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      Violence is coming to define American political life | Stephen Marche

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      America reached its apex of self-parody shortly after 7pm on 14 June 2025. In that moment, the background band at Donald Trump’s military parade segued from Jump by Van Halen to Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival, just after the announcer explained that M777 howitzers are made out of titanium.Nobody, apparently, had considered the lyrics: “Some folks are born, made to wave the flag, they’re red, white and blue, and when the band plays Hail to the Chief, they point the cannon at you.” If this was some kind of surreptitious protest by the musicians, I salute them, but given the time and the place, sheer obliviousness is a better explanation. The crowd, pretty thin, did their best imitation of a cheer.The US clearly does not know how to do an authoritarian military parade. To be fair, they are just getting started. Authoritarian military parades are supposed to project invincible strength. They are supposed to make your own people impressed with the inhuman discipline of your troops, and to strike fear into your enemies at the capacity of your organization. In Trump’s parade, the soldiers resembled children forced to participate in a half-assed school play, trying to figure out how to avoid embarrassment as far as possible, and the military itself looked better suited to running a Kid Rock tour than a country’s defence.But do not confuse Trump’s debased parade with a joke or an innocent piece of entertainment. The Trump parade took place in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota state representative. While it was under way, security forces were firing teargas on protesters in Los Angeles.Violence is coming to define American political life – spectacular violence including the parade and real violence like the assassination of Hortman. Political destabilization is arriving far too quickly to be perceived in its entirety. So much is happening so fast that it’s impossible to keep track of the decline. Increasingly, the question is becoming: when are we going to start calling this what it is?When I published my book The Next Civil War in 2022, the US was very far from the threshold of what the experts at the Peace Research Institute Oslo defined as civil war, which is 1,000 combatant deaths a year. They defined civil conflict as a 1,000 combatant deaths a year, so the US already fits comfortably in that category. But the definitions of war and conflict never applied perfectly to the American reality, because it is so much bigger and so much more geographically diverse than other countries. As we start to see violence overtaking American political life, the transition is more like a sunset than a light switch. Every day violence becomes more and more settled as the means of US politics.The parade, and the “No Kings” counter-protests, were both distractions from the fact that American political life is moving away from discourse altogether. Don’t like what the senators of the other party are saying? Handcuff them. Don’t like protestors? Send in the marines. Don’t like the makeup of the House of Representatives in Minnesota? Kill the top Democrat. The political purpose of the parade, from Trump’s point of view, was to demonstrate his mastery of the means of violence. He needed to show, to the military and to the American people both, that he can make the army do what he tells it, and established traditions and the rule of law will not alter his will.But the primary effect of the parade was to demonstrate an immense weakness, in Trump and in the American people. It was a parade reminiscent of the most vacuous regimes in history. In 1977, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the leader of the Central African Republic, declared himself emperor and indulged in a coronation that imitated the coronation of Napoleon I in immaculate detail. He even went so far as to use eight white Norman horses to pull the carriage, but the French horses were not used to the climate and several died. Trump’s parade felt like a lazier version of that.The spectre of defeat hovered over the entire celebration of supposed strength. The last time the US military threw a parade was 1991, which was the last time they triumphed over an opponent, the last time their war machine produced the results they had been attempting. The US has not won a war since then. But hey, if you can’t win a war, at least you can throw a parade.Except they couldn’t even throw a parade! The end of the show was almost too perfect. A frail Lee Greenwood, a country singer long past his “best before” date, sang God Bless America raggedly, lousily. “Our flag still stands for freedom,” he sang. “They can’t take that away.” O can’t they? Trump at the center fidgeted like a rich kid bored with his servants and toys. The whole business was like watching some sordid fairy tale: the unloved boy who everybody hated grew up to force the American people to throw him a birthday party and give him a flag. And then almost nobody came.What’s true of men is also true of countries: the more they need to show off how strong they are, the weaker they are. The weakness, rather than the strength, is terrifying. Whoever is so scared and so needy as to need that parade is capable of anything. That goes for Trump, and that goes for his country.

      Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War More

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      Trump’s ‘revenge tax’ could threaten foreign investment into US, analysts say

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      Foreign investment into the US could be threatened by Donald Trump’s new “revenge” taxes, analysts have warned.A provision within the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will allow the US to apply higher taxes on foreign individuals, businesses and investors connected to jurisdictions that impose “unfair foreign taxes” on US individuals and companies.Companies listed on the London Stock Exchange could choose to avoid the measure by redomiciling in New York.Section 899, as it is called, classes digital service taxes and “diverted profits taxes” as unfair, along with any taxes that target US entities. It would allow US authorities to impose an additional tax starting at 5% and increasing by five percentage points annually, up to 20%.Max Yoeli, a senior research fellow in the US and the Americas programme at Chatham House, says section 899 “threatens to further alienate foreign investors”.It could chill investment into the US by calling into question its “fundamental openness”, he added.The Italian bank UniCredit agrees that section 899 could further damage foreign investor sentiment towards US dollar-denominated assets. It could backfire on the US, it says, given the large amount of domestic assets held by foreigners.“The list of countries that would fall into this category is long and encompasses most European countries, including Italy and Germany,” UniCredit told clients, saying that foreign investors had more than doubled their holdings of US assets over the past decade.“Not only would this additional tax serve to finance corporate tax reductions, but it would also likely be used as a negotiating tool for the US in trade deals, especially as Republicans seem willing to withdraw from the global minimum tax framework.”View image in fullscreenUniCredit also fears the dollar’s safe haven status could be undermined if there are fresh tax disputes between the US and other countries.The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed by the US House of Representatives last month. The Senate is yet to approve the bill, with the White House setting a deadline of 4 July.George Saravelos, the global head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, warned last month that section 899 could allow the US administration to transform its trade war into a capital war by “explicitly using taxation on foreign holdings of US assets as leverage to further US economic goals”.UK companies could certainly fall foul of section 899, as Britain operates a digital services tax aimed at tech multinationals, and a diverted profits tax designed to clamp down on tax avoidance by multinationals.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGoldman Sachs has calculated that UK corporates are “particularly exposed” to section 899, as roughly 30% of the revenues of companies listed on the FTSE 100 are generated in the US.However, as companies that are majority-owned by US shareholders are exempt, City bosses may consider moving their stock market listing to New York, to dodge section 899.“This ownership dynamic not only mitigates tax risk but also reinforces the strategic case for relisting in the US, where investor bases are deeper and more aligned with US revenue exposure,” the Goldman Sachs analysts said.According to Goldman, the large UK companies with the most significant exposure to the US, and who are not majority-owned by US investors, are the media group Pearson, the business services group Experian, the pest control business Rentokil and the pharmaceuticals manufacturer Hikma.Ashtead Group, Compass and Melrose also generate a large proportion of their sales stateside, but as they have majority US ownership they should be exempt from section 899.French companies could also be at risk, as Paris operates a digital services tax on the revenues that large tech companies generate in France. More

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      Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’

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      She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavicist”, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. “It’s kind of baffling,” she says.In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump’s birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task, recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist’s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.View image in fullscreen“It’s all almost too stereotypical,” Shore reflects. “A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,” she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. “As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.”That response captures the double lens through which Shore sees the Trump phenomenon, informed by both the Third Reich and the “neo-totalitarianism” exhibited most clearly in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. We speak as Shore is trying to do her day job, having touched down in Warsaw en route to Kyiv, with Poland and Ukraine long a focus of her studies. Via Zoom from a hotel lobby, she peppers our conversation with terms drawn from a Russian political lexicon that suddenly fits a US president.“The unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology … in Russian, it’s obnazhenie; ‘laying bare’.” It’s an approach to politics “in which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,” not concealed in any way. “And that’s its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.”She fears that the sheer shamelessness of Trump has “really disempowered the opposition, because our impulse is to keep looking for the thing that’s hidden and expose it, and we think that’s going to be what makes the system unravel.” But the problem is not what’s hidden, it’s “what we’ve normalised – because the whole strategy is to throw it all in your face.”None of this has been an overnight realisation for Shore. It had been building for years, with origins that predate Trump. Now 53, she had spent most of her 20s focused on eastern Europe, barely paying attention to US politics, when the deadlocked presidential election of 2000 and the aborted Florida recount fiasco made her realise that “we didn’t really know how to count votes”. Next she was wondering: “Why exactly were we going to war in Iraq?” But the moment her academic work began to shed an uncomfortable light on the American present came in the presidential race of 2008.View image in fullscreen“When John McCain chose Sarah Palin, I felt like she was a character right out of the 1930s.” The Republican vice-presidential candidate lived, Shore thought, “in a totally fictitious world … not constrained by empirical reality.” Someone like that, Shore believed, could really rile up a mob.And then came Trump.Once again, it was the lack of truthfulness that terrified her. “Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil,” she says. Lying is essential to totalitarianism; she understood that from her scholarly research. But while Hitler and Stalin’s lies were in the service of some vast “eschatological vision”, the post-truth dishonesty of a Trump or Putin struck her as different. The only relevant criterion for each man is whether this or that act is “advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment. It’s pure, naked transaction.”When Trump was elected in 2016, Shore found herself “lying on the floor of my office, throwing up into a plastic bag. I felt like this was the end of the world. I felt like something had happened that was just catastrophic on a world historical scale, that was never going to be OK.”Did she consider leaving the US then? She did, not least because both she and her husband had received offers to teach in Geneva. “We tore our hair out debating it.” Snyder’s instinct was to stay and fight: he’s a “committed patriot”, she says. Besides, their children were younger; there was their schooling to think about. So they stayed at Yale. “These things are so contingent; you can’t do a control study on real life.”But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. “So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court’s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.”View image in fullscreenEvents so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were “abusing” him, an episode, says Shore, “right out of Stalinism” – to say nothing of Trump’s regular attacks on “USA-hating judges” who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. “Dark fantasies are coming true.”She readily admits that her reaction to these events is not wholly or coldly analytical. It’s more personal than that. “I’m a neurotic catastrophist,” she says. “I feel like we could just subtitle [this period] ‘the vindication of the neurotic catastrophist’. I mean, I’ve been anxious and neurotic since birth.” She draws the contrast with her husband: “Tim is not an anxious person by nature, and that is just hardwired.”She’s referring in part to their different backgrounds. Snyder is a child of Quakers; Shore is Jewish, raised in Allentown, eastern Pennsylvania. Her father was a doctor and her mother “a doctor’s wife” who was later a preschool teacher. Shore grew up in a community with Holocaust survivors. “I do think there’s something about having heard stories of the Holocaust at a young age that was formative. If you hear these stories – people narrating what they went through in Auschwitz, even if they’re narrating it for eight, nine or 10-year-olds – it impresses itself on your consciousness. Once you know it’s possible, you just can’t unknow that.”How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: “My fear is we’re headed to civil war.” She restates a basic truth about the US. “There’s a lot of guns. There’s a lot of gun violence. There’s a habituation to violence that’s very American, that Europeans don’t understand.” Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new “permissiveness” that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump’s indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: “You can feel that brewing.”She also worries that instead of fighting back, “people become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.”View image in fullscreenLater she speaks of the beauty of solidarity, those fleeting moments when societies come together, often to expel a tyrant. She recalls the trade union Solidarity in communist-era Poland and the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. By leaving America – and Americans – in their hour of need, is she not betraying the very solidarity she reveres?“I feel incredibly guilty about that,” she sighs. All the more so when she sees the criticism directed at her husband. They were on sabbatical together in Canada when Trump won the 2024 election, but “had he been alone, he would have gone back to fight … That’s his personality. But he wouldn’t have done that to me and the kids.” To those minded to hurl accusations of betrayal and cowardice, she says: “Direct them all to me. I’m the coward. I take full blame for that.” It was she, not Snyder, who decided that “no, I’m not bringing my kids back to this”.I linger on that word “coward”. It goes to one of the fears that led to Shore’s decision. She does not doubt her own intellectual courage, her willingness to say or write what she believes, regardless of the consequences. But, she says, “I’ve never trusted myself to be physically courageous.” She worries that she is, in fact, “a physical coward”.She began to wonder: what would I do if someone came to take my students away? “If you’re in a classroom, you know your job is to look out for your students.” But could she do it? Many of her students are from overseas. “What am I going to do if masked guys in balaclavas come and try to take this person away? Would I be brave? Would I try to pull them away? Would I try to pull the mask off? Would I scream? Would I cry? Would I run away?” She didn’t trust herself to do what would need to be done.So now she is in what she calls “a luxurious position”: at a university across the border, safely out of reach of both Trump’s threats to cut funding and the ICE officials currently striking terror into the hearts of international students and others. As a result, she feels “more obligated to speak out … on behalf of my colleagues and on behalf of other Americans who are at risk”.At one point in our conversation, we talk about those US citizens who put Trump back in the White House, even though, as she puts it, they knew who he was. “Nothing was hidden. People had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose this. And that disgust, I couldn’t shake that. I thought: ‘People wanted this – and I don’t want to have anything to do with this.’”Does that mean she will never return to the US? “I would never say, ‘I would never go back.’ I always feel that what history teaches you is not what will happen, but what can happen. The possibilities are generally much more capacious than anyone is expecting at that moment.”Contained in that remark is, if not optimism, then at least the possibility of it. And, right now, that might be as much as we can ask for. More

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      Trump news at a glance: President says of Israel-Iran conflict ‘sometimes they have to fight it out’ as G7 leaders gather

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      As heavy exchanges of missile fire continue and the death toll mounts on both sides, European leaders want to pin down Donald Trump on his Iran strategy – including getting a definitive response on whether he will use his influence over Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to have the warring parties call a ceasefire or instead let them continue fighting.Predicting “peace soon” between Israel and Iran, Trump appeared to have learned little from his 2024 election boast that he could stop the Russia-Ukraine war in “24 hours”. If Israel and Iran can be convinced to call a ceasefire, it might allow the rescheduling of US talks with Iran on its civil nuclear programme that had been set for Sunday but were cancelled after Israel launched its assault on Thursday night.Before leaving for the G7 summit in Canada on Sunday, Trump was asked what he was doing to de-escalate the situation. “I hope there’s going to be a deal. I think it’s time for a deal,” he told reporters, adding “sometimes they have to fight it out.”European leaders to press Trump on Israel-Iran strategy at G7 meetingEuropean leaders gathering for a G7 summit with Donald Trump in the Canadian Rockies plan to spend the opening day asking him to justify his confidence and largely unsubstantiated remarks that Israel and Iran will make a deal that will mean “peace soon”.The president has boasted that “we can easily get a deal done between Iran and Israel, and end this bloody conflict”.Read the full storyTrump vetoed Israeli plan to kill Iran’s supreme leader – reportDonald Trump vetoed an Israeli plan in recent days to kill Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, two anonymous US officials told Reuters on Sunday.Read the full storyMacron criticises Trump’s threats to take over Greenland during visitEmmanuel Macron criticised Donald Trump’s threats to take over Greenland as he became the first foreign head of state to visit the vast, mineral-rich Arctic territory since the US president began making explicit threats to annex it.“I don’t think that’s what allies do,” Macron said as he arrived in the Danish autonomous territory for a highly symbolic visit aimed at conveying “France’s and the EU’s solidarity” with Greenland on his way to the G7 in Canada.Read the full story‘No Kings’ demonstrator dies after being shot at Utah protest, police sayA demonstrator died after being shot on Saturday during Salt Lake City’s “No Kings” protest, Utah police said. Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, 39, was apparently shot by a man who was part of the event’s peacekeeping team.Brian Redd, the Salt Lake City police chief, called the victim “an innocent bystander participating in the demonstration.”Read the full storySuspect in shootings of Minnesota lawmakers apprehended – reportsThe man suspected of opening fire on two Minnesota legislators and their spouses on 14 June, killing one legislator and her husband, was apprehended late on Sunday night, officials told the Associated Press and New York Times.Vance Boelter, 57, stands accused of fatally shooting the Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, at their residence. Boelter is also suspected of shooting the state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their home, seriously injuring them.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Donald Trump’s army parade was neither the totalitarian North Korean spectacle that critics had grimly predicted, nor the triumph of Maga nationalism fans craved, J Oliver Conroy writes.

      Trump has absorbed the accusations of authoritarianism for usurping the powers of California’s government by deploying the national guard and marines in Los Angeles – but Stephen Miller – the modestly titled White House deputy chief of staff – may have been the true catalyst for those volatile scenes.

      The administration’s cuts to scientific research and attacks on higher education have soured the US as an academic sowing ground – and as a direct consequence the best and brightest minds are leaving to carve out a career overseas.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 14 June. More

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      Trump coveted a military spectacle but his parade proved underwhelming: ‘Just kind of lame’

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      On Saturday, as a crowd of thousands of people near the Washington Monument listened, a loudspeaker dramatically announced the names of America’s secretary of defense, vice-president and president. The final name received a modest roar that surely flushed the watching commander-in-chief with validation. With that, and with the boom of a 21-gun salute, the military parade that Donald Trump had coveted for years finally began.A protester, Nicky Sundt, kept a lonely and mostly silent vigil at the side of the road. She held a sign depicting a cartoon Trump brushing back his comb-over to reveal a swastika emblazoned on his forehead. The placard said “Save our democracy”. Standing near her – as a “counterprotest to the counterprotest to the protest, or something,” as one of them put it – a group of pro-Trump men held court. One was draped in an American flag. Another had a giant picture of Trump, in a crown, with the exhortation “Trump for king”.For the next couple of hours, in heat and occasional drizzle, spectators watched as the US army celebrated its 250th birthday – and, although he claims it is a coincidence, Trump’s 79th – with America’s largest and most controversial military parade in decades. Troops marched. Tanks and armored personnel carriers rolled. Helicopters clattered. Paratroopers plunged out of the overcast sky.Yet, for all of it, the parade was somehow neither the totalitarian North Korean spectacle that critics had grimly predicted, nor the triumph of Maga nationalism that Trump’s most diehard fans craved. It was just a parade – and a parade that was, for all its millions of dollars spent, controversy engendered, and exhausting security precautions, a little underwhelming.Since his first term, when he saw and was deeply impressed by a Bastille Day parade in Paris, Trump made no secret of his desire to hold a grand military review of his own. Military leaders, cognizant of the high costs and reputational issues of the idea, have in the past been resistant. Now, no longer.The event was not without problems, however. For one, the weather kept threatening to literally rain on the parade. For another, recent news developments have both distracted the world’s attention from the parade and cast an ugly pall on it.In California, national guardsmen and US marines have been deployed against the will of state authorities after Ice deportation raids have sparked widespread protests. In the Middle East, Israel’s attack on Iran has led to deadly retaliation. And early Saturday morning, an assassin impersonating a police officer shot two Democratic lawmakers and their families at their homes in Minnesota, killing a state representative and her husband and wounding a state senator and his wife.Trump’s plans for a military parade also sparked protests in many cities, including in Washington DC, where a few hundred gathered to chant, “Deportations, we say no / Now’s the time for Trump to go / Ice Gestapo, we say no / Now’s the time for Trump to go…”View image in fullscreenArmed with signs declaring “All hail Commander Bone Spur” (Trump was medically excused from serving in the Vietnam war) and “History is watching”, they marched to the White House. Trump’s attitude to the rule of law “is scary”, explained one marcher in her 20s, who asked to be identified only as Madison. “I would like to see Donald Trump impeached and imprisoned.”As she and the other leftists marched, a young man, bare chested and wearing a bucket hat, approached a demonstration marshal. He seemed confused. He wanted to know where the protest for the opposite point of view could be found.Downtown Washington was, in fact, thronged with people representing both points of view, and they could be distinguished, much of the time, on sight – with preppy attire and the occasional Maga accessory marking Trump’s fans, and Covid masks, dark clothing, and a general glower designating anti-Trumpers.The mood at the actual army parade was cordial enough, in part because the overwhelming majority of attendees seemed to be either Trump supporters, military families or mostly apolitical daytrippers who just wanted to see a parade. Yet the crowd was on the smaller side, given the magnitude of the event.Similarly, although the army’s marching went smoothly, the larger public event seemed less than well-planned. The garbage cans, few and far between, were overflowing. There weren’t enough exits. The only food source for thousands of people was a handful of food trucks with lines of 40 or 50 people waiting at each. Because the parade closed down blocks and blocks and there was a dearth of signs with clear directions, it was also extraordinarily difficult to find one’s way in or out.View image in fullscreenA secret service officer, trying to explain the general confusion, just sighed. “Nobody knows what’s going on.”A tent managed by a beverage company handed out room-temperature bottles of an energy drink, Phorm. The flavor, called Screamin’ Freedom, tasted like hard candies dissolved in water, and an advisory on the cans warned that they were not to be consumed by minors or pregnant women.Although the military has agreed to cover the estimated $25m to $45m price of the parade, including the costs of reinforcing streets to protect them against so much heavy machinery, residents of Washington have been less than thrilled. The parade’s attendees seemed to be tilted toward people who had traveled from suburban Virginia or Maryland or even further afield. At one point a young girl walked by wearing a Mennonite bonnet. It wasn’t quite Maga Woodstock, but it was close.Chelsea, a woman in her 30s wearing a Maga hat, came all the way from New Jersey. Asked what she thought of Trump’s decision to deploy the military in LA, she said, “You don’t have leadership in that state. The [Democratic politicians there] don’t seem to have a fire in them.” Trump, she argued, was taking a risk to try to help California out of a lawlessness created by the cowardice of its local politicians. This was a common sentiment.View image in fullscreenA group of women from Pennsylvania were sitting on the grass. One wore a red-white-and-blue blouse, the other a flag-printed dress. “Trump wants to keep us safe,” she said. “He’s not Hitler.”“Or a king!” one of her friends said. She defended Trump’s decision to ban transgender troops from the military, and complained that Biden had subjected the military to political correctness and DEI initiatives. “The military is not a social experiment.”A little over an hour into the parade, which was still going strong, the crowd was beginning to show some signs of restlessness. Even a few people in Maga hats appeared to be packing up their things and heading home. The first wave of hundreds of people slowly funneled through the gates, and past entrepreneurs hawking Maga gear and baseball caps with Ice written on them.A young man, asked what he thought of the parade, remarked that he was not impressed. He felt that Trump’s close association with the celebration had politicized it and “made a mockery” of the army, though it wasn’t the army’s fault.More to the point, he added, the event was “just kind of … lame”. More

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      Right back at ya! Trump’s crude but effective rhetorical standby | Chris Taylor

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      Donald Trump and his allies wasted little time in branding the people protesting against immigration enforcement raids in Los Angeles as “insurrectionists”. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy – particularly the vindictive kind – spoke darkly of a “violent insurrection”. JD Vance, the vice-president, inveighed against “insurrectionists carrying foreign flags” on the streets of the nation’s second-biggest city.It didn’t escape notice that an insurrection was exactly what the president was accused of instigating on 6 January 2021, when the flag being paraded through the Capitol was that of the Confederate secessionists. And that Trump hadn’t shown quite the same enthusiasm for sending in the troops then.But simply accusing the leader of the Maga movement of hypocrisy feels like such a 2015 move. It barely registers as news these days.What’s really notable is that this is the latest example of Trump’s well-honed tactic of repurposing criticisms of himself to attack his enemies.The world was first introduced to this manoeuvre on 19 October 2016 during a presidential debate in Las Vegas. When Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being Vladimir Putin’s puppet, Trump shot back: “No puppet, no puppet … No, you’re the puppet.”To many it sounded infantile, more proof of Trump’s lack of seriousness as a candidate. Back then, Twitter was the go-to platform to register reaction, as CBS reported:“‘NO, YOU’RE THE PUPPET!’ A presidential candidate just went straight up preschool on his opponent,” one person tweeted.“‘NO YOU’RE THE PUPPET’ shows how truly childish our election system has become,” someone replied.True, but these reactions underestimated the power of this simple, some would say puerile, tactic. After all, this was a time when the term “fake news” was still used in its original sense of fringe media stories that were deliberately untrue before Trump restyled it into a catch-all term for the mainstream media and anything it produces that he doesn’t like.The fact that people are now less likely to associate “fake news” with Pizzagate than with Trump’s attacks on the likes of CNN shows just how effective this switcheroo is.But its real power lies in the way it undermines the very notion of truth. If everyone’s an insurrectionist, no one is. As with Humpty Dumpty, words mean what Trump wants them to mean.The more you look, the more you see the tactic everywhere. It’s a pretty safe bet the phrase “election interference” had never tripped off Trump’s tongue before 2016, when the question of Russia’s role in helping secure his election ultimately led to the Mueller report. After he was charged with election interference following the 2020 vote, however, he accused, among others, the Biden administration, the Secret Service, Google, the British Labour party and Kamala Harris (on the – entirely false – grounds she had posted AI-created images of her rallies) of “election interference” in the 2024 contest.When Democrats accused Trump of trying to “weaponize” the Department of Justice in his attempts to illicitly stay in office after his 2020 election defeat, it was only a question of time before “weaponization” would re-emerge, rotated 180 degrees, as a favourite term in the Maga lexicon of vitriol. Once Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in 2023, it was they who set up a formal subcommittee on “weaponization” of the federal government, to castigate their enemies. And when the Trump 2.0 administration weaponized the federal government to fire justice department officials who had participated in Jack Smith’s “election interference” case against Trump on the grounds that they had weaponized the government … we had truly stepped through the looking glass.Accusing anti-racist campaigners of racism? Check. Denouncing Jews as antisemites? Check.And it’s all helped by another apparently childish but startlingly effective tactic: repetition. Why did a majority of Republicans in 2024 believe that Biden’s election victory four years earlier was rigged despite all evidence to the contrary? Probably because Trump spent fours years, day after day, saying it was. Why did so many Americans in the 2024 election campaign insist they had been better off four years earlier despite the demonstrable fact that Covid-hit 2020 had been an economic disaster? Well, maybe Trump’s constant bragging about presiding over the “greatest economy in the history of the world” had more than a little method to it. (As the musician Mark E Smith said in another context: “It’s not repetition; it’s discipline.” You can say that again.)Trump’s rhetorical tropes may display a certain reptilian genius but there is nothing new under the sun.“The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” So claimed a 1941 article called Churchill’s Lie Factory written by one Joseph Goebbels, who had been accused of … exactly that.

      Chris Taylor is a subeditor at the Guardian US and author of The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna More

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      The rise of Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policy

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      With Los Angeles convulsed by confrontation between pro-migrant protesters and military units dispatched by Donald Trump, no figure apart from the president has loomed larger than Stephen Miller.As the man in the Oval Office, it is Trump who has absorbed the accusations of authoritarianism for usurping the powers of California’s government after deploying 4,000 national guard troops and 700 active marines on to the streets of a city that is home to more undocumented immigrants than any other in the US.Behind the scenes, however, this has been the apogee of Miller’s power – and an episode that illuminated his power in a White House where his influence far outstrips his misleadingly modest title of deputy chief of staff.Miller, 39, may have been the true catalyst for the volatile scenes that played out over several days in the city of his birth.As the long-term architect of Trump’s years-long effort to reinvent US immigration policy, he has pressed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents to intensify efforts to arrest migrants as deportation figures fell far short of pre-election promises.At a meeting at Ice’s Washington headquarters last month, Miller ordered them to skip the usual practice of compiling lists of suspected illegal migrants and instead target Home Depot, where day laborers gather for short-term hire, and 7-Eleven stores, to carry out mass arrests, the Wall Street Journal reported.Ice would aim for a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day, he told Fox News – a figure exceeding previous estimates, based on assumptions that those with criminal records would be prioritised. It also seemed to raise the risk of mistakes and wrongful arrests.Accordingly, Ice has drastically stepped up its arrest rate – and broadened the profile of those targeted.The results have been plain to see. As demonstrators took to the streets, Miller promptly raised the stakes by accusing them of an “insurrection”.Amid the hullabaloo and expressions of outrage, Miller may allowed himself a quiet smile of satisfaction over sticking it to the city of his birth – in many ways emblematic of the progressive cultural trends despised by Trump’s “Make America great again” (Maga) followers but a place where his own hardline anti-immigrant views had long provoked derision.The son of affluent Jewish parents, Miller’s evolution into a race-baiting provocateur took shape in the upscale suburb of Santa Monica, where he gained notoriety as an incendiary agitator at the eponymous local high school.Video footage purportedly from the period and circulated on social media shows a bearded Miller stridently voicing his disdainful view of school janitorial staff“Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do this,” he shouts into a microphone.The gross statement seems to have been representative of a broader canvas of toxic ideas, with racism at its core.In Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, to date the only biography published on Miller, author Jean Guerrero recounts one episode from the future political operative’s adolescence, when he suddenly ditched a close friend, Jason Islas, on the grounds of his ethnicity.“The conversation was remarkably calm,” Islas, a Mexican American, is quoted saying. “He expressed hatred for me in a calm, cool, matter-of-fact way.”An article he wrote as a 16-year-old for a local website expresses contempt for fellow students of Hispanic origin.“When I entered Santa Monica High School in ninth grade, I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills,” Miller wrote on the Surfsantamonica site. “There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school.”The school, he added, was one where “Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome” – a view reflecting the then recentness of the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaida and also Miller’s increasing focus on Muslims.Miller’s indulgence in far-right ideas continued during his college years at Duke University in North Carolina, where he associated with white nationalist thinkers and groups.According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he worked with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which it defined as a “an anti-Muslim hate group”, and also with Richard Spencer, a white nationalist leader who popularized the term “alt-right” to describe groups that defined themselves through a white racial identity.View image in fullscreenAfter graduating, Miller moved to Washington to work in Congress, serving first as a press secretary to Michele Bachmann, then a Republican representative for Minnesota, before moving to work for Jeff Sessions, at the time a rightwing Alabama senator who later became Trump’s first attorney general.It was in the latter role that his reputation as an avatar of extreme anti-immigrant agitprop became established. In 2013, helped by Miller, Sessions torpedoed a bipartisan piece of legislation that was intended to pave the way for immigration for undocumented migrants.To help sink the bill, Miller used Breitbart News, a rightwing website then headed by Steve Bannon. It would prove to be a fateful connection.The Breitbart connection also shone further light on Miller’s views on race and immigration, as revealed in emails he sent to editors and reporters.They showed a preoccupation with the 1924 Immigration Act, signed by President Calvin Coolidge, which severely restricted immigration to the US from certain parts of the world on what observers say were racial and eugenics grounds. Hitler subsequently praised the legislation as a model for Germany in Mein Kampf.After Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015 – creating scandalizing headlines by demonizing Mexican immigrants as “drug dealers, criminals and rapists”, Miller took a leave of absence from Sessions’ Senate office to work for him.On the recommendation of Bannon, by then Trump’s campaign chief, he was installed as a speech writer, chiefly because of his focus on immigration, which had become the candidate’s own signature issue.It enabled Miller to showcase his ability to channel Trump’s inner self. The pair have politically inseparable ever since.Miller wrote Trump’s dystopian “American carnage” speech for his first inauguration in January 2017. As a senior policy adviser in the first Trump administration, it was Miller who was behind some of its most notorious policy initiatives. These included the so-called “Muslim ban” on travellers from seven majority-Muslim countries and the practice of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border.His growing notoriety as an anti-immigration extremist drew criticism from his own relatives. In 2018, his maternal uncle, David Glosser, branded him a “hypocrite” for ignoring the memory of his ancestors, who fled antisemitic pogroms in tsarist Russia.“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, wrote in Politico.Miller cared little for such sentimentality.After Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, Miller stuck with the former president – even while his political future initially looked doomed in the aftermath of the 6 January 2021 attack by his supporters on the US Capitol.Consequently, he grew ever more powerful in Trump’s inner circle. He may have earned extra kudos by declining to exploit their relationship to win lucrative consulting contracts, instead setting up a non-profit, the America First Legal foundation.Meanwhile, he immersed himself in studying how to overcome the hurdles that stymied Trump’s agenda during his first presidency.The outcome has been apparent in the blizzard of executive orders during the restored president’s first months back in the White House. Miller purposely sought to “flood the zone” in a manner that would overwhelm the capacity of the courts – or the media – to respond.No order was more quintessentially Miller’s than that issued on the day of Trump’s second inauguration on 20 January, which attempted to cancel birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants. The order was challenged in the courts and is now with the supreme court after the administration challenged the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions supporting a right that is guaranteed in the US constitution.Miller’s anti-immigrant zeal has at times exceeded even that of Trump. According to the New York Times, the president told a campaign meeting last year that if it was up to Miller, there would only be 100 million people living in the US – and all of them would look like Miller.The bond between the two men has grown to such an extent that Miller has been dubbed “the president’s id” in some circles.“He has been for a while. It’s just now he has the leverage and power to fully effectuate it,” an unnamed former Trump adviser told NBC. Others have called him “the most consequential” White House official since Dick Cheney, who exercised vast influence as vice-president under George W Bush.Critics cast Miller as the root of all evil in Trump’s White House. “Stephen Miller is responsible for all the bad things happening in the United States,” NBC quoted Ben Ray Luján, a Democratic senator for New Mexico, as saying.Miller’s exalted place at Trump’s side was illustrated during the recent Signalgate episode – as revealed by the Atlantic, whose editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently invited into a government chat group to discuss airstrikes on Houthi militants in Yemen, whose missile attacks on Israel threatened Suez canal shipping routes.When JD Vance questioned the strikes – asking whether Trump “is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe” – Miller unambiguously slapped the vice-president down.“As I heard it, the president was clear: green light,” Miller said, according to the transcript.The clearest testimony to Miller’s status has come from Trump himself. Asked by Kristen Welker, the moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, about speculation that Miller might become national security adviser, a usually influential White House post currently filled, albeit temporarily, by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, after the previous incumbent, Mike Waltz, was fired.“Stephen is much higher on the totem pole than that,” Trump replied.The result is that Miller’s presence is detectable in all policy areas, including at the state department, where he succeeded in having his ally, Christopher Landau, installed as Rubio’s deputy.The goal is to control the flow of foreigners entering the United States, insiders have told the Guardian.At the state department, Landau has become an important liaison to officials in the consular affairs section, which has been put under the leadership of a conservative coterie of diplomats and reoriented toward policing migration.Officials from the state department have joined FBI agents on recent Ice raids aimed at tracking down unregistered migrants.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, laments that Miller’s rising star means he can “use the powers of the federal government to unleash his fascist worldview”.“[That view] has now been transformed into the main political policy and aim of Donald Trump’s presidency,” said Setmayer, who now heads the Seneca Project, a women-led political action committee.“The demagoguery of immigration has long been at the centre of Donald Trump’s political rise, and Stephen Miller’s desire to make America whiter and less diverse, married with the power of the presidency without guardrails, is incredibly dangerous and should concern every American who believes in the rule of law.”Andrew Roth and David Smith contributed reporting More