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      When the physicists need burner phones, that’s when you know America’s changed | John Naughton

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      At international academic conferences recently, one sees an interesting trend. Some American participants are travelling with “burner” phones or have minimalist laptops running browsers and not much else. In other words, they are equipped with the same kind of kit that security-conscious people used to bring 15 years ago when travelling to China.So what’s up? Well, these academics have a finger on the pulse of Trump’s America, and are concerned about what might happen when they return home. They’ve read on Robert Reich’s Substack about the French scientist who was prevented from entering the country because US Border Patrol agents had found messages from him in which he had expressed his “personal opinion” to colleagues and friends about Trump’s science policies.Or they’ve heard about Dr Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University who was trying to return to the US after visiting relatives in Lebanon. She was deported, reports Reich, “despite having a valid visa and a court order” blocking her removal. “Federal authorities alleged that they found ‘sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures’ in her phone and that she attended the funeral for the leader of Hezbollah in February.”And they also know about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, whom – though he is a legal permanent resident of the US and has not been charged with a crime – the government is trying to deport because he had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia.Those pro-Gaza demonstrations so irked the Trump regime that it demanded the return of $400m of federal research funding. When Columbia sought a meeting to discuss the matter, it received a letter setting out the conditions that it would have to accept before the government would deign to talk. These included a stipulation that Columbia must “begin the process of placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years”.The bullying of Columbia is the canary in the coalmine which reveals the Trump-Musk junta has it in for American universities. There are two reasons for their hostility. The first is that, as elite institutions devoted to freedom of inquiry and the telling of uncomfortable truths, they are anathema to the new autocrats in Washington. The second is that some of them (the so-called Ivy League) are fabulously wealthy, being for the most part hedge funds with nice universities attached. And if there’s one thing that Donald Trump cannot abide, it is large pots of money that he and his ghastly tribe can smell but not touch. So if the aloof trustees of Harvard, Princeton, Yale et al think that their august institutions lie beyond his reach, perhaps they should understand that Trump looks on them much as Henry VIII looked on the rich monasteries of his heyday.Many teachers and researchers in US universities are now fearful of what lies ahead. No line of inquiry is safe from the raging firestorm of Maga intolerance. Many of the most vulnerable areas of inquiry lie in the health sector – LGBTQ+ medicine, epidemiology, infectious diseases, immunology, and so on. But there’s also endangered research on environmental issues and the climate crisis, socioeconomic inequality, plus the humanities, social science and astrophysics.The looming crisis in the US is beginning to remind people in Europe of the 1930s, when the UK and the US began to realise that Jewish scientists needed to be rescued from the Nazis. About 2,000 scientists and academics fled the fascist countries between 1933 and 1941, fearing for themselves or Jewish family members. Then, universities in the US and the UK made space for and welcomed a whole generation of geniuses – Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Max Born, Rudolf Peierls, Francis Simon, to name just a few. Likewise, members of the Frankfurt School were rescued and installed in New York, where they became mightily critical of American capitalism but at least lived to tell their particular tale. As did Thomas Mann.Now, in a different age, there are stirrings in Europe to provide safe places for American researchers. In France, Aix-Marseille University is welcoming American scientists whose work has become untenable after the Trump administration’s cuts in certain academic sectors. The Free University of Brussels (VUB) is opening 12 postdoctoral positions for international researchers, which are open to American researchers working in socially relevant fields. The fellowships come with substantial funding (€2.5m) as part of the European Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme. It’s also aiming to attract American professors looking to relocate. VUB, with its Francophone sister university ULB, is providing 18 apartments for international researchers seeking temporary residence at the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies.This is the beginning of something hopeful. But it also raises the question of what UK institutions are doing to meet the coming challenge. The answer, at the moment, seems to be nothing much. Perhaps that’s because most of British academia still can’t get its head around the idea that the US is now an enemy, not an ally, and that the “special relationship” is yesterday’s story.What I’ve been readingHow I accidentally got sent Trump’s Yemen textsJeffrey Goldberg’s astonishing story about the White House security leak in the Atlantic.Philosophy and fatherhoodA curious tendency among western philosophers explored in an intriguing post by Doug Muir.AI has learned to reason … … or has it? A lovely explainer by Melanie Mitchell.

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      ‘It’s a scary time’: artists react to White House’s recent targeting of Smithsonian Institution

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      Artists, academics and politicians have shared their outrage in reaction to the Trump administration’s latest executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum network.Late on Thursday, Trump announced that his administration had ordered a large reshaping of the Smithsonian in an attempt to eliminate what he described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”.“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,” read the order.Trump’s order specifically criticized the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Saam) exhibit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture. The exhibit features 82 sculptures from more than 70 artists to “[examine] the role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race in the United States”, according to the museum’s website.The artist Roberto Lugo, who is featured in the Shape of Power exhibit, said it felt “scary” to watch the Trump administration attempt to censure his and others’ work.“The idea of something that I’ve made being in such an important exhibition, and being targeted by people who run the entire country,” Lugo said. “It’s a scary time because you just don’t know if your work is going to be used to help people understand one another or if it’s going to be used as a tool to further divide people,” he added.To create his featured sculpture, DNA Study Revisited, Lugo had to physically encase his entire body in plaster and rubber for hours at a time. It then took more than a month to create the finished piece.The creation of art, Lugo said, allows him to “process experiences”.“I have faced violence in my life because of racism,” Lugo, who is Afro-Latino, said. “As a child, I was assaulted with a baseball bat for trying to play in the wrong neighborhood.” He added: “This was a very therapeutic experience to feel like my DNA is represented in such an important exhibition.”Trump also condemned the widely lauded National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). The museum, which formally opened in 2016 at a ceremony with then president Barack Obama, has been celebrated for its thorough curation process of Black American history.As a part of the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, Trump has ordered his vice-president, JD Vance, to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s museums, educational centers and more.Trump’s executive order has already sent shocks through the art and museum spaces, as officials weigh how to continue their work with an administration focused on limiting truth.Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett shared her frustration at Trump’s order and broader opposition to diversity and inclusion on social media.“First Trump removes any reference of diversity from the present – now he’s trying to remove it from our history. Let me be PERFECTLY clear – you cannot erase our past and you cannot stop us from fulfilling our future,” she said in a post on X.US representative Steven Horsford accused the Trump administration of “trying to erase Black history and silence conversations about systemic injustice” with this latest executive order. “By defunding institutions and banning critical conversations, they’re rewriting the narrative,” he said in a statement on X.The attorney and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump emphasized how Trump had specifically called out the NMAAHC, despite its historical archival work that benefits the national as a whole.“The National Museum of African American History and Culture reveals the truth about our nation’s past. Yet a new executive order calls for removing “divisive ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution and singled out the NMAAHC,” he said on X.Educators have also voiced their dismay at Trump’s attempts to attack the work of reporting on American history.Eddie S Glaude Jr, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, wrote on X, “And they said it was about eggs … ,” referring to Republicans’ purported focus on inflation and egg prices.In comments to the Washington Post, Chandra Manning, a professor of American history at Georgetown University, said: “It seems to suggest that if we allow anyone to hear the whole story of challenges that Americans have overcome, our nation will shatter. The American people are not so fragile as all that.”Of his Saam exhibit, Lugo said it is an opportunity for selected artists and the communities they represent to have a chance to share their own experiences.“The exhibition is really about telling people’s stories, just as human beings. For some of us, how we appear on the outside has driven people to act a certain way towards us and stereotype us,” said Lugo. He added: “My work is really about harmony and showing people how we’re alike and how we should celebrate each other’s histories. A blanket overall statement that anything regarding race is divisive is really misunderstanding the role of the artists and what it is that we’re trying to achieve with our work.”How and when Trump’s executive orders will take place remain unclear. The Smithsonian has not released a statement on the orders or how it plans to address ongoing attempts at the federal level to shape its content. More

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      My child has autism. Trump and RFK Jr linking it to vaccines scares parents like me

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      It was a moment when Donald Trump’s larger-than-life presence on the global stage became unexpectedly personal.Near the end of his one-hour, 40-minute speech to a joint session of Congress on 4 March, the US president diverted from his favoured themes of a new golden age of American greatness and grievances against his adversaries to address a more unlikely topic: autism.The president drew his audience’s attention to Robert F Kennedy Jr, his controversial, newly confirmed choice as health secretary, and charged him with one overarching responsibility.“Not long ago, you can’t even believe these numbers – one in 10,000 children had autism,” Trump intoned. “Now it’s one in 36. There’s something wrong. One in 36 think of that. So we’re going to find out what it is. And there’s nobody better than Bobby.“Good luck. It’s a very important job.”It was not the first time that Trump had waded into the controversy swirling around autism – a neurodivergent condition affecting an estimated 75 million people worldwide. Nor was it the first occasion that he had touted Kennedy’s credentials as being able to tackle it.But the high symbolism of the setting brought home to me, a watching journalist, with sobering clarity that a life-changing decision, taken for the most pressing of family reasons, had taken on unforeseen contours.Just over two years ago, my wife and I had moved to the United States so that we could better address the needs of our son, who had been diagnosed with autism just before his third birthday. We had gradually despaired of finding a practical solution in the Czech capital of Prague, where we previously lived, and where state-of-the-art therapeutic remedies were still fledgling works in progress.America, by contrast, seemed to be a land of possibility and innovative approaches and to offer a more amenable environment to our circumstances – and had the added attraction that we all held US citizenship.In the period since our arrival, we found progress uneven, but engaged an outstanding therapist who made up for our difficulties navigating the Maryland state education system. I shifted my career from one centered in Europe, to covering US politics – and the second Trump administration.Now here – in the highest shrine of US democracy – was the graphically vivid figure of Trump digressing from his usual weaving script to elevate the very topic that had brought us to America’s shores to a national priority.It was not, to put it mildly, exactly what we had envisioned.The uptick in the autism trend Trump cited was exaggerated; while the most recent US autism statistics, recorded in 2020, did indeed record one in 36 children in the US having received a diagnosis of autism, the jump was less dramatic than he described – comparing with a rate of one in 150 in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Nevertheless, the undoubted spike in instances of the condition meant that his proclaimed zeal to find a cause resonated with many, us included.The catch lay in his choice of Kennedy, who has declared that autism is caused by vaccines – a scientifically baseless theory which Trump himself has previously indulged – as the lead figure in a national crusade to discover a cause.I spoke with other parents of children with autism, who used a range of pejorative adjectives to deride this conviction; among them “dangerous”, “scary”, “batshit crazy”, “despicable” and “disgusting”.Kennedy’s views carry weight which, experts fear, will be lent still greater authority by his new health portfolio. The CDC is reportedly now planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism.“Were I the father of a child with autism, I would be really angry at the anti-vaccine community for taking this story hostage and for diverting resources and attention away from the real cause, or causes, of autism,” said Paul Offit, a pediatrician specialising in immunology and author of the 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets, which rebutted the alleged links between the condition and vaccines.“There’s financial or emotional burdens that make it hard enough for parents, but to have this offered as a reason for why a child has autism is just spurious and in some ways malicious, because I think it puts the burden on the parent.”Belief in the alleged connection between vaccinations and autism gained traction after a 1998 study conducted by a British physician, Andrew Wakefield, and published in the Lancet asserted a causal link with the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The paper ignited a firestorm of controversy in Britain, with the then prime minister, Tony Blair, pressured to say whether his baby son had been administered the MMR shot.But research underpinning the finding was later debunked as fraudulent, leading to the Lancet retracting the paper and Wakefield being struck off the UK medical register. Multiple subsequent studies have found no connection between the vaccine and autism.Despite the countervailing evidence, suspicions persisted – fuelled in no small part by Kennedy himself, who has shown himself unmoved in the face of challenge.My personal interest in Kennedy and his views on vaccines was piqued after hearing a 2023 podcast interview with the New Yorker. He was adamant under questioning from the magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick, who – disclosing himself as the parent of a child with “quite severe” autism – asked if he had second thoughts about “slinging around theories … that don’t have any great credibility among scientists”.“I’ve read the science on autism and I can tell you … If it didn’t come from the vaccines, then where is it coming from?” Kennedy responded.Scientists say there are multiple potential answers to that question, including genetics, drugs taken during pregnancy, age of conception – albeit none giving a definitive explanation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When you hear about autism and its causes, the first thing people think is vaccines, which is the one thing you can say it’s not,” Offit said.Caught in the crossfire of this conflict between science and dogma are parents struggling to cope with a condition whose manifestations can be maddening, challenging and bewildering.Autism is a wide spectrum condition and children with it come in a surprising variety of types. Some – like my son – are functional, verbal and teachable, with aspects of high intelligence; others are non-verbal and may have severe intellectual disabilities; many others may fall somewhere in between.“If you’ve met one child with autism, you’ve met one child with autism,” goes the refrain among many specialists.Common to all, however, are atypical behaviours that for the parents, are life-changing and force them to make painful adaptations, sometimes at high financial cost.A complaint frequently heard about Kennedy’s views is that they heap stigmatisation on their children and unwarranted blame on the parents.“It puts a stigma on our children that their parents did something wrong when they were pregnant with them, and thus it’s the parents fault,” said Davina Kleid, 38, an executive assistant in a real estate development company in Maryland, whose nine-year-old daughter has autism.Kleid feared Kennedy’s views have the potential to unleash an eventual crackdown conjuring scenes resembling The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s novel dystopian novel depicting a bleak patriarchal future and female subjugation.“Who knows? Maybe I could be arrested for having a child on the spectrum, because they’re going to say that I did something to purposely cause her to have this condition,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with my child. It’s how she was born. I’m not ashamed of it, and I don’t think anyone should be ashamed of it.”Madeline, a publisher from Maryland who requested that her real name not be disclosed, said Kennedy’s views amounted to a disparagement of her 24-year-old son, who was born at the height of the MMR controversy arising from the Wakefield paper but who showed signs of developmental delay before being vaccinated.“It is just insulting that people would think that it would be better to get measles or mumps or pertussis or whooping cough than to have autism,” she said. “And RFK Jr has said as much. It’s like this is worse than getting these terrible, life-threatening diseases.”Lux Blakthorne, 33, a professional gardener living in Chester county, Pennsylvania, said fears for the future over her non-verbal, nine-year-old autistic son, Kai, had prompted her to make plans to emigrate to Germany, the country of her ex-husband’s birth and where she said provisions for autism had made great strides.The breaking point, she said, would be cuts to Medicaid, the public healthcare system that Kennedy oversees and which pays for Kai’s daily needs including education at a special private facility.An added factor is a recent White House executive order banning puberty blocking medication for those under 18, a measure aimed at stymying gender-affirming care for transgender youth but which, Blakthorne says, would prevent her trying to mitigate harmful autism-related behaviour that is likely to be exacerbated by the onset of puberty.“I think RFK sees disabilities as a problem that needs to be fixed,” said Blakthorne. “He has a dangerous belief system, and it’s not science- or fact-based.”Yet amid the negativity, the Autism Science Foundation, a research group, says Kennedy has a unique opportunity to discover its causes.“Many of us in the autism community give RFK credit for wanting to study the causes of autism,” said Alison Singer, the foundation’s president and the mother of a daughter with autism.“What would be very positive is if as health secretary, he can declare profound autism as a national public health emergency,” she said.“That would open up a variety of actions he could take, like making additional grants, entering into new contracts [and] really focusing funding on investigating the causes of autism, treatments and prevention.” More

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      The Signal chat exposes the administration’s incompetence – and its pecking order | Sidney Blumenthal

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      On 13 March, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who was the policy director for two secretaries of defense and was a member of the House intelligence committee, sent a message on the commercial Signal app: “Team – establishing a principles group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours.” “The Houthis PC small group” would oversee a US air attack on the Houthis in Yemen.Despite Waltz’s extensive professional background, he misspelled “principals” as “principles” – perhaps an ordinary typo, but symptomatic of the shambles to come. Although the secretaries of defense, state and treasury, the director of national intelligence, the CIA director, the vice-president, and the president’s chief of staff were among the 18 people included, neither the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, who is a statutory member of the principals committee of the National Security Council, nor any military designee was invited into this group. Instead, the editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was sent a link. Waltz noted: “Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days.”The Atlantic’s publication of Goldberg’s article about the Signal group’s exchanges was followed by a spray of attempts to cover it up. Trump and the rest of his administration simply denied that anything classified had been released; there were no “war plans”, it was a “hoax”, Goldberg was “scum”, “a loser” and “discredited”, and what about Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton? Which prompted Goldberg to publish the detailed war plans he had withheld in his first article. He was the only responsible person involved in the incident.Quite apart from the glaring incompetence and illegality of the whole affair – Goldberg’s careless inclusion, the fact that a provision of the Espionage Act (18 USC § 793) criminalizes “gross negligence” for mishandling classified national security material, and that operating on Signal with timed deletion of messages violates the preservation of records for the National Archives – the conversation pulled back the curtain on the White House.The transcript exposed the internal pecking order of the Trump administration and its actual chain of command, if it could be called anything that regular. In the end, the final decision-maker within the group to whom the others deferred was not any cabinet secretary or the chief of staff. They turned to “SM” – Stephen Miller – the deputy chief of staff who is Trump’s zealous enforcer. The chief of staff, Susie Wiles, came across as a cheerleader. Miller was the one who gave the stamp of approval. He conveyed Trump’s word. For all intents and purposes, Stephen Miller acted as the de facto president.The desultory discussion on Signal also highlighted the juvenile towel-snapping bro culture at the top of the administration. The Fox News personalities in the cabinet and the others who have habituated themselves to blathering forceful opinions appeared in the leaked transcript to have seamlessly carried over their habits of loud and thoughtless talk. Above all, they don’t know when not to speak; nor do they know what they reveal about themselves when they do. They don’t know how to conduct themselves as serious people in the room. Their incompetence comes naturally.About the military plan on the eve of being executed, JD Vance opined: “I think we are making a mistake.” By venturing his view at this advanced point in the operation, he showed that he had been out of the loop. Vice-presidents since Walter Mondale, under President Jimmy Carter, have been made indispensable figures in important decisions, especially involving national security. But Vance sounded like an outsider, a guest on a podcast.He went on about how the Houthis menacing the trade in the Hormuz Strait affected Europe more than the United States. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” he said. Vance felt that it was Trump who was out of the loop or assumed Trump’s ignorance. If only Trump understood his own contradictions.But Vance conceded: “I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself.” Where did he think he would voice his dissent, Joe Rogan’s show? He did not know Goldberg was already listening in. Then Vance suggested: “But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”“There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line,” piped up Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, lending support to Vance. Kent has been an overlooked figure in the scandal. He has an extensive history of associations with extremist domestic terrorist organizations. As a Republican congressional candidate, he paid a consulting fee to a member of the Proud Boys; he has also been close to the Christian nationalist Patriot Prayer group involved in violent street brawls in Portland; defended the white supremacist Nick Fuentes; and stated: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with there being a white people special interest group,” during an interview with a group called the American Populist Union. In 2022, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Kent called him “very reasonable”. When Kent ran for the House that year, after his ties to the far right were exposed, he claimed he had distanced himself from such groups. Kent was the deputy of the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, on the Signal group.Waltz joined in the Europe-bashing with talking points to buttress Trump’s zero-sum mercantilist view of the world, explaining: “Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.”Vance broke in to say that if Hegseth wanted “to do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”Hegseth agreed: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” He added: “Question is timing.”Enter Stephen Miller. “As I heard it,” he said, “the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”“As I heard it …” Miller spoke as if he were the only one to hear Trump. No one else said they had. Miller was definitive. He was more than the Trump whisperer. He was the voice of Trump.Miller also chimed in on the chorus of contempt for Europe. It was as though Europe was the enemy. The allies are not really allies; they are renters, and the rent should be raised.On 15 March, Hegseth returned with an “update” of precise details of the attack. “I will say a prayer for victory,” he wrote. It was a go. As it proceeded, Waltz chronicled the targets hit on Signal.Susie Wiles weighed in: “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.”Waltz posted three emojis – a fist, a flag and a fire.“Great work all. Powerful start,” said Miller. He was the one to give the praise. He apparently had the authority.In Russia, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, responded with two prayer emojis, a flexed muscle emoji and two American flag emojis.Afterward, Witkoff, a former New York real estate operator and Trump golfing partner, gave an interview to Tucker Carlson, the far-right podcaster who is highly influential with JD Vance and Hegseth, in which Witkoff said he “liked” Vladimir Putin, who was not “a bad guy”, “straight up”, and had presented him with a portrait of Trump to take home – “such a gracious moment”.Proclaimed a “success”, the operation itself will do little to quell the Iran-backed Houthis, who resumed their missile attacks on shipping in the Hormuz Strait after Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking to maintain his fragile grasp on power, abandoned the ceasefire in Gaza, which Trump declared he “fully supports” after doing nothing to sustain it. Instead, Trump proposed turning the ravaged Palestinian territory into a beachfront property, a “riviera of the Middle East”. Trump shared an AI-generated video of himself and Netanyahu lolling on the beach with dollars raining down and half-naked dancing women. Trump’s policy, of which the Houthi strike supposedly demonstrates “success”, has further entangled the US in cycles of violence without any clear path forward.As soon as Goldberg’s article appeared, the cover-up effort began. “I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic; to me it’s a magazine that is going out of business,” Trump said. “I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?”Republicans in the Congress stammered or were silent. At last, the senator Roger Wicker, of Mississippi, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, called for an expedited report from the Pentagon’s inspector general. Unfortunately, there is no such inspector general – at least not a permanent one. Trump fired him on 27 January along with 16 others across federal agencies and departments, without reason, contrary to the Inspector General Act of 1978, tightened in 2022. “I don’t know [the fired inspectors general],” Trump said, “but some people thought that some were unfair or were not doing the job.” For now, there is an acting inspector general.The scandal might have been avoided if Hegseth could have consulted with the Pentagon’s legal authorities, the judge advocate generals. But he fired the top Jag officers of the army, navy and air force three weeks before the Signal group was formed.Nor did Hegseth, or anyone else, apparently think to include the joint chiefs of staff, who just might have objected to the obvious sloppiness and illegality of the Signal setup. But on 21 February, Trump fired the chair of the joint chiefs, the four-star general CQ Brown Jr, the chief of naval operations and the air force vice-chief of staff. He had already removed the chief of the US Coast Guard.Brown, the former air force chief, was the first Black person to head a branch of the armed forces. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt,” said Hegseth in dismissing Brown. Adm Christopher Grady, serving as the acting chair of the joint chiefs, was not sent the invitation for the Signal group that Goldberg received.To replace Brown, Trump has nominated a retired three-star general, Dan Caine, whom Trump insists on calling “Razin’ Caine”. But no one raised Caine to participate in the chat.He might be grateful to have been ignored. Instead of the three-star general, Waltz mobilized three emojis.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      Trump news at a glance: Vance stakes US claim for Greenland as island’s new coalition insists it ‘belongs to us’

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      JD Vance told troops in Greenland that the US has to gain control of the Arctic island to stop the threat of China and Russia as he doubled down on his criticism of Denmark, which he said has “not done a good job”.As the US vice-president toured Pituffik space base, Donald Trump reiterated his previous claims that the US needs Greenland for “world peace”. “I think Greenland understands that the United States should own it,” the US president said at a press conference at the White House on Friday. “And if Denmark and the EU don’t understand it, we have to explain it to them.”In a show of national unity before Vance’s arrival, four of the territory’s five parties signed a coalition agreement that states on page one: “Greenland belongs to us.”Here’s the full story and other key Trump news of the day:JD Vance says US must control Greenland Under increasingly strained relations between the White House and Greenland and Denmark, Vance said: “Our message to Denmark is very simple: you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.”Read the full storyTrump targets Smithsonian Institution for ‘improper ideology’Donald Trump has ordered a highly controversial reshaping of the US Smithsonian Institution, claiming he will eliminate what his administration regards as “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the world’s largest set of museums, educational and research entities grouped under one institutional umbrella.The announcement has sparked outrage from critics, accusing Trump of taking action to “remove diversity” from American history.Read the full storyTrump and Carney talk to avert trade warDonald Trump described a long-awaited call with the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, as “extremely productive” amid a trade war between the two nations launched by the US president.The Friday morning call, requested by the White House, marks the first time the two leaders have spoken since Carney became prime minister on 14 March. In the call, Carney also said his government would implement retaliatory tariffs “to protect Canadian workers and our economy” ahead of expected levies from the US due to come into effect on 2 April.Read the full storyUS to vet student visa applicants for ‘terrorist activity’The United States has ordered consular offices to significantly expand their screening processes for student visa applicants, including through comprehensive social media investigations, to exclude people they deem to support terrorism.Read the full storyClinton says Trump ‘stupidity’ a threat for USHillary Clinton on Friday called the Trump administration’s approach to governing both dumb and dangerous in an essay excoriating the Signal chat scandal and the Elon Musk-led mission to slash the federal workforce, and concluding that Trump would make the US “feeble and friendless”.Read the full storyFury as Trump axes collective bargaining for federal workers Union leaders have accused Donald Trump of union-busting in a “blatant” attempt to silence them after the president stepped up his attacks on government unions on Thursday, signing an executive order that attempts to eliminate collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.Read the full storyTwo law firms sue Trump as third makes $100m dealTwo prominent law firms sued the Trump administration on Friday, seeking to block executive orders that would halt the firms’ business with the government and revoke the security clearances of its attorneys.The suits come amid deep concern the legal community is not doing enough to push back against efforts to target them. A third top US law firm – Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom – reached an agreement to avoid an executive order, agreeing to do $100m in pro-bono work “in the Trump administration and beyond”.Read the full storyFired watchdog warns of rule by billionairesThe US is in the midst of an extraordinary battle between “the rule of law versus the rule of billionaires”, a top Democratic government official and attorney has warned, after his unprecedented firing by Donald Trump.Alvaro Bedoya, abruptly terminated as a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week, sounded a “blinking red alarm” over backroom “quid pro quo” dealmaking he said appears to be taking place in the Trump administration.Read the full storyElon Musk’s xAI company buys X in $33bn dealElon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence firm has acquired Musk’s X – the social media platform formerly known as Twitter – for $33bn, marking the latest twist in the billionaire’s rapid consolidation of power.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The Democratic attorney general of Wisconsin has asked a court to block Elon Musk from giving $1m checks to voters as he seeks to influence a state supreme court race whose outcome could shape the future of the entire US.

      A US district judge blocked the Trump administration from dismantling a key consumer financial watchdog. Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s ruling puts in place a preliminary injunction that maintains the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s existence while she considers the arguments of a lawsuit seeking to prevent the president’s decimation of the bureau.

      Detained Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers have called for his release, arguing he is facing inhumane treatment in detention. Baher Azmy, who argued Khalil’s case should be returned to a New York court, said: “They keep passing around the body in an almost Kafkaesque way.”

      Donald Trump has pardoned the three co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, who had pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act for failing to maintain anti-money laundering and know-your-customer programs.

      The FCC will investigate diversity efforts at the Walt Disney Company and its subsidiary ABC, the head of the US agency said on Friday.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 27 March. More

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      US judge temporarily blocks Trump from firing Voice of America staff

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      A federal judge on Friday ordered Donald Trump’s administration to temporarily pause its efforts to shut down Voice of America, stopping the government from firing 1,300 journalists and other employees at the US news service that were abruptly placed on leave earlier this month.District judge J Paul Oetken said in a Friday opinion that the Trump administration could not unilaterally terminate Voice of America and related radio programs that were approved and funded by Congress. Rescinding funds for those programs would require congressional approval, the judge wrote.Oetken did not require Voice of America to resume broadcasts, but his order made clear that employees should not be fired until further court proceedings could determine whether the shutdown was “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of federal law.“This is a decisive victory for press freedom and the First Amendment, and a sharp rebuke to an administration that has shown utter disregard for the principles that define our democracy,” said Andrew Celli, an attorney for the plaintiffs.The US Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other government-funded media, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.The agency had told unions that it was about to terminate 623 Voice of America employees, a number that “entirely forecloses” any attempt to resume broadcasts at the level envisioned by Congress, according to court documents filed by the plaintiffs.Voice of America was founded to combat Nazi propaganda at the height of the second world war, and it has grown to become an international media broadcaster, operating in more than 40 languages and spreading U.S. news narratives into countries lacking a free press. As a group, US Agency for Global Media employed roughly 3,500 workers with an $886m budget in 2024, according to its latest report to Congress.Voice of America journalists and their unions sued the US Agency for Global Media, its acting director, Victor Morales, and special adviser Kari Lake last week, saying that their shutdown violated the workers’ constitutional first amendment right to free speech.The Voice of America employees’ lawsuit is one of four pending challenges to the Trump administration’s attempted shutdown of government-funded media programs. Other challenges have been filed by Radio Free Europe, a separate group of Voice of America employees, and grant recipient Open Technology Fund.US Agency for Global Media had argued that it had not violated the laws that governed Voice of America’s operations. The agency said in court filings that it had reduced operations to a “statutory minimum” by restoring broadcasts in Cuba and reinstating 33 employees at the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. More

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      FCC to investigate Disney and ABC over potential violation in diversity practices

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      The US’s top media regulator on Friday said it was opening an investigation into the diversity practices of Walt Disney and its ABC unit, saying they may violate equal employment opportunity regulations.Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair, wrote to the Disney CEO, Robert Iger, in a letter dated on Thursday that the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts may not have complied with FCC regulations and that changes by the company may not go far enough.“For decades, Disney focused on churning out box office and programming successes,” Carr wrote in the letter. “But then something changed. Disney has now been embroiled in rounds of controversy surrounding its DEI policies.“I want to ensure that Disney ends any and all discriminatory initiatives in substance, not just name,” Carr wrote.He has sent letters to Comcast and Verizon announcing similar investigations into diversity practices.Disney has come into conflict with Republicans in recent years. In 2023 the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, clashed with Disney over its opposition to the state’s so-called “don’t say gay” law and rightwingers have attacked the company for being “woke” – most recently for the casting of Rachel Zegler, an American actor of Colombian descent, in the titular role of its Snow White reboot.“We are reviewing the Federal Communications Commission’s letter, and we look forward to engaging with the commission to answer its questions,” a Disney spokesperson said.Disney recently revised its executive compensation policies to remove diversity and inclusion as a performance metric, adding a new standard called “talent strategy”, aimed at upholding the company’s values.Carr said the FCC’s enforcement bureau would be engaging with Disney “to obtain an accounting of Disney and ABC’s DEI programs, policies, and practices”.Carr, who was designed chair by Donald Trump on 20 January, has been aggressively investigating media companies.In December, ABC News agreed to give $15m to Trump’s future presidential library to settle a lawsuit over comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made on air involving the civil case brought against Trump by the writer E Jean Carroll.Days after Carr took over as chair, the FCC reinstated complaints about the 60 Minutes interview with Harris, as well as complaints about how ABC News moderated the pre-election TV debate between then president Joe Biden and Trump.It also reinstated complaints against Comcast’s NBC for allowing Harris to appear on Saturday Night Live shortly before the election.Trump has sued CBS for $20bn, claiming that 60 Minutes deceptively edited the interview in order to interfere in the November presidential election, which he won.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      White House asks supreme court to allow deportations under wartime law

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      The Trump administration on Friday asked the US supreme court to intervene to allow the government to continue to deport immigrants using the obscure Alien Enemies Act.The request came one day after a federal appeals court upheld a Washington DC federal judge’s temporary block on immigrant expulsions via a wartime act that allows the administration to bypass normal due process, for example by allowing people a court hearing before shipping them out of the US.Friday’s emergency request claims that the federal court’s order temporarily blocking the removal of Venezuelans forces the US to “harbor individuals whom national-security officials have identified as members of a foreign terrorist organization bent upon grievously harming Americans”.Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has spurred a legal battle between the executive and judiciary branches of the US federal government.“We will urge the supreme court to preserve the status quo to give the courts time to hear this case, so that more individuals are not sent off to a notorious foreign prison without any process, based on an unprecedented and unlawful use of a wartime authority,” said Lee Gelernt in a statement on Friday afternoon. Gelernt is the deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project and lead counsel in the case.As the executive branch continues to battle the constitutionally coequal judiciary branch for primacy, the US justice department said in its filing on Friday that the case presents the question of who decides how to conduct sensitive national security-related operations, the president or the judiciary.“The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the President,” the department wrote. “The republic cannot afford a different choice.“On 15 March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime statute allowing the government to expel foreign nationals considered to be enemies to the US. When invoking the act, Trump, without proof, claimed that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had “infiltrated” the US at the behest of the Venezuelan government.A US intelligence document accessed by the New York Times contradicts Trump’s claim about the Venezuelan government’s ties to the gang.That day, attorneys filed an emergency motion to block the use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel migrants to El Salvador. Then planes took off from the US, transporting the nearly 300 immigrants accused of being gang members. As the planes were in mid-air, a federal judge in Washington blocked the use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel the immigrants, but the Venezuelans were not returned to the US.Despite the Trump administration in its supreme court filing claiming that it engaged in a “rigorous process” to identify members of the Venezuelan gang, news stories are increasingly placing those claims into question. Family members of many of the deported Venezuelan migrants deny the alleged gang ties. This month, the US district judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to engage in “individualized hearings” for immigrants accused of being members of Tren de Aragua. More