Donald Trump

Subterms

    More stories

    • 200 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump moves to end union rights for many government agency employees – US politics live

      by

      Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and will be bringing you all the latest news lines through this morning.We start with news that president Donald Trump has signed an executive order limiting numerous federal workers from unionising and ordering the government to stop engaging in any collective bargaining.A memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) references an order from Trump but also provides a fact sheet, setting out the rationale for such a move, The Hill reports.It reads: “President Trump is taking action to ensure that agencies vital to national security can execute their missions without delay and protect the American people.”The Hill reports today:
      The order targets agencies it says have a national security mission but many of the departments don’t have a strict national security connection.
      In addition to all agencies with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of State, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, the order also covers the Treasury Department, all agencies with Health and Human Services (HHS), the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the General Services Administration, and many more.
      In total the OPM memo references 18 departments while also including numerous component agencies. The OPM memo instructs agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreement.
      “Consequently, those agencies and subdivisions are no longer required to collectively bargain with Federal unions,” OPM states in its memo.
      Because the statutory authority underlying the original recognition of the relevant unions no longer applies, unions lose their status as the ‘exclusive[ly] recogni[zed]’ labor organizations for employees of the agencies.
      The memo also says “agencies should cease participating in grievance procedures after terminating their CBA [collective bargaining agreements].”It has been condemned by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) in an email to members, which said the Trump administration was “illegally strip[ping] collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers”.The AFGE added:
      Let’s be clear. National security is not the reason for this action. This is retaliation because our union is standing up for AFGE members – and a warning to every union: fall in line, or else.
      AFGE is not going anywhere. We are fighting back. We are preparing legal action.
      In other news:

      Lawmakers sent a bipartisan letter to the Pentagon’s inspector general asking for an investigation into the Signal group chat in which the defense secretary texted attack plans on a non-secure device.

      Fearing the loss of her seat in the House, Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the UN.

      Judge James Boasberg ordered all relevant government agencies to retain the Signal group chat messages tat are now the subject of litigation.

      Asked about reports that 300 student visas had been revoked, US secretary of state Marco Rubio replied: “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

      Attorney general Pamela Jo Bondi directed the justice department’s civil rights division to ensure that four California universities – Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of California, Irvine – are not using “illegal DEI policies” in admissions.

      Trump signed an executive order directing his vice-president, JD Vance, to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

      A Russian scientist working at Harvard has been detained by Ice and threatened with deportation back to Russia, where she faces jail for protesting the war on Ukraine. More

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: judge orders now-infamous Signal chat be retained as tariff fallout deepens

      by

      A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to preserve all Signal messages exchanged in the now-infamous group chat in which officials organised a high-level military operation in Yemen that inadvertently included a journalist.The temporary restraining order compels defense secretary Pete Hegseth, secretary of state Marco Rubio, treasury secretary Scott Bessent, CIA director John Ratcliffe and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to save their texts from 11 to 15 March.Judge orders retention of all Signal group textsJames Boasberg, the chief US district judge in Washington, ordered all messages in the group chat be preserved, adding that his decision was aimed at ensuring no messages were lost and not because he decided the Trump administration had done anything wrong.Boasberg is set to decide at a later stage whether the disappearing message function of the Signal chat violated federal records retention laws.Read the full storyEnd of an era for Canada-US ties, says Carney, as allies decry Trump’s car tariffsCanada’s prime minister has said the era of deep ties with the US “is over”, as governments from Tokyo to Berlin to Paris sharply criticized Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on car imports, with some threatening retaliatory action.Mark Carney warned Canadians that Trump had permanently altered relations and that, regardless of any future trade deals, there would be “no turning back”.Read the full storyHegseth’s Arabic tattoo stirs controversyThe US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth has a tattoo that appears to read “infidel” or “non-believer” in Arabic, according to photos on his social media account.In photos posted on Tuesday on X, the former Fox News host had what appears to be a tattoo that says “kafir”, an Arabic term used within Islam to describe an unbeliever. Hegseth appears to have also had the tattoo in another Instagram photo posted in July 2024. A pro-Palestinian activist said Hegseth having the tattoo was a “clear symbol of Islamophobia”.Read the full storyStefanik’s UN bid axed to protect House majorityUS House representative Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the US ambassador to the United Nations was pulled by Donald Trump on Thursday, a stunning turnaround for his cabinet pick after her confirmation had been stalled over concerns about Republicans’ tight margins in the House.Read the full storyRubio boasts of 300 cancelled visasThe US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, boasted on Thursday that he has cancelled more than 300 visas for people he labelled “lunatics” in connection with pro-Palestinian university campus protests.The US state department is undertaking a widespread visa-review process, revoking hundreds of visas and placing hundreds more under scrutiny, targeting mostly foreign nationals engaged in pro-Palestine activism, according to official statements.During a visit to Guyana, Rubio said: “We do it every day, every time I find one of these lunatics.”Read the full storyTrump lawyers defend sending student to detention centreLawyers for the US government defended their transferring of doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk from Massachusetts to immigration detention in Louisiana because they did so before a court ordered she not be removed from without prior notice.Ozturk, a 30-year-old student from Tufts University, was sent to detention in the south on Wednesday after being snatched off the street by masked Ice agents outside her home on Tuesday.Read the full storyFossil fuel firms can email Trump to skip pollution rulesDonald Trump’s administration has offered fossil fuel companies an extraordinary opportunity to evade air pollution rules by simply emailing the US president to ask him to exempt them.Read the full storyThe Vances head to Greenland The vice-president, JD Vance, and his wife, Usha Vance, are due to touch down in Greenland on Friday in a drastically scaled down trip to the Arctic island after the original plans for the unsolicited visit prompted an international diplomatic row.The visit to Pituffik, a remote ice-locked US military base in northwestern Greenland, will be closely watched by leaders in Nuuk and Copenhagen, both of whom have aired their opposition to the contentious trip amid ongoing threats by Donald Trump to acquire Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark.Read the full story.What else happened today:

      Airline travel between Canada and the US is “collapsing” over Trump tariffs, with flight bookings between the two countries down by over 70%.

      Robert F Kennedy Jr said the nation’s health agencies will cut 10,000 jobs from their 82,000-person workforce – an enormous reduction the US health secretary characterized as streamlining federal bureaucracy amid internal resistance to the administration’s agenda.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 26 March 2025. More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for ‘improper ideology’

      by

      Donald Trump revealed his intentions to reshape the Smithsonian Institution with an executive order on Thursday that targets funding to programs with “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology”.The president said there has been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite US history by replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”.He signed an executive order putting JD Vance in charge of an effort to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.Trump’s order specifically names the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Women’s history museum, which is in development.“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn – not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” the order said.Representatives for the Smithsonian did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education and research complex. It consists of 21 museums and the National Zoo. Eleven museums are located along the National Mall in Washington.The institution was established with funds from James Smithson, a British scientist who left his estate to the United States to found “at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge”.On Thursday, Trump also created the “DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force” by executive order. It will be chaired by Stephen Miller, the US homeland security adviser.According to the order, the task force will coordinate with local officials on such things as enforcing federal immigration law, including deporting people living illegally in the city, boost the law enforcement presence, and increase the speed and lower the cost of processing applications to carry concealed weapons.The order also calls for removing graffiti and taking other steps to beautify the city.Trump has talked often about his desire to make the city safer and prettier. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump withdraws Elise Stefanik’s UN nomination to protect GOP House majority

      by

      Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he was pulling US House representative Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the US ambassador to the United Nations, a stunning turnaround for his cabinet pick after her confirmation had been stalled over concerns about Republicans’ tight margins in the House.Trump confirmed he was withdrawing the New York Republican’s nomination in a Truth Social post, saying that it was “essential that we maintain EVERY Republican Seat in Congress”.“We must be unified to accomplish our Mission, and Elise Stefanik has been a vital part of our efforts from the very beginning. I have asked Elise, as one of my biggest Allies, to remain in Congress,” the president said, without mentioning who he would nominate as a replacement for his last remaining cabinet seat.Stefanik’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump had tapped Stefanik to represent the US at the international body shortly after winning re-election in November. She was seen as among the least controversial cabinet picks, and her nomination advanced out of committee in late January, but House Republicans’ razor-thin majority kept her ultimate confirmation in a state of purgatory for the last several months.In recent weeks, it had seemed as if Stefanik’s nomination would advance to the Senate floor, given two US House special elections in Florida in districts that Trump easily won in 2024. Filling those vacant GOP seats would have allowed Stefanik to finally resign from the House and given Republicans, who currently hold 218 seats, a little more breathing room on passing legislation in a growingly divided Congress. Democrats hold 213 seats.But Democrats’ upset in a Tuesday special election for a Pennsylvania state Senate seat in Republican-leaning suburbs and farming communities surely gave the GOP pause.Stefanik is the fourth Trump administration nominee who didn’t make it through the confirmation process. Previously, former US House representative Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration for attorney general, Chad Chronister was pulled for the Drug Enforcement Administration and former Florida representative Dr David Weldon was yanked from contention to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Stefanik had been in a state of limbo for months, not able to engage in her official duties as a member of the 119th Congress or to participate in the action at the UN. The vacancy of a permanent US ambassador was happening at a critical moment for the international body as the world leaders had been discussing the two major wars between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Hamas.In late February, the US mission, under Trump, split with its European allies by refusing to blame Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in votes on three U.N. resolutions seeking an end to the three-year war. Dorothy Shea, the deputy US ambassador to the UN, has been the face of America’s mission in New York during the transition. More

    • 200 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Trump and reality: from promoting alternative facts to erasing truths | Editorial

      by

      What does the public need to know? The Trump White House boasts of being the most transparent administration in history – though commentators have suggested that the inadvertent leak of military plans to a journalist may have happened because senior figures were using messaging apps such as Signal to avoid oversight. Last week, it released thousands of pages of documents on John F Kennedy’s assassination. Donald Trump has declared that Kennedy’s family and the American people “deserve transparency and truth”.Strikingly, this stated commitment to sharing information comes as his administration defunds data collection and erases existing troves of knowledge from government websites. The main drivers appear to be the desire to remove “woke” content and global heating data, and the slashing of federal spending. Information resources are both the target and collateral damage. Other political factors may be affecting federal records too. Last month, Mr Trump sacked the head of the National Archives without explanation, after grumbling about the body’s involvement in the justice department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents.The impact is already painfully evident. Cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have affected not only climate records but also an extreme weather risk tool. The purge’s results are absurd as well as damaging. A webpage on the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, appears to have been marked for deletion because it was mistaken for a reference to LGBTQ+ issues.Yet the disparity between the data dump on the Kennedy assassination and the removal of other material is not a contradiction. It speaks volumes about the administration’s approach to truth and knowledge, which it regards as contingent and a matter of convenience. (Tellingly, it is also axing the body that provides most federal funding to libraries.)The 1963 presidential assassination is not only an event around which multiple theories circle but one that helped feed a broader culture of conspiracy theorising and distrust in authority. That has metastatised to the bizarre and extreme claims embraced and even promoted by Mr Trump or figures around him, including birtherism, Pizzagate and QAnon. These increasingly fantastical narratives have had real-world consequences. Facts, science and rationality itself are under attack.In his first term, Mr Trump’s aides shamelessly promoted “alternative facts” while decrying actual facts as “fake news”. The Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over those four years. This time round, his administration is removing existing sources of information. Websites, datasets and other information vanished from federal health websites – such as that for the Centers for Disease Control – last month, though some has since reappeared. One scientist called it “a digital book burning”. The Union of Concerned Scientists has warned that “critically important science conducted at many US agencies, institutions, and universities [is] under increasing assault”.Ad hoc preservation of essential national information and records is usually the work of those faced with the destructive force of foreign invasions, jihadist insurgencies or dictators. But as this bonfire blazes, a motley but committed array of individuals – “nerds who care”, in the words of one – are fighting back by preserving data before it is deleted. Their admirable effort to defend the truth deserves support.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The Atlantic handled ‘Signalgate’ with good judgment | Margaret Sullivan

      by

      Over the past six months or so, the Atlantic has been assembling more and more reporting talent, including by poaching some of the biggest stars from the troubled Washington Post.One of the best intelligence reporters in the country is Shane Harris, who moved from the Post to the Atlantic last summer.Harris shared the byline this week on the Atlantic’s shocking scoop, in which top editor Jeffrey Goldberg inadvertently was given access to a group text where top US officials were planning a strike in Yemen.Before they published and at every step along the way, the Atlantic conferred with knowledgable lawyers about how to proceed. The journalists revealed what they had in stages, and carefully.The Atlantic thus was a model of caution and good judgment.“Jeff Goldberg and The Atlantic handled the whole thing perfectly,” Martin Baron, the renowned editor who led the Washington Post newsroom until 2021, told me in an email on Thursday.The journalists’ actions “could be a college journalism class in careful, ethical handling of sensitive information”, said David Boardman, dean of Temple University’s media school.The contrast was sharp between those well-considered measures and the dangerous negligence at the highest level of the Trump administration. One awful thing is that this incompetence is baked in; in a very real sense it is intentional. Just as “the cruelty is the point,” as writer Adam Serwer said years ago of Trump World, so is the bumbling.It’s an offshoot of the only thing that really matters to Trump: loyalty.“Carelessness – or any of the injurious attributes of clowns, idiots and buffoons – is something Trump can trust,” noted John Stoehr, who writes The Editorial Board, a politics newsletter. “When things go south, as they will, he can trust them to cling to him more tightly, as by then, he might be the only thing standing between them and a jail cell.”Here’s one telling detail. When Tim Miller on the Bulwark’s daily podcast asked Goldberg about the covert CIA operative who was named in the text thread, the Atlantic editor said he purposely withheld her name.“I didn’t put it in the story because she’s under cover. But, I mean, the CIA director put it in the chat.”Yet, inevitably, Trump loyalists responded by trashing Goldberg and the Atlantic. Always attack, as Trump learned decades ago at the knee of the disgraced lawyer Roy Cohn.Thus, Goldberg was described as sleazy, and the magazine itself as hyper-partisan and failing.The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called the story “another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin”.You would have to be plenty credulous or truth-averse to buy that, and much of Maga Nation is just that, including those who relied on Fox News – where, soon after the story broke, prime-time host Jesse Watters made himself part of the defense team: “Journalists like Goldberg will sometimes send out fake names with a contact with their cells to deceive politicians. … This wouldn’t surprise me if Goldberg sneaked his way in.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Atlantic’s CEO, Nick Thompson, noted the contrast: “One lesson from this story: how honest, consistent and careful with national security the best reporters are, compared to the people who always attack them.”Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality turned defense secretary, played the blame game rather than concede his culpability. “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist,” Hegseth said of Goldberg.Granted, a scintilla of acknowledgment came from the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who said “somebody” made a mistake by adding a journalist to the chat, but that didn’t begin to touch the utter lack of security provisions that were laid bare – the apparent use of personal devices by these powerful officials, the reliance on Signal, the messaging app that’s inappropriate for such uses, and so much more.That Goldberg and the magazine are being targeted by Trump and others in his government, Baron told me, was a sign of the administration’s “desperation, its unwillingness to accept responsibility for its own egregious blunders and the hollowness of its attacks on the media”. Just so.Shining a bright spotlight on this mess was a public service. One can only imagine what other information has been as recklessly handled.Maybe this revelation will prevent future lapses, though with this crowd in charge I wouldn’t count on it. Instead, we’ll see punitive leak investigations and even more efforts to control information.Still, this chapter does show the value of conscientious journalism in an increasingly dangerous environment.There has been plenty of sleaziness on display in recent days – but it has nothing to do with the Atlantic’s exemplary reporting.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

    • 238 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump is moving fast and breaking things, but that may result in a better US | Simon Jenkins

      by

      “Move fast and break things” was Mark Zuckerberg’s motto in launching Facebook 20 years ago. It seemed the antithesis of management-school custom and practice. But it worked, to be imitated after a fashion by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other digital tycoons with similar success. Donald Trump is now seeing if it works in government.The smart money in Washington was that after the fiasco of Trump’s first term, his second would see a more emollient president, one careful of his reputation. He would reach out, consult, become a peacemaker, in his desperation to become a Nobel president like Barack Obama.How wrong that has proved. Trump is doing what few leaders dare do. He is being a cultural revolutionary, a Mao Zedong, a grandiloquent system smasher. He wants to reorder Washington’s role in the US and the US’s role in the world. He knows that he may have just two years before “the system” – the electoral cycle, the judiciary and state governments – blocks his path. If he truly wants revolution he must break things, and fast.The historian Arthur Schlesinger said the US needed occasional shocks to wipe away the cobwebs, the bureaucracy and the dirt of an ever more cumbersome union. Should it get out of hand and disaster threaten, the constitution was designed to pull the country back from the brink. Thus it rid itself of Richard Nixon, but not before his radicalism towards China achieved the US’s exit from Vietnam. Might this apply to Trump?Already a dose of the so-called new realism has torn through Nato’s cobwebs. Trump simply does not regard Russia as a threat to the US and western Europe. It is merely obsessed, as it has been throughout history, with its frontier states, with the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and the “stans”, nations that Trump has little interest in defending. Yet ever since the end of the cold war – and during most of it – Nato’s rationale has relied on a thesis, a conventional wisdom, that Russia is set on the conquest of western Europe. If Keir Starmer really thinks, as he appears to, that Russia’s assault on Ukraine threatens Britain, Trump’s message is that Britain should pare down its welfare state and rearm quickly. American taxpayers are not going to be taken for that ride.It was indeed a Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, who warned against exaggerating the Russian threat to sustain Nato, which was already the biggest and richest military establishment the world had ever seen. The defence lobby demanded deterrence to be infinite. Trump has called that bluff. To him the US’s defence is just that: to guard its own borders. So should be Europe’s. It is hardly an outrageous view. No one was screaming for war when Russia invaded Georgia or Ukraine in 2014. It is one thing to disagree with this argument, another to dismiss it as 1939-style appeasement, as western defence lobbyists have done.Meanwhile, on the subject of borders Trump is hardly out on a limb. The US gains about 150,000 Mexican immigrants a year, to join the 11 million already there. Mexico and Canada bombard the US with imports, as does China. To Trump, Americans should pay for their goods what it costs Americans to make them. If they want Chinese cars they can donate 25% of the price to the government as a tariff. As for fentanyl, the way to get countries such as China to stem the flow and the deaths that follow is again with tariffs, massive tariffs. Sometimes in diplomacy only force talks – force backed up with uncertainty.Almost every president comes to Washington promising to cut the bureaucracy. Thus did Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush. The reality is that an activist president breeds bureaucrats. The power of the centre in a democracy attracts more power. Trump knows he has no time for a long fight. It is Musk and the chainsaw or it is nothing. Education is not a federal function but a job for the states. So shut the US Department of Education. Ditto USAID. Also slash the state department. Raid the Treasury. Sure, things will get broken, but it is no worse than doing nothing. That is what cultural revolution means.Trump and his administration’s actions have been in many respects appalling. To renege on Joe Biden’s aid to Ukraine in mid-battle, to call Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator, to insult Canada, to threaten Greenland, to stop famine relief to Africa, to propose a Gaza beach resort, to bully lawyers, to leak security meetings, all beggar belief. Trump and his team are like playground thugs in their crudity and rudeness.But this is the sound of things breaking. It illustrates why Washington develops a defensive “swamp”, to guard against inexperienced presidents. As it is, the chance of Trump succeeding in his radicalism is small. You cannot stage much of a revolution in two years.There will be a counter-revolution. Greenland is unlikely to be an American Ukraine. Tariffs will come back down. The Democrats will recover their nerve. Many of Trump’s “broken things” will be patched together. But in among the chaos are challenges to convention that were overdue. Nato could become realistic. A forever war in Ukraine – or wider – could be avoided and Russia readmitted to the community of nations, as China was after Nixon.This is at least possible. More to the point, the US may review its role in the world, a role that has meant a quarter of a century of moral belligerence, with appalling cost and slaughter. It should revert to being what it is, another nation among nations. That may even be the result of someone moving fast and breaking things.

      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More