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      Zelenskyy says Russia will ‘wage war on Nato’ if US support for Ukraine wanes

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      Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday predicted Russia would “wage war against Nato” if the US stepped back from its support of Ukraine – and that he had seen intelligence suggesting that the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, was building up troops for a possible military invasion of another European country.The Ukrainian president made the claim on the NBC show Meet the Press in a wide-ranging interview ahead of an emergency summit of European leaders in Paris to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine – and peace talks between US and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia.“It can happen in summer, maybe in the beginning, maybe in the end of summer. I do not know when he prepares it,” Zelenskyy said. “But it will happen. And at that moment, knowing that he did not succeed in occupying us, we do not know where he will go.”Zelenskyy added that he believed Putin’s next targets could be Poland and Lithuania – which were occupied during the second world war by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – “because we believe that [Russian president] Putin will wage war against Nato”, the international military alliance formally known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.Zelenskyy said he had viewed documents indicating that Putin was “preparing to train 150,000 people” in Belarus, a staunch ally of Moscow – and that he had shared that intelligence with allies.The Russian leader, Zelenskyy said, wanted to “show it for the world that it is just training” and would claim “that these are exercises that are always ongoing” in Belarus.“But it’s not truth,” Zelenskyy said. “From such point, he began the occupation [of Ukraine] three years ago. Full-scale war he began from some symbolic trainings. The missiles the first night flew from Belarus, and the invasion came from Belarus.”Zelenskyy insisted he still had trust in Donald Trump’s ability to negotiate with Russia after beginning his second US presidency in January. But Zelenskyy said he would not accept any peace agreement that excluded Ukraine from the negotiating table. He also said that some of the “messages” coming from the US in recent days, such as Vice-President JD Vance’s speech in Munich denouncing European leaders, and Trump’s comment that Ukraine “may be Russian some day”, were “a disappointment”.In a recent exclusive interview with the Guardian, Zelenskyy stressed that Europe could not guarantee Ukraine’s security without US help – and he returned to the theme in his Meet the Press interview.“There is no leader in the world who can really make a deal with Putin without us about us,” he said, speaking in English.“Of course, the US can have a lot of decisions, economical partnerships, etc. We’re not happy with it, but they can have [them] with [the] Russians. But not about this war without us.“There are messages, which, you know, make disappointment for a lot of leaders of Europe, because they also feel sometimes that they are out of decisions.“They have to be in unity with the US otherwise, not only [can the] US lose Europe as a strategic partner, Europe also can lose the US.”His comments mirrored the alarm of European leaders at the US’s backpedalling over support for Ukraine, and Trump’s cozying up to Putin in a recent phone call, which many have portrayed as a capitulation.In advance of Vance’s divisive speech at the Munich Security Conference, European powers including Britain, France and Germany said there could be no lasting peace in Ukraine without their participation in peace talks.After it, some, including the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, took Vance to task for his comments questioning the future of the decades-old US-European alliance. Scholz also accused the US of “unacceptable interference” in its upcoming election after praise from Vance and the billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s “special government employee”, for the far-right nationalist party AfD.Zelenskyy, who in Munich on Saturday called for the formation of an armed forces of Europe, told NBC that any weakening of US support for Europe or Nato would open the door to Putin’s plans for a territory grab.“What is he waiting for? For a weakening of Nato by, for instance, policy of the US, that the US will think to take its military from Europe,” he said.“Yes, Putin thinks of that. But I will believe that the US will not take its forces, its contingents from Europe, because that will severely weaken Nato and the European continent. Putin definitely counts on that, and the fact that we receive information that he will think of the invasion against former Soviet republics.“The risk that Russia will occupy Europe is 100%, not all Europe, they will begin [with] those countries who are our friends, small countries who’ve been in the USSR, in the Soviet Union. Forgive me, but today these are Nato countries.” More

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      Trump’s comments on Canada prompt surge of patriotism – in a Canadian way

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      A lone figure takes to the stage, a giant maple leaf flag rippling on a screen behind him as he gingerly approaches the microphone.“I’m not a lumberjack, or a fur trader,” he tells the crowd. “I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it ‘about’ – not ‘a boot’.”The crowd, indifferent at first, grows increasingly enthusiastic as the man works his way through a catalogue of Canadian stereotypes, passing from diffidence to defiance before the climactic cry: “Canada is the second largest landmass! The first nation of hockey! And the best part of North America! My name is Joe! And I am Canadian!”The ad, for Molson Canadian beer, was immensely popular when it aired in 2000. And now, with Canada’s identity and sovereignty under threat, it has roared back into the public consciousness.In recent weeks, Canadian patriotism has surged in response to Donald Trump’s suggestion that the US could annex its northern neighbour. His threats have prompted an outpouring of disbelief and defiance, but – in a very Canadian way – they has also revived questions over the complexities of national identity.View image in fullscreenTrump began his campaign of diplomatic trolling before he had even assumed office, questioning Canada’s viability as a nation, suggesting that it could become the 51st American state, and deriding the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as a “governor”.In response, Canadians have taken to acts of patriotism, small and large: one pilot flew his small plane in the shape of a maple leaf; sports fans have booed US teams; hats insisting “Canada is not for sale” have gone viral; consumers have pledged to buy only Canadian-made products – a pledge skewered in a viral sketch in which one shopper berates another for buying American ketchup.“What the hell are you doing?” he asked “We’re in a trade war, you traitor!”“It’s been absolutely crazy and overwhelming,” said Dylan Lobo, who runs MadeInCa, a website that catalogues products made in-country. “We’re struggling to keep up with all the listings. People are really frustrated and they want to find a way to support Canadian and buy Canadian.”Politicians, aware of a looming election, have wrapped themselves in the flag. And in a show of bipartisan unity, five former prime ministers have called for Canadian unity.“We all agree on one thing: Canada, the true north, strong and free, the best country in the world, is worth celebrating and fighting for,” the leaders wrote in a statement.A recent poll found pro-Canadian sentiment has surged in recent weeks – with the biggest leap towards patriotism found in francophone Quebec, a region historically ambivalent towards federal patriotism.View image in fullscreenThe shift marks a dramatic rebound from 2020, when the divisive policies of the coronavirus pandemic shifted how many Canadians viewed the flag – especially after the maple leaf was appropriated by the by far-right Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa.At the same time, new stress has been put on Canadian national identity amid growing recognition of the historical injustices perpetrated against Indigenous peoples. Statues of monarchs and founding statesmen have been pulled down, and buildings renamed amid a heated national discussion about the legacy of colonial rule.“Trump’s comments on annexation have certainly awakened something in people,” said Wilfred King, the chief of Gull Bay First Nation. “But I think we also need to remember on both side of the border, that Indigenous people in Canada are the only ones that can really speak about true sovereignty in this country.”Unlike in other colonial conquests, King said, the Crown made alliances with Indigenous peoples in what is now Canada. “There was no surrender to outside forces.”“When crisis and conflict came, we answered the call. Indigenous people volunteered more than any other group to fight alongside their allies in both world wars,” said King, whose father served in the second world war. “When they returned home, they were marginalized. They saw what it was like to be betrayed by a friend.”And so the fraught nature of Canada’s relationship with the US is jarringly familiar to the country’s first peoples. “They’re only feeling what we’ve been feeling for the last 175 years. It’s how the government has treated First Nations in Canada.”View image in fullscreenFor Jeff Douglas, who played Joe Canada in popular the 2000 ad campaign, the recent surge of nationalism has brought mixed feelings.“Patriotism wasn’t something that ever really resonated with me and I was very ignorant about the totality of Canadian history when we made the ad,” he said.Douglas, who later became an acclaimed radio host for the CBC, says decades spent meeting different groups across the country has deepened his understanding of Canada’s complicated, and dark, history.“I think that we can still be proud. We just have to be aware – and then being aware of the wrongs of the past and the continuing wrongs in the present doesn’t mean that we can’t be proud to be Canadian. Pride in being Canadian cannot come at the cost of that awareness,” he said.And while he says a “blind” shift towards patriotism doesn’t serve the broader goals of fixing injustices, it also reflects the “dynamic” nature of people’s relationship with their country.“There are going to be times where you’re going to need to just say, ‘We need to be strong and face forward if that’s what the country needs to get through the existential threat we’re facing,’” he said.Douglas is hopeful the current fixation on buttressing Canadian identity in the face of threats to the country will serve a broader purpose.“My love of the country, or rather the people of the country, is a love of what we potentially could achieve, and it is richer when I understand the complexity of where we’ve been and where we are. We can grow. But it’s important to remember that you can love something that’s imperfect.” More

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      The courts separate democracy from autocracy. Will Trump defy them?

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      Will the Trump administration defy the courts?JD Vance’s tweet last weekend that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power” has sparked widespread concern that the Trump administration might become the first in US history to do so. At least at this stage, it is not clear that it will come to that, notwithstanding the president’s proclivity for asserting limitless executive power. But as other countries’ experiences show, if he were to adopt the position of the US vice-president, Trump would be crossing perhaps the most fundamental line demarcating constitutional democracy from autocracy.Consider just a few examples. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez spent years undermining the country’s supreme court, declaring that it lacked “legitimate and moral authority”. The former president later refused to comply with a 2003 order to demilitarize the Caracas police force, instead tightening military control over law enforcement to entrench his power. In Hungary, after failing to enforce rulings of the constitutional court, Viktor Orbán’s government openly defied the European Union’s highest court’s ruling finding Hungary’s restrictive asylum scheme in violation of EU law. Likewise, in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan systematically ignored domestic and European court of human rights rulings that ordered the government to release journalists and other political activists critical of his government.Nothing is more challenging to an authoritarian than an independent judiciary ready to hold the leader accountable. When would-be authoritarians perceive judicial oversight as a threat, they respond by dismissing and defying court rulings or otherwise undermining judicial independence. By the time the authoritarian takeover is complete, the judiciary is rendered toothless. Courts are especially vulnerable to such moves because they do not have their own enforcement arms.To be sure, we are not there yet. But Vance seems to see these examples not as object lessons in what not to do, but as models for the US president to follow. In 2021, Vance said his “one piece of advice” to Trump for a second term would be to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people … And when the courts – because you will get taken to court – and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” (It is disputed whether Jackson even said this, but in any event he never defied the court.)In Trump’s last term, he had a worse won-lost record in the supreme court than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt – yet he abided by all court orders. And in the wake of concern about Vance’ s comments, Trump said he always obeys courts, but will pursue appeals. Thus far, that seems to be the case. But no responsible government official – much less the No 2 official in the executive branch – should even suggest that defying the courts is appropriate.View image in fullscreenTrump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk, is also fanning the flames. On 8 February, hours after a federal judge in New York temporarily blocked Musk’s team from accessing sensitive personal information held by the Department of the Treasury on millions of Americans, Musk shared a tweet from another user saying: “I don’t like the precedent it sets when you defy a judicial ruling, but I’m just wondering what other options are these judges leaving us.” The next day, Musk posted: “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!”On 12 February, Musk tweeted: “Bravo!” in response to a claim by El Salvador’s autocratic president, Nayib Bukele, that he had impeached judges in 2021 “and then proceeded to fix the country”. Musk added: “We must impeach judges who are grossly undermining the will of the people and destroying America. It is the only way.” Bukele’s removal of five constitutional court judges in 2021 is widely regarded as a “technical coup” that paved the way for him to seek re-election in violation of constitutional term limits. Musk is no lawyer, but he should know that in the US, impeachment is reserved for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, not decisions Musk does not like.Government officials are of course free to criticize court decisions. But Vance’s and Musk’s comments echo those of authoritarian regimes around the world, which often seek to undermine the legitimacy of any institution that might constrain their actions – the courts, the press, the non-profit sector. The criticism is often the first step in a campaign to sweep away all constraints.The federal courts in the US system are given independence and final say on legal disputes so that they can act as a check on the political branches. In 1975, the supreme court explained that “all orders and judgments of courts must be complied with promptly.” Indeed, the chief justice, John Roberts, in his annual end-of-year report on the federal judiciary in 2024, identified “threats to defy lawfully entered judgments” as one of the core issues that “threaten the independence of judges on which the rule of law depends”.The moment of truth may come soon. More than 60 lawsuits have been filed challenging Trump’s initial measures – from seeking to revoke birthright citizenship to freezing federal funding. Nearly every court to rule thus far has ruled against the administration.Were the Trump administration to follow Vance’s and Musk’s advice and defy the supreme court, the fallout would be swift, widespread – and justified. The supreme court has limited formal resources to compel the president to follow its dictates, because the president, not the courts, oversees federal law enforcement. Despite that formal reality, defiance would be an impeachable offense – and if the Republican party stood behind the president at that point, it would pay greatly at the polls. That’s because few principles are as fundamental to the American system as the notion that the supreme court has final say on constitutional and statutory issues and its orders must be obeyed. Trump would cross that line at his own, his party’s, and the country’s peril.

      Amrit Singh is a law professor and executive director of the Rule of Law Impact Lab at Stanford Law School. David Cole is a professor at Georgetown Law and former legal director of the ACLU More

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      ‘A particularly heinous villain’: a disdain for Musk has sparked protests across US

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      When protesters showed up at state capitols around the country and at a host of federal agencies this month, they carried signs with messages about the unelected billionaire running a slash-and-burn government-cutting campaign that moved them to action.As liberal protesters find their footing in the second Donald Trump era, Elon Musk is proving a potent target.“He’s a particularly heinous villain,” said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the activist organization Indivisible. “He is less popular even than Trump, and it makes sense, because he’s an unelected billionaire, in fact, the richest man in the world, who’s trying to end cancer research and nutrition assistance for the poorest children in the country.”Trump’s inauguration wasn’t met with protests like in 2017. In the 2024 election, Trump won the popular vote for the first time and Republicans took hold of both chambers of Congress, dampening the movement against him. But the ascendancy of Musk in Washington has given the leftwing protest movement somebody to mobilize against, and people across the country appear to be taking their poster boards out of storage.In Washington, Indivisible and other groups on the left have organized protests, moving from agency to agency and following Musk’s team at the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) as it tries to gut programs and services.The protests are meant to voice anger against Musk and Trump, but also to pressure Democrats into working in tandem with groups such as Indivisible as an opposition party, Levin said. Democratic elected officials have not led the resistance, he argued, so the resistance is pushing them to action.Even without Musk, though, Levin thinks people would have been moved to opposition by the actions taken by the Trump administration, which is “not starved for possible villains”.“Musk is particularly bad, and he makes for an easy opponent to rally against,” he said. “ We thought there was going to be a backlash at some point. We didn’t think that we were going to have the richest man in the world tweet out that the Department of Education no longer exists. I mean, that is bonkers.”Beyond DC, a nascent protest movement – organized on social media by people who were tired of waiting for direction on how to voice their discontent with Trump – began in late January with a Reddit post that set a date chosen at random, 5 February, for a 50-state protest. Now called 50501 (for 50 states, 50 protests, one day), the group claims people turned out in 80 cities that day. Established left-leaning groups first viewed the protest plans with wariness, given the organizers’ inexperience.The movement is planning a president’s day protest on 17 February, dubbing it the “not my president’s day of action”. On social media, the group talks about standing up to dictators and “tech bros” and against the abuse of power they see in the second Trump administration.View image in fullscreenThe 50501 group is working to build relationships with activists around the country and plan further protests, said Sydney, an organizer with 50501, who asked that her last name not be used. She had never organized before, but didn’t see anyone on social media channels planning for the 5 February protest in Pennsylvania.“I decided to pick the ball up and do it myself. And I learned a lot extremely quickly. It’s probably one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done,” she said.Levin, of Indivisible, said he hoped those who attend protests then find further ways to get involved – many local chapters of Indivisible formed on the buses on the way home from the Women’s March in 2017, he said.Those Indivisible chapters around the country have grown steadily, and Levin is seeing more groups registering now than the same period in 2017. Chapters in all 50 states organized 300 events at local Senate offices to call on senators to oppose Russ Vought’s nomination to lead the office of management and budget.Levin said his organization was initially “really frustrated” that Democratic leadership was not responding strongly to the funding freeze that caused confusion and chaos. The group held a “Nobody Elected Elon” protest at the treasury department, and elected Democratic members of Congress made an appearance.At a protest at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on 10 February, Levin introduced 17 members of Congress. During each introduction, he asked them if they would withhold their vote on any funding bill, the next big battle for Democrats to show they are standing against the Trump agenda. Sixteen of the 17 said they would – some answering before he could even finish the question. The one who didn’t, the California representative Brad Sherman, faced a crowd chanting “withhold your vote,” Levin said.While the long-term efficacy of such efforts is unclear, Quinta Jurecic, a a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, suggested in an interview with the New York Times that protests outside the labor department prompted in an-person “Doge” meeting to move online.Some Democrats have privately complained that Indivisible and MoveOn, another liberal advocacy group, were pressuring them too much, considering Republicans hold the levers of government power, Axios reported. Faced with a barrage of phone calls, Democratic representative Don Beyer said: “It’s been a constant theme of us saying, ‘Please call the Republicans.’”Republicans have also been getting calls – Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska, told the Washington Post on 7 February that the Senate was receiving 1,600 calls per minute, and that calls to her office were mostly from people concerned about Musk and his agency.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic representative from New York, said in an Instagram story that the volume of calls to her Republican colleagues is sending the message that people are mobilized and angry. “But the pressure needs to stay on,” she said.Send us a tip
      If you have information you’d like to share securely with the Guardian about the impact of cuts to federal programs, please use a non-work device to contact us via the Signal messaging app at (646) 886-8761. More

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      How a faded New York hotel became a lethal political battleground

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      Manhattan’s Roosevelt hotel, with its faded Renaissance revival facade, last week became the focal point of a fast-moving political battle enveloping New York City’s mayor, the state governor and the department of justice in the service of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.Trump’s new head of homeland security, Kristi Noem, claims the formerly luxurious 1,025-room hotel, now a shelter for mostly Central and South American immigrants, is a “base of operations” for Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan prison gang.Noem’s head of immigration enforcement, Tom Homan, wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents to be able to enter the hotel, but New York’s sanctuary city laws prevent New York police from cooperating.The Trump administration, under Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Doge team, claimed that $80m had recently been transferred to New York to house migrants, including in the Roosevelt, and clawed it back.The Roosevelt is a grimy backdrop to an extraordinary battle that has pitted the city’s Democrat mayor, Eric Adams, seeking re-election this year, against Governor Kathy Hochul, and has had career federal prosecutors, Democrat and Republican, at each other’s­ throats over claims of bias and corruption.Late Friday, the justice department moved to dismiss corruption charges against Mayor Adams, the latest move in a legal saga that led over two days to the resignation of seven career prosecutors and left a justice department in chaos.View image in fullscreenDuring his campaign Trump vowed to “save” New York, claiming that businesses were fleeing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who were sucking up public resources. Last year, the city estimated that the migration crisis has cost New York $5bn in two years, and costs are expected to double in 2025.Last week, the justice department in Washington sent a proposal to New York’s southern district to shelve an indictment against Adams on corruption charges of accepting illegal campaign donations in exchange for political favours, arguing that it would interfere with his ability to help the administration tackle illegal immigration.Democrats claimed the move amounted to using the law to influence an elected politician. It was characterised by one of Adams’ prosecutors as a “dismissal-with-leverage” proposal, a corrupt exchange for allowing federal agents to deport tens of thousands of migrants in the city against sanctuary city laws.Danielle Sassoon, acting US attorney in New York, said she could not “agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations”, and resigned. Emil Bove, acting deputy US attorney general, accepted her resignation, alleging that she was “incapable of fairly and impartially” reviewing the case.Hochul said she was considering removing Adams as mayor over the alleged deal and claims Trump’s department of justice “is already showing they’re corrupt”. Homan called Hochul an “embarrassment” who “needs to be removed”. Progressive Bronx Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “This corruption poses a real threat to the people of the city.”View image in fullscreenThe escalating drama kicked off last month when Damian Williams, the former Democrat prosecutor who brought corruption charges against Adams, wrote that New York was “being led with a broken ethical compass” – seemingly a reference to Adams.That was a red flag to the incoming administration, whose chief executive is still smarting over a state conviction on a scheme to obscure hush-money payments to a porn actor and an $83m civil judgment for defaming writer E Jean Carroll and has seemingly found an ally in the Democrat mayor.“We are living in an era where political favoritism overrides the legal process in pursuit of political gains. This marks a dangerous new phase where selective law enforcement, applied at whim, is a weapon,” said Mike Quinn, a lawyer involved in the drive to hold Sackler family members accountable for the opioid crisis.Adams, like Trump, claims the criminal actions brought against him are politically motivated. The two are growing closer, with Adams visiting Trump at his Florida estate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe impact on Adam’s re-election prospects are hard to read. A recent poll ahead of the Democrat primary in April had the mayor in third or fourth place, behind Trump’s arch enemy Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who resigned in 2021 amid a sexual harassment scandal. Cuomo has not yet officially declared. In the running also is Zohran Mamdani, a progressive Democrat, who has vowed to lower the cost of living for working-class New Yorkers.A poll last month found that 73% of likely primary voters held an “unfavorable” view of Adams, with fears about subway crime, highlighted in December when a homeless woman was fatally set on fire in a subway car, among the factors behind their dissatisfaction.“New Yorkers have the idea that the mayor turns on the lights in the morning and turns them off at night,” says Democrat consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “They instil in him tremendous values and powers. When he fails to meet them on either side of the aisle, people lose their minds, and that’s what’s happening in New York right now.”But Adams has scored some wins, including reducing a post-Covid rat infestation by introducing plastic rubbish bins. “Everybody wants the city to function, and if it doesn’t function it doesn’t really matter what your ideological bent is,” says Sheinkopf. “It’s about how the garbage gets picked up, how you don’t feel threatened by homeless people and how your life functions.”But the left also dislikes Adams as a matter of reflex. “It’s a natural response, because anything Trump touches is right by definition,” Sheinkopf points out.If Adams loses the Democrat nomination, he could run as a Republican, much as three-term mayor Mike Bloomberg did in 2002. New York has only had four Republican mayors in a century, each one elected after a crisis.The crisis this time, says Sheinkopf, “is that New York is out of control. Corruption, crime and the sense that things have broken down.” But he doubts Adams is the one to fix it. “He created it, so it’s a hard sell”.One scenario, hinted at by City Hall insiders, is that under a deal to drop the Adams corruption charges, the mayor could then switch party in a bid to stop Trump’s arch enemy, Cuomo.Trump and Cuomo have fought bitterly over the years, including in 2019, when Trump called his brother Chris, a former CNN host, Fredo after the hapless brother in The Godfather. “If I wasn’t governor of New York, I would have decked him. Period,” Cuomo said. More

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      ‘The greatest propaganda op in history’: Trump’s reshaping of US culture evokes past antidemocratic regimes

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      Bigger than the Super Bowl, claimed Donald Trump, sitting in a big leather chair beside a big map. Then came an announcement over the public address system. “Air Force One is currently in international waters,” declared the flight crew of the US presidential jet, “for the first time in history flying over the recently renamed Gulf of America.”As his aides clapped and whooped, Trump gloated: “Isn’t that nice? We’re about ‘Make America Great Again’, right? That’s what we care about.” He proceeded to sign a proclamation declaring 9 February “Gulf of America Day” as Air Force One flew over the body of water previously known as the Gulf of Mexico.It was classic Trumpian showmanship from the highest perch in the world. It was also the latest salvo by the 47th president and his allies to control language, influence media narratives and reshape cultural institutions in ways that some compare with the Soviet Union or other authoritarian regimes from history.Long a master of branding, Trump is making propaganda a core element of his strongman presidency. This comes as little surprise to critics who regard it as an extension of last year’s election campaign in which he sold himself as a champion of the forgotten people and victim of a weaponised justice department.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Donald Trump’s re-election is the greatest, most successful propaganda op in history. Propaganda is why Donald Trump is president again and they know this, which is why they undermined the press, expertise and science.”Since taking office, Trump has outpaced his predecessors by signing 64 executive orders and 27 memos and proclamations in less than a month. His blitz on immigration, trade and the federal bureaucracy was expected. But the president’s aggressive approach to reshaping national identity through symbolism and language has taken opponents by surprise.When Trump used his inaugural address to assert his vision of US dominance by promising to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton burst out laughing. But the switch came with a sinister edge.This week, the White House banned the Associated Press, one of the world’s biggest news outlets, because it has not changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America (the AP serves numerous countries that do not recognise the new name). The punitive measure prompted CNN to invoke “newspeak” from George Orwell’s novel 1984, in which language is a tool of control and can be narrowed to limit thought.In a similar vein, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, signed an order restoring the name of a special operations forces base in North Carolina back to Fort Bragg, reversing a Joe Biden effort in 2023 to remove names that honored Confederate leaders (Hegseth swerved past that association by this time recognising Roland Bragg, an obscure veteran of the second world war).The White House is also redefining terms to cast opponents in a negative light – for example, by referring to fired federal employees as “deep-state activists”. The National Park Service erased references to transgender people on its webpage for the Stonewall national monument.As the AP discovered, the media – long derided by Trump as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” – is now subject to a system of rewards and punishments. The owners of the Washington Post and major social media platforms such as Facebook and X had the best seats in the house at his inauguration.At least 10 of the 18 reporters that the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called on during her briefing this week work for partisan rightwing outlets. Officials at the Pentagon decided to “rotate” eight major news outlets from their workspaces, replacing them with more Trump-friendly media, and invited a far-right activist, Jack Posobiec, to take part in Hegseth’s first trip overseas.In addition, Trump is pursuing lawsuits against media outlets by using novel legal theories to circumvent established first amendment protections, while his allies are using the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to target broadcast news networks whose content they deem unfavorable.View image in fullscreenThere are concerns that the intimidatory tactics are working. Setmayer, who now leads the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee, said: “The mainstream American media has failed. What is happening is not a normal transition; it’s a constitutional crisis. That’s the way the American media should be covering this and they’re not.“They’re parsing their words. They’re whitewashing and sanewashing what Elon Musk has been allowed to do and what Donald Trump is telegraphing he plans to do more of. They’ve made a business decision to obey in advance. It’s not an accident that Trump went after the FCC licenses and sued these media conglomerates for them to bend their knees to him, so they won’t cover him honestly.”Trump is also making a surprise foray into arts and culture with a hostile takeover of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, a living memorial for the 35th president that, with a $268m budget last year, hosts classical music, dance, hip-hop, opera, theatre, touring productions and educational arts programming.Trump has installed himself as chair, stacked the board of trustees with his loyalists and replaced president Deborah Rutter with his former acting director of national intelligence, Ric Grenell, a disrupter who has no prior experience in arts administration.“We know the importance of the arts in telling stories and keeping the truth out there and in being part of the resistance, so it is no accident that Trump is coming for the arts, similar to other fascists in history,” Setmayer said.The president admitted he has not been to the Kennedy Center but felt the overhaul was necessary because of drag shows that are “specifically targeting our youth” as well as other “anti-American propaganda”. He told reporters: “We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country.” In response, several stars have dissociated themselves from the centre.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt the same time, the National Endowment for the Arts, the biggest national funder of the arts and arts education with a budget of $207m in 2024, has cancelled grants aimed at marginalised groups and posted updated guidelines stating that grant recipients should “not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)’” or “use federal funds to promote gender ideology”.The changes fueled concerns about the politicisation of the arts, with critics pointing to examples of dictators in history who suppressed and censored artists.Olivia Troye, a former adviser to then vice-president Mike Pence, said: “There’s a lot of things I expected from Trump, having worked with his circle of people, but I have to say that it was striking to me when he decided to insert himself and take over the Kennedy Center because that to me was a sign that it is him wanting to fully control all narratives.”Trump is exhibiting an authoritarian streak and seeking to curb dissent, Troye added: “The arts is a significant pillar of watching what happens in nations that are facing the potential failing of their democracy and that’s concerning. People need to be paying attention to these types of thing.”“They may seem frivolous: why do I care what he did to the Kennedy Center? Well, let’s look at the history. Who has ever done that as president? Why is he doing that? It’s all part of the overarching effort by this individual who wants to control every narrative there is.”Like past authoritarians, Trump understands the power of symbols such as Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, which is carved with the faces of former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna of Florida proposed legislation adding Trump to the monument, explaining: “President Trump’s bold leadership and steadfast dedication to America’s greatness have cemented his place in history.”Trump has issued an order to revive a “National Garden of American Heroes”, an attempt to curate a version of history that reinforces ideas of national exceptionalism. The representative Buddy Carter of Georgia has introduced a bill to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”, as Trumpseeks to acquire the island territory.Trump has also called for “patriotic education”, attempting to control what is taught in schools and instil a conservative vision. The administration is pushing to restrict what teachers can teach about gender and race and has threatened to withhold funds from schools that fail to comply.Above all, the 47th president is dominating the nation’s attention, filling news cycles and social media 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Last Sunday, he became the first sitting US president to attend the Super Bowl, the crown jewel of US sport, which drew a record 127 million viewers and “a Caesar-at-the-Colosseum air,” according to New York Times critic James Poniewozik.Then, when Trump hosted ally Elon Musk and his son X in the Oval Office, there was saturation coverage. White House communications director Steven Cheung tweeted an image of eight news networks simultaneously broadcasting the meeting and boasted: “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”Reed Galen, president of the Union, a pro-democracy coalition, said: “With dictators throughout history, it’s all spectacle. The idea of propaganda is not necessarily to lie about things but to keep the attention focused where you want it, and he’s a master of that.”Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history and Italian studies professor at New York University and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, describes Trump as “one of the most successful propagandists in all of history”, as skilled as the former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in his use of images, symbols and repetition.She said: “The cult of personality is that you must be omnipotent but you’re also omnipresent, you’re everywhere. It’s not just old-school dictatorships like North Korea today or communist China where the face of the leader is everywhere.“Nowadays, for example, Modi in India is the most followed leader in the world. He’s a genius at Instagram. When he ran for office in 2014, he used holograms so he could be in a hundred places at the same time. Being everywhere and inescapable is part of making the population depend on you and on no one else.” More

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      Donald Trump has become master of the US Senate | Sidney Blumenthal

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      First, before Elon Musk came for everyone, Donald Trump came for the US Senate. When he returned to office, the House of Representatives was already under his heel. Many of the House Republican leaders had been his sidekicks during January 6, and one, Mike Johnson, had since become the speaker. The Senate, however, still retained, for the most part, its club-like atmosphere where the members considered themselves powers unto themselves. Senators with a toga complex have always looked down on House members as rabble. Trump viewed the independent character of the upper body as a thorn in his side. The subservience of the House of Representatives was the model that Trump envisioned for the Senate. It could no longer pretend to be the greatest deliberative body of legislators in the world, but a vassal fiefdom subject to his whims.Trump’s opportunity to crush the Senate appeared at once. As soon as he made his nominations for his cabinet, the Senate would hold confirmation hearings. His misfit nominees gave him his chance. In any previous time, just a tincture of the alcoholism, serial sexual abuse, playing footsie with a Russian-backed despot, hawking of snake oil, doodling enemies lists and bilking non-profit organizations, quite apart from plain incompetence, would have been enough to knock them out before they ever approached a seat in a hearing room.The senator John Tower, of Texas, very much a member of the club of his day, but a drunken sexual harasser of the old school, groping in elevators, was exposed when George HW Bush nominated him as secretary of defense, and dropped out. But shame in the Trump orbit is as antiquated a notion as virtue.The patent unfitness of Trump’s nominees put the senators on the spot. It was the senators, not the obviously disqualified nominees, who had to pass the test. They were not the ones sitting in judgment; they were in Trump’s dock. If Trump could break the lords of the Senate over his cabinet of curiosities, he could reduce them to being his serfs. By transforming their duty to advise and consent into shut up and obey, Trump would trample more than unstated norms. He would be obliterating a constitutional responsibility of the Senate and removing a further check and balance on his power.Subverting the institution was not an abstract exercise. If individual senators looked like they might stand in the way, it was not enough that they be defeated on a roll-call vote. They had to be personally violated. The part of themselves that they held to be at their core both as public officials and private persons had to be soiled. They had to be made examples before the others. Their humiliation had to be performed as a public demonstration. By voting in favor of nominees they knew in their bones should never be approved, whose disqualifications crossed the senators’ deepest principles, their intimidation made them Trump’s subjects. Once the method of defilement was established, it would be applied again and again. It would loom as an ever-present threat over any others’ wavering. Trump’s degradation would be sufficient to cow the rest. But he would not stop. After the first victim, then there was the next, and the next, one after another, until Trump was the master of the Senate. Trump began with one senator whose vulnerability he could twist to make her writhe.That senator was Joni Ernst, of Iowa.View image in fullscreenAfter attending Iowa State University, where she joined ROTC, Ernst enlisted in the army, served during the Iraq war in Kuwait in charge of a transport unit, and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. Running for the US Senate in 2014, she said she had been sexually harassed in the military and pledged that, if elected, she would make independent investigation and prosecution of sexual crimes her signature issue.Once she entered the Senate, Ernst was for the most part a down-the-line conservative Republican, yet was also among the few Republicans who consistently sponsored and voted for bills to protect victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, especially focusing on women in the military.When Ernst divorced in 2019, her painful story of emotional and physical abuse became public – her husband’s dalliance with a babysitter, his long-term affair with a mistress and, after she confronted him, how he suddenly “grabbed me by the throat with his hands and threw me on the landing floor. And then he pounded my head.” Her husband responded by accusing her of having an affair herself, which she said was a “lie”. She also revealed at that time that she had been raped as a college student, reported it to the counseling service, but chose not to go to the police, and had kept it a secret. “I couldn’t stomach the idea that my rape would become public knowledge,” she wrote in a memoir published in 2020. “I was sure my boyfriend would find a way to blame me.”Ernst’s divorce complaint disclosed for the first time that she had turned down candidate Donald Trump’s offer to be his vice-presidential running mate in the 2016 campaign. She attributed her refusal as vaguely not being “the right thing for me or my family”. It is uncertain whether Trump ever made the actual offer. He took Mike Pence, who was pressed on him by his campaign manager Paul Manafort to represent the evangelical right.When Trump nominated Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense, stories instantly surfaced that the Fox News weekend host had been accused of rape, paid hush money, had a history of sexual abuse in two of his marriages, impregnated a girlfriend and was a raging alcoholic who drank on the job. He also opposed women serving in combat roles in the military, as Ernst had.“I am a survivor of sexual assault,” Ernst said in her initial response to Hegseth’s nomination. She insisted that she wanted “to make sure that any allegations have been cleared, and that’s why we have to have a very thorough vetting process”.But the “vetting process” was warped. Witnesses were hesitant to come forward, afraid they would be subject to the reign of terror that Christine Blasey Ford endured when she publicly testified in Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing to be on the supreme court he had sexually assaulted her. But the woman who claimed that Hegseth had raped her was willing to speak privately with Ernst. So were two other witnesses, both female soldiers who would also talk to her in private about his drunkenness and sexual harassment.Ernst was then subjected to waves of “Maga” attacks. Facing re-election in 2026, she was threatened with a primary challenge from a local rightwing talkshow host, Steve Dease, who posted: “Joni Ernst sucked as a Senator long before this … I am willing to primary her for the good of the cause.” Elon Musk forked over a half-million dollars to blast ads that wallpapered Iowa TV, hailing Hegseth as a “patriot” and “warrior”, and warning that the “deep state” (ie Ernst) opposed him. Donald Trump Jr unleashed a storm on social media against Ernst, saying that if any senator criticized Hegseth, “maybe you’re in the wrong political party!” An online squadron of winged monkeys swarmed her. The phrase “She’s a Democrat” trended.Ernst succumbed to the smear campaign. She refused to meet with the alleged rape victim, according to a report by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker. She also would not see the other women with first-hand accounts. Ernst hid. The witnesses, however, told their stories to Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat of Illinois and a combat veteran who lost both of her legs. From her isolation, Ernst finally released an announcement that she would support Hegseth. Duckworth said that Ernst and other Republican senators had refused to put “the national security of America over their own political survival”.Then came the turn of Thom Tillis, the senator of North Carolina. He, too, was wary of Hegseth. He heard first-hand from a witness about his drunken behavior. Tillis told Hegseth’s former sister-in-law that if she provided an affidavit about Hegseth’s abuse, he would vote against him. So, she came forward despite the slings and arrows of the Trump mob. The evening before the vote, Tillis quietly told the Republican leader John Thune he would oppose Hegseth. Tillis spoke with both JD Vance and Trump. Unlike Ernst, none of his drama was conducted in public. When the time came to vote, Tillis, who faces a tough re-election in 2026, voted “yes”. Tillis turned on a dime.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThen they came for Bill Cassidy, the senator of Louisiana. Cassidy is a physician who has devoted much of his career to public health and educating people about the importance of vaccinations. He was the decisive vote on the Senate finance committee on the nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr to become secretary of health and human services, the leading vaccine skeptic who has made millions off his crank conspiracy theories and whose cousin, Caroline Kennedy, called him “a predator”.Cassidy attempted to coax Kennedy into committing to the scientific truth that vaccines work.“I’m a doc, trying to understand,” Cassidy said. “Convince me that you will become the public health advocate, but not just churn the old information so that there’s never a conclusion.” No matter how many times he tried, Kennedy would not give him a straight answer.Cassidy was already vulnerable. He had voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection. A far-right primary opponent, the representative Clay Higgins, was preparing to run against him. After Cassidy’s questioning of Kennedy, the winged monkeys descended on him. And Higgins posted on X: “So, vote your conscience Senator, or don’t. Either way, We’re watching.” Cassidy replied with a biblical quotation: “Joshua said to them: ‘Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Be strong and courageous. This is what the LORD will do to all the enemies you are going to fight.” But when the vote came, Cassidy crumpled.They came for Todd Young, the senator of Indiana. He is something of Hoosier Republican royalty, married to the niece of former vice-president Dan Quayle. Young was poised as the decisive vote on the Senate intelligence committee on the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence. In addition to “parroting false Russian propaganda”, as the former senator Mitt Romney put it, and visiting Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, whom she declared was not a “torturer” and “murderer”, she had urged a pardon for “brave” Edward Snowden, who stole massive amounts of data from the National Security Agency and absconded to Russia. When Young asked her whether Snowden had “betrayed the American people”, she acknowledged he had broken the law, but would not go beyond that formulation. Young appeared edgy about her nomination.“Todd Young is a deep state puppet,” posted Elon Musk. His ears had pricked up when he had learned that Young was on the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, created by Ronald Reagan and funded through USAid to promote the rule of law and democracy around the world. Musk tweeted that the NED was “an evil organization [that] needs to be dissolved”. The Trump X mob swarmed. Besieged, Young spoke with JD Vance. The US vice-president arranged a call with Musk. Young announced he would back Gabbard. The noise disappeared.The novel Advise and Consent, by a Washington reporter, Allen Drury, published in 1959 and produced as a movie in 1962, described a cold war melodrama in the Senate over the confirmation of a nominee to become secretary of state who had a left-wing background in his youth. One senator, with a secret gay past, caught up in the fight, fearing exposure, commits suicide. (The scene depicting a gay bar was a movie first.) But the suicide was not over any great principle. The victim was collateral damage. And the president in Advise and Consent was not attempting to use the process to coerce the Senate into vassalage.Hegseth, Kennedy and Gabbard are now all confirmed. The advise and consent responsibility of the Senate was twisted. The senators came to kneel before Trump – and Musk. Musk praised Young, the former “puppet”, as “a great ally”. Cassidy posted: “After collaborative conversations with RFK and the White House, I voted yes to confirm him.” Tillis gave a floor speech extolling Musk and Doge: “Innovation requires pushing the envelope and taking calculated risks.” Ernst wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled USAid Is a Rogue Agency.Meanwhile, the $2bn in USAid purchases of agricultural products for humanitarian aid were suspended. The Iowa Soybean Association, dependent on a $95m grant supporting more than 1,000 farms that was now not being paid, protested. Ernst, a member of the Senate agriculture committee, was silent.“I was embarrassed,” Ernst told the Des Moines Register about speaking about being raped. “I didn’t know how to explain it. I was so humiliated. And I’m a private person, when it comes to those things.” After that incident, she found herself in an abusive relationship and the victim of domestic violence. As a senator, she used her position to break with her past of victimhood and established herself as a champion of those who had been victimized as she had been. But then she found herself in another abusive relationship, with Donald Trump. She was threatened with being completely stripped of everything she had striven for and her status as a senator destroyed. She had a choice to stand up against her transgressor or to subject herself to him. She decided to submit to the humiliation. And afterward she became the enabler of the abuser.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      A tale of two suckers: Donald Trump’s plastic straws and Keir Starmer | Stewart Lee

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      It’s difficult to know whether to set any store by Donald Trump’s bleak and yet also often banal pronouncements, which read as if handfuls of offensive concepts have been tossed into the air by a monkey, read out in whatever order they landed and then made policy. Until it’s clear they can’t work. At which point, the monkey must toss again.But this month, Trump, whose morning ablutions increasingly appear to consist of dousing himself in sachets of the kind of cheap hot chocolate powder I steal from three-star hotels, like a flightless bird stuck in the machine that glazes Magnum lollies, declared he wanted to build his hotels on the mass graves of Gaza. Hasn’t Trump seen The Shining? It won’t end well. Pity those whose children have the misfortune to die next to a monetisable stretch of shoreline. And hope humanity’s next wave of mass killings happens somewhere uneven and way inland that hopefully wouldn’t even make a decent golf course.Is Ukraine the frontier upon which the future of European democracy hinges, or is it just a massive stretch of undeveloped fairway, its leisure/conference utility value currently compromised only by the desire of some losers to continue living in the country they consider home? Where we see the falling domino chain that starts with Poland and ends in your back garden, does Trump see only a succession of 18-hole courses full of men in caps and enormous flapping flares brokering manly deals at the tee? Drive your golf carts over the bones of the dead!But maybe Trump’s horrible mouth-cack is just continuing evidence of his former acolyte Steve Bannon’s advice to “flood the zone with shit”? Does Trump really hate all sea creatures so much that he has to reinstate the plastic straws Joe Biden successfully, and commendably, outlawed? Perhaps he was once told to keep his hands to himself by a mermaid. “These things don’t work,” Trump said of paper straws. “I’ve had them many times, and on occasion, they break, they explode.” Must millions of seabirds, turtles, manatees and dolphins die because Trump imagines that paper straws explode? Or so he can suck up his Diet Coke fast enough to amuse Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth and JD Vance by burping a smelly chorus of YMCA in Biden’s face next time there’s a gathering of ex-presidents.Because Trump, a fully grown man with unlimited funds, loves Diet Coke, and it’s tempting to wonder how many of his seemingly incomprehensible policy decisions can be traced back to his desire to be continually saturated by the soft drink. Maybe there is a subterranean lake of the stuff somewhere deep beneath the Greenland tundra that the climate crisis, which doesn’t exist, will soon make accessible to Trump’s deep Diet Coke drills? Delighted Inuit strip off their sealskins and dance in the showering liquid as they realise they have just struck a rich seam of their new master’s black gold. Like some kind of infantilised diaper king, Trump has genuinely had a special Diet Coke-summoning button installed in the Oval Office. Hopefully, he won’t get it mixed up with that other button. It will be a shame if all life on Earth is fatally irradiated just because Trump wanted a 500ml bucket of fizz to swill down his Big Mac and fries.But are we meant to take Trump’s erratic announcements seriously? While the last concerned voices of the dying liberal press pen outraged articles to their dying liberal readers about Gaza hotels, the invasion of Canada and Trump making it compulsory to drink everything through a Trump Plastic Freedom Straw Company Deluxe Plastic Freedom Straw ™ ®, even cauliflower cheese soup, his homunculus Musk has been quietly dismantling the infrastructure of American government as you knew it. There are cup-and-ball tricksters on Parisian street corners with more subtle moves.Half a dozen of Musk’s own hand-harvested incels-in-waiting, the kind of people who under normal circumstances would have got rich by inventing a way in which hardcore digital pornography could have been mainlined directly into the bloodstream in liquid form, have, under the spurious authority of Musk’s imaginary “department of government efficiency”, gone in and stolen all the data about everyone and everything in the US ever. Never mind. I am sure they will use it responsibly. What can possibly go wrong?Some people gathered at the scenes of Musk’s cost-cutting exercises and waved placards. Others sat and gawked at news footage of Kanye West’s naked wife’s arse or enjoyed disappointing trailers for the new Captain America movie, while the world as they knew it crumbled beneath their king-sized sofas. Keir Starmer backed away, as one might from a neighbour’s unpredictable weapon dog, avoiding direct comment, dodging a commitment to the AI declaration like a coward and hoping for the best, while Trumpy growls and foams. Which simply won’t do.Look. I’m as disappointed as the next metropolitan liberal elitist champagne socialist by Starmer’s government. While I accept, for example, the migration crisis must be addressed, I didn’t expect Starmer, who once left his “village and went to the city of Leeds” and “discovered a whole new world of indie bands – like Orange Juice and the Wedding Present”, to do it with Nigel Farage-style performative cruelty. Address the migration crisis, by all means, but don’t be a c*** about it. Did Orange Juice suffer the indignity of their eponymous third album not even entering the top 50 in 1984 just so, 41 years later, Starmer could send Yvette Cooper out to downgrade the desperate, like Paul Golding in heels.Currently, as Putin puffs up under Trump’s protection and unregulated AI threatens to rewrite history in real time, Starmer is on his knees sucking the paper straw of Trump’s presidency. I fear it may be about to explode in his mouth.

      Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July

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