn, a ruthless New York lawyer who later became mentor to a young Trump. Risen sees plenty of other parallels between McCarthy and Trump.View image in fullscreen“I spent a lot of time looking at the encomiums to McCarthy when he died, and letters his friends were sharing, and so much of it was the sentiment that McCarthy was the ultimate victim, because McCarthy was the guy who was willing to say the truth, and he was destroyed for it.”Trump also presents himself as both victim and avenger, promising revenge and retribution.“There was around [McCarthy] this idea that it wasn’t enough just to replace the leaders. It wasn’t enough just to control spending. Reform was not enough. The fundamental core of the New Deal” – Franklin Roosevelt’s vast modernization of the US state, from the 1930s – “needed to be thrown in the garbage, and anybody ever connected to any of that needed to be banished.”In the 1950s, that effort failed. In the 2020s, Trump and his mega-donor and aide Elon Musk are trying again – it seems with more success.Risen said: “When you look at not so much Trump but at some of the more systematic thinkers around him, like JD Vance and his circle, like Kevin Roberts, Stephen Miller, I think some of these guys do have a sense of history.”“I don’t think Elon Musk does, necessarily, but he is saying those same things about ‘We need to go in and dismantle, essentially, the New Deal architecture.’ And it’s not just because it’s expensive, it’s because it’s [seen as] un-American and a rot on society. In the 1940s and 50s, the name for this was ‘communism’. In that sense, communism was a red herring. It wasn’t really about communism. It was about progressivism. It was about the New Deal. It’s about this culture in America that was more tolerant, pluralistic, in favor of labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights. That was the target.”During the red scare, in what came to be called “the lavender scare”, gay men were ensnared and ruthlessly ruined.Risen said: “Today, it’s DEI or woke or whatever. But it’s the same thing. It’s not that they’re getting rid of DEI programs, whatever that might mean. They’re mainly getting rid of fundamental civil rights protections or offices that protect civil rights, that are nothing about what they charge.“That is the real game, at heart. It’s what was going on in the red scare.”

      Red Scare is published in the US by Scribner More

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      Is Trump’s authoritarian lurch following the playbook of Iran’s Ahmadinejad?

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      It reads like an inventory of Donald Trump’s first two months back in the White House.A newly elected demagogic president, renowned for his rabble-rousing rallies and provocative stunts, makes a whirlwind start on taking office.He upends the country’s international relations in a series of undiplomatic demarches.State institutions are gutted or closed in an outburst of radicalism aimed at transforming government.Law enforcement authorities stage performative public roundups of those deemed, accurately or not, to be violent criminals.Critics complain of statutes being routinely broken. Universities and media are targeted in a clampdown on free expression.A widely revered cultural institution undergoes a government takeover and is given a conservative makeover.Wrongfooted opposition politicians try to recover ground by highlighting the rising cost of dietary staples and the failure to address the kitchen-table issues that voters elected the president to solve.Fitting as all this might be as a summary of the helter-skelter opening phase of Trump’s second presidency, it also describes events that followed the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran 20 years ago.Ahmadinejad emerged as an arch-nemesis of the west after rising to power from obscurity in 2005. His offensive diatribes against Israel – which he suggested should be erased from the map – and repeated denials of the Holocaust were the stuff of cartoon villainy, sharpened further by his hawkish championing of Iran’s nuclear programme.He was also an electoral populist in the Trump mould, as adept at drawing vast crowds with his message of championing the left-behinds and dispossessed as he was at riling his opponents.View image in fullscreenIranians have noticed the matching personas. “There was a joke in Iran during Trump’s first term that when he became president, Iran finally managed to export its revolution,” said Vali Nasr, an Iranian-born international affairs scholar at Johns Hopkins University. “Trump was basically Ahmadinejad in the US.”In a striking twist, Ahmadinejad even addressed Columbia University – an institution now threatened with grant cuts by the Trump administration over an alleged failure to combat campus antisemitism by tolerating pro-Palestinian protesters – in a 2007 visit to New York. The university’s then president, Lee Bollinger, assailed him to his face for his Holocaust denial and called him a “cruel and petty dictator”, a description that seemed to presage the criticisms of many of Trump’s opponents.The parallels, however, are superficial – and the differences just as significant.Ahmadinejad, remembered for his trademark man-of-the-people white jacket, defined himself by his frugality and surrounded himself with like types; Trump flaunts his wealth and seems to have space in his inner circle for billionaires, for whom he favours huge tax cuts.Moreover, any comparison between Iran and the US must come with a health warning.Iran, under the stifling religious regime that seized power after the 1979 revolution that toppled the country’s former pro-western monarch, Shah Mohammad Pahlavi, was hardly a flourishing democracy before Ahmadinejad’s presidency – even after a period of relatively liberal reform under his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami.“He came to power in an already deeply authoritarian regime,” said Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was in Iran when Ahmadinejad became president. “He took what was already a seven on the repression scale and made it a nine.”Yet the fact that any analogy can be drawn at all attests to the uncharted territory the US has entered under Trump.In recent weeks, as the president and his allies have assailed judges and hinted that they could flout court rulings, commentators and experts have warned of a looming constitutional crisis and lurch towards authoritarianism and even dictatorship.Scholars have touted a variety of global precedents in a quest for a parallel that might act as a guide for where US democracy is headed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenCommonly cited examples are Hungary and its strongman prime minister, Viktor Orbán; Turkey, whose president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has held power for 22 years and has purged the judges and military general who upheld the secular state structure created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; and Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin. The ascents of all three are often viewed as instances of democracies and once-independent institutions being emasculated and elections gamed to sustain the incumbent.More encouraging portents are seen in Poland and the Czech Republic, where rightwing populist nationalist forces lost power in the most recent elections to parties or presidential candidates committed to the liberal democratic mainstream and to international institutions such as the EU and Nato.Yet none seem to rival the sheer ferocity with which Trump has eviscerated federal agencies, denounced judges and churned out landscape-changing executive orders.The problem was summed up by Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and author of books on democracy’s decline and autocracy’s rise, who told the New York Times that he had seen nothing like Trump’s assault on democratic institutions.The first two months under Trump had been “much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding”, he said. “Erdoğan, [Venezuelan leader Hugo] Chávez, Orbán – they hid it.”Other observers agree that Trump’s moves are of greater magnitude than those seen in other democracies turned autocracies.“The best parallel that I can see is the collapse of the Soviet Union,” said Nader Hashemi, professor of Middle East and Islamic studies at Georgetown University and another academic of Iranian origin.“A political order that everyone thought had a long shelf life rapidly collapses, is completely disorienting, and people are trying to figure out what comes next.“We don’t really have precedents similar to this moment where you have a longstanding existing democracy that’s a major power that collapses so rapidly and quickly and is moving in the direction of authoritarianism. I think its impact will also be felt globally.”View image in fullscreenNasr said Trump confounded comparisons with previous democracy-subverting authoritarians, likening the current White House to the court of King Henry VIII, the 16th-century monarch recalled for his six wives and for triggering the English reformation.“The way he’s setting up authority in the White House looks more like a Tudor monarchy than modern authoritarianism,” he said. “The White House looks more like an imperial court.”Trump, argued Nasr, “has a theory of rapid, massive change” that recalled the approach of military coup leaders in the third world who judged that their agenda was incompatible with democracy.The common bond between Trump and Ahmadinejad may be the forces that brought them to power.“One could say that the very first kind of backlash in our era against what economic liberalisation can do to a society happened in Iran,” said Nasr.Under Ahmadinejad’s two presidential predecessors, Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, liberal economic reforms intended to generate prosperity after years of post-revolutionary austerity produced an affluent, consumerist middle class – but left behind a disaffected population group that felt it had lost out.“It created a class in Iran much like the people who voted for Brexit [in Britain] or people who voted for Trump,” Nasr said. “So [Ahmadinejad] was anti-establishment in the way Boris Johnson was during Brexit, or Trump was during his two campaigns. There is definitely a parallel there.”Hashemi saw another parallel in Trump’s attacks on universities and the media – a trend which Iran witnessed (accompanied with much greater repression) even before Ahmadinejad took power, as hardliners tried to snuff out the freedoms that reformists had introduced.“Then Ahmadinejad comes and continues in an authoritarian direction,” he said. “The parallel between that period and now in the United States is that authoritarian regimes hate independent institutions, the press and particularly universities, because they foster free thinking, they hold power to account. That’s why we’re seeing this attack on Columbia University and other universities.”Ahmadinejad, having stoked inflation with populist cash handouts and facilitated the Revolutionary Guards’ takeover of the economy, was ultimately thwarted by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and most powerful cleric, who marginalised him while using Ahmadinejad’s authoritarian impulses to accrue more autocratic powers to himself.Trump – having subjugated the Republican-ruled Congress, and who is now limited only by a constitutional bar on seeking a third term that some of his supporters are already clamouring to amend – is subject to no such constraints.“In a way, Trump’s conduct is more sinister because he’s trying to turn a democracy into an autocracy,” said Sadjadpour. Given the odium in which Ahmadinejad’s detractors once held him, it seems a particularly ominous verdict. More

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      Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets | Kenan Malik

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      ‘Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed by his son, John Huston. That line was to have appeared on screen at the beginning of the film. It didn’t, on orders from the studio, Warner Bros. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor’,” John Huston later reflected. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.”It was a relatively insignificant moment in the drama of America’s postwar red scare. McCarthyism proper had still to take flight. Yet, so deep ran the fear already that a single, everyday word could create consternation in Hollywood.McCarthyism, the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, “was a peculiarly American style of repression – nonviolent and consensual. Only two people were killed; only a few hundred went to jail.” Yet it constituted “one of the most severe episodes of political repression the United States ever experienced”.Sackings and legal sanctions created such fear that, in the words of the political philosopher Corey Robin, society was put “on lockdown”, with people so “petrified of being punished for their political beliefs” that “they drew in their political limbs”.It was not just communists who were silenced. “If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is an inequality of wealth,” claimed the chair of one state committee on un-American activities, “there is every reason to believe that person is a communist.” This at a time when Jim Crow still held the south in its grip. The red scare paused the civil rights movement for more than a decade and drew the teeth of union radicalism.Fear has always been a means of enforcing social order, most obviously in authoritarian states, from China to Saudi Arabia, Turkey to Russia, where repression becomes the foundation of political rule. In liberal democracies, order rests more on consensus than overt brutality. But here, too, fear plays its role. The worker’s fear of being sacked, the claimant’s of being sanctioned, the renter’s of being made homeless, the fear of the working-class mother facing a social worker or of the black teenager walking past a policeman – relations of power are also relations of fear, but fears usually so sublimated that we simply accept that that’s the way the system works.It is when consensus ruptures, when social conflict erupts, or when the authorities need to assert their power, that liberal democracies begin wielding fear more overtly as a political tool to quieten dissent or impose authority. Think of how the British state treated Irish people in the 1970s and 1980s, or miners during the great strike of 1984/85.Seventy years on from McCarthyism, America seems to be entering such a moment. Over the past month, we have seen the mass deportation to a notorious foreign jail of hundreds of people declared to be illegal immigrants and gang members, without evidence or due process; the arrest, detention and threatened deportation of foreign students, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal and Yunseo Chung, for protesting about the war in Gaza; the blacklisting of law firms representing clients of whom Donald Trump does not approve; the mass sackings of federal workers.Fear works here in two ways. The targets of repression are groups about whom it is easier to create fear, and so easier to deprive of rights and due process. Doing so then creates a wider climate of fear in which people become less willing to speak out, and not just about Palestine. Already, “whole segments of American society [are] running scared”, as one observer put it.Institutions such as universities, Schrecker concluded about the 1950s, “did not fight McCarthyism” but “contributed to it”, not only through dismissals and blacklists but also through accepting “the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing”, thereby conferring “respectability upon the most repressive elements” of the process.It’s a process repeating itself today. Earlier this month, after cancelling $400m (£310m) in federal grants and contracts, Trump made a series of demands of Columbia University, including that it change its disciplinary rules, place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” and adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that its own lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, condemns as having been “weaponised” into “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite” and to “go after pro-Palestinian speech”. Last week, Columbia capitulated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMichael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, one of the few academic leaders willing to speak out, decries “the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era”, describing “anticipatory obedience” as “a form of cowardice”. Cowardice, though, has become the defining trait, most university leaders “just happy that Columbia is the whipping boy”. Columbia may be the first university in Trump’s crosshairs, but it won’t be the last. Keeping silent won’t save them.In his incendiary speech in Munich in February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, harangued European leaders to worry less about Russia than “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”, especially free speech. The same, it would seem, applies to America, too. Many of those who previously so vigorously upheld the importance of free speech have suddenly lost their voice or now believe that speech should be free only for those with the right kinds of views. The brazen hypocrisy of Vance, and of the fair-weather supporters of free speech, should nevertheless not lead us to ignore the fact that, from more intrusive policing of social media to greater restrictions on our ability to protest to the disciplining, even sacking, of workers holding “gender-critical views”, these are issues to which we urgently need to attend.“I live in an age of fear,” lamented the essayist and author EB White in 1947, after the New York Herald had suggested that all employees be forced to declare their political beliefs to retain their jobs. He was, he insisted, less worried “that there were communists in Hollywood” than to “read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control”. It is a perspective as vital now as it was then, and as necessary on this side of the Atlantic as in America. More

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      The Observer view on JD Vance: spurned in Greenland and humiliated at home, the vice-president should resign

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      Not for the first time, JD Vance, America’s outspoken vice-president, has made a public fool of himself. He insisted on visiting Greenland despite unequivocal statements by the territory’s leaders and Denmark’s government that he was not invited and not welcome. Vance’s trip was confined to a remote Arctic base, where he briefly spoke to a few Americans. Plans to make a wider tour and speak to Greenlanders were cancelled – because Greenlanders did not want to speak to him.Such hostility is entirely understandable, given the repeated, provocative and disrespectful declarations by Vance’s boss, Donald Trump, that the US plans to annex Greenland and may do so illegally and by force. Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. Election results this month showed the vast majority of local people back expanded self-rule or outright independence. They do not want to be Americans.In a feeble attempt to justify what is, in effect, a Putin-style bid to seize another country’s sovereign territory, Vance claimed Denmark had failed to protect Greenland from Chinese and Russian threats – but did not produce any evidence. He also failed to explain why, if such dangers exist, the US, which like Denmark is a Nato member, has not honoured its legal obligation to develop a “collective capacity to resist armed attack” under the 1951 US-Denmark “Defence of Greenland” treaty.Trump, too, has been prating about Greenland’s importance for “world peace”. It’s true the Arctic region is seeing increased great power competition, partly because climate change renders it more accessible. Yet Trump, in another echo of Ukraine, appears more motivated by desire to control Greenland’s untapped mineral wealth. As in Gaza and Panama, his main interest is not security and justice but geopolitical, financial and commercial advantage. Insulting plans to enrol Canada as the 51st state reflect another Trump preoccupation: a return to an earlier age of aggressive US territorial expansionism.Vance in Greenland may have preferred a woolly hat to a pith helmet, but his imperialist intentions were unmistakable. Yet despite his frosty reception, he was perhaps glad to escape Washington, where he and his travelling companion, US national security adviser Mike Waltz, are feeling the heat for another scandalous piece of foolishness: the Signal message group security breach. This concerns the inadvertent inclusion of a leading journalist in an online discussion by Vance, Waltz and senior officials of real-time US bombing attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen.This breach, by itself, is bad enough. It might have endangered US pilots and wrecked the Houthi operation. The discussion, on an insecure platform, could have been, and probably was overheard by the Russians and others. Yet its contents, which have now been published in full, also include rude and mocking comments by Vance and Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, about European allies. Their shaming, ignorant exchanges dramatically and damagingly highlight the rapid deterioration in transatlantic ties since Trump took office.Like the Greenland incursion, the official response to the Signal scandal speaks volumes about the true nature of the Trump administration. Trump’s shabby instinct was to deny all responsibility, minimise its importance, denigrate the journalist and dismiss the whole thing as a hoax. Hegseth’s claim that no classified information was released is an obvious, stupid lie, as the transcript demonstrates. There is huge hypocrisy in the refusal of Waltz, Vance and Hegseth to even contemplate resignation, when such a blunder by a lower-ranking official would certainly have led to the sack.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbove all, the hubris, arrogance, amateurishness and irresponsibility revealed by both episodes is truly shocking – and a chilling warning to the world. More

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      Trump news at a glance: anti-Musk protesters target Tesla showrooms around the world

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      People around the world joined protests against Elon Musk and his attempts to dismantle the US federal government on Saturday, gathering outside Tesla showrooms from Australia to Switzerland and California.Protest organizers asked people to do three things: don’t buy a Tesla, sell off Tesla stock and join the “Tesla Takedown” movement. “Hurting Tesla is stopping Musk,” reads one of the group’s taglines. “Stopping Musk will help save lives and our democracy.”Musk, the world’s richest person, heads Donald Trump’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), which he’s tasked with slashing federal budgets in the US, including laying off tens of thousands of workers.Thousands join anti-Musk protests around the worldWith more than 200 events planned worldwide, protests kicked off midday in front of Tesla showrooms in Australia and New Zealand and then rippled across Europe in countries including Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK.Each rally was locally organized with original themes. In Ireland, it was “Smash the Fash”, and Switzerland had “Down with Doge”.Read the full storySenior FDA official resigns citing RFK Jr’s ‘misinformation and lies’A senior health official in the US, who was seen as a guardrail against any future politicisation of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of life-saving vaccines, has resigned abruptly, citing the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “misinformation and lies”.Multiple media outlets, citing people familiar with the matter, reported late on Friday that Dr Peter Marks had been given the choice to resign or be fired by a Health and Human Services (HHS) department official. He chose to resign.Read the full storyMost employees of US Institute of Peace fired en masseMost employees at the US Institute of Peace, a congressionally created and funded thinktank now taken over by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”, received email notices of their mass firing late Friday, the latest step in the Trump administration’s government downsizing.Read the full storyLeaders of Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies center step downThe leaders of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies are leaving their positions after the center faced accusations of anti-Israel bias. Faculty members who spoke to the New York Times anonymously said they believed that Cemal Kafadar and Rosie Bsheer were forced out of their roles.The departures come as the Trump administration scrutinizes institutions that have had pro-Palestinian protests over the last year.Read the full storyPeter Hegseth’s wife attended sensitive meetings with foreign officials – reportThe wife of the US defense secretary Pete Hegseth attended two meetings with foreign defense officials during which sensitive information was discussed, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. Jennifer Hegseth has been present at two meetings where sensitive information was discussed, one with the UK secretary of defense, John Healey, and one in Brussels at Nato headquarters, the WSJ reported.Read the full storyTrump grants clemency to media executive convicted of fraudFormer talkshow host and Ozy Media co-founder Carlos Watson received clemency from Donald Trump, sparing him a 10-year jail sentence. Watson was traveling to the Lompoc, California, federal correctional institution when he learned of the presidential commutation afforded to him, as CNBC reported. He published a statement that thanked the president and insulted the Trump-appointed federal judge who sentenced him, Eric Komitee, as “conflicted and unethical”.Read the full storyJob cuts at health department will pave way for private sector takeover, experts warnMassive job cuts planned for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will pave the way for takeover of crucial services by the private sector, imperiling the US in future health emergencies, health experts and Democratic politicians warn.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The New College of Florida has fired a Chinese language professor under a state law that restricts Florida’s public universities from hiring individuals they deem to be from “countries of concern”.

      US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he did not warn car industry executives against raising prices as tariffs on foreign-made autos come into force, telling NBC News he “couldn’t care less” if they do.

      The Trump administration has ordered some French companies with US government contracts to comply with his executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes, highlighting the extraterritorial reach of US policies and their potential impact on European corporate practices.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 28 March. More

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      Trump has managed to spin Signalgate as a media lapse, not a major security breach | Andrew Roth

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      When it comes to Trump-era scandals, the shameless responses to “Signalgate”, in which top administration officials discussing details of an impending strike in Yemen in a group chat without noticing the presence of a prominent journalist, should set alarm bells ringing for its brazenness and incompetence.In a particularly jaw-dropping exchange, Tulsi Gabbard, the United States’ director of national intelligence, was forced to backtrack during a house hearing after she had said that there had been no specific information in the Signal chat about an impending military strike. Then, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published the chat in full, contradicting Gabbard’s remarks that no classified data or weapons systems had been mentioned in the chat.“My answer yesterday was based on my recollection, or the lack thereof, on the details that were posted there,” said Gabbard. “What was shared today reflects the fact that I was not directly involved with that part of the Signal chat.”Then there was the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth who – staring straight down the camera – baldly stated: “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.” The next day, Goldberg revealed that Hegseth himself had texted the precise timing of the attacks and the weapons systems to be used, specifically F-18 jets and MQ-9 drones.And Michael Waltz, the White House national security adviser, was left scrambling on live television as he was quizzed by a Fox News anchor on how Goldberg’s number had ended up on his phone. “You’ve never talked to him before so how is the number on your phone?” asked conservative television anchor Laura Ingraham. “It gets sucked in,” Waltz, a former congressman and army special forces soldier, replied – without explaining how a number can get “sucked in” to a phone.But despite all this, no one is really taking the prospects of an investigation seriously. At heart, this is about politics – and the fact is that Democrats simply don’t have the votes or the sway to deliver a body blow to the administration at this point.It’s unlikely that anyone will be punished. Donald Trump has told his aides that he doesn’t want to give the Atlantic a scalp, and vice-president JD Vance responded forcefully during a trip to Greenland on Friday: “If you think you’re going to force the president of the United States to fire anybody you’ve got another think coming … I’m the vice-president saying it here on Friday: we are standing behind our entire national security team.”For decades, national security was broadly seen as the last bastion of bipartisanship in Washington, an area where Democrats and Republicans put aside their differences for a general consensus on supporting the national interest. Members of Congress on the intelligence and foreign affairs committees often maintained cordial relationships. There was also an understanding that big scandals could jump the partisan line, and lead to serious repercussions even with tensions between the parties at their highest.Scooter Libby, once chief of staff to vice-president Dick Cheney, was sentenced to prison after an investigation into the leak of the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. The Department of Justice under Barack Obama launched more Espionage Act investigations for leaking sensitive information than all previous administrations combined.And the FBI, of course, launched a years-long investigation into Hillary Clinton for keeping emails on a home computer server that ultimately may have helped sway the elections. “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity,” Clinton wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Friday. “We’re all shocked – shocked! – that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws … What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.”Observers have remarked that the scandal would have been far greater if it had taken place at a lower level in the intelligence community. Mid-level officers and defence officials would all face far harsher blowback if they were caught divulging the kind of information that Hegseth sent into the chat, including the specific timing of the strikes and the weapons systems to be used.But the Trump administration believes that it can simply divert and divide public attention until there is a new scandal. That may be a winning strategy. Trump is to introduce tariffs this week that will probably dominate the news agenda for weeks. And his deputies are out on cable news every day, pushing back at the media for covering the scandal and suggesting that Goldberg somehow sneaked his way into the chat rather than being added directly by Waltz, the national security adviser.“They have treated this as a media event to be spun rather than a grievous error to be rectified,” wrote Phil Klay, a military veteran and guest columnist for the New York Times. The early indications are that the Trump administration will skate through this scandal, crossing into new territory in Washington where even a major security leak can be repainted as the fault of the media for covering it. More