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      Trump says he doesn’t know if he needs to uphold constitutional due process

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      Donald Trump said “I don’t know” when asked if he needed to uphold the US constitution when it comes to giving immigrants the right of due process as he gave a wide-ranging TV interview broadcast on Sunday.At the same time the US president also said he saw himself as leaving office at the end of his current term and not seeking a third one – something he has not previously always been consistent on even though a third term is widely seen as unconstitutional.But when it comes to giving immigrants full rights in US law in the face of Trump’s long-promised campaign of mass deportations, Trump was less clear on the need for due process and following US law and court decisions.“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump replied when asked by Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker whether he agreed with his secretary of state Marco Rubio who had previously expressed support for the idea that everyone had the right to due process.When pressed Trump continued: “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the supreme court said. What you said is not what I heard the supreme court said. They have a different interpretation,” the US president added.Trump also gave his clearest indication to date that he plans to leave office at the end of his second term, acknowledging the constitutional constraints preventing him from seeking a third term.“I’ll be an eight-year president, I’ll be a two-term president. I always thought that was very important,” Trump said. But he acknowledged that some people want him to serve a third term, which is currently prohibited by a constitutional amendment passed in 1947.“I have never had requests so strong as that,” told the broadcaster. “But it’s something that, to the best of my knowledge, you’re not allowed to do. I don’t know if that’s constitutional that they’re not allowing you to do it or anything else.”“I’m looking to have four great years and turn it over to somebody, ideally a great Republican, a great Republican to carry it forward,” he added.Trump described the support for a third term as sign of approval, “because they like the job I’m doing, and it’s a compliment. It’s really a great compliment.”The president’s comments downplaying the idea of a third term come as the Trump Organization began selling Trump 2028-branded red hats. The $50 hats are listed with the description: “The future looks bright! Rewrite the rules with the Trump 2028 high crown hat.”In January, Tennessee Republican congressman Andy Ogles introduced a resolution in January seeking to amend the Constitution to allow the president to be elected for up to three terms. That was followed by calls to reaffirm the 22nd amendment’s prohibition on a third term.Trump refused to be drawn on whom he might support as a successor, a position typical to president’s without the option to run again who do not want to be seen as lame ducks as party succession issues begin to bubble up.Trump praised both vice president JD Vance and Rubio – two names that are consistently mentioned – and was asked if he saw Vance as his successor.“It could very well be … I don’t want to get involved in that. I think he’s a fantastic, brilliant guy. Marco is great. There’s a lot of them that are great. I also see tremendous unity. But certainly you would say that somebody’s the VP, if that person is outstanding, I guess that person would have an advantage.” More

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      Federal workers in limbo amid whiplash White House firings and court-ordered rehirings

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      In the 100 days since Donald Trump returned to power, the new administration has driven tens of thousands of federal workers from a civil service it has denigrated as “bloated” and “corrupt”. Among its first targets: probationary workers like Cindi Hron.Hron, a landscape architect with the US Forest Service, was one of thousands abruptly fired across the agency on 14 February, in an action some now refer to as the Valentine’s Day massacre, executed by Elon Musk’s newly empowered “department of government efficiency”, or Doge.“As much as I could see it coming, it was still a gut punch,” she said. Hron was given just two hours to return her equipment before losing access to her government email.In the weeks that followed, similar scenes played out across the government – nurses at the Department of Veterans Affairs, food safety regulators at the Department of Agriculture, scientists at the Department of Health and Human Services. Employees, along with unions and legal groups, challenged the legality of the widespread terminations. At least 24,000 of those dismissals led to court-ordered reinstatements, which have since been paused.Whiplashing court orders have left probationary workers in a fragile state of limbo. Some have been rehired, while others remain on administrative leave. Some have received backpay and benefits, while others have not. Some were returned to work, put on administrative leave and then fired again, after an intervention by the supreme court.“There is a state of confusion as to anybody’s status,” said Jeffrey Grant, a former deputy director at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.Hron had already moved back to Pennsylvania, where she had relocated from to accept the Forest Service job in Utah, when she learned that she would be reinstated, in compliance with a ruling by the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency responsible for protecting federal employees. The reversal was welcome but the return to work felt precarious. When her department extended a second “deferred resignation” offer, she decided to take it.“Doge has just taken a baseball bat and it’s just breaking things,” she said. “It’s certainly not the way I ever anticipated leaving a job.”Probationary workers are employees who generally have less than a year in their role after being hired or promoted, though they are often highly skilled and have years of prior experience in the federal government. While they lack the full job protections of longer-tenured civil servants during this period, probationary workers can only be removed for poor performance or conduct.In late April, a federal judge in California said the administration’s suggestion that tens of thousands of probationary workers were dismissed because of their performance was “a total sham” and order several agencies to provide a retraction in writing.View image in fullscreenBut in a blow to efforts to challenge their removals, the office of special counsel, an independent watchdog agency, announced it was dropping its inquiry into a torrent of complaints that the Trump administration had unlawfully terminated probationary workers. The decision was a reversal of the conclusion reached by the previous head of the agency, Hampton Dellinger, who was fired by Trump.Craig Becker, senior counsel for the AFL-CIO, which is challenging the administration’s firings of probationary employees, said a legal defense network established to provide assistance to federal workers has fielded many calls from employees struggling with questions over benefits and job status.“It’s been a hellish way of treating people,” said Tom Di Liberto, a public affairs specialist and climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) who was among the probationary employees dismissed in February, rehired and put on administrative leave in March and dismissed again on 10 April.Di Liberto’s probationary period would have ended before he was refired on 10 April, but the termination was backdated to 27 February.“They didn’t want us basically to be able to say that we had employment,” he said. “I’m sure that’s not legal, but I’m sure that’s what the courts will decide.”It is not clear how many federal employees were in a probationary status when Doge began its mass firings earlier this year. An analysis by the Partnership for Public Service estimates the number was roughly 250,000. At the time Trump won the election in November, the federal workforce employed just over 3 million people, excluding the roughly 1.3 million active-duty military personnel.Musk initially promised Doge would slash $1tn – a sum so large he and Trump suggested some of the savings could be distributed to taxpayers. This month, Musk revised his target to $150bn – just 2% of the federal budget. A tracker of the savings Doge claims to have achieved is riddled with well-documented errors, duplications and inaccuracies.The Doge team’s efforts have also cost billions of dollars. The Partnership for Public Service estimated Doge’s firings, rehirings, lost productivity and paid leave will cost upwards of $135bn this fiscal year, not including costs associated with court battles their actions have incited.View image in fullscreenAmericans broadly support Doge’s stated mission – tackling waste and inefficiency in government. And experts on the federal bureaucracy as well as workers themselves acknowledge that reforms are needed.But the stories of fired workers, shared at town halls and protests, have helped rally raucous – and even poignant – opposition to Musk’s government-slashing initiative. Polls show Musk and Doge are increasingly unpopular. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll, 56% of respondents agreed that Trump was “going too far” in laying off government employees.“Efficiency is a cloak for a Project 2025 operation to gut the federal workforce and replace career civil servants with Trump loyalists,” said Rob Shriver, the former director of the office of personnel management, referring to the far-right blueprint for overhauling the federal government.Shriver, who now serves as managing director of the Civil Service Strong initiative at Democracy Forward, a legal group contesting the administration’s sweeping dismissals of government employees, expressed concern that Doge’s brute-force approach to government cost-cutting could have lasting repercussions on the civil service.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe administration’s treatment of federal workers risked eroding longstanding expectations of job security and confidence in its public service mission – advantages that help the government recruit new talent.“I think that the stability has been completely undermined by these antics,” Shriver said. “And I think folks have a lot of questions about what they would be asked to do were they to come in and work for a federal agency – whether what they would be asked to do would be in line with their values as somebody who wants to serve the public and takes an oath to the constitution.”Even after Musk said recently he would step back from leading Doge, the administration has made clear its government-shrinking crusade is far from complete. And probationary workers say they feel more vulnerable than ever. Last week, Trump signed an executive order making it easier to fire probationary employees by expanding agency discretion over whether they attain full status.Doge did not reply to multiple requests for comment.“President Trump is the chief executive of the executive branch and reserves the right to fire anyone he wants,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement.The day-to-day stress brought about by the administration’s demonization of federal workers as “deep state” bureaucrats working to thwart the president’s agenda has left the workforce deeply demoralized.One reinstated probationary employee with the US Forest Service in Alaska, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal, said some days she feels so “downtrodden” that she can’t stop crying. At the same time she feels a deep sense of resolve to “hold the line” and “not comply in advance”.“We are the indicator species in this situation,” she said. “This is happening to us first, but the ripple effects of not having us – and not having all of those protections that the federal government provides for the resources that people care so much about, and the lands that they subsist on – will be absolutely enormous.”View image in fullscreenThe anxiety and fatigue is by design. A destabilized civil service was central to the vision laid out by Russell Vought, head of the office of management and budget and chief architect of Project 2025, who once said: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”Multiple probationary employees told the Guardian they expect to be targeted in future rounds of layoffs. Several said they were pursuing other opportunities or had accepted their agency’s buyout offer, while some remained hopeful they would prevail in court.The mass exodus of probationary workers has already disrupted government functions and services – and is raising alarms about the loss of scientific and technical expertise.“The US has been a leader in hurricane science and in weather forecasting,” said Andy Hazelton, a physical scientist who worked on hurricane modeling at Noaa. “We have so much talent, so much knowledge and data. But everything that’s happened, it’s kind of threatening that.”Hazelton, who was among the probationary employees caught in the chaotic cycle of being fired, reinstated and dismissed again, said Noaa staff were already stretched thin. Staff reductions, coupled with proposed budget cuts, could affect work on the agency’s lifesaving forecasts just as hurricane season approaches, he warned.“I worry that the forecasts, perhaps the improvements we’ve come to rely on, may not be as reliable going forward,” he said.As Hron prepares to leave the Forest Service, she has been thinking about the oath she took nearly one year ago.During a security training as part of her onboarding, Hron remembers incorrectly answering a question about the type of threat facing the agency. She assumed the answer was “foreign”, but the correct response was “domestic”. At the time, she found it surprising.Now she has come to believe that the Trump administration’s war on federal workers is the very kind of domestic threat the agency warned of: “We just departed from the ethics, the guidelines and policies that shape what I understood the Forest Service to be.” More

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      Donald Trump’s cartoon-like chaos leaves US economy on unstable course | Heather Stewart

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      Ten days reporting from the US – in Pittsburgh, Washington DC, and just across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia – gave me a fascinating snapshot of what feels like the slow-motion unravelling of the world’s largest economy.So many conversations featured uncertainty and wariness; and weariness, too, as businesses and consumers weigh up every decision, against the backdrop of the chaos emanating from the White House.Even the president conceded last week that the economy was in a “transition period”, claiming he had warned of this during his campaign. (When challenged, the White House could not come up with any examples of when he had done so.)The problem for Trump and his supporters, many of whom remain staunchly loyal, is that the transition period in question is starting to resemble that felt by the classic Looney Tunes character Wile E Coyote between charging off a cliff into midair and plunging to the ground.So far, the hard data from the US economy is holding up well. Friday’s payrolls report was strong, and the negative first quarter gross domestic product reading, while worrying, was hard to take a clear reading from because of the rise in imports as companies stocked up ahead of tariffs.There is little sign of anything as dramatic as mass job cuts, or a sudden stop in consumer spending – although the recent crop of data mainly relates to the period before “liberation day”.Look at the forward-looking surveys, though, and there are clear signs of anxiety. The long-running Michigan consumer sentiment index just had its steepest quarterly decline since the 1990 recession.Spend any amount of time talking to US consumers and businesses, and it is abundantly clear why: there are so many sources of policy ambiguity as to make the future not just uncertain but completely unknowable.There is a cliche that “markets hate uncertainty”, but in truth the same applies to everyone in the real economy, too: the company wondering what size order to put in and how many people to hire and the family thinking about buying that fridge or booking that holiday.It is not surprising they are uncertain. No one, even inside the administration, can say with any confidence what the tariff rates on imports from specific countries will be in July.Even if the tariff policy was crystal clear, its impact on prices would be hard to gauge – depending, as it does, on how much of the cost companies are willing to bear (or “eat”, as the Americans have it) at the expense of reduced profits, and how much is passed on to consumers.For the moment, as the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has admitted, the tariffs on China, at 145%, are now so high as to amount to an effective trade embargo.Not every company will have the deep pockets and global reach of Apple to be able to bend its supply chain away from China to manufacture products for the US elsewhere (in the iPhone-maker’s case, India). Instead, many will be scrambling to find substitutes, which may be more expensive or not exist at all. Shortages of some products seem a distinct possibility.At the same time, sharp cuts in federal budgets, many of which have an ideological taint, including Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decimation of the National Institutes of Health, are raising short-term questions about unemployment and much longer-term worries about the US’s world-leading science base.Some of the most heartbreaking conversations I had were about aspects of Trump’s immigration policy: the man who said a Guatemalan friend’s six-year-old son had stopped going to school in case his mum was snatched by the authorities while he was there, and the restaurant manager who said it was becoming harder to hire Latinos because even fully documented workers feared they could face deportation anyway.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThese are first and foremost human tragedies, but clearly they also have an economic dimension. The credit rating agency Fitch warned in a report last week: “Risks associated with mass deportations could include potential worker shortages, production delays and increased wage inflation that hinders revenue growth, weakens profitability and lowers return on investment.”Of course, because the US economy’s abrupt gearshift has been driven by deliberate policy actions, it’s tempting to think: “It doesn’t have to be like this.”Much more of the real economy impact so far results from this widely shared uncertainty – or perhaps it is better to call it fear – than from the specifics of Trump’s policies.Business owners told me that if they just knew what the final tariffs on products from the various countries in their supply chain would be, for example, then over time they could adapt.It is not completely out of the question that a more settled policy position could arrive in the coming weeks.Certainly, Bessent appears to be trying to manoeuvre Trump towards striking a series of “deals” (in effect, promises of concessions in exchange for tariff carve-outs) with key economies.Yet the president appears to have such a love of political drama – and such an inability to choose a course and stick to it – that the unknowability of future policy seems to be the very essence of Trump 2.0.It seemed to be the mighty bond markets, driving up the cost of US borrowing, that checked Trump’s initial “liberation day” drive, prompting the “pause”.But if time drags on with no agreements in sight, the next wave of distress signals are likely to come not from Wall Street but from main street – in soaring prices and empty shelves. How Trump responds then is anyone’s guess. More

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      Geography has given the US unrivaled security. Trump is destroying it | Gil Barndollar and Rajan Menon

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      The secret to American power and pre-eminence was best summed up more than a century ago.America, observed Jean Jules Jusserand, France’s ambassador to the United States during the first world war, “is blessed among the nations”. To the north and south were friendly and militarily weak neighbors; “on the east, fish, and the west, fish”. The United States was and is both a continental power and, in strategic terms, an island – with all the security those gifts of geography provide. No world power has ever been as fortunate. This unique physical security is the real American exceptionalism.Americans take this providential geography for granted: their country’s wars are always away games, and their neighbors are trading partners and weekend getaway destinations, not rivals or enemies. The ability of the United States to project power around the globe depends on technology and logistics, but it rests ultimately on the foundation of secure borders and friendly neighbors. But that may not be the case much longer. In threatening war with both Canada and Mexico, Donald Trump is obliterating America’s greatest strategic advantage.In normal times, one would be hard-pressed to find a pair of friendlier nations than the United States and Canada. Canadians and Americans share a common language (aside from the Québécois), sports leagues, $683bn in trade, and the world’s longest undefended border, more than 5,000 miles (8,000km) long. Americans and Canadians have fought side by side in both world wars, as well as in Korea and Afghanistan.Trump’s coveting of Canada is easy to mock and dismiss. Since returning to office in January, he has said repeatedly that he wants to make Canada the 51st state and taken to calling former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau “Governor Trudeau.” In what could be a satire of the post-9/11 ambitions of some American neoconservatives, Trump called the border with Canada “an artificial line” that “makes no sense”.But Canadians aren’t laughing. Living next door to a superpower that has fought multiple wars over the last 20 years and now practices a post-truth politics, they are angry and rattled.Liquor stores in Canada have pulled American-made alcohol from their shelves. The singing of the Star-Spangled Banner during hockey and basketball games has provoked boos from the stands. Airline travel from Canada to the United States has cratered, with ticket sales dropping 70%. Trudeau, not knowing he was on a hot mic, told his ministerial colleagues that Trump’s territorial avarice was “a real thing” and that they should not dismiss it as typical Trumpian bluster. Mark Carney, Trudeau’s successor, warned Canadians that the longtime partnership with the US, “based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over”.Earlier this year, Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative party’s candidate in Canada’s national elections, enjoyed a huge lead in the polls and seemed destined to become the next prime minister. But Canadians’ dislike of Trump apparently helped Carney, a political newcomer and the Liberal party’s candidate (despite Trump’s criticism of Poilievre in a Fox News interview, perhaps because Poilievre, reacting to his falling poll numbers, pivoted to criticizing the American president). Carney’s poll numbers surged, Poilievre’s plunged, and this week, Carney won the election – but he’s not about to preside over Canada’s annexation. By Carney’s account, in conversations, Trump has brought up his vision of Canada as the United States’ 51st state, something Carney has dismissed outright.Americans are apt to find the idea of a security threat from Canada ridiculous. Some of Trump’s antipathy to Canada rests on its paltry defense spending, less than 1.5% of GDP, making Canada one of Nato’s laggards. But Canadian capabilities are critical for the defense of the American homeland. Canadian long- and short-range radars provide the bulk of the North Warning System (NWS), which guards against airplanes and missiles entering North America via the North Pole. A Canadian withdrawal from the jointly run NWS would diminish the United States’ capacity for strategic defense and deterrence. While such a move by Canada would normally be unthinkable, if it fears invasion, as it has reason to do now, it may take steps that have hitherto been beyond the realm of possibility.If Trump’s actions against Canada boggle the mind, his stance toward Mexico is more explicable, albeit far more dangerous. Trump came down that golden escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 and announced his first presidential bid with a diatribe against Mexican immigrants. In the decade since, the Republican party has come to view Mexican drug cartels, if not the Mexican state itself, as a major threat to the United States, even as Mexico has displaced China to become the US’s largest trading partner.With Trump back in power, the reality is starting to match the rhetoric. Active-duty US troops are now on the southern border and Mexican drug cartels have been officially labeled as foreign terrorist groups, providing the legal pretext for the president to order US soldiers to enter Mexican territory and destroy them. US surveillance drones are monitoring fentanyl labs in Mexico – by mutual agreement – but the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has ruled out their being used to strike drug cartels, something US officials have reportedly discussed.Although Trump issued an executive order on the first day of his second term, declaring an emergency on the US-Mexican border, the active duty troops he has deployed there aren’t currently engaged in law enforcement, which US law prohibits, only providing logistical support to Customs and Border Protection. But were Trump to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act at some point, that could change and the military could begin apprehending and detaining Mexican migrants.Any unilateral US military intervention in Mexico would be reckless. With some of the US’s largest cities just a few hours from the border, the cartels would have ample opportunities for retaliation, which in turn would provoke American escalation. Civilian deaths caused by US military strikes could unleash major domestic strife in Mexico, a country of 130 million people, to the point of creating a tidal wave of refugees. US geography shielded it from most of the consequences of its disastrous post-9/11 wars in the greater Middle East. But US luck would finally run out if Trump tried to rerun a version of the “war on terror” across the southern border.With wars raging in Europe and the Middle East and Trump toying with unprecedented tariffs on many US partners and allies, the fallout from Trump’s “America first” policies seem to be primarily in Europe and Asia. But the most gratuitous and serious threats to American security and prosperity lie closer to home.Barely three months into his second term, Donald Trump has damaged, perhaps even irrevocably, relationships with his country’s two neighbors and largest trading partners. Few US presidents have committed greater strategic malpractice. None have done it with such speed. If the president wants to identify something he has achieved that none of his modern-day predecessors have, this feat would certainly qualify.

      Gil Barndollar is a non-resident fellow at the Defense Priorities Foundation. Rajan Menon is Spitzer professor emeritus of international relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and a senior research scholar at the Saltzman Institute at Columbia University. More

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      Trump feels tug of political gravity as economy falters and polls plunge

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      “Not just courageous” but “actually fearless”, said Doug Burgum. The “first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country ever”, said Pam Bondi. “Most” of the presidents whose portraits adorn the Oval Office – which include George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan – were mere “placeholders” who were not “men of action”, mused JD Vance.Before the TV cameras on Wednesday, top cabinet officials took turns drenching Donald Trump with praise that some critics found evocative of politics in North Korea. Yet beyond the walls of the White House, the mood was shifting. New data showed the economy is shrinking. The national security adviser was about to be ousted. Opinion polls told of a president whose unpopularity is historic.After a hundred days in which Trump at times appeared invincible, political gravity is exerting itself. A majority of Americans regard him as both a failure and a would-be dictator. From the courts to the streets, from law offices to college campuses, revolt is swelling. Republicans are eyeing next year’s midterm elections with nervousness.“The honeymoon is over,” said John Zogby, an author and pollster. “He actually squandered his hundred days, perhaps you can argue, by doing too much, not succeeding with much of it and overplaying his hand. At the end of the 100 days his polling numbers reflect an unsuccessful quarter. Every poll that I know of, including mine, has him upside down.”Trump took office on 20 January with huge political capital. He had beaten his election rival Kamala Harris in every swing state and won the national popular vote for the first time, albeit at less than 50%. Having survived four legal cases, his sense of vindication was absolute. Tech billionaires and media moguls came to his Mar-a-Lago estate to kiss the ring.He started fast and furious. As Trump signed a record number of executive orders – now more than 140 – Democrats looked like a boxer dazed by a flurry of punches at the opening bell. They struggled to find their feet and respond to a president who at breathtaking speed marginalised Congress, attacked judges and unleashed Elon Musk to eviscerate the federal government.Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, said: “The reality is you do it fast, you do it furious, you do it at different times and levels and places and you wind up creating 100 rabbit holes at one time. People are stuck trying to figure out which is the most important rabbit hole to go down. That’s what you’ve seen play out.”Yet 2 April, which Trump dubbed “liberation day” as he announced sweeping global tariffs, may also come to be seen as overreach day. His haphazard trade war rattled allies and wiped trillions of dollars off the stock market. Only fears of a bond market catastrophe spooked him into hitting the pause button. But he left in place tariffs on China as high as 145% and Beijing has refused to blink.View image in fullscreenThe chaos has shaken the faith of Trump voters who felt that he would at least deliver economic competence and guarantee the bottom line. Food prices are rising and tariffs are expected to disrupt supply chains soon, leading to empty shelves reminiscent of the Covid-19 pandemic. On Wednesday Trump admitted children might “have two dolls instead of 30 dolls” at Christmas and sought to blame his predecessor Joe Biden.Meanwhile Musk has sown further discord. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs. The US development agency USAID, a crucial tool of soft power, was closed. The social security welfare system has reportedly been hit by regional office closures, website crashes and some recipients being declared dead. Yet Doge looks set to fall well short of its $1tn target in savings and Musk is preparing to step away.Trump is even losing public backing on his signature issue of immigration. He sent troops to the border and expanded deportation targets, leading to a steep drop in illegal border crossings. But efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act for rapid deportations have faced legal challenges and concerns about due process.The aggressive enforcement led to the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland man with protected legal status, to a notorious prison in El Salvador. The supreme court ordered the administration to facilitate his return but Trump has refused.Trump promised to swiftly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza but both conflicts continue. His national security adviser, Mike Waltz, mistakenly added a journalist to a sensitive Signal chat discussing military operations. On Thursday it emerged that Waltz would leave his post and be nominated as US ambassador to the UN instead.Trump vowed to be a “dictator” on “day one” but, critics say, his pretensions to authoritarianism have been undercut by the ineptitude that derailed his first term and led to a crushing defeat in 2020. He has the lowest approval rating at the 100-day mark of any president in the past 80 years.According to a poll published by the Washington Post newspaper and ABC News, only 39% of Americans approve of how Trump is conducting his presidency. About 64% of respondents said he was “going too far” in his efforts to expand presidential powers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother survey by the Decision Desk HQ survey showed 44% approval and 56% disapproval. It also found that 64% of respondents said tariffs hurt consumers, and 91% were worried about inflation, with 62% “very concerned”. The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) thinktank found that 52% agreed Trump was “a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy”.Opposition is manifesting itself in myriad ways and cutting Trump down to size. About 50 of his executive orders have been partially or fully blocked by courts, while about 40 have been left in effect, according to a count by the Associated Press.View image in fullscreenAnti-Trump demonstrations are growing in scale and frequency in cities and towns across the country. Democrats are holding raucous town halls in traditional Republican territory. After initially buckling under Trump’s “days of thunder”, law firms, non-profits and universities have found a spine and are feeding off one another’s resolve. Political commentators sense that the momentum is shifting.Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “What Trump had going for him was he created this sense that he was an irresistible force, that resistance was futile, that everyone had to accommodate his whims and his agenda.“But now you’re seeing the supreme court pushing back on him, the markets expressing alarm and his poll numbers going south. The shock and awe which seemed irresistible for so long now seems to be encountering much more resistance.”Trump is not the first president to feel the pinch of political gravity. Biden started positively but saw his approval rating dip below 50% for the first time in August 2021, following the botched US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to an NBC News poll, He never recovered.A sustained backlash against Trump could become a threat to Republicans who, while more devoutly loyal than ever, have to worry about their seats in Congress in the midterm elections in November 2026. Historically the party that holds the White House tends to suffer losses in the midterms. Republicans currently hold a narrow 220-213 majority in the House of Representatives.Patrick Gaspard, a former official in the Barack Obama administration, said: “I would not judge this presidency to be a success. More likely than not we’ll begin to see Republicans whose names are on the ballot in 2026 slowly but clearly moving away from this agenda. It’s very clear that many Trump voters already have buyer’s remorse.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: Rubio tangles with Germany; crackdown on campus protests continues

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      Germany’s foreign ministry has pushed back after Marco Rubio criticised the country’s decision to designate the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party a “confirmed rightwing extremist” force incompatible with its constitution.“This is democracy,” the ministry said in a post on X, adding that the courts would have the final say and that “we have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped”. The US secretary of state had called the move “tyranny in disguise”.The spat unfolded as the US continued its crackdown on pro-Palestinian free speech, with nine activists arrested at an encampment at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.Here are the key stories at a glance:Germany pushes back after Rubio defends AfDGermany’s foreign ministry has hit back at the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, after he called on Berlin to reverse course over a decision to label the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party a “confirmed rightwing extremist group”.On Thursday, Rubio took to X and wrote: “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy – it’s tyranny in disguise.”The German foreign ministry pushed back in its own statement, saying: “This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough and independent investigation to protect our constitution and the rule of law.”Read the full storyNine arrested as police disband pro-Palestinian encampment at SwarthmoreThe Swarthmore borough police department disbanded a four-day pro-Palestinian encampment on Swarthmore College’s campus and arrested nine activists.The demonstration calling on the Pennsylvania college to divest from the tech company Cisco due to its ties to the Israeli government was a rare uprising in an academic year where higher-education institutions have been quick to quash them.Read the full storyCourt backs Trump administration over VoA employeesA federal appeals court has foiled a plan to return more than 1,000 Voice of America (VoA) workers to their desks after an earlier court ruling granted a temporary stay on Donald Trump’s executive order dismantling the US taxpayer-funded news service for overseas listeners.Read the full storyMass resignations at labor department threaten US workers, staff warnA “catastrophic” exodus of thousands of employees from the US Department of Labor threatens “all of the core aspects of working life”, insiders have warned, amid fears that the Trump administration will further slash the agency’s operations.Read the full storySpaceX employees vote to create own town called ‘Starbase’Voters in a small patch of south Texas voted on Saturday to give Elon Musk a town to call his own, officially creating a new city called Starbase in the area where Musk’s SpaceX holds rocket launches.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, signed a law on Saturday making more than 5 million students eligible to use state funds for private schools, a watershed moment in the conservative campaign to remake public education in the US.

      A Guatemalan immigrant who crossed the US border eight months pregnant and gave birth in Arizona has avoided fast-track deportation after intervention by the state’s governor.

      Donald Trump posted an AI-generated photo showing himself as the pope ahead of this week’s gathering of cardinals to choose a new leader, drawing instant outrage on X.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 2 May 2025. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘What is left of our democracy?’: freed Palestinian human rights advocate warns of US authoritarian rule

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      Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinian green-card holder and Columbia University student freed on Wednesday after more than two weeks in immigration detention, has issued a stark warning about the US’s descent into authoritarianism.“Once the repression of dissent, in the name of security, becomes a key objective of a government, authoritarian rule and even martial law are not far off. When they look at my case, all Americans should ask themselves: what is left of our democracy, and who will be targeted next?” said Mahddawi in an op-ed for the New York Times.Mahdawi, a Palestinian human rights advocate based in Vermont, was detained and ordered deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being prosecuted of any crime – and without due process. The philosophy student was arrested by masked Ice agents in Colchester, Vermont, during what should have been his citizenship naturalization interview.He is among a growing number of international students who have been ordered deported for their Palestinian rights advocacy by the Trump administration, which is using an obscure law to accuse these individuals of posing a threat to US foreign policy interests. Unlike the others, Mahdawi avoided being sent to a Louisiana detention facility after the Ice agents narrowly missed the flight, allowing his attorneys to challenge the deportation order in Vermont.“Despite spending 16 nights in a jail cell, I never lost hope in the inevitability of justice and the principles of democracy. I wanted to become a citizen of this country because I believe in the principles that it enshrines,” writes Mahdawi.“The American government accuses me of undermining US foreign policy, a patently absurd pretext for deportation for political speech that the Trump administration dislikes. The government is scraping the bottom of the barrel in its attempts to smear me. My only ‘crime’ is refusing to accept the slaughter of Palestinians, opposing war and promoting peace. I have simply insisted that international law must be respected. I believe the way to a just and long-lasting peace for Palestinians and Israelis is through diplomacy and restorative justice.”Mahdawi was born and raised in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, where as a child he bore witness to the death of his brother after he was denied access to medical care, and the detention and imprisonment of multiple close relatives including his grandfather and father by Israeli forces.Moving to the US in 2014 was his first experience of freedom, he said.“Ultimately, I sought American citizenship not only because I did not want to lose the freedom I enjoyed as a permanent resident but even more so because I believe in the principles and values of democracy, which this country stipulates in its founding documents,” he wrote in the Times.“These very freedoms are under attack today, both for me and for others like me. The Trump administration is hewing to Israel’s playbook: Under the thinly veiled guise of security, rights are being denied and due process eliminated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“By seeking to deport me, the Trump administration is sending a clear message: There is no room for dissent, free speech be damned. It seems willing to shield an extremist Israeli government from criticism at the expense of constitutional rights, all while suppressing the possibility of a peaceful future for both Palestinians and Israelis, a future free of trauma and fear.”Israel’s war on Gaza since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack has killed at least 52,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities. Thousands more people are missing and feared dead, while tens of thousands have suffered injuries and preventable diseases including acute malnutrition.In the ruling ordering Mahdawi’s release on bail on Wednesday, Judge Geoffrey W Crawford wrote: “Legal residents not charged with crimes or misconduct are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day.” He likened the Trump administration’s crackdown on students and free speech to the red scare and the McCarthy era.Upon his release, Mahdawi told supporters and the media: “I am saying it clear and loud. To President Trump and his cabinet: I am not afraid of you.” More