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      US sanctions major Russian oil companies and calls for Moscow to accept immediate Ukraine ceasefire – live

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      The Trump administration said on Wednesday it is “imposing further sanctions as a result of Russia’s lack of serious commitment to a peace process to end the war in Ukraine”.Donald Trump just shared the news by posting a press release from the US treasury, headlined “US treasury sanctions major Russian oil companies, calls on Moscow to immediately agree to ceasefire”, on his social media platform.According to the treasury, the new measures from the US office of foreign assets control (OFAC) “increase pressure on Russia’s energy sector and degrade the Kremlin’s ability to raise revenue for its war machine and support its weakened economy. The United States will continue to advocate for a peaceful resolution to the war, and a permanent peace depends entirely on Russia’s willingness to negotiate in good faith. Treasury will continue to use its authorities in support of a peace process.”“Now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate ceasefire,” the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said in a statement. “Given President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine. Treasury is prepared to take further action if necessary to support President Trump’s effort to end yet another war. We encourage our allies to join us in and adhere to these sanctions.”The treasury said the sanctions target Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.After imposing new sanctions on Russian oil firms he called “tremendous” Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he had canceled a planned meeting with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president in Budapest.“We cancelled the meeting with President Putin. It just, it didn’t feel right to me. It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get. So I cancelled it. But we’ll do it in the future,” Trump said, while sitting with Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, in the Oval Office.Asked by a reporter to comment on his treasury secretary’s statement that Putin had not been honest in his talks with Trump, the president said: “Well I think that, in terms of honesty, the only thing that I can say is, every time I speak with Vladimir, I have good conversations and then they don’t go anywhere, they just don’t go anywhere.”Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told Fox Business News, “President Putin has not come to the table in an honest and forthright manner, as we’d hoped. There were talks in Alaska, President Trump walked away when he realized that things were not moving forward.”“These are tremendous sanctions,” Trump also said. These are very big against their two big oil companies — and we hope that they won’t be on for long. We hope that the war will be settled.”Jeff Merkley, a Democratic senator from Oregon, just yielded the Senate floor after speaking for 22 hour and 37 minutes.Merkley said at the start of his speech that he was “holding the floor to protest Trump dragging us further into authoritarianism.”In particular, the Oregon senator said, he objected to the idea of letting Donald Trump claim, against all evidence, that he had the right to send military forces to Portland because the city a small protest constituted “an insurrection”.“Our founders did not want the president to be a king,” Merkley said. “A king can decide on a whim to deploy troops against his own people, presidents cannot.”The Trump administration said on Wednesday it is “imposing further sanctions as a result of Russia’s lack of serious commitment to a peace process to end the war in Ukraine”.Donald Trump just shared the news by posting a press release from the US treasury, headlined “US treasury sanctions major Russian oil companies, calls on Moscow to immediately agree to ceasefire”, on his social media platform.According to the treasury, the new measures from the US office of foreign assets control (OFAC) “increase pressure on Russia’s energy sector and degrade the Kremlin’s ability to raise revenue for its war machine and support its weakened economy. The United States will continue to advocate for a peaceful resolution to the war, and a permanent peace depends entirely on Russia’s willingness to negotiate in good faith. Treasury will continue to use its authorities in support of a peace process.”“Now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate ceasefire,” the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said in a statement. “Given President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine. Treasury is prepared to take further action if necessary to support President Trump’s effort to end yet another war. We encourage our allies to join us in and adhere to these sanctions.”The treasury said the sanctions target Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.A federal district court judge in Portland, Oregon, rejected the Trump administration’s request to immediately lift a temporary restraining order that blocks the deployment of national guard troops in the city.The judge, Karin Immergut, previously issued two orders blocking the deployment of national guard troops, after finding that Donald Trump’s claim that the city she lives in is “War ravaged” was “simply untethered to the facts”.Immergut’s first order, blocking the deployment of Oregon national guard troops, was reversed by a three-judge appeals court panel on Monday, but her second order, which bars the deployment of national guard troops from any state or the District of Columbia, remains in effect because the government appealed only her first order and not the second one.Immergut, who was nominated to the bench by Trump in his first term, issued the second order in response to Trump’s clear attempt to evade her first order by flying troops from California’s national guard to Oregon.Justice department lawyers asked Immergut to dissolve the second order based on the reasoning of the two appeals court judges who accepted Trump’s claim that a small protest against immigration raids in Portland, by dozens of protesters, required the deployment of the military.Instead, she scheduled a hearing for Friday morning in Portland. The judge’s orders to the lawyers for Trump and Oregon asks them to address the possible rehearing of the three-judge panel’s decision by a larger panel of the appeals court, which that court will consider on Thursday.A federal judge in Chicago on Wednesday agreed to extend her order blocking Donald Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to the Chicago area, possibly by 30 days.The district court judge, April Perry, said at a hearing that her order will extend until she decides the case, unless the US supreme court steps in to lift it, as the Trump administration has requested.In a filing on Tuesday, the solicitor general, John Sauer, one of Trump’s former personal defense attorneys, urged the supreme court to issue an emergency order lifting the temporary restraining order (TRO) that would let federalized guard troops be deployed.“Every day this improper TRO remains in effect imposes grievous and irreparable harm on the Executive,” Sauer wrote.The surprise demolition of the East Wing of the White House, to make room for Donald Trump’s vast ballroom, is not going down well with former staffers of the office of the first lady, which had been located in the East Wing for decades.“My heart is breaking for the evident loss of prestige for the first ladies and their staffs,” Penny Adams, who worked in the East Wing for former first lady Pat Nixon, told East Wing Magazine, a newsletter that covers first ladies present and past.“The photos were jarring when I first saw them,” Michael LaRosa, a press secretary for Jill Biden wrote in an email to the same newsletter. “Initially, they felt like a gut punch. It was also a bit eerie and sad to see some of the interior reduced to rubble.”Adams also said that some former Nixon staffers had tried, and failed, “to push back on this devastation”.One of Trump’s most cherished possessions is a 1987 letter from Richard Nixon, the disgraced former president, who passed on praise of the future president’s appearance on a daytime talkshow that year from the former first lady.“Dear Donald,” Nixon wrote. “I did not see the program, but Mrs Nixon told me you were great on the Donahue show.”“As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner!”As we prepare for the meeting between Nato secretary Mark Rutte and Donald Trump, a reminder of the context of these talks.This is a snap meeting, put together as progress between Ukraine and Russia has stalled. Recently, the White House said there were no immediate plans for the president to meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, despite Trump touting a second bilateral meeting in Budapest.The last time Rutte was in Washington was for a meeting with Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders in August.According to Nato officials, cited by multiple outlets, Rutte is hoping to discuss a 12-point peace plan with Trump. Drawn up by Europe and Ukraine, the plan calls for a ceasefire based on current battle lines, return of the deported children and a prisoner exchange.The White House did not respond to a question from the Guardian today about when demolition of the East Wing would be completed, as construction continues. An administration official did say that “the scope and size of the project has always been subject to vary and the process developed”. They added that the National Capital Planning Commission “does not require permits for demolition, only for vertical construction” and that “permits will be submitted to the NPC at the appropriate time”.The New York Times reported that the teardown should be completed by this weekend, according to an official speaking anonymously.Earlier, my colleague Lauren Aratani reported that the White House had yet to submit plans for Donald Trump’s new ballroom to the federal agency that oversees construction of federal buildings, though demolition is already under way.The treasury secretary Scott Bessent just gaggled with reporters outside the White House.He said that a “substantial pickup” in sanctions on Russia are coming soon. “We are going to announce either after the close this afternoon, or first thing tomorrow,” he said.As Jeff Merkley hits the 20th hour of his Senate floor speech, his Democratic colleagues in the upper chamber have praised his efforts, and joined him on the floor to ask questions and give him small breaks as he continues his marathon monologue.The senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, called it “incredible”, characterizing the speech as part of the “fight to protect American families from Trump’s reckless and corrupt administration”.Earlier, senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, said that it “says a lot” about the Trump administration that Merkley can spend hours “talking all the different ways Trump is hurting hardworking Americans and not run out of things to say”.Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey who currently holds the record for longest floor speech (coming in at over 25 hours), said Merkley was “demonstrating how Trump is moving us towards tyranny, instead of standing up for American ideals”.Donald Trump has urged US cattle farmers to “get their prices down” in order to encourage Americans to buy their beef.On Truth Social, the president said that ranchers throughout the country “don’t understand” that the only reason they are “doing so well” is because of Trump’s tariffs on several countries, “including a 50% Tariff on Brazil”.He added:
      If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years – Terrible! It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!
      Over the weekend, Trump told reporters he was considering importing beef from Argentina in order to lower prices for consumers.The revelation that a top federal prosecutor used an encrypted messaging application and had messages set to auto-delete after eight hours is “deeply troubling” and may be illegal, a watchdog group said.Lindsey Halligan, the interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, used Signal to communicate with Anna Bower, a journalist for Lawfare, about the criminal case she is pursuing against New York attorney general Letitia James. Bower published the full conversation Monday evening and said Halligan had set messages to auto-delete after eight hours.“The story about US attorney Lindsey Halligan’s use of Signal is deeply troubling. That she used the app apparently to discuss government business with a reporter and configured her messages to disappear after eight hours, raises serious concerns that she is actively violating the Federal Records Act and the justice department’s own records-retention rules,” said Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of American Oversight, a non-profit that frequently files lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain federal records.“Even if portions of the conversation might contain information not typically subject to immediate public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, federal law still requires that such records be preserved for specified periods. Setting such communications to automatically delete is not only inconsistent with those obligations but patently unlawful,” she said. “If Halligan failed to ensure these Signal messages were preserved, her actions may have violated federal law and warrant investigation or corrective action by attorney general Pam Bondi and acting archivist Marco Rubio.”The justice department did not return a request for comment.Federal law generally requires government employees to preserve official government records and sets penalties for destroying them.Per my last post, it’s worth underscoring that Platner has achieved significant momentum since he entered the race to challenge incumbent Republican senator Susan Collins.Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, launched her bid for Senate recently – making the schism between the old and new guard of the party abundantly clear.Meanwhile, Jordan Wood, another Maine Democratic candidate for Senate, said today that Platner’s Reddit comments are “disqualifying and not who we are as Mainers or as Democrats”.He added:
      With Donald Trump and his sycophants demonizing Americans, spewing hate, and running roughshod over the constitution, Democrats need to be able to condemn Trump’s actions with moral clarity. Graham Platner no longer can. More

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      Democratic senator’s anti-Trump floor speech ends after nearly 23 hours

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      Oregon’s Jeff Merkley gave a marathon, nearly 23-hour speech on the Senate floor that began on Tuesday and ended late Wednesday, pressing the case that Donald Trump is acting as an authoritarian by prosecuting political enemies and deploying the military into Merkley’s home town of Portland.The 68-year-old senator began speaking around 6.20pm on Tuesday evening and continued until just after 5pm on Wednesday. Standing continuously on the Senate floor alongside placards that read “authoritarianism is here now!” and “Trump is violating the law”, Merkley paused only to take questions from fellow Democratic senators who joined him in the chamber to make their own points about the president’s conduct.“I’ve come to the Senate floor tonight to ring the alarm bells. We’re in the most perilous moment, the biggest threat to our republic since the civil war. President Trump is shredding our constitution,” Merkley said as he began his speech.He repeated those words as he finished speaking just before sunset the following day, and thanked the No Kings protesters who had filled the streets of American cities in anti-Trump demonstrations the prior weekend.“They were ringing the alarm bells. They were saying that it is absolutely unacceptable to have an authoritarian government,” Merkley said.The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said the Oregonian delivered an “amazing tour de force over these many hours. Jeff Merkley has been the Paul Revere of 21st-century America, literally, figuratively, riding from one corner of this country to the other, alerting people to the danger.”Republican whip John Barrasso followed him up by saying Merkley’s speech was “what I can only describe as rubbish” and noting it did nothing to resolve the deadlock over government funding that has forced a shutdown.Merkley spoke a day after a federal appeals court had allowed the president to send the national guard into Portland over the objections of local leaders, who say there is no merit to the president’s claim that the city is a “war zone”. Trump has also ordered a similar deployment of troops into Chicago, where federal agents are carrying out an aggressive crackdown targeting people they believe to be undocumented immigrants. The supreme court is poised to consider a legal challenge to that move.The senator touched on those deployments to cities that are overwhelmingly Democratic, as well as other instances where the president is seen as retaliating against his political enemies, including the charges a handpicked US attorney has filed against the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, and former FBI director James Comey.“Equal justice under law – that’s the vision here in America. Not unequal injustice, which is what the president is pursuing by taking the power of the government and going after individuals that he does not like or perceives to be political opponents,” Merkley said.“That’s what you read about in authoritarian governments far away, and you go, that would never happen in the United States of America, but it is happening right here, right now.”Merkley’s address is the second instance this year in which a Democratic senator has staged a lengthy floor speech to condemn Trump’s policies. About two months after Trump’s inauguration, Cory Booker of New Jersey spoke for 25 hours and five minutes, setting a new record for the longest speech ever by a solo senator.On Wednesday morning, the Oregon senator stood speaking from a lectern where he had placed a small glass of water and a copy of How Democracies Die, a 2018 book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt detailing how representative governments around the world have been dismantled.Among those who joined him on the floor was Booker, who said: “We are seeing a time now that if we do not ring the alarm bells, more and more Americans will be hurt by a president who is acting more like an authoritarian leader than a democratically elected executive.”Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal likened Trump’s partial demolition of the White House East Wing to layoffs and funding cuts he has ordered across the government.“This destruction that Donald Trump is doing to the White House is emblematic of the wrecking ball he is taking to our democracy. Put aside the waste of money that could be used to improve our education system, solve food insecurity, guarantee the election integrity of this nation – the damage that he’s doing to this iconic symbol of America is so costly to our image and esteem around the world,” Blumenthal said.Ron Wyden, Oregon’s senior senator, said in an interview that his counterpart was “making some particularly, relevant and important points about the threat”.Asked if other Senate Democrats were planning such lengthy speeches, Wyden said: “You take them one at a time, but I think what Senator Merkley is doing is very important.”The speech comes on the 22nd day of the government shutdown that began at the start of the month, when Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on legislation to extend funding beyond the end of September.The Senate has held 11 unsuccessful votes on a Republican-backed bill to extend funding through 21 November, which Democrats have blocked because it does not including healthcare funding that they are demanding, as well as curbs on Trump’s use of rescissions to slash funding approved by Congress.After Merkley finished his speech, the Senate’s Republican leaders moved to hold a 12th vote on the funding bill. 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      Big? Beautiful? Donald Trump is literally ripping apart the home of US democracy. Is anyone really surprised? | Emma Brockes

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      Occasionally, life gives you scenarios that are so on the money it’s impossible to do anything with them. Boris Johnson getting stuck halfway down a zip wire while waving two union flags, for instance; or Liz Truss getting lost while attempting to leave a room – two images that are so embarrassingly on point it is almost difficult to enjoy them. An audience likes to feel it has done a bit of work before arriving at a punch line, which is why, on Monday, when demolition crews moved into the White House to knock down part of the East Wing at the behest of Donald Trump, it felt once again like we were living in post-satirical times.As far as we can tell from the photos, Trump didn’t actually send in a wrecking ball – although his administration did sharply reprimand government employees working in a neighbouring Treasury building for posting visuals of the demolition online, so at this point who knows? There were, however, diggers, torn-down walls and an awful lot of dust. This was the first stage of a project Trump has advertised as the addition to the White House of a 90,000 sq ft (8,300 sq metres) ballroom, at an estimated cost of $250m (£187m) and a capacity, according to Trump, of “999 people”. And while, granted, it’s not a branch of McDonald’s – one thing about Trump’s range is that, however bad things are, they could always have been worse – architectural and heritage institutes have been expressing concern.Presidents, of course, like to leave their mark on the nation’s furnishings as on its finances. The Obamas planted a kitchen garden at the White House, put in a basketball court and tweaked the lighting, apparently so it was bright enough for their daughters to do their homework. Joe Biden had less time to renovate, but did swap out Trump’s gold drapes in the Oval Office for some sober Clinton-era curtains and a new rug.Trump, meanwhile, paved over the Rose Garden, decked out the Oval Office in gold, and now appears to be wholesale demolishing the East Wing’s 1942 facade to build a giant event space – and you have to wonder if the state banquet he enjoyed at Windsor Castle last month has been a spur to get construction under way. As for what the new space might look like, we must assume that Clark Construction and McCrery Architects, the design and building entities involved, will be led by Trump’s general aesthetic and find a happy medium between the Grand Ballroom at Mar-a-Lago and Saddam Hussein’s palace.Well, you can imagine, there’s been some carping online. The Society of Architectural Historians released a statement expressing “great concern” over the proposed ballroom. The American Institute of Architects put out a stiff note reminding the president that “the historic edifice at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the People’s House, a national treasure and an enduring symbol of our democracy”. And more importantly, that “any modifications to it – especially modifications of this magnitude – should reflect the importance, scale and symbolic weight of the White House itself”. This was, perhaps, a discreet way of pointing out that, given you can barely put up a shelf in a major city on the eastern seaboard without having to get a permit, the DC Department of Buildings might care to look into things.In her commentary online, Hillary Clinton was more direct: “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.” For many Americans, the demolition photos were soul-shuddering in a way that has no direct equivalence in the UK. I suppose if they changed the door numbers in Downing Street a lot of people might be upset and disturbed. But the building at No 10, and the living quarters in particular – which for a long time looked like one of those rental ads that go viral for demanding £2,000 a month for a flat in east London that is smaller than the inside of a canal boat – have never been as iconic or emotionally charged as their US counterparts.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, dismissed all the chatter as “fake outrage”, while the president himself posted online, “For more than 150 years, every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, State Visits, etc.” As with everything Trump says, it’s the “etc” in this sentence that should cause the most worry. The ballroom will be funded via private donations, setting up yet another race to curry favour with the president. And, as an event space, it will run in competition with the Trump International Hotel, offering the possibility of a very Trumpian future use for the building: the White House as venue for corporate retreat.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
      skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      RFK Jr railed against ultra-processed foods. Trump’s policies encourage their production

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      As health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr has repeatedly blamed industrially manufactured food products for the country’s chronic illness and obesity crises, and urged Americans to limit their consumption of foods with added sugar, salt, fat, dyes and preservatives.Amid a slew of controversial and unbacked public health claims, his stance on ultra-processed foods is one of his least polarizing. More than 65% of Americans say they are in favor of reforming processed foods to remove added sugars and added dyes, according to a January Associated Press and National Opinion Research Center poll.Yet while RFK Jr touts the importance of eliminating ultra-processed foods from the US diet, nutrition experts say several of the Trump administration policies, including massive subsidies to corn and soy farms, undermine that goal.“Maha leadership is really failing on their promise to fight chronic disease, and they’re betraying the members of the public who put their trust in them to address this very real problem that Americans are really concerned about,” said Aviva Musicus, an assistant professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.In September, Kennedy’s health and human services department released the “Make America Healthy Again” strategy report, billing it as a roadmap to improve children’s health. The report named highly processed foods as a leading driver behind the rising rates of chronic disease in children and outlined more than 120 recommendations, including educational campaigns to promote new, forthcoming dietary guidelines; advancing policies to restrict food dye additives; and potential revisions to nutrition information rule-making.The report has been criticized by nutrition and public health experts, however, for its focus on voluntary action over meaningful regulation of food and chemical companies. It suggests tracking Americans’ exposure to chemicals and pesticides, but does not impose any limitations on pesticide use, for example. Despite poor diet being named as a harm to children’s health, it does not suggest regulating the majority of additives in ultra-processed foods (UPFs).It instead proposes developing a government-wide definition to “support potential future research and policy activity”. The plan also recommends the exploration of “potential industry guidelines”, to limit the marketing of unhealthy food to children. Some advocates say that the report’s goals clash with the Trump administration’s cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), Medicaid and scientific funding, all of which are essential to public health.“When it comes to food, Maha doesn’t seem particularly interested in regulation, despite talking about the need to protect consumers from industry influence and the harms the industry is creating,” Musicus said.A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote in a statement to the Guardian: “The MAHA Strategy is a comprehensive plan with more than 120 initiatives designed to reverse the failed policies that have fueled America’s childhood chronic disease epidemic. It represents the most ambitious reform agenda in modern history – realigning our food and health systems, transforming education, and unleashing science to safeguard America’s children and families.”She added: “HHS is committed to serving the American people, not special interests, by delivering radical transparency and upholding gold-standard science.”Ultra-processed foods are industrially altered food products that include processed additives to improve taste, convenience and shelf life. Making up as much as 73% of the US food supply, UPFs have been linked to a number of health risks including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, digestive and microbiome issues, and adverse mental health.Many of the additives in UPFs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, corn starch, dextrose, soy lecithin and maltodextrin, are derivatives of corn and soy, two commodity crops that receive millions in agricultural subsidies. Trump’s reconciliation bill, signed into law in July, increases spending on these subsidies by $52bn over the next 10 years, according to an analysis by the Environmental Working Group. (Subsidy payments increased even as programs like Snap, which in 2024 provided food and nutrition assistance to 41 million Americans, faced significant cuts.)Subsidies for corn and soy “have definitely contributed”, to the proliferation of UPFs, said Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. The consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, for example, increased 1,000% between 1970 and 1990.“Our farm policy is designed for farmers to overproduce corn and soy, and encourage them to do that,” Lilliston said. Decades of huge subsidies for commodity crops led to an excess amount of corn and soy, which eventually were used to produce the additives in ultra-processed foods like corn syrup and soy lecithin, he added.“It’s hard to find a processed food, if you look at the ingredients, that doesn’t have corn and soy in there. It’s incredibly cheap – below the cost of production – there’s so much of it, and there’s access to so much of it,” Lilliston said. Today, ultra-processed foods make up more than half of the calories in the American diet, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Soy and corn – most of which is converted to animal feed, ethanol fuel, and byproducts used in UPFs – make up more than half of the country’s cropland. The farms that grow fruits and vegetables (known as specialty crops), are typically smaller and are not eligible for the majority of subsidies. But, these “are the types of farms that will be providing healthy foods, fruits, and vegetables on plates across the US”, said Jared Hayes, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Working Group.Before joining Trump’s cabinet, RFK Jr himself blamed agricultural subsidies for America’s addiction to ultra-processed foods. In a 2024 interview, RFK Jr said the US obesity epidemic was being driven by food “poisoned” by “heavily subsidized” commodity crop derivatives. In a 2024 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy listed several steps Trump could take to “Make America Healthy Again,” and among them was reforming crop subsidies.“They make corn, soybeans and wheat artificially cheap, so those crops end up in many processed forms,” he wrote, adding: “Our subsidy program is so backward that less than 2% of farm subsidies go to fruits and vegetables.”The first Maha assessment report, released in May, blamed the food manufacturing industry for rising rates of chronic illness. After its publication, more than 250 food and agriculture groups, including the American Soybean Association and the National Corn Growers Association signed a letter claiming it included “erroneous representations” about food and agriculture and called for “formal inclusion of food and agriculture representatives in the commission’s processes moving forward”.But in the follow-up report, there was little mention of the food industry’s role in children’s health, nor were there suggested pathways to regulate what ingredients companies put in their products. While ultra-processed foods were mentioned 40 times in the initial report, the second, strategy report mentioned the term just twice.“Kennedy has framed himself as an anti-corporate hero, while at the same time utilized the age-old tactic of becoming buddies with the very industries that he purports he wants to change or regulate,” said Rebecca Wolf, the food policy lead at Food and Water Watch.“There’s anti-corporate rhetoric, but at the same time an inability and an unwillingness to actually take on corporate power,” Wolf said. “We’ve just [been] keeping a really close eye on the difference between narrative and policy, and what I’ve seen right now are policies that will not protect people, but in fact, further threaten their health.”To truly build a healthier US diet, Musicus says the Trump administration, in addition to regulating UPFs, should not be cutting the very programs that make nutritious food and healthcare more accessible to low-income families and individuals.“We’ve seen the federal government cut Snap benefits, write off millions of Americans from their health insurance coverage, slashed programs to help farmers bring local foods into schools, eviscerate government funding for research on nutrition and health and threaten access to life-saving vaccines,” Musicus said, adding that RFK Jr had simultaneously failed to impose meaningful regulation on the food industry.“As a result, the net public health impact of this administration has been negative, despite the fact that they’re constantly talking about improving Americans’ health,” she said. 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      Albanese has worked out a way to deal with Trump – even if there are areas where they don’t see eye to eye

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      Outside the White House cabinet room hangs a painting of Donald Trump flanked by Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, in front of a billowing American flag.The fan-fiction rendition of three Republican leaders, proudly displayed on a main thoroughfare amid a gallery of other photographs and portraits of Trump, is far from the oddest thing in the home and office of the 47th president. The White House is a homage to gilding and gold, crown moulding daubed in glittering paint, with knick-knacks gaudy and glistening stuffed on to his shelves, a Diet Coke button on his desk, and a new ballroom requiring the partial tear-down of the historic East Wing.But the painting, spied on the way into Trump’s press conference with Anthony Albanese on Monday, is a good place to start in considering just how much of a political odd couple the two men are – and why, from the outside at least, their remarkably warm first formal sit-down surprised nearly everyone.Nearly everyone, except the prime minister himself.Trump, the brash and unflinching authoritarian conservative launching assaults on the judiciary and political opponents to steamroll his agenda, who hangs portraits comparing himself to arguably America’s greatest president who freed the slaves and won the civil war. Albanese, a leftwing warrior turned cautious team captain, who has made a virtue of “orderly government” and knocked more ambitious policies on the head out of pragmatism.Sign up: AU Breaking News emailWalking from the Brady press briefing room, shuffling through poky corridors toward the cabinet room, there was a sense among the media pack that we could be in for – if not a Zelenskyy-style browbeating – at least a disagreement or two. Turning a corner, as if to bluntly contrast the two men, the corridor suddenly filled with wall-to-wall images of Trump.Trump striding a red carpet in front of Air Force One, Trump brandishing an agreement signed with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump flashing a thumbs up with Palestinian Authority chair Mahmoud Abbas, with giant meme text reading “PEACE 2025” superimposed along the bottom. Right outside the cabinet room, as if to bludgeon your head in with symbolism, a giant oil painting of Trump standing stoically in front of a half-dozen American flags. About 20 paintings and photos, each pumping up Trump’s tyres more than the last, leave visitors in no doubt about whose White House we’re in.On tables in the anteroom, White House attendants buzzed around preparing for the official lunch to come, plastic bottles of Diet Coke sitting in plastic buckets of ice next to silver platters of crystal ware.But inside the room, the two men sat side-by-side as partners. Nestled between military flags and nearly needing to shield their eyes from Trump’s gleaming trappings of office, the leaders shared a minerals deal, shared black Texta pens, shared a laugh at Kevin Rudd, then shared a meal.Albanese famously once said in 2017 that Trump “scares the shit out of me”. It would have been hard for the then shadow minister to imagine he would be sitting in Trump’s White House eight years later, swapping jokes and gifts – let alone to imagine himself praising the Republican president a day after millions rallied across America for the No Kings protests against Trump’s policies, including troubling immigration raids, sending military into Democratic-governed cities, and crackdowns on free speech.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPosters advertising the rally and critical of Trump still hung in streets around the White House the day of Albanese’s arrival. Families and tour groups milled awkwardly on the outskirts of the White House and Capitol building, not allowed in due to the continuing government shutdown as Trump’s Republicans remain in a stalemate with Democrats over budget funding.Albanese later described his first proper meeting with “very warm” Trump as a major success, the president taking him on a tour of the White House and Oval Office. Albanese and his team had been confident it would go well, the US-Australia relationship – forged in history and the heat of battle – being bigger than the people occupying each nation’s government benches.The extraordinary warmness shown by Trump was held up as vindication of the prime minister’s foreign policy acumen, and the nerve he had shown in not bending to opposition demands to beg and scrape for a meeting earlier. Sussan Ley walked back her only criticisms of the meeting less than 24 hours after making them, in the face of ridicule for her overreach.But relief and victory were written across the faces of the PM and his people on Tuesday, realising they had not only escaped the White House without tripping up, but indeed in triumph.As they fly home on Wednesday, perhaps they’ll be thinking of their wins: Aukus backed in the strongest terms (albeit with mysterious “ambiguities” the US wants to iron out, and which Albanese refused to talk about). A multi-billion minerals deal. Zero blowback from any number of policy areas, from defence to the Middle East, where the two nations have disagreed.Inevitable criticism from the ALP’s left flank came quickly, with former Labor senator Doug Cameron calling Albanese’s conduct a “capitulation”. Albanese’s joking quip that he would use Trump’s warm words about him in future election ads will be played again and again by progressive critics unhappy about Labor further tying Australia to the US administration.In 2017, adding to his “scared” remarks, Albanese said: “We have an alliance with the US, we’ve got to deal with him, but that doesn’t mean that you’re uncritical about it.”At the time, Albanese was a shadow minister. Now as prime minister, he has seemingly worked out a way to deal with Trump – even if they’re unlikely to swap interior design tips anytime soon. More

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      Trump news at a glance: Rare Republican pushback forces Trump nominee to lead whistleblower office to drop out

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      Donald Trump’s nominee to lead a federal watchdog agency, Paul Ingrassia, withdrew on Tuesday following a report that Ingrassia described himself as having a “Nazi streak.”Ingrassia said in a social media post that he was pulling out of a scheduled Thursday hearing before a Senate panel that was set to consider his nomination because “I do not have enough Republican votes at this time.”The post came after Senate majority leader John Thune on Monday called for the White House to pull the nomination. Thune’s remarks marked a rare sign of opposition in a Republican-controlled Senate that has shown little interest in challenging Trump’s nominees and his agenda.Trump nominee to lead whistleblower office drops out after racist texts surfaceIngrassia, currently a White House liaison at the Department of Homeland Security, was the subject of a report on Monday published in Politico. The report featured text messages where he allegedly described himself as having “a Nazi streak” and suggested Martin Luther King Jr Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell”.Read the full storyPlans for Trump-Putin talks in Budapest shelvedPlans to hold a summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Budapest have been put on hold as Ukraine and its European allies rallied in pushing for a ceasefire without territorial concessions from Kyiv.The White House said there were now “no plans” for the US president to meet his Russian counterpart “in the immediate future” as a round of diplomacy at the end of last week failed to yield any significant progress towards ending the war.Read the full storyVance expresses ‘great optimism’ over Gaza ceasefire deal Vice-president JD Vance traveled to Israel as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to strengthen the ceasefire agreement in Gaza. Vance expressed “great optimism” over the Gaza truce plan which he described as “going better than expected”, two days after Israeli airstrikes killed 26 Palestinians.Read the full storyArizona sues Mike Johnson over refusal to swear in DemocratArizona’s attorney general is suing House speaker Mike Johnson over his refusal to swear in Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat who won a congressional special election in September. Grijalva has said she believes Johnson is holding off on swearing her in because she wants to release the Epstein files.Read the full storyJohnson says he won’t block Epstein files House voteRepublican House speaker Mike Johnson said he would not prevent a vote on legislation to make the Jeffrey Epstein files public – even as the chamber remained out of session for a fourth straight week. Johnson has kept the House of Representatives in recess ever since the shutdown began at the start of the month, after Democrats and Republicans failed to reach an agreement on extending government funding beyond the end of September.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      North Carolina Republicans passed a new congressional map with the intent of contributing more Republicans to the US Congress as the national redistricting battlefield widens.

      A man who was pardoned by Trump for his conviction in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol has been arrested for allegedly threatening to kill the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 20 October 2025. More

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      Top Senate Republican casts further doubt on Trump special counsel pick after ‘Nazi streak’ comments – live

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      Addressing reporters after lunch in the Rose Garden, Senate majority leader John Thune took a question about the White House’s updated stance on Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which now remains in question after Politico reported text messages in which Ingrassia allegedly described himself as having “a Nazi streak” and suggested Martin Luther King Jr Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell”.“They’ll have something official to say about that. But you know what we’ve said,” Thune said, after he told reporters on Monday that Ingrassia’s nomination is “not going to pass”.During the White House celebration of Diwali, Donald Trump repeated a disputed claim that he brokered a ceasefire this year between India and Pakistan by threatening to impose tariffs if the conflict continued.“Let me also extend our warmest wishes to the people of India. I just spoke to your prime minister today. We had a great conversation. We talk about trade, we talk about a lot of things, but mostly the world of trade, he’s very interested in that,” Trump said.“Although we did talk a little while ago about, ‘let’s have no wars with Pakistan,’ and I think the fact that trade was involved, I was able to talk him out of that,” Trump added.Trump’s claim that he brokered the India-Pakistan ceasefire in May reportedly infuriated the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, who insists that it was settled directly between the two nations, and caused a rift between Trump and Modi.The fact that Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, gave Trump credit and nominated the US president for the Nobel Peace Prize, is unlikely to have improved relations between Modi and Trump.In his remarks, Trump repeatedly suggested that he had used tariffs to bring peace around the globe, perhaps previewing the case his administration will make next month at the supreme court when it asks the court to overturn lower court rulings that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal.Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, at a celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, Donald Trump was asked about a report that he is demanding hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the thwarted legal cases against him after his first term.While Trump initially suggested that he was unaware of the report, he said, “I guess they probably owe me a lot of money for that.”He added that he would donate any money paid to him by the government to charity or to pay for public works, like the construction of a massive ballroom at the White House.“We have numerous cases, having to do with the fraud of the election, the 2020 election” Trump added. “Because of everything we found out, I guess they owe me a lot of money.”He then suggested that both Kash Patel, the FBI director, and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, “are working on” investigations of the 2020 election he falsely claims was stolen from him.“What they did, they rigged the election,” Trump said later, suggesting that the compensation he expects is not simply to pay his legal fees but a sort of compensation for not being named the winner of the 2020 election he lost.Graham Platner, the Maine oysterman and former US marine campaigning to be the Democrat’s candidate in next year’s US Senate race, “has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest” and “knows damn well what it means,” according to one of his close aides who resigned last week.Platner tried to get ahead of the revelation that he has a skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest known as Totenkopf, a symbol used by the Nazi SS, by releasing video of himself shirtless to Pod Save America, and offering an explanation to the podcast run by former Obama communications staffers.In the interview, Platner claimed that he was unaware of the Nazi link when he got the tattoo while on leave in the Croatian city of Split during his time in the marines.Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, disputed that in a Facebook post shared by Alex Seitz-Wald, the editor of Maine’s Midcoast Villager newspaper.“Graham has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest,” McDonald wrote. “He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff. Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”“His campaign released it themselves to some podcast bros,” she added, “along with a video of him shirtless and drunk at a wedding to try to get ahead of it.”Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, told Igor Bobic of HuffPost on Tuesday that he continues to support Platner. “There’s a young man who served his country in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he went through some really difficult experiences seeing friends of his killed or whatever, and in spite of all of that he had the courage to run”, Sanders said.“I personally think he is an excellent candidate. I’m going to support him, and I look forward to him becoming the next senator in the state of Maine”, he added.Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill today, House speaker Mike Johnson said a vote to release the full tranche of Epstein files will hit the House floor, after representative-elect Adelita Grijalva is sworn in.Grijalva will be the 218th signature needed on a discharge petition that would force a vote in the House. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have accused Johnson of delaying the formal swearing in of the Arizona representative and staving off a vote.“If you get the signatures, it goes to a vote,” Johnson said today. However, at a press conference earlier he said the bipartisan effort would be redundant as the House oversight committee continues its investigation into the handling of the Epstein case.Democratic congressman Ro Khanna said that Johnson saying he would not block the vote is ultimately “a big deal”.“I appreciate Speaker Johnson making it clear we will get a vote on Rep. Thomas Massie and my bill to release the Epstein files. The advocacy of the survivors is working. Now let’s get Adelita Grijalva sworn in and Congress back to work,” Khanna added in a statement.In his gaggle, Thune noted that the next vote in the Senate, on the House-passed stopgap funding bill to reopen the government, will take place tomorrow. He said he’s confident that he’ll get enough Democrats on board to cross the 60-vote threshold.Addressing reporters after lunch in the Rose Garden, Senate majority leader John Thune took a question about the White House’s updated stance on Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which now remains in question after Politico reported text messages in which Ingrassia allegedly described himself as having “a Nazi streak” and suggested Martin Luther King Jr Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell”.“They’ll have something official to say about that. But you know what we’ve said,” Thune said, after he told reporters on Monday that Ingrassia’s nomination is “not going to pass”.The New York Times reports that the president is demanding the justice department pay him about $230m in compensation for the federal investigations into him. They cite anonymous sources familiar with the matter.The sources tell the Times that Trump is seeking damages for “a number of purported violations of his rights”, including the FBI and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign.They add that the president has made these complaints through and administrative claims process, that have yet to be made public. Another complaint allegedly says that the FBI violated Trump’s rights when his Mar-a-Lago estate was searched in 2022 for classified documents.The report has raised significant concerns from legal experts about the ethics of these unprecedented demands – which would essentially require a department, that the president now oversees, to pay him out for their work investigating him.Attorneys for Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and legal US resident who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) following his pro-Palestinian activism, have filed appeals to prevent the Trump administration from detaining him again.Lawyers representing Khalil argued to the federal third circuit court of appeals in Philadelphia that his release from Ice detention by a lower court should be affirmed and that the US government should be barred from detaining or deporting Khalil in the future.“The Trump administration is still trying to bring me back to detention and block the federal court in New Jersey from reviewing my case, the same court that ordered my release and ruled that their actions against me were unlawful,” said Khalil of his case in a press release. “Their intention couldn’t be more clear: they want to make an example of me to intimidate those speaking out for Palestine across the country.”Khalil was released from Ice detention in June after spending more than 100 days in the LaSalle detention center, an immigration jail in Jena, Louisiana. Michael E Farbiarz, a US district judge in New Jersey, ordered Khalil’s release and blocked the Trump administration from deporting him for foreign policy reasons.But in September, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Khalil should be deported to Syria or Algeria for not reporting certain information on his green card application.The ruling from the judge, Jamee Comans, came amid a previous order from Farbiarz which bars Khalil’s deportation as the federal case proceeds in New Jersey. Khalil’s lawyers said they planned to appeal the latest deportation order and that Farbiarz’s mandates prevent Khalil’s removal.A group consisting of several hundred former US national security officials have issued a letter to Congress, urging its leaders to examine the existence of an “Interagency Weaponization Working Group.”The Steady State, a group of over former officials committed to their oath to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” wrote the letter Tuesday in response to reports of the IWWG, which is “apparently tasked with pursuing retributive actions against individuals perceived as political opponents of the president.”Citing a recent Reuters investigation, the letter said:
      If accurate, these reports describe a profound and dangerous subversion of the apolitical foundation of the Intelligence Community… The activities described in the Reuters report echo the worst examples of intelligence politicization and misuse of ‘security services’ in our history, and would represent a direct violation of the statutory and ethical boundaries designed to separate intelligence functions from domestic political operations.
      The letter went on to call leaders from the Senate and House intelligence, judiciary and armed services committees to:
      1. Hold immediate closed hearings with the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, and relevant agency heads to determine the existence, authority, and scope of any such interagency group;2. Request all documents, communications, and membership lists related to the IWWG and similar “weaponization” initiatives, including taskings and technical-collection authorizations;3. Assess potential violations of the National Security Act, Executive Order 12333, and statutory prohibitions on domestic intelligence activities; and4. Affirm publicly—in a bipartisan statement—that the Intelligence Community must never be employed for political or personal retribution.
      It is nearly 2pm ET in Washington DC. Here’s a look at where things currently stand across US politics:

      There are no plans for Donald Trump to meet with Vladmir Putin “in the immediate future”, a White House official told the Guardian. The official added that the recent call between secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was “productive”, and therefore an additional-in-person meeting between the envoys is “not necessary”.

      Hosting several Republican lawmakers at the White House for lunch, Trump spent most of his opening remarks heralding the success of his sweeping tariffs. “We’re a wealthy nation again, and we’re a nation that can be secure. We’re a nation that can start paying down our debt, and with tariffs, we’re the wealthiest nation ever in the history of the world,” he said.

      Earlier today, Trump said on Truth Social that several Middle East allies told him they would “welcome the opportunity” at Trump’s request to go into Gaza “with a heavy force” and “straighten our Hamas” if they “continue to behave badly”. This comes after the 11-day ceasefire in Gaza was seriously undermined on Sunday when Israel launched waves of deadly airstrikes and said it would cut off aid into the territory “until further notice” after a reported attack by Hamas, which the militant group denied being involved in.

      Meanwhile, JD Vance, who is currently on a visit to Israel, said that he would not “put an explicit deadline” on Hamas to comply with the key points of the Gaze ceasefire deal. “If Hamas doesn’t comply with the deal, very bad things are going to happen,” Vance said, reiterating Donald Trump’s threats earlier today on social media.

      New York state police announced recently that a pardoned rioter at the January 6 insurrection was arrested last weekend for allegedly threatening to kill Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader. House Republican speaker Mike Johnson noted that “anybody who threatens political violence against elected officials or anyone else should be have the full weight and measure of the Department of Justice on their head.”

      Johnson also said that lawmakers on the House oversight committee are “working around the clock” to ensure “maximum transparency” in the ongoing investigation into the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. He added that the committee’s work is “already accomplishing” what the bipartisan discharge petition, which would force a vote on the House floor to release the full tranche of Epstein records, seeks to do achieve.

      Some Republican senators have said they don’t support Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel, ahead of his confirmation hearing on Thursday. Politico reported on Monday that Ingrassia told other Republicans he “has a Nazi streak” and said holidays commemorating Black people should be “eviscerated”, in a private group chat.

      The CIA is providing the bulk of the intelligence used to carry out the controversial lethal air strikes by the Trump administration against boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs from Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the operations. Experts say the agency’s central role means much of the evidence used to select which alleged smugglers to kill on the open sea will almost certainly remain secret.
      The Senate’s top Republican, John Thune, closed out the lunch in the Rose Garden by urging his colleagues across the aisle to “get wise” and “vote to reopen the government”.“Everybody here has voted now 11 different times to open up the government, and we are going to keep voting to open up the government, and eventually, the Democrats, hopefully, sooner or later, are going to come around,” Thune said.Trump is running through what he sees are the greatest hits of his first nine months back at the White House. “We don’t need to pass any more bills. We got everything in that bill,” the president said, referring to his sweeping domestic policy agenda that he signed into law in July.Here are a few pictures of some of the senators and officials in the Rose Garden today. More

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      Trump is threatening Venezuela. But his own country looks a lot like it | Daniel Mendiola

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      Here in the Americas, we have a peculiar tradition. Every time there is a major election, prominent figures on the right find themselves compelled to repeat some version of the vaguely menacing prediction: if the candidate for the left wins, we will become “the next Venezuela”.Whether Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia or Ecuador, countries throughout the western hemisphere keep this tradition. Donald Trump has also participated in this ritual, proclaiming during the 2024 election cycle that if Kamala Harris won, our country would become “Venezuela on steroids”.Oddly spoken with disdain.Harris, of course, lost the election, so we will never know how Venezuela-esque her version of the US might have been. But we are seeing Trump’s America, and the reality is: it’s looking a lot like Venezuela.Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez – a charismatic yet polarizing leftwing figure – political discourses have shrouded Venezuela in conflicting layers of partisan caricature, often making it difficult to parse what is actually happening. At this point, however, there is no doubt that the country is in crisis.Migration statistics alone provide compelling evidence. Amnesty International and the UN refugee agency estimate that nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014 – as much as 25% of the population. Hyperinflation and food shortages have driven this exodus, compounded by authoritarianism and increasing repression under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, who has held on to power since 2013 through elections with overwhelming evidence of fraud.Significantly, the US has hardly been an innocent bystander. Not only have we frequently doled out reprehensible treatment to Venezuelan asylum seekers, but we have also played a role in creating the conditions that are forcing people to migrate in the first place. The US has maintained a belligerent stance toward Venezuela for more than two decades – for example, supporting a short-lived coup to overthrow Chávez in 2002, as well as hitting the country with sanctions – and the Trump administration has recently escalated the conflict by ordering a series of deadly strikes on civilian boats suspected of smuggling drugs off the Venezuelan the coast. Reports also indicate that Trump is considering an intervention to depose Maduro, and the CIA may already be carrying out covert operations in the country.Journalists and legal analysts have done excellent work explaining how these strikes are illegal according to US and international law, in addition to being murderously cruel. There has also been great coverage of how the demonization of Venezuelan immigrants – including a steady stream of propaganda painting Venezuelan immigrants as gang members and terrorists – has long been a centerpiece of Trump’s platform.These actions are disgraceful on their own terms. But they are also bitterly ironic: even while terrorizing Venezuelans in the name of defending democracy, Trump has, in fact, been running a strikingly similar authoritarian playbook. Noteworthy parallels include dismantling constitutional limits on presidential authority, manipulating electoral districts to inflate his party’s representation in Congress, and using state power to repress political opponents.In Venezuela’s case, the story begins with a fraught referendum. Immediately upon taking office in 1999, Chávez decreed a new executive power: the ability to call for a referendum on writing a new constitution. The legality of the claim was dubious given that the Venezuelan legal system already had mechanisms for updating the constitution, and a simple majority popular vote was not one of them. Nonetheless, the Venezuelan supreme court relented, and when the referendum passed, Chávez asserted a heavy hand in creating the process for how a constitutional assembly would work. Moreover, he unilaterally gave this assembly outsized powers to govern, suspending Congress and the supreme court in the meantime. Unsurprisingly, the resulting constitution of 1999 expanded executive authority considerably, and the entire process established a precedent to continue using these largely hand-picked constitutional assemblies to overrule congress whenever the opposition gained ground.While there are, likewise, calls for a constitutional convention coming from Trump allies that could function in a similar way, this hasn’t actually been necessary in the US. Rather, the conservative supermajority on the supreme court has managed to effectively do the same thing on its own: repeatedly ignoring plain text as well as its own precedent in order to assign new powers to the presidency while at the same time eviscerating longstanding checks from other branches of government and independent agencies alike. In short, even without literally rewriting the constitution, the supreme court has in practice served as a comparable constitutional assembly, fundamentally reshaping constitutional norms to create a “unitary executive” with fewer checks on executive power than ever before.Taking this comparison even deeper, there are also important parallels in Trump’s efforts to stack Congress through “gerrymandering”: a trick that hinges on exploiting the mathematical quirks of single-member, winner-take-all districts. For example, in a system where every district has an isolated winner-take-all race, even if one party gets 49% of the vote across the country, that does not mean that it will end up having 49% of the representation in Congress. In fact, if each district is a perfect microcosm of society with 49% of voters supporting this party, it could actually end up with zero seats in congress, despite representing roughly half the population.In short, single-member, winner-take-all districts have the potential to massively inflate or deflate a party’s overall electoral showing, depending on how the voters are distributed among the districts. And if the party in power gets to redraw the districts, they can easily rig the game. Knowing full well the consequences, the US supreme court blessed this approach during Trump’s first term, and now at a time when Republicans have a clear advantage in controlling redistricting, the justices are poised to make it even easier. Within this context, Trump is pushing Republican-governed states to capitalize.Significantly, Chávez’s early efforts to consolidate power used a similar mechanism. Though under-appreciated now, Venezuela’s earlier election system under its 1961 constitution actually included a clause guaranteeing minority representation, and officials developed a clever method to allocate seats roughly proportional to a party’s overall support. This made gerrymandering impossible, limiting the ability of the ruling party to press their advantage by further manipulating districts. In 1999, however, Chávez’s constitutional assembly eliminated this system, changing the rules so that most congressional seats would instead come from winner-take-all districts. The effect – at least in the short term while Chávez consolidated power – was to considerably inflate his party’s congressional representation.Along with expanding executive power and manipulating congressional elections, a third commonality – repression of political opponents – needs little explanation. Even before Maduro apparently resorted to overt election fraud, the Chávez government faced accusations of intimidating judges and arresting opposition candidates. Vocal critics of the government have also reported heavy-handed tactics from formal military and paramilitary forces alike.As we now watch Trump deploy troops in Democratic-led cities across the country; turn federal agencies such as Ice and into personal secret police who operate with impunity; and push to systematically arrest political opponents, the parallels are obvious.Ultimately, while there is every reason to believe that Venezuela is in crisis, there is no reason to believe that Trump’s military aggression will have any benefit for the people of either country. The bottom line: the Trump administration has demonstrated time and time again that it has no qualms about wreaking havoc on Venezuelan civilians – nor on its own. Trump’s abuses of power at home and in the Caribbean are two sides of the same coin. We must condemn both.

      Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College More