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      A Trump-Putin carve-up of Ukraine is indefensible | Letters

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      I look with horror and outrage not only at the patronising and hypocritical words of JD Vance in Munich (JD Vance stuns Munich conference with blistering attack on Europe’s leaders, 14 February) but also at the apparent attempt by Donald Trump to effect peace between Ukraine and Russia without including either Ukraine or Europe more generally (Trump says he has spoken to Putin and agreed to negotiate Ukraine ceasefire, 12 February).A peace that prevents any more bloodshed can only be a good thing, but it cannot be a carve-up in which Vladimir Putin achieves the victory that Ukrainians have so gallantly deprived him of on the battlefield. Or in which Ukraine is impoverished and emasculated by a greedy US and irredentist Russia.Moreover, if Europe and, by extension, the UK, are to be excluded from negotiations on the future of Ukraine and the continent, under no circumstances should British or other European troops be used in a peacekeeping role.The idea that Trump thinks he can cut a deal with Putin, rob Ukraine of her mineral wealth and then leave Europe to pick up the pieces is disgraceful beyond belief. We should not fall for it.It is unacceptable that British lives be risked for the knavery of Trump and his acolytes. If the US wants European troops on the ground, we get a place at the negotiating table. No ifs, no buts. No taxation without representation: is that not a founding principle of US democracy?William SeafordNewport If Donald Trump is determined to upend post-1945 international structures, as seems likely given his vice-president’s speech, then both sides of the Atlantic need to contemplate the full meaning of a transactional approach to security. Maybe British politicians will stop kidding themselves about the so-called special relationship, which has only ever been special to the Americans when it suited them. At the same time, perhaps someone can inform Trump that it is a mistake to evaluate defence alliances like real-estate deals.Should the president pay a visit to the UK, as Keir Starmer seems to hope, I suggest he be taken to visit the Iraq and Afghanistan memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens, London, where he’ll be reminded of the 626 UK military personnel who died in furtherance of American wars in those countries between 2001 and 2014. Given the popular reverence for veterans in the US, the Maga movement might find our military sacrifice is one of the few aspects of the North Atlantic alliance it can’t easily dismiss.If Trump then still ditches Europe in favour of deals with Putin, it needs to be made clear that self-interest works on both sides. The US won’t be able to expect its former allies to fall in line behind it in the same way it has commanded since the end of the second world war.Mark CottleMaesygwartha, Monmouthshire As Simon Tisdall pointed out a year ago in the Observer, the UK cannot maintain its Trident nuclear deterrent without the active support of the United States. There now appears a high risk that the US will want to be able to veto the use of Trident by the UK and/or to extract a high price for any continued support. Isn’t it time to think about mothballing Trident and redirecting that funding to conventional defence capacity in Europe?Simon RewLondon More

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      Musk’s rampage through government shows us how we can finally close the book on what Trumpism is all about | Osita Nwanevu

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      It is humbling to realize, almost a decade into his tenure at the center of American politics and life, that Donald Trump still has the power to surprise us. As recently as inauguration day, the conventional wisdom on Elon Musk’s role in the administration was that he’d been given a meaningless post at a powerless agency whose name itself was a joke. From the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, it was said, Musk would issue easily ignored recommendations the gullible would take as evidence that Trump was streamlining the federal bureaucracy – a promise reliably made and broken by countless presidents. Instead, in a turn of events magazine cover artists have delighted in, Musk as a “special government employee” has seemingly taken the reins of the executive branch ⁠– a de facto co-president or perhaps a vice, while JD Vance busies himself with his duties delivering social media clapbacks and jeremiads about wokeness to European leaders.For weeks now, the Doge’s fleas have been hopping from agency to agency, gaining access to key administrative and financial systems, including databases filled with sensitive information on ordinary Americans and infrastructure at the treasury that disburses trillions in payments across the federal government. One member of the team Musk installed there, Marko Elez, resigned after it was revealed he had written posts supporting, in his words, “Indian hate” and a “eugenic immigration policy” as recently as December. After defenses from Vance and Trump, he was reinstated. Meanwhile, fired leaders across the government are now seeking employment; about 75,000 federal workers have accepted a buyout from the administration. USAid has been gutted, putting the health and sustenance of countless vulnerable people around the world in immediate jeopardy, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education are now under assault. Words and whole areas of inquiry are being banned for researchers; government-wide, anything that smacks even vaguely of diversity and equity recruitment and training isn’t long for this world. What’s more, all of this comes on the heels of Trump’s extraordinary freeze on federal loans and grants ⁠– justified as a step towards rooting out “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies” in government ⁠– which threatened programs like Medicaid, Head Start and even Meals on Wheels before it was blocked in court.There and elsewhere, those hoping to put the brakes on the administration’s moves are relying on lawfare to restore order. But this blitzkrieg is working anyway ⁠– the federal government has been weakened and all Trump and Musk have left standing is being remade in their image. Meanwhile, outside DC, Trump’s deportation campaign has begun with alarming departures even from the barbarism of Trump’s first term, like the provisions being made to house migrants at Guantánamo Bay and to send detainees, perhaps including American citizens, to prison in El Salvador.It’s on tariffs, though, that Trump’s ambitions seem to have been significantly impeded. When Canada and Mexico struck border security deals to pause the administration’s threatened levies for a month, the White House was quick to frame them as victories for its trade agenda.But anyone who’s bothered to examine the Canadian and Mexican concessions closely knows that Trump delivered next to nothing ⁠– his ploy won a Canadian border plan that had already been announced and a reshuffling of Mexican troops to bolster the 10,000 already stationed at that border to little effect as far as the flow of fentanyl is concerned. Even the 10% tariff on China now in effect is much lower than the 60% levy Trump promised during the campaign.It will take some time before all the dust settles and the rest of the Trump domestic agenda shapes up. But these early days have given us enough of a glimpse at what will matter most to the administration that we can finally close the book on what Trumpism is all about. Nearly 10 years have been spent parsing Trump’s policies and rhetoric to identify points of departure from the Republican party of old. In columns and essays, academic symposiums and cable news bull sessions, it’s been argued that Trumpism has less to do with conservatism as we’ve known it than with other more interesting -isms ⁠– post-liberalism, post-neoliberalism, populism and, yes, fascism. It ought to be clearer to us now ⁠that the reality is much simpler. Donald Trump, a Republican president backed by Republican voters and the Republican party as an institution, is using extralegal means to enact longstanding parts of the Republican agenda and the conservative project ⁠– including, chiefly, the crippling of the federal government. The most significant standing policy accomplishment of his first term in office was a large tax cut Republicans are hoping to extend. This Trump administration promises to be more innovative to the same ends. The tasks of deregulation and privatization are themselves being deregulated and privatized ⁠– turned over substantially to Musk, who seems willing to shrink and weaken government in ways Republican politicians and bureaucrats in administrations past were unwilling to try themselves, a crusade legal scholars and government officials are calling illegal.As Musk and conservative movement veterans like office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, work away at all this, Trump’s tariff agenda ⁠– long scoffed at by Republican business leaders and donors ⁠– is faltering. And on immigration, it bears repeating that Trump’s supposedly distinctive nativism has precedents in Republican politics. The more immigration-friendly George W Bush-era that the Trump years are often unfavorably compared with were preceded by a period in the 1990s when the right, including establishment figures like William F Buckley Jr, strongly backed restrictionism. They were followed, in the years just before Trump fully entered the picture, by a period when candidates like the now-sainted Mitt Romney leaned into restricting immigration so strongly that Republican leaders openly feared they would be permanently uncompetitive with Latino voters.That never came to pass for reasons the 2024 election underscored clearly ⁠– many Americans, of all ethnicities, are plainly through with politics as usual. Decades of rhetoric from mainstream politicians about how Washington is broken and in need of candidates willing to bust things up and Get Stuff Done, whatever the Stuff may be, have culminated in the re-election, by a genuine plurality, of a candidate willing to abrogate the constitution to that end ⁠– one who has also promised to finally deliver on another standard bit of political pablum, the idea of “running the government like a business”. This is essentially what Musk has been brought on to do. The move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley is breaking the federal infrastructure; whether they recognize it or not, workers across many industries have faced the very same situation federal workers do now, with their agency and very livelihoods being sacrificed on the altar of supposed efficiency.The Democrats who have been roused to action on their behalf ⁠– feebly and belatedly, per usual ⁠– have centered the argument that Trump’s and Musk’s rampage through the federal government is unlawful and unconstitutional. “What Trump and Musk have done is not only wrong, it’s illegal,” the Virginia congressman Don Beyer said at a rally outside USAid’s offices earlier this month.“USAid was established by an act of Congress, and it can only be disbanded by an act of Congress. Stopping this will require action by the courts and for Republicans to show up and show courage and stand up for our country.” Republicans, wouldn’t you know it, have gotten rather blase about the whole constitution thing in response. Last week, John Kennedy, the Oxford-educated senator from Louisiana who does a mean Foghorn Leghorn impression for his constituents and the press, defended the constitutionality of Musk’s activities immediately before dismissing the idea that their constitutionality mattered at all. “[T]he issue, anyway, is not process,” he said. “The issue is substance. Did they find wasteful spending, or not?” The North Carolina senator Thom Tillis was more direct ⁠– while Musk’s attack on Congress-approved spending “runs afoul of the constitution in the strictest sense”, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”Just how much bellyaching about the constitution should Democrats actually be doing? All that’s happening now is happening in large part because the men who wrote the constitution more than two centuries ago failed to anticipate anything like contemporary political parties, much less parties that would adopt the ironic disposition towards the document that Republicans now have. Its checks and balances simply weren’t designed to withstand the skulduggery of organized political factions willing to sacralize the document instrumentally and disregard it as necessary. It should never be forgotten that Trump was brought to power by an ugly mutant of the founders’ electoral college to begin with. The longstanding Republican structural advantage in the Senate and constitution’s supermajoritarian threshold for an impeachment conviction allowed Republicans to defend him from the consequences of his actions twice ⁠– the second time despite a simple majority of senators voting to convict in the wake of his scheme to steal the 2020 election and the resulting attack on Congress.In November, voters either enthralled by his seeming invincibility or resigned to it sent him back to the White House. And the major legal challenges to all he’s done and will do this time around will inevitably wind their way to a supreme court dominated by conservatives Trump himself and the Republican party successfully installed, in full keeping with the constitution’s rules, to give themselves their best possible odds of winning their policy fights and hobbling Democratic governance. Topping it all off, Musk’s seat at the heart of the federal government has been handed to him as a reward for the more than $250m ⁠– a mere sliver of his wealth ⁠– that he contributed to Trump’s re-election effort, a sum only made possible by the supreme court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, which allowed donors, corporations and interest groups to raise and spend unlimited amounts on elections through Super Pacs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy now, it should be clear to all who don’t have an emotional, political or professional investment in believing or pretending to believe otherwise that the American constitutional order has developed a kind of autoimmune disease. The very mechanisms the founders crafted to protect the republic are now an existential threat to it; in their greed and determination to implement the conservative agenda, Trump, Musk and Republicans empowered by those mechanisms are happily ignoring or working to override the parts of the constitution that don’t advantage them or suit their ends. As a matter of substance, this is a system that needs to be dramatically reformed or reimagined rather than rescued; as a matter of politics, one of the central lessons of this past election is that critical constituencies Democrats need to improve with in order to stay competitive federally care far less about protecting our sickly institutions than they care about a great many other things that they hoped Donald Trump would accomplish. As of now, even amid the mess in Washington, voters aren’t giving him marks that are all that terrible – a recent CBS poll found solid majorities of Americans describing his leadership so far as “tough”, “energetic”, “focused” and “effective”.The legal fights against the administration being waged on constitutional grounds should obviously continue; like Republicans, liberal lawyers seeking liberal ends should avail themselves of whatever arguments stand the best chance of prevailing in the courts. Politically though, Democrats need to refocus. If appeals to our norms and constitution were politically potent enough on their own to work against Trump, he wouldn’t be in the Oval Office waging war against the administrative state today. Put more simply, no one watches a game for the referees.Democrats should be positioning themselves not as the guardians of America’s institutions but as the defenders of the American people’s concrete interests ⁠– showing and telling voters about all the federal government does for them every day and how the conservative agenda Trump, Musk and the Republican party are pursuing threatens and has always threatened them. The perversity of a man getting to rework their government purely because he happens to be the wealthiest person in the world and financially backed Trump’s campaign should, of course, also be underscored.The especially ambitious might even try arguing to the American people that all the goings-on in Washington illustrate the danger of having so much wealth accumulate in the hands of a few in the first place. Elon Musk is gliding towards becoming the planet’s very first trillionaire. His access to the levers and gears of the federal government now could help him along in myriad ways. Even an improved political system would struggle to constrain the amount of power he possessed as a private citizen and has now leveraged into a public office; democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up. Right now, that project is succeeding.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘The path forward is clear’: how Trump taking office has ‘turbocharged’ climate accountability efforts

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      Donald Trump’s re-election has “turbocharged” climate accountability efforts including laws which aim to force greenhouse gas emitters to pay damages for fueling dangerous global warming, say activists.These “make polluters pay” laws, led by blue states’ attorneys general, and climate accountability lawsuits will be a major front for climate litigation in the coming months and years. They are being challenged by red states and the fossil fuel industry, which are also fighting against accountability-focused climate lawsuits waged by governments and youth environmentalists.On day one of his second term, the US president affirmed his loyalty to the oil industry with a spate of executive actions to roll back environmental protections and a pledge to “drill, baby, drill”. The ferocity of his anti-environment agenda has inspired unprecedented interest in climate accountability, said Jamie Henn, director of the anti-oil and gas non-profit Fossil Free Media.“I think Trump’s election has turbocharged the ‘make polluters pay’ movement,” said Henn, who has been a leader in the campaign for a decade.More state lawmakers are writing legislative proposals to force oil companies to pay for climate disasters, while law firms are helping governments sue the industry. And youth activists are working on a new legal challenge to the Trump administration’s pro-fossil fuel policies.Industry interests, however, are also attempting to kill those accountability efforts – and Trump may embolden them.The state of Vermont in May passed a first-of-its-kind law holding fossil fuel firms financially responsible for climate damages and New York passed a similar measure in December.The policies force oil companies to pay for climate impacts to which their emissions have contributed. Known as “climate superfund” bills, they are loosely modeled on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Superfund program.Similar bills are being considered in Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts and now Rhode Island, where a measure was introduced last week. A policy will also soon be introduced in California, where recent deadly wildfires have revived the call for the proposal after one was weighed last year.Minnesota and Oregon lawmakers are also considering introducing climate superfund acts. And since inauguration day, activists and officials in a dozen other states have expressed interest in doing the same, said Henn.“I think people are really latching on to this message and this approach right now,” Henn said. “It finally gives people a way to respond to climate disasters, and it’s something that we can do without the federal government.”View image in fullscreenProgressives introduced a federal climate superfund act last year. But with Republicans in control of the White House and both branches of Congress, it has a “less than zero chance of passing”, said Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of the Sabin center for climate change law at Columbia University.The state laws are already facing pushback in the courts. This month, 22 red states and two oil trade groups sued to block New York’s climate superfund law.“This bill is an attempt by New York to step into the shoes of the federal government to regulate something that they have absolutely no business regulating,” West Virginia’s attorney general, John B McCuskey, who led the suit and whose state is a top coal producer, told Fox News.In late December, trade groups also filed a lawsuit against Vermont’s climate superfund act which, if successful, could potentially topple New York’s law.Fossil fuel interests were expected to challenge the climate superfund laws even if Kamala Harris was elected president and have been boosted by Trump’s win. “I think [they] feel like they have more of a shot with the executive backing them,” said Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign.It “would not be shocking” if Trump’s justice department were to file briefs in support of plaintiffs fighting the laws, said Gerrard, which could tip the scales in their favor.More legal challenges may also be on the way, and if additional states pass similar policies, they are expected to face similar lawsuits. But Henn says he is confident the laws will prevail.“I think Republicans think that they’re going to be able to just scare off local legislators or local attorneys general from pursuing a polluter pays agenda, but I think they’re wrong,” he said. “We have widespread public support for this approach. People don’t like the fossil fuel industry.”Over the last decade, states and municipalities have also brought more than 30 lawsuits against fossil fuel interests, accusing them of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products while seeking damages for climate impacts.As Trump’s pro-fossil fuel policies move the US in “precisely the wrong direction” on the climate crisis, they will “surely inspire yet more litigation”, said Gerrard. Michigan has announced plans to file a suit in the coming months, and more are likely to be rolled out this year.The cases face a formidable opponent in the fossil fuel industry, which has long attempted to fend off the lawsuits. Since January, courts have dismissed litigation filed by New Jersey, New York and a Maryland city and county, saying the states lacked jurisdiction to hear the cases.Other decisions have been positive for the plaintiffs. In three decisions since spring 2023, the supreme court turned down petitions from the fossil fuel industry to move the venue of the lawsuits from the state courts where they were originally filed, to federal courts which are seen as more friendly to the industry.Last week, a court in Colorado heard arguments over the same issue in a lawsuit filed by the city of Boulder. The outcome will have major implications for the future of the challenge.Trump has pledged to put an end to the wave of lawsuits, which he has called “frivolous”. During his first term, his administration filed influential briefs in the cases supporting the oil companies – something his justice department could do again. “It’s clear where their allegiances are,” said Gerrard. “And if they file briefs that would be good for the defendants.”Alyssa Johl, vice-president and general counsel of the Center for Climate Integrity, which tracks and supports the lawsuits, said: “There is still a long road ahead for these efforts, but the path forward is clear.”“As communities grapple with the increasingly devastating consequences of big oil’s decades-long deception, the need for accountability is greater than ever,” she said.Youth-led litigationAnother climate-focused legal movement that is gaining steam: youth-led challenges against state and federal government agencies, for allegedly violating constitutional rights with pro-fossil fuel policies.Trump’s second term presents an important moment for these lawsuits, said Julia Olson, founder of the law firm Our Children’s Trust, which brought the litigation. While some lawyers will fight each rollback individually, her strategy could “secure systemic change”, she said.View image in fullscreenOn Wednesday, a US judge rejected an Our Children’s Trust suit filed by California youth against the EPA, saying the challengers failed to show that they had been injured by the federal body. Olson said the judge “misapplied the law”.That same day, the most well-known Our Children’s Trust case, Juliana v United States – in which 21 young people sued the federal government – suffered a blow. In December, the plaintiffs filed a petition with the supreme court to send the case back to trial after it was tossed out. The US solicitor general has now filed a brief opposing their petition; Olson said it “mischaracterized” the case.Our Children’s Trust’s lawsuits have in other instances seen major victories. In December, Montana’s supreme court upheld a landmark climate ruling in favor of young plaintiffs, which said the state was violating youths’ constitutional right to a clean environment by permitting fossil fuel projects with no regard for global warming.That victory in a pro-fossil fuel red state, said Olson, inspires hope that children could win a lawsuit against a conservative, oil and gas-friendly federal government.She is working on another lawsuit against the Trump administration, whose “brazen” anti-environment agenda could bolster the challengers’ arguments, she said.“These policies will kill children … and by making his agenda obvious, I think that he helps us make that clear.” More

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      Chrisette Michelle sang for Trump in 2017. The backlash lasted years: ‘I thought they’d never stop hating me’

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      The Grammy-winning singer Chrisette Michele keeps her phone switched off, a habit that stems from her long stint in cancellation purgatory. Her brother barely got through last month to relay the news that Snoop Dogg had been DJing at a party for Donald Trump’s second inaugural, and many in the Black community were irate. Longtime fans were calling Snoop a sellout, she learned, and were unfollowing him online by the hundreds of thousands.Snoop remained defiant in the face of this controversy, which really peeved the hordes who well remember when Snoop was regulating Maga support in the music industry. That defiance “was the thing that resonated with me”, says Michele when I initially reach her the week after Trump’s second inauguration. “We live in a different era where you can say what you think and not feel like you might die.”In 2017, Michele performed at a Trump inauguration in a shocking break from the music industry’s anti-Maga stance. She was met with considerable backlash from fans and from industry peers including Questlove, the Roots drummer and Tonight Show bandleader. Despite Michele’s extensive success working with rappers Nas and Jay-Z, the decision to perform for Trump cost her future gigs and more opportunities to collaborate with industry heavyweights.Now that some music stars have hopped on the Maga bandwagon, she can’t help reflecting on the price she paid for making the worst decision of her career. “I just remember sitting in a hotel lobby next to my manager, who was my husband of two years at the time, in tears, thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just become a professor,’” she recalls. “The constant gnawing and chewing and shouting at me was so difficult.”You wonder if the outcome might have been different if Michele had a catalog to rival Snoop’s, or even a song as big as Drop It Like It’s Hot. A native of Long Island, New York, Michele, now 42, came to prominence during the neo soul movement of the mid-noughties, following Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and India Arie. Michele’s satin voice, jazzy vibes and overall versatility made her a sought-after hip-hop balladeer by everyone from the Roots to Rick Ross – the latter of whom appeared at last month’s inaugural Crypto Ball alongside Snoop and Soulja Boy. In 2009, Michele earned a performance Grammy for her third single, Be OK, which also featured will.i.am. All the while Michele remained open about the pressures she felt around her body image, becoming a champion of the #BlackGirlMagic movement.View image in fullscreenMichele didn’t enter the political arena; it landed on her in 2014, when Michelle Obama turned up for one of her shows outside Washington DC. She was not Michelle Obama that night, Michele recalls, “she was my homegirl. She came backstage and asked for a selfie with her mom and her aunt. She wore pink lipstick – like, happy, girlie pink lipstick. She knew all the words. She was a fan.”In 2016 Barack Obama added If I Have My Way, a groovy ballad from Michele’s debut album, to his summer playlist. Michele sang for the president at that year’s Democratic national convention and at his final White House state dinner, when the Obamas hosted Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. She takes patriotic duty seriously and eagerly. “When it comes to singing overseas for the troops or at the DNC, I don’t take it for granted,” says Michele. “I’m proud to be an American, always have been since I was a kid – and that’s a very difficult thing to say as a Black woman.”When Trump’s team invited her to perform at a 2017 inauguration event, Michele accepted – somewhat naively, as it turns out. She doesn’t support or particularly like the guy and was aware of the potential career ramifications. But she saw the gig as an opportunity to confront Trump and see if he kept the same racist, misogynistic energy in person. Even though there seemed to be some cover on the inauguration event’s performance lineup, which also included the gospel music stars Travis Greene and Tina Campbell (of Mary Mary fame), Michele, because of her more mainstream appeal, became the focus. Michele’s longtime supporters begged her to reconsider the gig. In response to reports that she was receiving at least $250,000 for her appearance – the true fee was closer to $75,000 – Questlove and Talib Kweli, both former collaborators of Michele’s, volunteered to pay her not to perform – which hurt. “Honestly, I had to stop paying attention after a while,” she says.The music industry was in no mood to party with Trump when he ran in 2016. Eminem openly criticized his policies. Queen’s Brian May condemned his use of We Are the Champions at the Republican national convention. Elton John turned down an invitation to perform at his 2017 inauguration. But few artists were as stridently anti-Trump as Snoop, a social justice advocate who once characterized the gang violence he grew up around in Los Angeles as a trickle-down effect of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Snoop set the rules of engagement, pre-emptively denouncing the Black artists who would perform for Trump’s inaugural as “Uncle Toms” and “jigaboos” – derogatory terms that insinuate a deeper racial betrayal. His 2017 music video for the song Lavender, a heavy-handed Trump allegory, features a society of clowns that is ruled by a character named Ronald Klump, whom he shoots with a toy gun. The video outraged Marco Rubio and other Maga Republicans and had Trump musing about the reaction Snoop might have gotten if he had made a similar video about Barack Obama.View image in fullscreenBut Snoop’s tune changed in 2021 after Trump pardoned Michael “Harry-O” Harris, co-founder of the Death Row Records label that launched Snoop’s music career. (Harris had been serving a 25-years-to-life sentence for drug trafficking and attempted murder.) “I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump,” Snoop said last year. “He has done only great things for me.”At the Crypto Ball, Snoop was photographed throwing up hand signs with Bo Loudon, a young Maga influencer who is close with Barron Trump; Loudon captioned the picture: “Welcome to Maga, Snoop!” The endorsement effectively consolidated Snoop’s metamorphosis from Murder Was the Case gangsta rapper to ubiquitous pitchman to all-American mascot. Reacting to the Crypto Ball gig, The View’s Ana Navarro likened Snoop to a “trained seal”. Other rappers who have performed for Trump have suffered backlash even as Carrie Underwood and other music industry standard-bearers have capitulated to Maga. (After Nelly performed at a separate inauguration event, the administrator of a popular Instagram page dedicated to his wife, the R&B singer Ashanti, stepped down, citing disappointment with the Hot in Herre rapper – who is also unapologetic.)Michele processed the scenes of Snoop with Rick Ross and Soulja Boy at last month’s inauguration ball with wonder. “My initial reaction was, ‘Isn’t it nice to see Black men dancing in America so unapologetically?’” she says. When she faced criticism for her own performance, “I guess I wasn’t so masculine in my way of saying, ‘You don’t get to tell me what to do,’” she adds. “I just did what I thought was right. I didn’t shout at anybody and tell them not to say what they think.”In the main, the reputational damage to these men has been mostly cosmetic. For Snoop, the controversy has simply presented yet another occasion for him to play the part of America’s lovable scamp. Weeks after raising hackles at the inauguration event, he was back on stage for the NFL’s year-end awards show and for a television PSA that ran during the Super Bowl calling on viewers to “stand up to hate,” reigniting criticism of his inauguration appearance. Michele remembers arriving at a Super Bowl party at the Fountainebleau resort in Las Vegas as the ad was airing. “I’m still processing that commercial,” she jokes.Sometimes Michele thinks an overtly militant defense might have shortened her time in purgatory. “That was the most uncomfortable realization,” she says. “Like, if I’m not shouting and throwing my fist in the air, then it’s quite possible that I get ignored because I’m Black and soft. Look at Amber Rose. She spoke at the RNC, people were hard on her – and she just said, ‘Screw you,’ with that big, beautiful smile on her face. And people just backed up. The funny thing is: I don’t agree with her! I just watched it like, ‘OK, girl …’”Michele hoped to make a statement through the inauguration performance itself, but her messages were mixed. She sang a gospel song called Intentional, which calls for an unwavering belief in a divine plan – an argument evangelicals use to justify Trump support. She wore a maxi skirt replete with images of Black torture and subjugation by Jean-Michele Basquiat. In the end Trump didn’t make the performance, and she never got to meet him. By the time she walked off stage after the four-minute gig, “the death threats were starting,” Michele says. “I was afraid.”She thought she could make them stop if she just took a moment to explain herself – although, she admits, her first instinct was “to be completely silent and just go somewhere and mind my business for four years”. In an open letter pushed on social media, she said she intended her performance to serve as a “bridge” between Trump supporters and opponents. During an appearance on the Breakfast Club, Michele emphasized her Basquiat skirt again while reviewing the other rebellious nuances of her performance. But her attempts at subtlety were ultimately lost on the masses. “That was me overanalyzing everything, overthinking everything,” she says. “Because my parents are teachers, I want everybody to understand all the angles. My shouting came from insecurity, from needing people to believe that I did this for the right reasons.”By then the blowback against Michele was already fierce and unrelenting. She was dropped by her record label and by Spike Lee – who had one of her songs, Black Girl Magic, slated for the Netflix reboot of She’s Gotta Have It. Industry friends kept their distance. Her marriage eventually fell apart under the strain. The sneaker preacher Jamal Bryant called for a boycott of her music. He’d later apologize, but Trump’s camp never reached out to check on her. “Can you put a note in there asking them to reach out to Chrisette?” she asks me, laughing. “My team is waiting on a follow-up phone call.”View image in fullscreenBut it was the constant stream of death threats coming through her phone that really pushed Michele into depression and suicidal ideation. “We had security guards at my hotel doors,” says Michele, who also recalls being heckled on stage. “I wasn’t going to the grocery store by myself for years.” In October 2017 she shared that the fallout from her inauguration performance had caused her to suffer a miscarriage – and was further vilified for punctuating the news with a picture that was not of her actual miscarriage. “That was me at my most panicked, the point where I came close to doing anything to get people just to be nice to me for one second,” she says. “I thought people were never going to stop hating me. I didn’t think this would go on for years.”In a 2018 Facebook post, a year into Trump’s first term and just before the midterm elections, Michele posted a picture of herself between the Obamas and the Singaporean prime minister at the state dinner while calling on voters to rebalance the scales. (“When I look back at this moment it reminds me of what this country’s leadership should look like,” she wrote. “Diplomacy. Civility. Compassion. Love. Integrity. Gangsters don’t run this country. The people do.”) But it just became a reason for critics to come at her harder.Michele started treating her phone like a landline, switching it on every now and then for friends and family. “As a person in the public space, you think it’s your job to be connected all the time,” she says. “But it’s incredibly easy to disconnect.”But even as Black America disavowed Michele, many industry peers rallied around her. “Anita Baker was very vocal about making sure I had her number and about calling her if I needed anything,” she recalls. “India Arie did an entire interview explaining how I should be spoken to as a person, pulled me backstage and shook [the sense back into] me. Kirk Franklin was like: ‘The Black community owes you an apology.’ But Stevie Wonder was the most adamant to me about continuing in this music space because he’s been through so many things himself. These are the people who really wanted to make sure that I knew they were there for me.”She carried on quietly for years – performing around the country and even launching a podcast called Inner Peace Examination, dedicated to self-reflection – until a curious thing happened: the political winds shifted. Trump stormed back from his 2020 defeat to win re-election, this time with backing from tech billionaires. Corporate America rushed to scrap its DEI programs in a fit of anticipatory obedience. Just last month Obama and Trump were observed chatting warmly to each other while sitting together at Jimmy Carter’s state funeral – as if they hadn’t been mortal enemies for the past 17 years.Ultimately, Michele wishes she could have been like Snoop and told her critics to kiss off, and she also wishes she had never taken the inauguration gig in the first place. It’s another nuanced position that could threaten her ongoing career recovery and land her in hot water all over again – but at least now Michele knows she’s built for tough times. “For about four or five years, I hated the word resilient,” she says, “because it meant I got cancelled and got back up. But now I embrace it because it means you kept going, and people stuck with you and you’re here now.” More

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      ‘X-rays into the president’s soul’: Jeffrey Toobin on Trump, Biden and the pardon power

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      To Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy, pardons are “X-rays into the soul” of the American president who gives them, revealing true character. Pardons can show compassion and mercy in the occupant of the Oval Office. More often, they expose venality and self-preservation.Toobin said: “One thing you can say about Donald Trump is that his moral compass always points in the same direction, and his motives are always the same, which are transactional and narcissistic. This is a good example, I think, of my thesis that pardons are X-rays into the president’s soul.”In his first term, Trump “wanted to settle a score with Robert Mueller, so he pardoned everyone Mueller prosecuted” in the special counsel’s investigation of Russian election interference in 2016 and links between Trump and Moscow, Toobin said.“Trump wanted to take care of his family, so he pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner,” who is now nominated as US ambassador to France, the author added. “He wanted to reward his House Republican allies, so he pardoned several who were engaged in egregious corruption, and he pardoned people who were [his son-in-law and adviser] Jared Kushner’s friends.”Asked why he wrote his 10th book to come out now, so soon after such a momentous election, Toobin, a former CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer, said: “I saw that from a very early stage in the campaign Trump was talking about January 6 pardons. But I also recognized that if Kamala Harris won, there would be pressure on her to pardon Trump” on 44 federal criminal charges now dismissed.“I think the proper way to understand the January 6 pardons [issued on day one of Trump’s second term] is to remember that Trump himself was a January 6 defendant, Toobin said. “He wasn’t charged with the riot the way the others were, but he was charged with trying to overthrow the election with the fake electors scheme. And if you look at the way in the beginning part of his second term he is settling scores and rewarding his friends, the January 6 pardons told you exactly how he was going to go about conducting his administration.”Reportedly saying: “Fuck it, release ’em all”, Trump gave pardons, commutations or other acts of clemency to the absurd, such as the J6 Praying Grandma and the QAnon Shaman, and to the outright sinister: hundreds who attacked police, militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy, Toobin wrote.He said: “If Trump had tried to carve out the non-violent January 6 rioters [for clemency], that that would have been somewhat more defensible than what he wound up doing, which was, in my view, completely indefensible.”His point about pardons being an X-ray for the soul applies to Joe Biden too.On the page, Toobin decries the 46th president’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, on gun and tax charges and any other grounds, having said he would not do so.Toobin said: “When you think about Hunter, this is a guy who was convicted of a crime, who pleaded guilty to other crimes. So it’s not like these were made-up accusations against him. Yes, the criminal justice system came down hard on him, but the criminal justice system comes down hard on a lot of people, and their father wasn’t president of the United States, so they don’t get this kind of break. And I just think that’s not how the system is supposed to work.”Publishing schedules being what they are, The Pardon does not cover the last-minute pre-emptive pardons Biden gave his brothers, his sister and their spouses, as well as public figures held to be in danger of persecution by Trump, Liz Cheney and Gen Mark Milley among them.But Toobin told the Guardian: “The family pardons were just bizarre, because these people, as far as I’m aware, are not even under investigation. But [Biden] was so worried and fixated on his family that he took this extraordinary step, which is just egregious to me.”The pardon is older than America. British kings could pardon people. When the states broke away, they kept the pardon for presidents. George Washington used it after the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, for men convicted of treason. Abraham Lincoln used it during the civil war to reprieve Union soldiers sentenced to die and to forgive Confederates in the name of peace.Such acts of mercy continue, memorably including Jimmy Carter’s clemency for those who dodged the draft for Vietnam and Barack Obama’s record-setting issue of commutations for people mostly jailed for minor crimes. Even Trump handed down mercy in his first term, amid the push which produced the First Step Act, criminal justice reform he swiftly seemed to forget.Asked which modern president has best used the pardon power for the public good, Toobin picks Obama. Inevitably, though, most public attention falls on use of the power for controversial ends, including George HW Bush’s mop-up of the Iran-Contra scandal and Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon for Marc Rich, a financier turned fugitive.The most famous pardon of all, the one Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal, hangs over every president. As Toobin sees it, had Harris taken office in January, pressure to pardon Trump of his alleged federal crimes would have been great, and it would have sprung from “an interesting shift in the conventional wisdom” about Ford and Nixon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It was widely considered a disaster in 1974” – Carl Bernstein told Bob Woodward, his Washington Post partner in reporting Watergate, “The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch” – “but now you’ve had Ted Kennedy giving Gerald Ford an award, saying he was right about the pardon. You have Bob Woodward changing his mind [to say the pardon was ‘an act of courage’]’, and at the oral argument of the Trump v United States supreme court case [about presidential immunity, last April], Justice Brett Kavanaugh said, ‘Well, everyone now agrees Ford did the right thing.’”Toobin thinks Ford did the wrong thing, given Nixon’s clearly criminal behavior. He was also “struck by the absence of a book heavily focused on that issue of the Ford pardon. So all those combinations led me to try to not only write a book, but have it come out in early 2025.”He duly devotes most of that book to the Nixon pardon: how Ford agonized about it, decided to do it, then employed an obscure young lawyer to make sure Nixon took it.“I had certainly never heard of Benton Becker when I went into this,” Toobin said. “And I think his central role illustrates how ill-prepared Ford was for the whole issue of dealing with Nixon, because if you want to address an issue that will be the central event of your presidency, maybe you want to entrust it to someone who is not a young volunteer lawyer, who is himself under criminal investigation.“Now, if you say that, you should say that Becker [who died in 2015] was completely cleared. But it struck me as ludicrous that a president with the entire resources of the White House counsel’s office, the justice department and the entire American government, chose to invest so much authority in this young man. I think that just illustrates how Ford’s anxiousness to get the whole Nixon subject behind him led him to fail to consider the consequences of what he was doing.”The rights and wrongs of the Nixon pardon echo to this day. Looking again to last year’s supreme court arguments over presidential immunity, which the justices decided did apply in relation to official acts, Toobin said: “I thought the best question at that oral argument was Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson saying, ‘If presidents are immune, why did Ford need to pardon Nixon?’ Which is a great question, and doesn’t really have an answer. The only real answer is that [Chief Justice] John Roberts just completely changed the rules” in Trump’s favor.The Pardon is Toobin’s guide to how presidential pardons work, for good or often ill. He is not optimistic that the power can be reined in or usefully reformed:“The both good and bad news is that our constitution is almost impossible to amend, and no one cares enough about pardons one way or the other to undertake the massive task of of trying to amend the constitution. It’s not even clear how you would amend it. My solution to pardon problems is not changing the constitution, it’s getting better presidents.”That will have to wait – at least for four more years.

      The Pardon is out now More

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      To the CEOs who’ve joined Trump’s fight against diversity, I say this: you’re making a big mistake | Stefan Stern

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      The mask has slipped and the gloves are off. A company which in 2022 boasted that it had exceeded its target, “spending $1.26 billion with US certified diverse suppliers”, is now ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.That company is Meta (formerly known as Facebook), whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced DEI dismantling shortly before he had a prominent seat at Donald Trump’s recent inauguration. Perhaps from that privileged spot he was able to imbibe some of the “masculine energy” he says he wants to see at work.Meta is not alone in signalling a shift from its previous position. Amazon, McDonald’s, Accenture, Google, General Motors, Pepsi, Walmart and Boeing are among the corporate giants who are downplaying or removing altogether references to DEI and public commitments to it. The consultancy Deloitte used to declare that “diversity, equity and inclusion are core to our values”. But, the FT reports, the page those words appeared on has been wiped from its website.It is possible these decisions were taken partly on legal advice. Zuckerberg seems to have pre-empted the attorney general, Trump’s Florida favourite Pam Bondi, as she recently declared that there should be an end to what she called “illegal DEI” and “accessibility” discrimination. You can imagine that in-house counsel had anticipated legal trouble and so were moved to suggest caution on DEI issues. Zuckerberg is not merely being cautious, however. He has moved Maxine Williams, former chief diversity officer, to a role concerned with “accessibility and engagement”. Whether that restructuring will be enough to satisfy the Maga overlords remains to be seen.Some of the changes at other companies may be merely symbolic or presentational. And not everyone is backing down. The investment bank Goldman Sachs stated: “We strongly believe that organisations benefit from diverse perspectives” – although this belief has not stopped them from removing one of their former requirements for diversity in their clients. Goldman Sachs is still “committed to operating our programmes and policies in compliance with the law”, it says. Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan Chase, dared anti-DEI activists to challenge his bank’s pro-diversity stance. (But he is taking a hard line on forcing people to return to the office, despite remote working being key for modern diverse workforces.)All the same, the overriding effect of seeing that array of (newly) admiring CEOs lining up in Washington to salute the incoming chief was to recall the timeless Marxist dictum (Groucho, not Karl): “Those are my principles and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.”View image in fullscreenMaybe the pressure has finally got to some of these top bosses. A recent article from senior partners at McKinsey noted that “CEOs are on the job 24/7, responsible for addressing an ever-shifting array of problems and threats”.But perhaps part of the problem is feeding already narcissistic CEOs the sort of grandiose advice offered by the blue-chip consultants in their article. Likening the boss to an “elite athlete”, the authors argue that CEOs need to use their time purposefully (like LeBron James, the basketball star), “perfect the art of recovery” (like the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo), keep learning (like the golfer Bryson DeChambeau), embrace data and analytics (like a Formula One grand prix driver) and be adaptable and resilient (like the gymnast Simone Biles and … Muhammad Ali).The end product sounds like a remarkable person indeed: “This is how leaders can … build their resilience muscle, and become … ready to thrive in the 21st century, while staying humble, celebrating noble failures, and always helping team members.” Yep, nobody I know, either.In fact, bosses risk being cut off from the everyday concerns of their staff. An academic study into this phenomenon looking back decades, published in the American Journal of Sociology and called The Great Separation, draws on evidence from a dozen countries. The highest earners inhabit the same narrow terrain, and have limited contact with lower earners, the researchers found. This can affect how elites engage with the rest of society, and how in turn lower earners see them. This “great separation” may have had an impact on “the key social and political challenges of our time”, the study says. Brexit, Trump, populism and the rise of the new right may all be symptoms.Can the media do anything to help? The new media business Semafor has just launched a weekly newsletter called The CEO Signal, available (for free!) to bosses running companies with annual turnover of at least $500m (£400m). Its editor, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, says there is a need for such a specially targeted publication: “There’s a place here in the market for something that’s much more tightly focused to the people at the very top of the org chart – who are actually trying to run exceedingly complicated organisations, at an increasingly complicated time,” he told the Press Gazette.“And there’s nobody in any organisation who faces the same list of challenges as the CEO does,” he added. “It’s a cliche to say that it’s lonely at the top, but there is something to that.” The venerable Harvard Business Review is also about to launch a new service specifically for the “C-suite” – that is, for people whose job title begins with the word “chief”.How these new publications will help to mitigate some of the problems highlighted by the “great separation” study is not immediately clear. I am, however, reminded of what Laura Empson, a professor at Bayes Business School in London, has observed: that if a leader complains it is lonely at the top then they “are not doing it right”.Rather than an ever-narrowing elite of CEOs becoming more and more detached from their workforce, we would do better to try to reconnect. Companies and workplaces should be vibrant and cohesive communities of people.The ghastly alternative could be seen at the White House last week, when Elon Musk cavorted around the Oval Office firing off wild and unsubstantiated accusations against public officials, while Trump looked on calmly. Musk confidently asserted, without offering any evidence, that some officials at the now gutted USAid had been taking “kickbacks”. This is not model CEO behaviour. And this is not the leadership we need.

      Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre. His latest book is Fair or Foul: the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition
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      Presidents at War: how battle has shaped American leaders

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      In his new book, Presidents at War, Steven M Gillon considers how the second world war shaped a generation of presidents, a span that takes in eight men – but not all of them served in uniform between 1941 and 1945.Gillon likes to “ask people, ‘There are seven men who served in uniform in world war two and who went on to be president: who are they?’ And most people think Jimmy Carter did, and they forget Ronald Reagan.”Carter was born in 1924 and came of age in wartime. But the submariner turned peanut farmer turned politician, who died aged 100 in December, graduated the US Naval Academy in 1946, the year after the war. Reagan, meanwhile, joined the Army Reserve in the 1930s and spent the war years enlisted – but stayed at home in Hollywood, where he made his name as an actor, narrating films and joining fundraising drives.“Reagan was the most fascinating for me,” says Gillon, emeritus professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and scholar-in-residence at the History Channel. “I once bought the story about: ‘Oh, he wanted to go and fight but his eyes were too bad.’ In fact, there’s all these machinations going on behind the scenes that keep him from going overseas, to make sure he stays in California so he can make movies, while at the same time creating this public image of a guy who has been off to war, and he comes home to his wife [Jane Wyman], and there’s a picture of him in his uniform, kissing his wife – who in fact he slept with every night during the war.”Gillon focuses on how the war affected men who led their country through the cold war with Russia, into the quagmire of Vietnam, and eventually into the first Iraq war. To Gillon, “those presidents who came closest to combat were the ones who were most restrained in their use of force afterwards,” meaning Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded Allied forces in Europe, and John F Kennedy and George HW Bush, who flirted with death in the Pacific, JFK as a torpedo boat captain, Bush as a navy flier.“Reagan is the exception of so many of these things,” Gillon says. “Reagan never sees war. He thinks he saw the Holocaust camps, but he didn’t. He just makes stuff up, and he thinks it’s true. But what I did not know was how he came out of the war with the real fear of nuclear weapons, and he belonged to an organization for international control of atomic weapons, largely a liberal organization, as he was involved in other liberal organizations like Americans for Democratic Action.“While he shed all the other liberal ties, he never shed that fear of nuclear weapons. And despite all his bombastic language, he was very restrained in the use of force. I mean, the only thing he did was create a phony war in Grenada [in which 19 Americans died] and see 241 Americans killed in Lebanon [both in 1983], and that was a peacekeeping mission.”View image in fullscreenIn response to the Beirut embassy bombing, Reagan launched limited strikes. He also bombed Libya, in 1986, and funded and fueled conflicts elsewhere, his efforts in Nicaragua creating the Iran-Contra scandal. But on the global scene, Gillon “was surprised at how restrained Reagan was. And then his fear of nuclear weapons made him open to [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s overtures” for detente and arms control “during his second term … this was where Reagan followed his own instincts and in this case his instincts were right, and he was the right person to do it because he had such strong anti-communist credentials. So that was a twist I had not appreciated before.”Gillon’s book contains more twists. Many involve Lyndon Baines Johnson, like Reagan no stranger to distorting facts for political gain. A congressman when the US entered the war, LBJ got himself into uniform for a Pacific fact-finding tour. Hitching a ride on a bomber, he survived an attack by Japanese fighters.“There’s controversy over whether that took place the way he described it,” Gillon says. “There was an article written by some aviation historians who said it never could have happened. And then, years later, the Japanese pilot who had actually led the attack against the American planes said he remembered Johnson’s plane. He remembered crippling it, and he said the plane was so wounded that he knew it wasn’t going to do any damage, so he broke off and went back into the main attack.”Johnson’s plane made it back to base, leaving him alive to tell tales of his own bravery on the campaign trail. Gillon shows how those tales grew more shameless but thinks the basic story “is definitely true”, including how a bathroom break meant Johnson lost a spot on a plane which was shot down, killing all onboard.“Yeah, Johnson was just cool as a cucumber. And I’m sure he was thrilled when he landed.”Gillon was born in working class Philadelphia in 1956, in the shadow of the war. Too young for the Vietnam draft, fascinated by the presidency, he graduated from Widener and Brown and then taught at Yale and Oxford. Recent books include America’s Reluctant Prince, about his late friend John F Kennedy Jr, and The Pact, about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, a Democratic president and a Republican House speaker whose relationship resonates loudly today.With his latest book, Gillon focuses on the major lessons of the second world war, particularly the cost of appeasement, Hitler’s triumph at Munich in 1938 a constant ghost at the feast. Such lessons, he says, “some forgot, like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, while others, like Kennedy and Bush, those who really saw battle and the horrors of war, you see them thinking about world war two all the time when they’re making big decisions, whether it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis for Kennedy or it’s the invasion of Iraq with George Bush”.View image in fullscreenLooking to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Gillon describes how both served but did not see battle. Both were in the navy. Ford’s closest brush with action involved a fire aboard his ship during a Pacific typhoon. Nixon was posted to tropical islands, working logistics and supply, failing to reach the front line.Vietnam dominates Gillon’s book. US involvement began under Eisenhower, accelerated under Kennedy, swirled into nightmare under Johnson and finally ended under Nixon – though he had lengthened the horror by thwarting peace talks for his own political gain. Gillon retells the extraordinary Anna Chennault affair, in which a Washington socialite acted as a go-between with the government of South Vietnam, relaying Nixon’s urge to boycott talks till the 1968 election was done. When Johnson learned of it, he told a senior Republican: “This is treason.” The senator agreed. Johnson called Nixon, who denied it. Gillon writes: “According to some reports, after hanging up, Nixon collapsed with laughter.”In 1968, Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. The war did not end until 1973. Reading Presidents at War, it is striking to realize that no future president who was of an age to serve in Vietnam did so.Bill Clinton opposed the war, studied abroad and denied accusations of dodging the draft. Joe Biden secured student deferments then was exempted on account of teenage asthma. George W Bush, the son of a war hero, went into the Texas Air national guard, which, Gillon notes, “is a place notoriously where rich, powerful people put their kids during war”. Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain did go to Vietnam – but lost presidential elections.As so often, Donald Trump is a whole other matter. He obtained student draft deferments but also found a doctor to say “bone spurs” in his heels rendered him unfit for service. He has also said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating in New York was his “personal Vietnam”, making him feel like “a great and very brave soldier”. It’s not a line to endear him to Gillon, who says he cast his first vote for a Republican president, Ford, but whose epilogue to Presidents at War makes clear his distaste for Trump, his view of military matters and his reported negative comments about those who serve.“I have my political point of view but when I write history, I try to be really fair-minded,” Gillon says. “And I can’t be fair-minded toward Trump. I just dislike him so much that I don’t think I could write a book about him. I wrote a book about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, and what made me happy was that both Clinton and Gingrich liked it. I take great pride in being fair of mind towards someone like Newt Gingrich, who I have no political affinity for, but I just can’t get to that point mentally with Trump. I can’t write a book that I feel I can’t be fair.”

      Presidents at War is out now More

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      There are many ways Trump could trigger a global collapse. Here’s how to survive if that happens | George Monbiot

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      Though we might find it hard to imagine, we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure.There are several possible mechanisms. Let’s start with an obvious one: their assault on financial regulation. Trump’s appointee to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Russell Vought, has suspended all the agency’s activity, slashed its budget and could be pursuing Musk’s ambition to “delete” the bureau. The CFPB was established by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, to protect people from the predatory activity that helped trigger the crash. The signal to the financial sector could not be clearer: “Fill your boots, boys.” A financial crisis in the US would immediately become a global crisis.But the hazards extend much further. Musk, calling for a “wholesale removal of regulations”, sends his child soldiers to attack government departments stabilising the entire US system. Regulations, though endlessly maligned by corporate and oligarchic propaganda, are all that protect us from multiple disasters. In its initial impacts, deregulation is class war, hitting the poorest and the middle classes at the behest of the rich. As the effects proliferate, it becomes an assault on everyone’s wellbeing.To give a couple of examples, the fires in Los Angeles this year are expected to cost, on various estimates, between $28bn and $75bn in insured losses alone. Estimates of total losses range from $160bn to $275bn. These immense costs are likely to be dwarfed by future climate disasters. As Trump rips down environmental protections and trashes federal responsiveness, the impacts will spiral. They could include non-linear shocks to either the insurance sector or homeowners, escalating into US-wide economic and social crisis.If (or when) another pandemic strikes, which could involve a pathogen more transmissible and even more deadly than Covid-19 (which has so far killed 1.2 million people in the US), it will hit a nation whose defences have been stood down. Basic public health measures, such as vaccination and quarantine, might be inaccessible to most. A pandemic in these circumstances could end millions of lives and cause spontaneous economic shutdown.Because there is little public understanding of how complex systems operate, collapse tends to take almost everyone by surprise. Complex systems (such as economies and human societies) have characteristics that make them either resilient or fragile. A system that loses its diversity, redundancy, modularity (the degree of compartmentalisation), its “circuit breakers” (such as government regulations) and backup strategies (alternative means of achieving a goal) is less resilient than one which retains these features. So is a system whose processes become synchronised. In a fragile system, shocks can amplify more rapidly and become more transmissible: a disruption in one place proliferates into disaster everywhere. This, as Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, has deftly explained, is what happened to the financial system in 2008.A consistent feature of globalised capitalism is an unintentional assault on systemic resilience. As corporations pursue similar profit-making strategies, and financialisation and digitisation permeate every enterprise, the economic system loses its diversity and starts to synchronise. As they consolidate, and the biggest conglomerates become hubs to which many other enterprises are connected (think of Amazon or the food and farming giant Cargill), major failures could cascade at astonishing speed.As every enterprise seeks efficiencies, the system loses its redundancy. As trading rules and physical infrastructure are standardised (think of those identical container terminals, shipping and trucking networks), the system loses both modularity and backup strategies. When a system has lost its resilience, a small external shock can trigger cascading collapse.Paradoxically, with his trade wars and assault on global standards, Trump could help to desynchronise the system and reintroduce some modularity. But, as he simultaneously rips down circuit breakers, undermines preparedness and treats Earth systems as an enemy to be crushed, the net effect is likely to make human systems more prone to collapse.At least in the short term, the far right tends to benefit from chaos and disruption: this is another of the feedback loops that can turn a crisis into a catastrophe. Trump presents himself as the hero who will save the nation from the ruptures he has caused, while deflecting the blame on to scapegoats.Alternatively, if collapse appears imminent, Trump and his team might not wish to respond. Like many of the ultra-rich, key figures in or around the administration entertain the kind of psychopathic fantasies indulged by Ayn Rand in her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, in which plutocrats leave the proles to die in the inferno they’ve created, while they migrate to their New Zealand bunkers, Mars or the ocean floor (forgetting, as they always do, that their wealth, power and survival is entirely dependent on other people). Or they yearn for a different apocalypse, in which the rest of us roast while they party with Jesus in his restored kingdom.Every government should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But, as they do with climate and ecological breakdown, freshwater depletion, the possibility of food system collapse, antibiotic resistance and nuclear proliferation, most governments, including the UK’s, now seem to hope for the best and leave it there. So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems.Start with this principle: don’t face your fears alone. Make friends, meet your neighbours, set up support networks, help those who are struggling. Since the dawn of humankind, those with robust social networks have been more resilient than those without.Discuss what we confront, explore the means by which we might respond. Through neighbourhood networks, start building a deliberative, participatory democracy, to resolve at least some of the issues that can be fixed at the local level. If you can, secure local resources for the community (in England this will be made easier with the forthcoming community right to buy, like Scotland’s).From democratised neighbourhoods, we might seek to develop a new politics, along the lines proposed by Murray Bookchin, in which decisions are passed upwards, not downwards, with the aim of creating a political system not only more democratic than those we currently suffer, but which also permits more diversity, redundancy and modularity.Yes, we also – and urgently – need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it’s beginning to look as if no one has our backs. Prepare for the worst.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More