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      Bullying, berating Trump shows his worst self in Zelenskyy ambush

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      “This is going to be great television,” Donald Trump remarked at the end. Sure. And the captain of the Titanic probably assured his passengers that this would make a great movie some day.Trump has just presided over one of the greatest diplomatic disasters in modern history. Tempers flared, voices were raised and protocol was shredded in the once hallowed in the Oval Office. As Trump got into a shouting match Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a horrified Europe watched the post-second world war order crumble before its eyes.Never before has a US president bullied and berated an adversary, never mind an ally, in such a public way. Of course reality TV star and wrestling fan turned US president had it all play out on television for the benefit of his populist support base – and a certain bare-chested chum in the Kremlin.Zelenskyy had come to the White House to sign a deal for US involvement in Ukraine’s mineral industry to pave the way for an end to three-year war in Russia. There was a hint of trouble to come when he arrived at the West Wing, wearing black – not a suit – and Trump greeted him with a handshake and sarcasm: “Wow, look, you’re all dressed up!”Inside the Oval Office, which has seen much but never anything quite like this, Zelenskyy thanked Trump for the invitation. At first all was sweetness and light as they fielded questions from reporters.There was a minor wrinkle over how much Europe support has given Ukraine, which ended with smiles, a playful but pointed tap on Zelenskyy, and ominous words from Trump: “Don’t argue with me.”But the last 10 minutes of the nearly 45-minute meeting devolved into acrimony and chaos. Zelenskyy found himself ambushed by Trump and his serpentine vice-president, JD Vance. He was expected to sit back and take a beating from Nurse Ratched and Miss Trunchbull. He refused.Vance said Joe Biden’s approach had failed and that diplomacy was the way forward. Zelenskyy challenged “JD” on this, noting Russia’s betrayals of trust in the past.Vance, who once declared he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine, was riled. Finger jabbing, he told Zelenskyy: “Mr President, with respect. I think it’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”Uh-oh. The politicians and journalists in the room could surely tell this was going off the rails. At one point the Ukrainian ambassador would put her head in her hands. She was all of us.Zelenskyy tried to push back, asking if Vance had ever been to Ukraine. Vance got angry and spoke of “propaganda tours”. Zelenskyy tried to answer but Trump interjected: “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”The men spoke over each other. Raising his voice, the president said: “You don’t have the cards right now.”Zelenskyy responded: “I’m not playing cards.”Trump, pointing an accusing finger and descending into his worst self from the presidential debates, admonished: “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with world war three and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should have.”TV pro tip: Trump has spent so many campaign rallies warning about world war three that the phrase has lost its shock value.Trump and Vance tried to scold Zelenskyy like an ungrateful child. Vance – who recently went to Munich to condemn Europe as being on the wrong side in the culture wars – demanded: “Have you said ‘thank you’ once?”Zelenskyy tried to respond. Trump told him his country was in big trouble. He went on: “The problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States and your people are very brave. But, you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out.“And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out and I don’t think it’s going to be pretty… But you’re not acting at all thankful, and that’s not a nice thing.”Zelenskyy looked shellshocked and Trump commented on what great TV it will be.No deal was done and a planned press conference was cancelled. Zelenskyy drove away empty-handed, having just endured own diplomatic Chernobyl. As for the rest of Europe, a bust of Winston Churchill, looming over the shoulders of Trump and Vance, may have shed a tear or two. More

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      ‘Dummies for Putin’: Democrats defend Zelenskyy after ‘shameful’ Trump meeting

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      Democratic lawmakers rushed to defend Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the Ukrainian leader was publicly berated by Donald Trump in a disastrous Oval Office meeting.The US president accused Zelenskyy of “gambling with world war three” while his vice-president, JD Vance, called the Ukrainian leader “disrespectful”, before cutting short talks aimed at kicking off the process of ending Kyiv’s three-year war with Russia.Zelenskyy abruptly left the White House soon after without signing a rare critical minerals deal with the US that Trump has said is the first step toward a ceasefire agreement that he is seeking to broker between Russia and Ukraine.Democratic senators came to Zelenskyy’s defense in statements condemning Trump and Vance’s “shameful” and “disgraceful” treatment of the Ukrainian leader.“Every time I’ve met with President Zelenskyy, he’s thanked the American people for our strong support,” Chris Coons, a Democratic senator from Delaware, wrote on X. “We owe him our thanks for leading a nation fighting on the front lines of democracy – not the public berating he received at the White House.”Adam Schiff, the California senator, said: ““A hero and a coward are meeting in the Oval Office today. And when the meeting is over, the hero will return home to Ukraine.”Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, said: “What an utter embarrassment for America. This whole sad scene.” The Arizona senator Ruben Gallego added: “This is a disgrace.”Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland also described the scenes in the Oval Office as “beyond disgraceful”. The Illinois senator Dick Durbin added: “The people of Ukraine and President Zelenskyy deserve an apology.”“Trump and Vance berating Zelenskyy – putting on a show of lies and misinformation that would make Putin blush – is an embarrassment for America and a betrayal of our allies,” Durbin said. “They’re popping champagne in the Kremlin.”Trump and Vance “are doing Putin’s dirty work”, the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said after the calamitous meeting, adding that his party will “never stop fighting for freedom and democracy”.Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, also accused Trump and Vance of “acting like ventriloquist dummies for Putin”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhitehouse was part of a bipartisan group of senators who met with Zelenskyy earlier in the morning before his meeting with the president. The Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said the hour-long discussion showed “strong bipartisan support in the Senate for Ukraine’s freedom and democracy”.Klobuchar later addressed Vance directly in a social media post saying that Zelenskyy had thanked the US “over and over again” both privately and publicly.“Our country thanks HIM and the Ukrainian patriots who have stood up to a dictator, buried their own & stopped Putin from marching right into the rest of Europe,” she wrote. “Shame on you,” she said, referring to Vance.Tina Smith, another Democratic senator from Minnesota, called on her Republican colleagues to “speak out” in the name of “patriotism”. “Once, we fought tyrants. Today Trump and Vance are bending America’s knee,” she said.But Republican senators rushed to defend Trump, describing the president’s exchange with Zelenskyy as evidence that he was “putting America first”.Mike Lee, a Utah Republican senator, thanked Trump and Vance “for standing up to our country and putting America first”. The Indiana Republican senator Jim Banks also thanked Trump for “standing up for America”.“[Zelenskyy] ungratefully expects us to bankroll and escalate another forever war–all while disrespecting the President,” Banks wrote on X. “The entitlement is insulting to working Americans.” More

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      Trump’s effort to curtail birthright citizenship suffers yet another setback

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      Donald Trump’s effort to curtail automatic birthright citizenship nationwide as part of his hardline immigration crackdown suffered another legal setback on Friday when a second federal appeals court declined to lift one of the court orders blocking the Republican president’s executive order.The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th US circuit court of appeals on a 2-1 vote rejected the Trump administration’s request for an order putting on hold a nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in Maryland who concluded the order was unconstitutional.“For well over a century, the federal government has recognized the birthright citizenship of children born in this country to undocumented or non-permanent immigrants,” the appeals court’s majority said.It said it was “hard to overstate the confusion and upheaval” that would result from allowing Trump’s order to take effect, as it challenged long-standing legal interpretations and practice in ways that could cause “chaos”.The panel’s majority included the US circuit judges Roger Gregory and Pamela Harris, both appointees of Democratic presidents. The US circuit judge Paul Niemeyer, an appointee of Republican former president George HW Bush, dissented, saying a nationwide injunction was “inappropriate”.It was the second time an appellate court had taken up Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, whose fate may ultimately be decided by the US supreme court.Another appeals court last week declined to lift a similar injunction issued by a judge in Seattle. Other judges in Massachusetts and New Hampshire have likewise enjoined the order, finding it violates the US constitution. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.Trump’s order, signed on his first day back in the White House on 20 January, directed US agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if neither their mother nor father was a US citizen or lawful permanent resident.That order was to apply to children born after 19 February, but implementation has been repeatedly blocked by judges at the urging of immigrant rights groups and Democratic state attorneys general. It has also been rejected by the supreme court in the past. More

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

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

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      Trump can’t fulfil his promise to fix the economy, so he’s blaming workers instead

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      During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump never missed an opportunity to harp on inflation, promising that “on day one” he would “end inflation” and lower the costs of groceries, cars and other common goods.Well, it’s day 40, and inflation saw its largest increase in over a year. Blink and you might have missed that Trump and his fellow Republicans have largely abandoned their concerns about inflation to focus on government “waste”.While Trump hasn’t fulfilled his campaign promise, he is living up to his usual brand of politics: the blame game. And this blame, as usual, is rooted in generating anger against “undeserving” Americans.This time, the undeserving are federal workers and poor people who get nominal benefits from the federal government – like Snap, which administers food stamps, and Medicaid. To fix so-called waste, the president apparently has no choice but to crack down on spending (and enlist help from Elon Musk), an issue that barely registered in the public consciousness in the past 10 years but is somehow now a rampant problem, according to Trump.There are policy frameworks backing Trump and the GOP’s divisiveness, including the well-known Project 2025 and a lesser-known House proposal published in 2024, Fiscal Sanity to Save America, that centers government “waste” instead of corporate greed. And now, with Republicans controlling the House, Senate and presidency, Republicans have the power to act on cuts that will harm millions of Americans.Musk and Trump, of course, have already worked to cut thousands of federal workers’ jobs. And with the Trump-backed budget bill the House passed on Wednesday, including $800bn in likely cuts from Medicaid, Republicans are one step closer to bulldozing America’s already paltry social safety net.This isn’t just at the federal level. Republicans have been floating proposals in state governments that would restrict healthcare, housing and food benefits instead of making it easier to afford things.The party of “freedom” is endorsing government home visits to surveil “fraud” in all US states (according to page 43 of the GOP’s “Fiscal Sanity” plan). The party of “family values” is also turning its attention to school lunch and breakfast programs, which it claims are subject to “widespread” fraud and abuse (page 46). The party that wants to “make America healthy again” is floating restrictions to Medicaid that would make recipients work at least 80 hours a month, a proposal that wastes government time and money to verify work requirements and which would probably just deter people from getting healthcare, as a flailing GOP work requirement experiment in Georgia has shown.And as Trump touts himself as an anti-war president, his proposals belie the fact that much of these spending cuts will now be diverted to defense contracts and other military and border spending, not on improving the economic lives of everyday workers to whom he made sweeping campaign promises.Meanwhile, straightforward proposals to simply give people more money (which does have evidence of working), such as universal basic income, would be outright banned at the federal level under the GOP plan. So as the cost of living is primed to increase, Republicans have ready-made excuses to justify cutting billions of dollars from these programs, an exceptional sort of cruelty.Of course, no one wants to see public money being spent wastefully or fraudulently. But incessant focus on “waste” stems from faulty, selective evidence. According to reports from Musk’s own so-called “department of government efficiency”, nearly 40% of cancelled contracts to cut costs are expected to yield no savings. It also stems from something else that does have proven results: the utility of public outrage.Focusing on extreme examples and “undeserving” government beneficiaries animates America’s existing propensity for divisiveness, giving Trump and his party wide latitude to wreck the lives of millions of people who don’t engage in fraud, waste or abuse. When Reagan wanted tax cuts for the rich, we saw the “welfare queen” trope. When neoliberal Democrats and Republicans wanted to cut public housing at the federal and local level, we saw extreme stories about the criminality of people who lived there. We cannot waste the money of hard-working Americans on these “others”. It’s a narrative – often hinging on racism and sexism – that has great outcomes for America’s capitalist class and the politicians who support them.So instead of protesting against the rising cost of living or making demands for universal healthcare, federal job guarantees, increased labor rights, or Snap benefits for all, or cutting the bloated defense budget and increasing taxes on the super-rich to pay for the nominal social welfare benefits that other industrial countries have normalized, working-class Americans are engaging in petty debates about what kinds of groceries other working-class Americans should buy and deputizing themselves to root out “abuse” among other workers.Republicans redirecting blame towards people who are suffering in this economy under the guise of “waste” is a distraction. As inflation is poised to worsen under Trump, Americans would be wise to focus their anger more on the elected officials and billionaires who profit from their pain than on each other.

      Malaika Jabali is a 2024 New America fellow, journalist and author of It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On More

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      Who’s the boss in Washington? An unelected, chaotic billionaire thinks he is | Moira Donegan

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      If you work for the federal government, it has become clear that Elon Musk thinks that he is your boss. The world’s richest man and patron of far-right causes worldwide has taken on his bizarre and extra-constitutional role in the Trump administration with an unexpected enthusiasm, enlisting a small squadron of college-aged boys to drastically cut spending across vast swaths of the sprawling US bureaucracy. His efforts have led to public health and safety crises in America, humanitarian emergencies abroad, economic devastation in families and communities that depend on federal employment, and the end of large amounts of American scientific and medical research. He has helped cut off funding for cancer research and Ebola prevention; he has ended services for disabled children, abused women and victims of consumer fraud.Musk has said that he aims to cut the federal budget by $2tn, though he has dramatically overstated the amount of spending cuts that he has achieved thus far – and does not seem to understand that some of these expenditures, such as the ones that prevent mass injury or disease, may in fact save the government money. Congress, for its part, is playing along. On Tuesday, House Republicans passed a budget resolution that dramatically cuts funding to Medicaid, the federal program that provides healthcare coverage to low-income Americans. But much of Musk’s slash-and-burn project to eliminate the functioning of the government comes from firing federal workers – which he seems to think he has the authority to do at will.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis was the logic behind an email that Musk sent on Saturday to all federal employees – including those decidedly not working in executive agencies, such as federal judges. The email, subject line “What did you do last week?”, asked every federal employee to list five “bullet points” describing their recent working accomplishments. Musk later stipulated on X, his social media platform, that anyone who did not respond by midnight on Monday night would be fired. With one missive, Musk appointed himself the manager of every single one of the federal government’s estimated 2.3 million employees. Report to him, they were told, or lose your jobs.Chaos ensued. Some employees said that responding to such an email would put them in legal danger, since they work on sensitive or classified material. Others were weary of auditioning for positions they already held, and submitting their work for the appraisal of an unelected billionaire whose claim to authority over their jobs has no legal basis. Supervisors were swamped with calls from their employees, asking what they should do about the email; they, in turn, tried to get clarity from upper management.At some agencies, work was derailed as teams spent time trying to figure out what to do with Musk’s demand; at others, employees who had gone home for the weekend had to come back into work because they could not access their work emails for instructions from their home computers. People were calling their bosses, their union reps, their colleagues, confused and panicked, wondering what would happen to them if they lost their health insurance or couldn’t make their car payment.It did not help matters that different government departments responded to Musk’s ultimatum with different instructions for their employees. Some told workers to respond to the email; others told them not to. A hastily assembled group of officials from defense and intelligence agencies spent the weekend trying to figure out a coordinated response, with the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the FBI head, Kash Patel, ultimately telling their staff to ignore it. Agencies including the Departments of State, Energy, Justice, and Defense also told their workers not to respond. But others, such as the Departments of Commerce, Education and Transportation, told their employees that they should comply. Things only got more confusing on Monday when the office of personnel management, the federal government’s HR body, through which Musk initially sent the mass email, tried to back off the billionaire’s demand, telling the management of various government entities that it would be up to each to determine how to direct its employees to respond. But then Donald Trump appeared to reiterate Musk’s initial demand, saying in the Oval Office of federal workers who did not respond to Musk’s email: “If you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired.”Who, exactly, is in charge here? The frightening speed with which the new Trump administration has pursued its sadistic agenda and frightening and unconstitutional expansion of executive powers can tend to obscure just how incompetent these people are. Two million federal workers now do not know whether their boss is the person above them on the org chart, or an erratic billionaire. Trying to figure it out required them to spend time in hectic and undignified scrambling, figuring out whether they would be obliged to grovel for their livelihoods or not. They spent time catering to the senseless and stupid demands of Musk’s ego, and because they had to spend their time that way, they could not spend it on their actual work.Not to mention that Musk, in his demand to control all federal employees and to rewrite the budgets and missions of federal agencies at a whim, seems to be pissing some people off. Members of the Trump cabinet have been leaking their displeasure with Musk over the past week, trying to assert control over their agencies and defend their turf. They, after all, have the Senate confirmations; they, after all, have the mandate of being selected by the president. It is yet to be seen whether any of that will hold a candle to what Musk has: the money.So far, the future is not looking bright for agency independence. Musk, who is not a cabinet member, appeared on Tuesday at a meeting of Trump’s cabinet and lectured the assembled agency heads just hours after the initial deadline had passed for their employees to report to him. Trump seemed to signal to the cabinet members that they should assume that an order from Musk was as good as an order from him. “Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” Trump asked, according to the New York Times. The response? “Nervous laughter rippled around the table.”

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘They’ve lost my trust’: consumers shun companies as bosses kowtow to Trump

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      In late January, Lauren Bedson did what many would likely find unthinkable: she cancelled her Amazon Prime membership. The catalyst was Donald Trump’s inauguration. Many more Americans are planning to make similar decisions this Friday.Bedson made her move after seeing photos of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, sitting with other tech moguls and billionaires, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai, just rows behind Trump at his inauguration.“I just couldn’t stand to see them so cowardly,” Bedson, of Camas, Washington, told the Guardian. “I lived in Seattle for over a decade. I was a fan of Amazon for a long time, I think they have a good product. But I’m just so disgusted. I don’t want to give these billionaire oligarchs any more of my money.”It’s a sentiment that many Americans have been feeling since Trump entered the White House. Companies and business leaders who were once passive or vocally critical of Trump are now trying to cozy up to him, leading consumers to question the values of the brands they used to trust. A recent Harris poll found that a quarter of American consumers have stopped shopping at their favorite stores because of shifting political stances.Many are being inspired by calls to boycott coming from social media. One boycott has gone viral over the last few weeks: a “blackout” of companies that dropped some of their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals, including Target, Amazon and Walmart, is planned for 28 February with protesters planning to halt all spending at these corporations for the day.View image in fullscreenBut people are also making the decision to boycott at their kitchen tables, trying to figure out how to resist Trump, and perhaps corporate capitalism at large, within their own communities.The Guardian asked readers how their shopping habits have changed over the last few months, as the political climate started to shift after Trump’s win. Hundreds from across the country said that they have stopped shopping at stores such as Walmart and Target that publicly announced the end of DEI goals. Dozens like Bedson had cancelled long held Prime accounts. Others have shut down their Facebook and Instagram accounts in protest of Meta.“I’m just trying to do little things that make me feel a little bit empowered, to stake my claim against what’s happening and how companies are acting in ways that are opposed to my values,” said Kim Wohlenhaus, of St Louis, Missouri, who cancelled her Prime membership, deleted her Meta accounts and has stopped shopping at Target. “It feels good to be able to do something.”Erica Bradley, of Reno, Nevada, said she stopped shopping at Target because of their changing DEI policies.“I don’t plan on going there ever again, just because I feel like they’ve shown that they’re not really committed to these things,” Bradley said. “They’ve lost my trust.”View image in fullscreenFor many consumers, the shift away from the big companies has revealed how much they have come to rely on them. As of last spring, 75% of American consumers had Amazon Prime memberships, a total of 180m Prime accounts, according to Bloomberg.Bedson said cancelling her account made her aware of a culture of consumerism in American where “in some ways, it feels like we don’t have a choice”.“Amazon is so convenient,” she said. “I think we all have become very complacent or complicit, and it’s hard to make these changes. But on the other hand, what else can we do?”It’s been a year since Bradley cancelled her Prime account, after she saw Amazon’s union busting. She recalls a transition period as she was adjusting to life without Prime, but it ultimately led her to spend less overall.“I just decided I don’t really need a lot of these things. Like I don’t need more clothes, I don’t really need more house decorations, which are things I used to spend a lot of money on,” Bradley said. “It’s not retail therapy anymore.”The Harris poll found that a third of Americans are similarly trying to “opt out” of the economy, cutting down on overall spending as the political stances of corporations have become murky.View image in fullscreen“It’s like a Whac-a-Mole now,” Wohlenhaus said. “You could really look in any direction and find something you dislike about the way corporations are caving to this administration.”Wohlenhaus said she has started to prioritize shopping at local businesses. She kept her Costco membership, since the company affirmed its DEI policies.During Joe Biden’s presidency, many of the boycotts against companies actually came from conservatives who felt corporations were caving to a “woke” mob. But boycotts didn’t amount to any serious consequences – with two exceptions. Bud Light saw a drop in sales after it sponsored a post by a transgender influencer and Target removed some of its Pride merchandise after conservative backlash.It’s unclear what the consequences of the current backlash will be. But Wohlenhaus and others voiced optimism that consumers are thinking critically about the choices they’re making at checkout.“Hopefully if thousands of other families are doing what we’re doing, I think they’ll start to feel it,” she said. “We don’t care about your products as much as we care about those values that we cherish.” More

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      Trump is unleashing anti-trans hysteria onto the world | Moira Donegan

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      In the video, she sounds exasperated. Hunter Schafer, a 26-year-old actor best known for her roles on the HBO series Euphoria and in the Hunger Games film The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, appeared in an eight-minute video last Friday in which she revealed that due to a Trump administration order, she had been assigned a passport with the gender marker “male”.Schafer, who is trans, began living as a girl in her early teens; she has lived as a woman for her entire adult life. In her video, she says that her IDs have been marked “female” for just about as long as she has had them. But after her passport was stolen in a car break-in in Barcelona, she has been issued a government identity document that represents a fiction that she is a man. Every time she travels now, she will have to present this document, she will have to account for the discrepancy between what it says about her, and what she clearly is.In her video, Schafer stresses her own privilege: for her, the incorrect passport is not a matter of life and death. But the harm to dignity that the new document will impose on her will be repeated, intimate and needless. It is an exercise in cruelty that the Trump administration has declared that official documents, like passports, will no longer reflect these basic realities of trans people’s lives. It is also a brute assertion of the Trump administration’s claim to control over reality itself: a way for them to make a lie into an official truth.Schafer is right that many trans Americans will fare even worse than she will. In a flurry of executive actions in their first days in office, the Trump regime issued a rapid flurry of anti-trans executive orders. They banned trans servicemembers from the military; the Pentagon is now moving to fire them all. They barred trans women and girls from participating in sports, and the NCAA promptly complied, throwing athletes off their teams in a reversal of 15 years of policy. They ordered that trans people not be granted equal access to housing and shelters, and Trump’s Housing and Urban Development department promptly stopped enforcing civil rights rules.They issued an order banning transition-related care for young people – people like the teenager Schafer had been when she began transitioning – and a number of hospitals and clinics canceled appointments, leaving often desperate patients with no way to get care. And this week, the Trump state department announced that it would deny visas for transgender athletes coming from abroad to compete in the United States before the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics – a move that also seems designed to allow them to deny all visas to trans travelers. This rapid mobilization across vastly different sectors of the law will have immediate and far-reaching results. It will ruin lives.The Trump administration and the broader revanchist movement are targeting trans people because they are a tiny minority that they think can be bullied and dehumanized without great political pushback. They are targeting trans people because trans life represents the principles of dignity, self-determination and gender equality that they abhor. And they are targeting trans people because they are hateful, sadistic and cruel – because they want to make people suffer for the crime of being different from them, and because they do not have the courage to pick on anyone who is more capable of fighting back.But the anti-trans sadism of the new Trump administration should not only offend us because it is cruel. It should offend us because it demands that government departments, federally funded institutions, and the people who work for them participate in a lie: that trans people are not who they say they are.Transphobes like those in the Trump administration have long smugly declared themselves the arbiters of the “truth” about gender – that it is fixed, that there are two, that gender is merely a brute fact of the body that cannot be changed, and that nothing that happens to a person after their sex is assigned at birth has any bearing on the truth of what their gender is. They have declared this with immense self-satisfaction; they have declared themselves rational, and intelligent, and even brave for saying it.But the gender marker on Hunter Schafer’s passport is not true; it represents a lie, an assertion in total contradiction not only to how she sees herself, but to how everyone else sees her, to the reality of how she lives her life. Every trans person who is issued a wrong document is coerced into this same lie; every other person, cisgender or not, who has to work with these documents and in deference to these policies is coerced into a lie, too. We are told that what we see and feel and experience of trans people does not count, that we should not believe our lying eyes. We are told that no official body of the federal government will accept the plain and obvious truth.Anti-trans hysteria, then, should be understood as a function of the Trump administration’s epistemic violence, its mission to make lies into policy and to suppress truth. It is as much of a lie that Hunter Schafer is a man as it is that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, or that vaccines cause autism, or that climate change isn’t real. There is a moral case to be made for resistance to these orders, but there is also an intellectual one. We do not have to be as stupid, in the face of trans existence, as the Trump administration demands that we be. We do not have to pretend not to know things that we do.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More