Donald Trump

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0

      by

      The first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the US but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster’s was “surreal”. The scourge of “fake news”, pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the rise of social media. And when presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” a few days after Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of the incoming administration appeared to be all but official.The truth panic had the unwelcome side-effect of emboldening those it sought to oppose. “Fake” was one of Trump’s favourite slap-downs, especially to news outlets that reported unwelcome facts about him and his associates. A booming Maga media further amplified the president’s lies and denials. The tools of liberal expertise appeared powerless to hold such brazen duplicity to account. A touchstone of the moment was the German-born writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who observed in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists”.In 2025, the denunciations have a different flavour. To many of us, the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies as one of stupidity. This diagnosis has credibility across the political spectrum. In January, the centrist columnist David Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled “The Six Principles of Stupidity”. The new administration, he wrote, was “behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?”In March, Hillary Clinton – not, perhaps, ideal counsel – weighed in with an op-ed in the same paper, with the headline: “How Much Dumber Will This Get?” “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me,” Clinton wrote, “it’s the stupidity.” And in April, the Marxist writer and intellectual Richard Seymour posted an essay on “Stupidity as Historical Force”. In place of Arendt, Seymour quoted Trotsky: “When the political curve goes down, stupidity dominates social thinking” – once the forces of reaction predominate, so reason gives way to insults and prejudice.Trump’s lying is no less constant or blatant than in 2016, but by now it feels familiar, already priced in. What more is there to say about the “war on truth” a decade into Trump’s political career?Still, at least two aspects of his second administration are newly and undoubtedly “stupid”. One is shambolic incompetence of a degree that led the editor of the Atlantic magazine to be accidentally added to a Signal group chat about US military operations, a group whose other members included the vice-president and the secretary of defence. A second is its incomprehensible determination to press ahead with policies – such as tariffs and the defunding of medical research – that will do deep harm without any apparent gain, even for Trump’s backers and clients, still less his voters.The spectacle of a prominent vaccine sceptic and wellness crank as secretary of health and human services goes beyond an abandonment of truth; it feels like an assault on human progress. Bans on fluoride in tap water, passed by legislators in Utah and Florida at Robert F Kennedy Jr’s behest, mark a new hostility to the very idea of evidence-based government. The escalation from Trump One to Trump Two has seen irrationality spread from the deliberative public sphere to flood the veins of government.When we interpret the actions of others, a basic principle is to assume that people have reasons for behaving as they do, even if those reasons may be emotional, shortsighted or cynical. In the wake of the group chat fiasco and the tariffs upheaval, social media posters made a kind of parlour game of cramming the Trump administration’s actions into their favoured explanatory paradigm. Signalgate must have been deliberate; tariffs must be a grand plan to crash the dollar in the interest of one economic faction or another. The risk is that ever-more elaborate explanations for stupid actions end up wrongly according those actions a kind of intelligence – rather confirming the insight of the political scientist Robyn Marasco that “conspiracy theory is a love affair with power that poses as its critique”.Such speculations are often met with a retort that leans even harder into the stupidity allegation. No, Trump and his people are not playing four-dimensional chess, the response goes – we are simply witnessing the consequences of allowing a deranged man into the highest office, backed by a coterie of dim and unqualified cronies. When political sociology falls short, medical psychiatry and an unspoken social Darwinism fill the void.Not for the first time, the early months of the second Trump administration drew comparisons to Mike Judge’s 2006 movie Idiocracy, in which a soldier of average intelligence wakes up 500 years into the future to discover a US governed by idiocy. Culturally, technologically and ecologically, the depiction feels grimly prophetic. Waste and pollution are out of control. The president is a TV celebrity with the manner and style of a pro-wrestling star. Doctors have been replaced by clunky diagnostic machines. Consumers sit in front of screens flooded with ads and slogans that they repeat like memes. When the soldier advises people to stop trying to irrigate their failing crops using a Gatorade-like drink and to use water instead, they swiftly abandon this practical suggestion when the drink manufacturer’s profits collapse. “Do you really want to live in a world where you’re trying to blow up the one person who is trying to help you?” the soldier asks in desperation, after people turn on him. And, yes, it turns out they do.View image in fullscreenWe might recognise stupefying consumerism and profit maximisation as symptoms of our own age of idiocy, but the premise of Judge’s satire is a politically ugly one. The reason the US has descended into this abyss over the centuries is that smart people (depicted as neurotic professionals) have stopped reproducing, while dumb people (depicted as violent trailer-park trash) can’t stop, eventually overwhelming the gene pool with stupidity. At a time when racial eugenics, natalist policy and IQ fixation are ascendant once more, this is scarcely a line of thinking that many liberals or leftists can endorse. Then again, who can be sure that opponents of reactionary “stupidity” don’t sometimes harbour eugenicist fantasies of their own? The aftermath of the Brexit vote – like tariffs, a seemingly senseless act of economic self-harm – witnessed liberal mutterings that typical leave voters were so elderly that by the time Brexit finally came into effect, many had already died.One needn’t indulge in such dark fantasies to hope that official stupidity eventually meets its comeuppance. Surely stupid economic policies must lead to stupid political strategy, resulting in the loss of power. Again, Britain’s recent experience offers a precedent: when the then prime minister, Liz Truss, put her own fiscal dogmas above the judgments of the bond markets in September 2022, she was swiftly ejected from office (with the help of the Bank of England) a mere 49 days after entering it. With Trump, many have looked to the bond markets as the final backstop of intelligence in a stupid world, the power that eventually forces idiots to confront consequences. This works up to a point, especially when financial pain is visited upon corporate executives who have the president’s ear – but it only trims away at the stupidity, warding off its worst excesses. Trump’s lack of basic causal understanding, of how policy A leads to outcome B, is not limited to economic policy, nor to Trump himself.The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional”, a feature of how organisations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences.Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organisational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things – universities, public health, market data – that help make the world intelligible. Trumpian stupidity isn’t an emergent side-effect of smart people’s failure to take control; it is imposed and enforced. This needs to be confronted politically and sociologically, without falling into the opposite trap of “sanewashing” or inflating strategic cunning to the point of conspiracy theory.“Since the beginning of this century, the growth of meaninglessness has been accompanied by loss of common sense,” wrote Arendt in 1953. “In many respects, this has appeared simply as an increasing stupidity … Stupidity in the Kantian sense has become the infirmity of everybody, and therefore can no longer be regarded as ‘beyond Remedy’.”Arendt’s argument contained a glimmer of hope. Stupidity on a social scale had to be remediable, if only because it was no longer explicable as a mere cognitive deficiency among individuals. She believed that people – intellectuals as much as “the masses” – had stopped exercising their powers of judgment, preferring to mouth platitudes or simply obey orders, rather than think for themselves. But what are the social and political conditions that normalise this? One is a society where people wait for instruction on how to think, which Arendt saw as a key characteristic of totalitarianism.This social model of stupidity – crystallised in the Orwellian image of brainwashed drones, trained to obey – has a superficial plausibility as a depiction of contemporary authoritarianism, but it misses a critical dimension of liberal societies as they took shape in the late 20th century. Judgment was not replaced by dictatorship, but rather outsourced to impersonal, superintelligent systems of data collection and analysis.Over the middle decades of the 20th century, the neoliberal argument for markets, made most potently by Friedrich Hayek, always emphasised that their primary function was to organise a society’s knowledge. Where markets ran smoothly and prices were set freely, there would be no need for anyone to exercise judgment beyond their own immediate wants, desires and expectations. The “stupid” person has just as much potential to thrive in a neoliberal society as the “smart” person, because the price system will ultimately decide on collective outcomes.In the early 21st century, similar arguments have been made for “big data” by Silicon Valley ideologue and former Wired editor Chris Anderson, and for randomised control trials by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Abhijit Banerjee: that they will happily render the theories, judgments and explanations of human beings – with all their biases and errors – redundant. Once everything is quantified, right down to nanodetails, not even measurement is needed, just algorithmic pattern recognition. You don’t need a concept of “rabbit” to identify the furry thing with big ears; you just design machines to identify which word most commonly appears alongside such an image.View image in fullscreenThus when people look to the bond markets to rescue us from stupidity, they are not expecting the return of “common sense”, but merely that certain behaviours and policies will receive lower scores than others. Similarly, large language models, which promise so much today, do not offer judgment, let alone intelligence, but unrivalled pattern-processing power, based on a vast corpus of precedents. (Large language models such as ChatGPT are intelligent within their own limits, but comically stupid when stretched beyond them. Google’s AI-generated search feature has been asked to explain the meaning of nonsensical made-up idioms – such as “you can’t lick a badger twice” and “erase twice, plank once” – which it confidently proceeded to do, producing torrents of bullshit. Professors will also be familiar with the experience of reading student essays that are neither very good nor very bad, but that uncanny combination of the intelligent and the stupid that is the mark of AI writing.)From the neoliberal critique of planning in the 1970s to Elon Musk’s Doge, political attacks on governmental and professional forms of human authority serve the parallel project of opening space for overarching technologies of quantification, comparison and evaluation. Yet the technological quest to “go meta” on the rest of society, thus reducing the role of human judgment, is not new. In The Human Condition, Arendt identified the launch of Sputnik in 1957 as a historical turning point, offering the possibility of an unworldly perspective on worldly affairs, downgrading the latter in the process. The cold war, which gave birth to the internet and myriad tools of control and surveillance, was a battle to achieve the most complete global viewpoint. No behaviour or movement was deemed irrelevant to uncovering the enemy’s intentions. Musk’s fixation on space (Starlink now has about 8,000 satellites in orbit) is of a piece with his flippant approach to human judgment. Pressed on why he falsely claimed, as a pretext for slashing its budget, that USAID spent $50m on condoms for Gaza, Musk casually responded: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect.”The transition of human activities on to surveillance platforms means that truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, become mere data points of equal value. False information and stupid policies can move markets at least as much as accurate information and smart policies, and so offer equal opportunity to speculators. One morning in April, the S&P 500 jumped 6% after a viral rumour that Trump’s tariff policy was being paused – a rumour the Financial Times traced back to a pseudonymous X user named Walter Bloomberg, based in Switzerland, with no offline credentials whatsoever. A Hayekian might point out that the error was quickly corrected – the market dropped 6% again within the hour – but this was a manifestly stupid turn of events.In a fully platform-based world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviours and patterns; meaning, intention and explanation become irrelevant. One of the most incisive accounts of this tendency in contemporary US politics comes from political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in their analysis of the “new conspiracism”.Classic conspiracy theory (regarding, say, the JFK assassination) rests on an overelaborate theoretical imagination, with complex causal chains, strategies and alliances. Its demands for coherence and meaning are excessive, while its tolerance for contingency is stunted. By contrast, “The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture … not evidence but repetition … The new conspiracism – all accusation, no evidence – substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough.”The new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and “conspiracy entrepreneurs”. Outlandish and pointless fantasies, such as the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don’t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared and repeated. Engagement – and revenue – is all.View image in fullscreenThis analysis takes us beyond the 2016-era panic over “truth” to help us chart the current political flood waters of “stupidity”. When Republican politicians go on TV and make absurd claims about tariffs, vaccines or immigration, is it best understood as “lying”, or as something else altogether? Often they are simply repeating lines that have already been circulating, filtering outward from nodes – Trump and RFK Jr especially – in the conspiracist network. Some claims act as loyalty oaths (affirmations that the 2020 election was stolen), but more are just deranged and bizarre, not to mention sick, such as the claim that DEI hiring policies were responsible for the fires that devastated Los Angeles in January, and the fatal aircraft collision that killed 67 people that same month. Taken as judgments or explanations, they raise questions about the cognitive faculties of the speaker, but perhaps they are better seen as memes. The individuals might sound stupid, but they are not the architects of a media sphere in which causal explanation has been sacrificed for symbolic mimicry, to fill time and generate content.In the same essay reflecting on stupidity, Arendt distinguished between “preliminary” and “true” understanding. Because it involves applying existing concepts to particular situations, preliminary understanding has a kind of circularity. It can be clever and correct, but it falls short when confronting the genuine novelty of human actions. One can escape the most brute form of stupidity, yet not truly understand the significance of the political and historical moment. Even the cleverest person or system can get trapped in a “preliminary” understanding of events.Arendt argued that there was a second human faculty, in addition to judgment, that allowed understanding to progress to a truer grasp of meaning: imagination. Imagination, for Arendt, is the uniquely human capacity to grasp truth via speculative leaps, drawing on empathy and creativity in the process, as opposed to scientific methods. Politics requires us to navigate situations which are incomparable and immeasurable, because they are genuinely new. This in turn requires something closer to aesthetic judgment than to scientific judgment.“Imagination alone,” Arendt wrote, “enables us to see things in their proper perspective.” The challenge Arendt poses to us is to think of truth and meaning not from the perspective of the economist, financial analyst, data scientist or sociologist, but of the historian, the kind who sees human events as a series of breaks, anomalies and initiations.This is what the “closed world” of platform and market surveillance can’t provide: a kind of understanding that is not reducible to empirical data. Artificial or market “intelligence” has the capacity to learn at ultra-high speed from existing data, but its range of possible outcomes, while extremely large, is nevertheless enumerable and therefore finite. In the gamified space of such “closed worlds”, history is finished, and all that remains is lots and lots of behaviours. Every conceivable event, utterance or idea is already out there, whether in the real-time computer of the market or the archival one of the data bank, waiting to be discovered.Trump and his administration are undoubtedly stupid. They don’t know what they are doing, don’t understand the precedents or facts involved and lack any curiosity about consequences, human and non-human. The tariffs fiasco has been the greatest fillip to the legitimacy of the economics profession in living memory, showing by a series of brute experimental results that international trade does, on balance, enhance prosperity and efficiency. It turns out that the foundational concepts of macroeconomics do have some empirical grip upon the world after all, and that to ignore them is an act of stupidity. Tragically, a similar process is under way in public health.But if our only alternative to stupidity is to reinstall the “preliminary understanding” of expert orthodoxy (welcome as that might be in some areas), then there will be no reflection on the wider historical conditions of stupidity, nor on the extent of stupid policy and process not only tolerated but valued by contemporary capitalism. The outsourcing of judgment to financial markets, digital platforms and fusions of the two is also an invitation for people to behave stupidly, albeit within systems that are governed by some esoteric form of mathematical reason. It would be absurd to seek hope in Trump and Trumpism, but perhaps stupidity on such a world-historical level can at least offer an opportunity for “true” understanding. Nothing – markets, bots or machines – can rescue us, except our imagination.A longer version of this essay appeared in n+1 magazine More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump signs order promising measures, including military, to defend Qatar

      by

      Donald Trump has signed an executive order vowing to use all measures including US military action to defend the energy-rich nation of Qatar – though it remains unclear just what weight the pledge will carry.The text of the order, available Wednesday on the White House’s website but dated Monday, appears to be another measure by Trump to assure the Qataris following Israel’s surprise attack on the country targeting Hamas leaders as they weighed accepting a ceasefire with Israel over the war in the Gaza Strip.The order cites the two countries’ “close cooperation” and “shared interest”, vowing to “guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the state of Qatar against external attack”.“The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty or critical infrastructure of the state of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” the order says.“In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures – including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military – to defend the interests of the United States and of the state of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”The order apparently came during a visit to Washington on Monday by Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump organized a call by Netanyahu to Qatar during the visit in which Netanyahu “expressed his deep regret” over the strike that killed six people, including a member of the Qatari security forces, the White House said.Qatar’s foreign ministry described the US pledge as “an important step in strengthening the two countries’ close defense partnership”. The Qatari-funded Al Jazeera satellite news network declared: “New Trump executive order guarantees Qatar security after Israeli attack.”Trump also spoke on the phone later Wednesday to Qatar’s ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.The White House did not release details about the call, though Qatar later said the two men spoke about Doha’s efforts to reach a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war.The true scope of the pledge by the US remains in question. Typically, legally binding agreements, or treaties, need to receive the approval of the US Senate. However, presidents have entered international agreements without the Senate’s approval, as Barack Obama did with Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.Ultimately, any decision to take military action rests with the president. That uncertainty has clouded previous US defense agreements in Trump’s second term, such as Nato’s Article 5 guarantees.Qatar, a peninsular nation in the Persian Gulf, became fantastically wealthy through its natural gas reserves. It has been a key partner of the US military, allowing its Central Command to have its forward operating base at its vast Al Udeid airbase.Joe Biden named Qatar as a major non-Nato ally in 2022, in part due to its help during the US’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. And Qatar has maintained close ties to Trump, from a real estate project with his eponymous Trump Organization to offering him a Boeing 747 to use as Air Force One.In the aftermath of the Israeli attack, Saudi Arabia entered a mutual defense agreement with Pakistan, bringing the kingdom under Islamabad’s nuclear umbrella. It’s unclear whether other Gulf Arab countries, worried about both Israel as well as Iran as it faces reimposed United Nations sanctions over its nuclear program, may seek similar arrangements with the region’s longtime security guarantor.“The Gulf’s centrality in the Middle East and its significance to the United States warrants specific US guarantees beyond President Donald J Trump’s assurances of nonrepetition and dinner meetings,” wrote Bader al-Saif, a history professor at Kuwait University who analyzes Gulf Arab affairs. More

    • 200 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Vance uses false claims to pin shutdown blame on Democrats as White House warns of layoffs

      by

      JD Vance, the US vice-president, used false claims to blame Democrats for the government shutdown as the White House warned that worker layoffs were imminent.Federal departments have been closing since midnight after a deadlocked Congress failed to pass a funding measure. The crisis has higher stakes than previous shutdowns, with Trump racing to slash government departments and threatening to turn furloughs into mass firings.Making a rare appearance in the White House briefing room, Vance told reporters: “We are going to have to lay some people off if the shutdown continues. We don’t like that. We don’t necessarily want to do it, but we’re going to do what we have to do to keep the American people’s essential services continuing to run.”Vance denied workers would be targeted because of their political allegiance but acknowledged there was still uncertainty over who might be laid off or furloughed. “We haven’t made any final decisions about what we’re going to do with certain workers,” he said. “What we’re saying is that we might have to take extraordinary steps, especially the longer this goes on.”About 750,000 federal employees are expected to be placed on furlough, an enforced leave, with pay withheld until they return to work. Essential workers such as military and border agents may be forced to work without pay, and some will likely miss pay cheques next week.At the same briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that government agencies are already preparing for cuts.“Unfortunately, because the Democrats shut down the government, the president has directed his cabinet, and the office of management and budget is working with agencies across the board, to identify where cuts can be made – and we believe that layoffs are imminent,” she said.The press secretary acknowledged she could not be precise about timing or identify the percentage of workers likely to be affected.As the messaging war over the shutdown intensifies, Democrats, motivated by grassroots anger over expiring healthcare subsidies, have been withholding Senate votes to fund the government as leverage to try and force negotiations.Vance sought to upbraid Democrats over their demands, targeting Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC.“The Chuck Schumer-AOC wing of the Democratic party shut down the government because they said to us, we will open the government only if you give billions of dollars of funding to healthcare for illegal aliens. That’s a ridiculous proposition.”It is also a false claim. US law bars undocumented immigrants from receiving the health care benefits Democrats are demanding, and the party has not called for a new act of Congress to change that.At a press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House of Representatives, said Trump and Republicans shut the government down to deny healthcare to working-class Americans.“The president has been engaging in irresponsible and unserious behaviour, demonstrating that, all along, Republicans wanted to shut the government down,” he said. “That’s no surprise, because for decades, Republicans have consistently shut the government down as part of their efforts to try to extract and jam their extreme rightwing agenda down the throats of the American people.”On another front, the White House began targeting Democratic-leaning states for a pause or cancellation of infrastructure funds.Russ Vought, the OMB director, said on X that roughly $18bn for New York City infrastructure projects had been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing to “unconstitutional DEI principles”. Later he said nearly $8bn in clean energy funding “to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled”.Schumer and Jeffries responded in a joint statement: “Donald Trump is once again treating working people as collateral damage in his endless campaign of chaos and revenge.”Shutdowns are a periodic feature of gridlocked Washington, although this is the first since a record 35-day pause in 2018-19, during Trump’s first term. Talks so far have been unusually bitter, with Trump mocking Schumer and Jeffries on social media.The president’s most recent video showed Jeffries being interviewed on MSNBC with an AI-generated moustache and sombrero, and four depictions of the president playing mariachi music.Vance made light of the tactic. “I think it’s funny. The president’s joking and we’re having a good time. You can negotiate in good faith while also making a little bit of fun at some of the absurdities of the Democrats’ positions, and even poking some fun at the absurdity of the themselves.“I’ll tell Hakeem Jeffries right now, I make the solemn promise to you that if you help us reopen the government, the sombrero memes will stop. I’ve talked to the president of the United States about that.”Jeffries has denounced the memes as racist. Vance retorted: “I honestly don’t even know what that means. Like, is he a Mexican American that is offended by having a sombrero meme?”Efforts to swiftly end the shutdown collapsed on Wednesday as Senate Democrats – who are demanding extended healthcare subsidies for low income families – refused to help the majority Republicans approve a bill passed by the House that would have reopened the government for several weeks.Congress is out on Thursday for the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday but the Senate returns to work on Friday and may be in session through the weekend. The House is not due back until next week.A Marist poll released on Tuesday found that 38% of voters would blame congressional Republicans for a shutdown, 27% would blame the Democrats and 31% both parties. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Democrats liken Trump to Putin after call to use US cities for military training

      by

      A leading Democrat has compared Donald Trump to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin after the US president told military leaders on Tuesday that the armed forces should use US cities as “training grounds”.JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, which is bracing for Trump to deploy national guard troops to his state, questioned the president’s mental health and accused him of behaving like an autocrat.“It appears that Donald Trump not only has dementia set in but he’s copying tactics of Vladimir Putin,” Pritzker said. “Sending troops into cities, thinking that that’s some sort of proving ground for war, or that indeed there’s some sort of internal war going on in the United States is just, frankly, inane and I’m concerned for his health.”Since returning to office in January, Trump has used crime and illegal immigration as a pretext to expand federal agents and national guard troops into cities led by Democrats, often with large African American populations.The president deployed in Los Angeles in June and Washington DC in August despite the objections of local officials and official figures showing that crime is falling. And over the weekend Trump announced plans to send national guard troops to what he described as “war-ravaged” Portland, though the city and state are seeking a restraining order, claiming that the president has overstepped his legal authority.On Tuesday, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, said a federal taskforce operation in Memphis, Tennessee was under way. Meanwhile, Louisiana’s governor asked for a national guard deployment to New Orleans and other cities.Trump dialled up the pressure further on Tuesday at a rare gathering of more than 800 military leaders in Quantico, Virginia. He said: “Last month I signed an executive order to provide training for quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”The phrase “enemy within” was used by Senator Joseph McCarthy in a 1950 speech about threats to democracy. McCarthy is best known for his aggressive campaign against alleged communist infiltration in the US government and society.Addressing an auditorium full of top brass from around the world, Trump said he told Pete Hegseth that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”Trump acknowledged that he had been criticised for deploying the military on US streets but claimed America was in the grips of a battle against immigrants in the country illegally.“America is under invasion from within,” Trump said. “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform, you can take them out.”The president encouraged soldiers harassed or assaulted by protesters to “get out of that car and do whatever the hell you want to do”.Democrats condemned the remarks as a dangerous escalation worthy of an authoritarian.Gavin Newsom, the California governor, whose name has been floated as a possible 2028 presidential contender, said the speech should terrify people.“Declaring war on our nation’s cities and using our troops as political pawns is what dictators do. This man cares about nothing but his own ego and power,” Newsom posted on X.Pritzker called for the 25th amendment to the constitution, which deals with the removal of a president incapacitated by a physical or mental illness, to be applied. “There is something genuinely wrong with this man, and the 25th amendment ought to be invoked,” he said.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “So, this is totally against the American grain, and it’s one example of many that they’re moving to an autocracy away from a democracy. In dictatorships, the federal military goes into the cities to do bad things.”Civil society groups also condemned the plans. Naureen Shah, director of government affairs of the equality division at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said: “We don’t need to spell out how dangerous the president’s message is, but here goes: military troops must not police us, let alone be used as a tool to suppress the president’s critics.”The Not Above the Law coalition said in a statement: “Trump’s suggestion that US cities should serve as military ‘training grounds’ represents a fundamental betrayal of American values. Our military exists to defend our nation and protect our freedoms, not to practice combat operations against our neighbors in our communities.”The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 is supposed to prevent presidents from using the military as a domestic police force. But Trump has exploited a loophole by deploying the national guard, a reserve force often used for natural disasters, and creating a new “quick reaction force” for crushing domestic unrest.At Tuesday’s event in Quantico, the defense secretary vowed the military would abolish “overbearing rules of engagement” and “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralise, hunt and kill the enemies of our country”.There were few visible reactions from the generals and admirals, who sat largely silent and expressionless. Trump, accustomed to roars or laughs at campaign rallies, found his punchlines fell flat. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Federal Reserve governor will keep job for now despite Trump’s bid to remove her

      by

      Lisa Cook, the US Federal Reserve governor, will keep her job for now, despite Donald Trump’s extraordinary bid to remove her from the central bank’s board with immediate effect.The US supreme court deferred action on the Department of Justice’s request to allow the president to fire Cook, at least until it hears oral arguments on the case in January.Trump has launched an unprecedented campaign to exert greater control over the Fed, publicly lambasting the US central bank over its decisions, installing a close ally on its board of governors, and attempting to fire Cook.His battle for influence has raised questions over the independence of the Fed, which for decades has steered the US economy without political interference.Trump tried to “immediately” dismiss Cook in August, citing unconfirmed allegations of mortgage fraud dating back to before she joined the Fed in 2022. She has denied wrongdoing, and argued the president has no authority to fire her.On Wednesday morning the supreme court considered his attempt to remove Cook – the first-ever bid by a president to fire a Fed official – and the administration’s complaints about judge’s order which had temporarily blocked Trump from firing her while litigation over the termination continues in a lower court.The justices declined to immediately decide a justice department request to put on hold the judge’s order, enabling Cook to stay in post for now.Abbe Lowell, of Lowell & Associates, and Norm Eisen, of the Democracy Defenders Fund, representing Cook, in a statement said: “The court’s decision rightly allows Governor Cook to continue in her role on the Federal Reserve board, and we look forward to further proceedings consistent with the court’s order.”The justice department was contacted for comment. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the administration was looking forward to oral arguments before the court.Carl Tobias, at the University of Richmond School of Law, suggested that the decision to keep Cook in place, and the court’s announcement that it would hear oral arguments on the merits of the case in January, were “good signs for both sides”.“It does protect the independence of the Fed, at least in the short term,” Tobias told the Guardian. “The one big question is: even if they have arguments in January, when will they issue the ruling? That could come early, because I expect the government will ask them to expedite everything, but it could be as late as June.”The court’s decision to maintain the status quo in the short term should allow markets to “settle down” and mitigate the uncertainty around the Fed, he added.In creating the Federal Reserve in 1913, Congress passed a law called the Federal Reserve Act that included provisions to shield the central bank from political interference, requiring governors to be removed by a president only “for cause”, though the law does not define the term nor establish procedures for removal. The law has never been tested in court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJia Cobb, a Washington-based US district judge, on 9 September ruled that Trump’s claims that Cook committed mortgage fraud before taking office, which Cook denies, were probably not sufficient grounds for removal under the Federal Reserve Act.Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, sued Trump in August after the president announced he would remove her. Cook has said the claims made by Trump against her did not give the president the legal authority to remove her and were a pretext to fire her because of her monetary policy stance.Trump has made no secret of his plans to influence the Fed, publicly describing plans to swiftly build “a majority” on its interest-rate setting committee of policymakers.He has repeatedly broken with precedent to demand rate cuts, and attack senior Fed officials, including its chair, Jerome Powell, when they repeatedly defied these calls.Powell has repeatedly stressed he is “strongly committed” to maintaining the Fed’s independence. His term as chair is due to end next year. The Trump administration has been drawing up plans to appoint a successor.Reuters contributed reporting More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Why healthcare spending was at the center of the US government shutdown battle

      by

      The federal government shut down on Wednesday in part, due to a battle between Democrats and Republicans over healthcare spending.Democrats had said that they would not vote for legislation to keep the government open unless Donald Trump and Republicans, who hold the majority in Congress, agreed to reverse cuts to Medicaid and extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans. That did not respire in either of the votes in the Senate on Tuesday.In June, the US president approved legislation he calls his “big, beautiful bill”, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would reduce federal Medicaid spending by $793bn and increase the number of uninsured people by 7.8 million.The savings in federal Medicaid spending will largely come from the implementation of the new requirements, which include completing 80 hours of work or community service activities per month, or meeting exemption criteria.The law also means that the premium tax credits implemented during the Covid-19 pandemic for insurance purchased through the Health Insurance Marketplace will expire at the end of 2025. That would make coverage more expensive and lead to 3.1 million more people without health insurance, according to the CBO.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We are not going to support a partisan Republican spending bill that continues to gut the healthcare of everyday Americans,” Jeffries said following a negotiation with Trump and Republican leaders on Monday.Meanwhile, Trump doubled down during an Oval Office press conference on Tuesday that if the parties can’t reach an agreement, “we can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them,” Trump said while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon. “Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”He did not mention Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act but said: “We can do things medically and other ways, including benefits.”Still, there could be an opening for negotiation in coming weeks. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, said on the Senate floor on Tuesday that the Democrats should vote to keep the government open until 21 November and that he would be happy to fix the “ACA credit issue” before the credits expire at the end of the year. More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      What do Trump and Hegseth’s inflammatory speeches to military generals signal? | Moira Donegan

      by

      Shortly after Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s defense secretary, summoned all the military’s generals to Quantico, Virginia, from their positions around the world in an unusual demand for an in-person assembly, Ben Hodges, a retired general, took to social media to evoke a bit of history. “July 1935,” Hodges said. “German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weiman constitution was void and that they would be required to swear a personal oath to the Führer. Most generals took the new oath to keep their positions.” Hegseth’s account replied to Hodges post: “Cool story, General”.Yet when the meeting finally happened on Tuesday morning, the army generals and navy admirals were treated to a 45-minute speech by Hegseth, followed by a rambling, hour-long address by Trump, which confirmed at least some of what Hodges seemed to fear. The defense secretary emphasized the army’s appearance, decrying “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon”, and signaled his intent to reshape the military’s culture so as to purge “wokeness” and evoke a more masculine image. “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses,” he said. “No more division, distraction and gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before, and will say again: We are done. With that. Shit.” The military, Hegseth suggested, would become an advertisement for the Trump regime’s preferred cultural style, and this transformation will evidently involve many changes to what the armed forces look like when they are photographed.To this end, Hegseth announced that he would also be eliminating or drastically curtailing the equal opportunity, whistleblower, inspector general and complaint procedures that allow military personnel to report harassment and misconduct. The changes seemed designed to particularly roll back efforts undertaken over the course of the 2010s to reduce sexual assault in the military and end its impunity.“No more frivolous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more smearing reputations,” said Hegseth, who settled a lawsuit brought by a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2020. (The settlement terms are confidential. Hegseth has said the allegations were false). “No more walking on eggshells.” One former official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told CNN: “I think what this is, is people are sick and tired of not being able to make inappropriate or sexually explicit jokes at the staff meetings.” Hegseth, it seems, is committed to restoring this treasured freedom.Hegseth similarly declared that he would be changing procedures that have allowed the military to be more diverse – such as eliminating special permissions for soldiers to grow beards, frequently used by Black soldiers, and raising physical fitness standards for specialized, often high-pay and high-status combat roles to what Hegseth seemed to believe is a threshold only men will meet. Hegseth, who has opposed women serving in combat roles, said that candidates for such jobs will be held to the “highest male standard”, which he also said was “gender neutral”. “If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” Hegseth said. “That is not the intent,” he added, questionably. “But it could be the result.”As for the officers themselves, a group which included several Black men and women of various races, Hegseth seemed to offer what he evidently thought was a flattering assessment of their masculine violence and virility. “You kill people and break things for a living,” Hegseth said to the assembled generals. “You are not politically correct and do not necessarily belong always in polite society.” The speech was repetitive and heavy on moments of self-conscious macho posturing. “To our enemies,” Hegseth said at one point “FAFO” – or, fuck around and find out. The defense secretary paused, seeming to wait for applause, but nobody clapped.Trump, meanwhile, also signaled that he seeks to transform the military into a partisan tool of his regime, repeatedly telling the assembled leaders that they would be tasked with missions targeting Americans. “America is under invasion from within,” the president said. “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out. It’s war from within.” Trump, who just days ago deployed 200 national guard troops to Portland, Oregon, with orders to use “full force, if necessary” offered that he had instructed Hegseth to use American cities as “training grounds”. At other times, Trump meandered, as he often does, into off-script comments that were difficult to parse. “But they’re not going to stand in our way, ever again,” Trump said. “You’re not going to see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people that ran that should have never been there. Because we have the United States military, the best, the boldest, the bravest, that the world has ever seen, that the world has ever known.”Trump, like Hegseth, sometimes paused, seeming to expect the generals to clap or laugh. But the laughs were not forthcoming; the military audience was largely silent.There is something pathetic about Hegseth and Trump, who have schemed and failed their way into positions of power and prestige that are comically outsized to their character. It is telling that Hegseth is so preoccupied with making the military into a photogenic spectacle of masculine strength – an anxious fixation on surface and spectacle that only highlights the US’s declining influence abroad.It is telling, too, that Trump can barely string sentences together, appearing distracted, sleepy, and barely coherent as he tells the armed forces to train their guns on his own people. There is no pretext that can sustain the delusion that these are serious people, or that their instructions to the military come from any motive other than their own desire for narcissistic gratification.They do not want to be strong to pursue the nation’s interests; they do not want to be strong to pursue any principles; they certainly do not want to be strong so that they can ensure the safety of the innocent. They want to be strong so that they can look big and important on TV. And for that, they flew the generals in from around the world, at tremendous taxpayer expense, to force them to sit as a captive audience for a pair of speeches that sounded like poor imitations of an action movie monologue.But as Hodges suggested, the ostentatious idiocy of these men does not mean that the generals and admirals assembled will not follow their orders. These military leaders have received the signal that their troops are to become whiter and more male; they have received the instruction that their next missions will involve suppressing domestic dissent. They have a choice between following their orders and keeping their jobs, or following an abstract set of principles, and leaving them. Most of them will choose the former.The US military, for all its wreckage and violence it imposes abroad and for all the cruelty and exploitation of the poor that it inflicts at home, has one consistent virtue: it has always been under quite firm civilian control. Most of the time, that’s a good thing.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Once again, Netanyahu has outplayed Trump | Mohamad Bazzi

      by

      As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump claimed he would quickly end the war in Gaza. Eight months after taking office, Trump finally decided to exert some US pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, announcing a 20-point peace plan at the White House on Monday.But the deal that the US president struck with Netanyahu – after Trump dithered for months, allowing Israel to continue its genocidal war with US weapons and unwavering political support – is less a ceasefire proposal than an ultimatum for Hamas to surrender.After nearly two years of prolonging the war and obstructing ceasefire negotiations, Netanyahu got almost everything he wanted, thanks to Trump. The US plan calls on Hamas to lay down its weapons and release the Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza, but it allows Israeli troops to occupy parts of Gaza for the foreseeable future. It’s close to the “total victory” over Hamas that Netanyahu has consistently promised the Israeli public, but failed to deliver on the battlefield.What if Hamas rejects this deal that was drafted without its input, or that of any other Palestinian faction? Trump made clear he would enable Netanyahu to sow even more death and destruction in Gaza. “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas,” he said at the White House. On Tuesday, Trump added he would give Hamas officials “three or four days” to respond – and warned that the group would “pay in hell” if it turns down the agreement. In past negotiations, Hamas had rejected Israeli proposals that forced the group to disarm and pushed it out of any future role governing Gaza.Once again, Netanyahu has outplayed Trump, who considers himself a master deal-maker. But he’s been regularly outmaneuvered by strongmen like Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin.When Trump took office in January, he had the upper hand over the Israeli leader, having pushed Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza that went into effect a day before the president’s inauguration on 20 January. But Netanyahu, who worried that his rightwing government would collapse if he agreed to a permanent truce with Hamas, imposed a new siege on Gaza in early March. With Trump’s blessing, Israel deprived Palestinians of food, medicine and other necessities. Netanyahu then refused to continue negotiations with Hamas, and broke the ceasefire after two months.Thanks to his unwavering support of Netanyahu, Trump has made the US more deeply complicit in Israel’s war crimes. Since Netanyahu resumed the war in March, civilians made up about 15 of every 16 people that the Israeli military has killed in Gaza, according to the independent violence-tracking group Acled. Israel has also pursued a more severe starvation campaign and instigated a famine in northern Gaza. (In August, the Guardian reported that a classified database maintained by the Israeli military showed that 83% of Palestinians killed in Gaza, between the outbreak of war in October 2023 and May of this year, were civilians.)Along the way, Netanyahu has exploited Trump’s desire for flattery, allowing the Israeli premier to not to draw out the war on Gaza but also to conduct attacks on other countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Starting with billions of dollars in US weapons provided by Joe Biden’s administration and continuing under Trump, Israel has been able to bomb virtually anywhere in the region, with impunity. In June, Israel launched a surprise attack against Iran, killing dozens of top military officials and nuclear scientists. Netanyahu then convinced Trump to briefly join Israel’s war, when he ordered US planes to bomb three major nuclear facilities in Iran.Two weeks later, in early July, the Israeli premier showed up for dinner at the White House. Trump was eager to build on the momentum of a ceasefire he brokered between Iran and Israel, and was planning to cajole Netanyahu into making a deal with Hamas in Gaza. But Netanyahu avoided being publicly pressured by Trump to end the Gaza war, as Trump had done weeks earlier with the Iran ceasefire. Instead, Netanyahu stroked Trump’s ego by revealing that he had nominated the US president for the Nobel peace prize.Netanyahu managed to both flatter Trump and tap into his sense of grievance over being denied the world’s top peacemaking award. Trump has insisted for years that he deserves the Nobel prize for orchestrating a series of diplomatic agreements between Israel and several Arab countries during his first term. These so-called Abraham Accords were brokered in 2020 by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser at the time, and they included the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. But Trump couldn’t entice Saudi Arabia, the most important Arab state, and its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to reach a normalization deal with Israel.Like Trump’s current peace plan for Gaza, the Abraham Accords were negotiated directly with Israel and autocratic Arab regimes – and they excluded Palestinians from any discussion of their future or aspirations. These are deals conceived by real estate tycoons like Trump, Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who has served as Middle East envoy and one of Trump’s top diplomats in his second term. Trump and Kushner have always viewed Gaza through the prism of a real estate project, where Palestinians are holdouts refusing to cave into pressure to make way for the renovation of prime beachfront property along the Mediterranean Sea.In one of the few positive developments for Gazans, Trump dropped his widely-derided idea, which he floated during a meeting with Netanyahu in February, for the US to take over Gaza and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”, in effect endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.But on Monday, as Trump announced his latest plan, which would establish a temporary governing board for Gaza that he himself would chair, he couldn’t resist ad-libbing a digression about the perceived value of the territory’s waterfront. “As a real estate person, I mean, they gave up the ocean,” Trump said, referring to the Israeli government’s decision in 2005 to withdraw troops occupying Gaza, along with about 8,000 Israeli settlers. He added: “They gave up the ocean. I said: ‘Who would do this deal?’”In reality, even after its withdrawal, Israel maintained control over Gaza’s airspace, borders and shoreline. In 2007, after Hamas took military control of Gaza following its victory in Palestinian legislative elections, Israel imposed a blockade on the territory that continues until today. Israel gave up the beach, but it still controlled the sea.In the days leading up to Monday’s announcement at the White House, Kushner and Witkoff spent hours meeting with Netanyahu, who was able to make last-minute changes to Trump’s plan, including the scope and timing of Israeli troop withdrawals from Gaza. As he has for the past two years, the Israeli prime minister managed to impose his will on a US administration that should have far more leverage over him than the other way around. And that means Netanyahu may well doom Trump’s latest peace deal.

      Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University More