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    Democratic lawmakers call for release of Tufts student from Ice detention

    A group of high-profile Democratic lawmakers has called on the Donald Trump administration to immediately release the Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, praised her “unwavering spirit” and warned that the White House is engaging in “repression”.In a New York Times essay published on Friday morning, the US senator Ed Markey and representatives Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley, who all represent Massachusetts, where Tufts is based, shared more details from their visit to Öztürk this week at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Louisiana, where she has been held since her arrest last month.“She was inadequately fed, kept in facilities with extremely cold temperatures and denied personal necessities and religious accommodations” and has “suffered asthma attacks for which she lacked her prescribed medication” the lawmakers wrote.“Despite all this” they added, “we were struck by her unwavering spirit.”The lawmakers were part of a delegation of congressional Democratic lawmakers who traveled to Louisiana this week to visit both Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist who is also being held in Ice custody at a separate facility in Louisiana.Öztürk, who co-authored an opinion essay last year in the Tufts student newspaper that was critical of the university’s response to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, was detained in late March and transferred to Louisiana. Neither she nor Khalil have been charged with any crimes and appear to have been targeted solely for their political views in a Trump administration crackdown that goes far beyond the undocumented immigrant communities that Trump pledged to expel when he was running for a second term.View image in fullscreen“This is not immigration enforcement” the lawmakers wrote. “This is repression. This is authoritarianism.”They warned that Öztürk’s case “is not an isolated one.“This administration has already overseen a wave of unconstitutional actions: raids without warrants, prolonged detentions without hearings and retaliatory deportations,” they wrote.The lawmakers cautioned that each case “chips away at the rule of law”, “makes it easier for the next to go unnoticed”, and “brings us closer to the authoritarianism we once believed could never take root on American soil.“When a government begins to imprison writers for their words, when it abandons legal norms for political convenience, when it cloaks oppression in the language of national security, alarm bells must ring. Loudly,” they wrote.They called for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release Öztürk immediately, to drop any proceedings against her and to investigate the conditions at the detention center where she is being held.They also urged their Republican colleagues “to stand up to President Trump’s evident disregard for the rule of law.“And we urge every American to understand: This is not someone else’s fight,” they conclude. “The Constitution is only as strong as our willingness to defend it.”Also, in Khalil’s case, lawyers for DHS disclosed in court documents that they did not have a warrant when they arrested him last month.The attorneys representing the administration argued on Thursday that “officers had exigent circumstances to conduct the warrantless arrest” and said that agents believed Khalil would “escape before they could obtain a warrant”.Khalil’s legal team has argued that Khalil’s removal proceedings should be terminated since he was arrested without a warrant. His lawyers also stated that Khalil had no plans to flee or leave the country, and emphasized that he “fully complied with the agents arresting him, despite the fact that after repeated requests by Khalil, his pregnant wife, and his lawyer, they never showed him a warrant”. His wife has since given birth while Khalil was not released for the event. More

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    US consumer sentiment sees largest drop since 1990 after Trump tariff chaos

    US consumer sentiment plummeted in April after Donald Trump’s trade war threw the global economy into chaos, according to a new report.The index of consumer sentiment, a score based on a monthly survey asking Americans about their financial outlooks, fell by 32% since January – the largest drop since the 1990 recession, according to the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.“Expectations worsened for vast swaths of the population across age, education income and political affiliation,” said Joanne Hsu, director of the surveys of consumers, in a statement. “Consumers perceived risks to multiple aspects of the economy, in large part due to ongoing uncertainty around trade policy and the potential for a resurgence of inflation looming ahead.”In April, the index of consumer sentiment fell to 52.2, down from 57 in March. The last time the index fell below 55 was in the summer of 2022, when inflation rose to 9%.Consumer expectation of inflation also soared from 5% in March to 6.5% in April, the highest it has been since 1981.It is a sign that, despite his insistence that tariffs will “make a lot of money” and have not yet raised prices, Trump still has not convinced many Americans that his tariffs will actually work.Trump’s trade policies have scared investors, causing sell-offs in stock and bond markets. The president softened his tone earlier this week on his trade war with China after a volatile few weeks. Markets rallied after Trump said that his Chinese tariffs “will come down substantially”, though he also warned that “it won’t be zero.”But Wall Street tends to be more reactive than consumers, who have shown four straight months of declining sentiment on the economy. Even after Trump paused the highest of his reciprocal tariffs, causing stock markets to rise, consumer inflation expectations still remained much higher compared with March.Higher inflation expectations have also been paired with consumers anticipating slower income growth for the year ahead, meaning that more of them will be hesitant to spend in the months ahead – which all could ultimately mean a slowdown in the economy.“Without reliably strong incomes, spending is unlikely to remain strong amid the numerous warning signs perceived by consumers,” Hsu said. More

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    Ukraine has exposed Trump’s true identity: as a vandal, an autocrat, a gangster and a fool | Jonathan Freedland

    To see the true face of Donald Trump, look no further than Ukraine. Laid bare in his handling of that issue are not only his myriad weaknesses, but also the danger he poses to his own country and the wider world – to say nothing of the battered people of Ukraine itself.Don’t be fooled by the mild, vaguely theatrical rebuke Trump issued to Vladimir Putin on Thursday after Moscow unleashed a deadly wave of drone strikes on Kyiv, killing 12 and injuring dozens: “Vladimir, STOP!” Pay attention instead to the fact that, in the nearly 100 days since Trump took office, the US has essentially switched sides in the battle between Putin’s Russia and democratic Ukraine, backing the invaders against the invaded.On Friday, Trump’s real-estate buddy and special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, held talks in Moscow with Putin. But any resemblance between the US and an honest broker is purely coincidental. On the contrary, previous encounters between the two men resulted in Witkoff parroting Kremlin talking points, essentially endorsing Russia’s claim to the Ukrainian territory it seized. In that, Witkoff was merely following the lead set by his boss: the supposed peace deal Trump is now in a hurry to seal amounts to handing Putin almost everything he wants and demanding Ukraine surrender.Hence Trump’s anger on Wednesday, when he accused Volodymyr Zelenskyy of making “inflammatory statements”. What had the Ukrainian president said that was so incendiary? He had calmly pointed out that he could not do as Trump demanded and recognise Russian control of Crimea, which Russia grabbed in 2014, because it was forbidden by his country’s constitution. It’s telling that Trump should be enraged by a president who thinks constitutions have to be respected.Whether Trump succeeds in making Kyiv buckle or not, the new reality is clear. The US president is taking an axe to an international order constructed in the aftermath of a bloody world war, a system that has held, however imperfectly, since 1945. A central tenet of that order was that big states could not simply swallow up smaller ones, that unprovoked aggression and conquest would no longer be allowed to stand. Yet here is Trump bent on rewarding just such an act of conquest, not simply acquiescing in Putin’s land grab in Ukraine but conferring on it the legitimacy of approval by the world’s most powerful nation.Note how he speaks as if Putin had every right to seize the territory of his neighbour. Asked this week what concessions, if any, he had extracted from Moscow, Trump replied that Putin’s willingness to stop the war, rather than gobbling up Ukraine in its entirety, was a “pretty big concession”.This is not only a disaster for Ukraine, though it is obviously that. It is also the destruction of global architecture that has stood for many decades – and it is hardly a lone case. Trump’s tariff fetish is similarly upending a system of international trade that had made the world, and especially the US, more prosperous. The consequences are already visible, in plunging global stock markets, gloomy growth forecasts and warnings of a recession that will start in the US and then spread everywhere else.Trump’s eagerness to acquiesce in Putin’s seizure of Ukraine makes a dead letter of international law, with its prohibition of the crime of aggression, and that too points to a wider pattern. For Trump is at war with the law at home as well as abroad. Indeed, in three short months, it has become an open question whether the rule of law still operates in the US.That peril is revealed most clearly in Trump’s willingness to defy the orders of the US courts. Judges have issued multiple rulings, seeking, for example, to delay or overturn the deportation of migrants without due process, only for those judges to be ignored or targeted with personal invective from the president. For the latest Politics Weekly America podcast, I spoke to Liz Oyer, a former justice department official fired last month after she refused to restore gun-owning rights to the actor and Trump pal Mel Gibson: he had lost them when he was convicted of domestic violence in 2011. Oyer is a sober, nonpartisan former civil servant, but she told me of her fears if the Trump administration continues to refuse to comply with the law as laid down by the courts. “We will have a true crisis on our hands. They are testing the limits.”Part of Trump’s assault on the law has come in a flurry of executive orders, targeting specific, named law firms that had previously acted for his opponents. He offered the firms a choice: either be barred by presidential diktat from cases involving the federal government, or commit to giving Trump and his administration free legal advice worth tens of millions of dollars. So many firms have caved in, the president now has access to an estimated $1bn (£750m) war chest of pro bono legal services. Trump has been bragging about it, but there’s a word for what he has done: extortion.It’s a favourite weapon of Trump’s and it’s been on display in Ukraine too. Let’s not forget the “deal” Trump wants to strike with Zelenskyy: a degree of US protection in return for half of the revenue from Ukraine’s minerals, ports and infrastructure. This is not the behaviour of an ally, but a gangster.Everything Trump does, and has always done, he is doing in and to Ukraine. Recall the hyperbolic promise he made to end the war within “24 hours” of returning to the White House. It was of a piece with the inflated hype that puffed up his real-estate career – and about as reliable. The same goes for his campaign promise to end inflation on “day one”, when his tariff policy is only going to push up prices.Now he threatens to walk away from Ukraine altogether, impatient to get a deal in time for his 100th-day celebrations on Tuesday. That’s typical too: so often Trump’s grand plans turn to dust because, if he doesn’t get an instant reward, he gets bored and drifts away. Witkoff’s previous role was securing a lasting ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Now that’s fallen apart, he’s moved on to other things.Above all, Trump’s willingness to capitulate to Putin on Ukraine is a reminder not only of his own authoritarian ambitions – he likes Putin because he wants to be like Putin – but also of how serially bad a negotiator this self-styled artist of the deal really is. He declared tariff war on China, thinking he could squeeze the US’s great economic rival. Instead, America’s biggest retailers this week warned that their shelves could soon be empty, thanks to the havoc Trump’s tariffs are unleashing on the global supply chain. Container traffic across the Pacific from China is already down by as much as 60%, meaning Americans are not going to get the goods they’ve come to rely on. Those shortages will lead to voter anger directed at Trump. To avert it, he needs a deal with China – desperately. He goes to the table weak, facing an opponent he has made strong. So much for the maestro dealmaker.There is no mystery to Trump. It’s all plain to see – the habits of the vandal, the autocrat, the gangster and the fool – with Ukraine as clear a guide as any. Not that that is any comfort to the people of that besieged land. They don’t want to be a cautionary tale, a demonstration case of the fecklessness and menace of Donald Trump. They want to be a free, independent nation. Their great misfortune is that the mighty country that should be their most powerful friend is now in the hands of an enemy.

    Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and the host of the Politics Weekly America podcast

    100 days of Trump’s presidency, with Jonathan Freedland and guests. On 30 April, join Jonathan Freedland, Kim Darroch, Devika Bhat and Leslie Vinjamuri as they discuss Trump’s presidency on his 100th day in office, live at Conway Hall London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live More

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    Ukraine, Gaza and Iran: can Witkoff secure any wins for Trump?

    Donald Trump’s version of Pax Americana, the idea that the US can through coercion impose order on the world, is facing its moment of truth in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.In the words of the former CIA director William Burns, it is in “one of those plastic moments” in international relations that come along maybe twice a century where the future could take many possible forms.The US’s aim has been to keep the three era-defining simultaneous sets of negotiations entirely separate, and to – as much as possible – shape their outcome alone. The approach is similar to the trade talks, where the intention is for supplicant countries to come to Washington individually bearing gifts in return for access to US markets.The administration may have felt it had little choice given the urgency, but whether it was wise to launch three such ambitious peace missions, and a global trade war, at the same time is debatable.It is true each of the three conflicts are discrete in that they have distinctive causes, contexts and dynamics, but they are becoming more intertwined than seemed apparent at the outset, in part because there is so much resistance building in Europe and elsewhere about the world order Donald Trump envisages, and his chosen methods.In diplomacy nothing is hermetically sealed – everything is inter-connected, especially since there is a common thread between the three talks in the personality of the property developer Steven Witkoff, Trump’s great friend who is leading the US talks in each case, flitting from Moscow to Muscat.View image in fullscreenTo solve these three conflicts simultaneously would be a daunting task for anyone, but it is especially for a man entirely new to diplomacy and, judging by some of his remarks, also equally new to history.Witkoff has strengths, not least that he is trusted by Trump. He also knows the president’s mind – and what should be taken at face value. He is loyal, so much so that he admits he worshipped Trump in New York so profoundly that he wanted to become him. He will not be pursuing any other agenda but the president’s.But he is also stretched, and there are basic issues of competence. Diplomats are reeling from big cuts to the state department budget and there is still an absence of experienced staffers. Witkoff simply does not have the institutional memory available to his opposite numbers in Iran, Israel and Russia. For instance, most of the Iranian negotiating team, led by the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, are veterans of the 2013-15 talks that led to the original Iran nuclear deal.Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s chief foreign policy adviser, who attended the first Russian-US talks this year in Saudi Arabia, spent 10 years in the US as Russian ambassador. He was accompanied by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund who then visited the US on 2 April.In the follow-up talks in Istanbul on 10 April, Aleksandr Darchiev, who has spent 33 years in the Russian foreign ministry and is Russian ambassador to the US, was pitted against a team led by Sonata Coulter, the new deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who does not share Trump’s benign view of Russia.View image in fullscreenAs to the Gaza issue, Benjamin Netanyahu has lived the Palestinian conflict since he became Israel’s ambassador to the UN in 1984.Richard Nephew, a former US Iran negotiator, says the cuts to state department means the US “is at risk of losing a generation of expertise … It’s beyond tragedy. It’s an absolutely devastating national security blow with the evisceration of these folks. The damage could be permanent, we have to acknowledge this.”One withering European diplomat says: “It is as if Witkoff is trying to play three dimensional chess with chess grandmasters on three chessboards simultaneously, not having played the game before.”Bluntly, Witkoff knows he needs to secure a diplomatic win for his impatient boss. But the longer the three conflicts continue, the more entangled they become with one another, the more Trump’s credibility is questioned. Already, according to a Reuters Ipsos poll published this month, 59% of Americans think Trump is costing their country its credibility on the global stage.The risk for Trump is that the decision to address so much so quickly ends up not being a show of American strength but the opposite – the public erosion of a super power.In the hurry to seal a deal with Iran inside two months, Trump, unlike in all previous nuclear talks with Tehran, has barred complicating European interests from the negotiation room.To Iran’s relief, Witkoff has not tabled an agenda that strays beyond stopping Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb. He has not raised Iran’s supply of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Nor has he tabled demands that Iran end arms supplies to its proxies fighting Israel.That has alarmed Israel, and to a lesser extent Europe, which sees Iran’s desire to have sanctions lifted as a rare opportunity to extract concessions from Tehran. Israel’s strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, and Mossad’s head, David Barnea, met Witkoff last Friday in Paris to try to persuade him that when he met the Iran negotiating team the next day in Rome, he had to demand the dismantling of Tehran’s civil nuclear programme.Witkoff refused, and amid many contradictory statements the administration has reverted to insisting that Iran import the necessary enriched uranium for its civil nuclear programme, rather than enrich it domestically.Russia, in a sign of Trump’s trust, might again become the repository of Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium, as it was after the 2015 deal.Israel is also wary of Trump’s aggrandisement of Russia. The Israeli thinktank INSS published a report this week detailing how Russia, in search of anti-western allies in the global south for its Ukraine war, has shown opportunistic political support not just to Iran but to Hamas. Israel will also be uneasy if Russia maintains its role in Syria.But if Trump has upset Netanyahu over Iran, he is keeping him sweet by giving him all he asks on Gaza.Initially, Witkoff received glowing accolades about how tough he had been with Netanyahu in his initial meeting in January. It was claimed that Witkoff ordered the Israeli president to meet him on a Saturday breaking the Sabbath and directed him to agree a ceasefire that he had refused to give to Joe Biden’s team for months.As a result, as Trump entered the White House on 19 January, he hailed the “EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signalled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies”.But Netanyahu, as was widely predicted in the region, found a reason not to open talks on the second phase of the ceasefire deal – the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a permanent end to the fighting.Witkoff came up with compromises to extend the ceasefire but Netanyahu rejected them, resuming the assault on Hamas on 19 March. The US envoy merely described Israel’s decision as “unfortunate, in some respects, but also falls into the had-to-be bucket”.View image in fullscreenNow Trump’s refusal to put any pressure on Israel to lift its six-week-old ban on aid entering Gaza is informing Europe’s rift with Trump. Marking 50 days of the ban this week, France, Germany and the UK issued a strongly worded statement describing the denial of aid as intolerable.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is calling for a coordinated European recognition of the state of Palestine, and Saudi Arabia is insisting the US does not attack Iran’s nuclear sites.Witkoff, by contrast, has been silent about Gaza’s fate and the collapse of the “EPIC ceasefire”.But if European diplomats think Witkoff was naive in dealing with Netanyahu, it is nothing to the scorn they hold for his handling of Putin.The anger is partly because Europeans had thought that, after the Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public row with Trump in the Oval Office, they had restored Ukraine’s standing in Washington by persuading Kyiv to back the full ceasefire that the US first proposed on 11 March.View image in fullscreenThe talks in Paris last week between Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and European leaders also gave Europe a chance to point out it was Putin that was stalling over a ceasefire.But instead of putting any countervailing pressure on Russia to accept a ceasefire, Witkoff switched strategy. In the words of Bruno Tertrais, a non-resident fellow at the Institut of Montaigne, Witkoff is “is now presenting a final peace plan, very favourable to the aggressor, even before the start of the negotiations, which had been due to take place after a ceasefire”.No European government has yet criticised Trump’s lopsided plan in public since, with few cards to play, the immediate necessity is to try to prevent Trump acting on his threat to walk away. At the very least, Europe will argue that if Trump wants Ukraine’s resources, he has to back up a European force patrolling a ceasefire, an issue that receives only sketchy reference in the US peace plan.The Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, addressing the country’s parliament on Wednesday, pointed to the necessity of these security guarantees. “Any arrangement with the Kremlin will only last so long as the Russian elite dreads the consequences of its breach,” he said.View image in fullscreenBut in a sense, Trump and Putin, according to Fiona Hill at the Brookings Institution, a Russia specialist in Trump’s first administration, may already have moved beyond the details of their Ukrainian settlement as they focus on their wider plan to restore the Russian-US relationship.It would be an era of great power collusion, not great power competition in which Gaza, Iran and Ukraine would be sites from which the US and Russia could profit.Writing on Truth Social about a phone call with Putin in February, Trump reported” “We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II … We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”Witkoff has also mused about what form this cooperation might take. “Shared sea lanes, maybe send [liquefied natural] gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together,” he said, adding: “Who doesn’t want to see a world like that?” More

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    Want to beat authoritarianism? Look to Latin America | Greg Grandin

    Inspiration on how to beat back authoritarianism is in short supply, but those searching for hope in these dark times might consider Latin America.It’s not the first place that comes to mind when thinking about democracy, associated as it is with coups, death squads, dictatorships, inequality, drug violence and now a country, El Salvador, offering itself up to Donald Trump as an offshore prison colony for deportees.It is a bleak place in many ways, especially for the jobless and the poor who flee their home countries in search of a better life somewhere else, often in the United States. The bleakness, though, only highlights the paradox: for all its maladies, for all its rightwing dictators and leftwing caudillos, for all its failings when it comes to democratic institutions, the region’s democratic spirit is surprisingly vital.Other areas of the world emerged broken from the cold war, roiled by resource conflicts, religious fundamentalism and ethnic hatreds. Think of the bloody Balkans of the 1990s or 1994’s Rwandan genocide.Not Latin America, where, by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, most of its anti-communist dictatorships had given way to constitutional rule. With the jackboot off their necks, reformers went on the offensive, seeking to redeem not just democracy but social democracy.Today, in the United States at least, the concept of democracy is generally defined minimally, as comprising regularly held elections, a commitment to due process to protect individual rights, and institutional stability. But earlier, in the middle of the last century, a more robust vision that included economic rights prevailed – that indeed the second world war was fought not just against fascism but for social democracy. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt liked to say. Reporting from Europe in late 1945, William Shirer described a groundswell demand for social democracy, in an article headlined: Germany is finished, communists distrusted, majority wants socialism.Latin America joined in the demand, and by 1945 nearly every country understood citizenship as entailing both individual and social rights. Latin Americans broadened classical liberalism’s “right to life” to mean a right to a healthy life, which obligated the state to provide healthcare. “Democracy, political as well as social and economic,” wrote Hernán Santa Cruz, a childhood friend of Salvador Allende and a Chilean UN delegate who helped Eleanor Roosevelt draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “comprises, in my mind, an indivisible whole”.That whole was shattered to pieces by the death-squad terror of the cold war, much of it patronized by Washington, followed by the free-market neoliberal economics pushed on Latin America during that war.Yet once the repression abated and citizens were free to vote their preference, they began to elect social democrats as presidents, men and women who represented a variety of historical social movements: feminists, trade unionists, peasant organizers, Indigenous rights campaigners, heterodox economists, environmentalists and liberation theologians. Today, a large majority of Latin Americans live in countries governed by the center left. Despite the best efforts of Friedrich von Hayek and his libertarian followers in the region to convince them otherwise, most Latin Americans do not believe that welfare turns citizens into serfs.Pankaj Mishra, in his survey of the horrors inflicted on Palestinians, has written about the “profound rupture” in the “moral history of the world” since 1945. No region has done more to heal that rupture than Latin America.And no region has had as much experience beating back fascists, long after the second world war had ended, than Latin America. Rightwing authoritarians, gripped by the same obsessions that move Trump supporters in the United States, have some momentum, though they haven’t been able to escalate occasional electoral victories, including in Argentina and Ecuador, into a full-on continental kulturkampf.Center-left democrats hold the right at bay by putting forth an expansive social-democratic agenda, one flexible enough to include demands for sexual and racial equality. As the US rolls back abortion rights, momentum in Latin America moves in the other direction – Argentina, Mexico and Colombia either decriminalizing or legalizing abortion. Gay marriage and same-sex civil unions have been recognized in 11 countries.Spasms of ethnonationalist rage gripped much of the world the 1990s – Indonesia’s 1998 anti-Chinese rampage, for example. In contrast, Indigenous peoples in countries including Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Guatemala burst into politics as the best bearers of the social democratic tradition, adding environmentalism and cultural rights to the standard menu of economic demands. Today, many countries have retreated behind an aggrieved nationalism. For the most part, Latin Americans have not. Their reaction to the depredations of corporate globalization is rarely expressed in xenophobic, antisemitic or conspiratorial tropes, as a struggle against “globalists”. Nationalism in Latin America has long been understood as a gateway to universalism.Frontline activists stand unbowed before police batons and paramilitary guns. In 2022, Latin America clocked the world’s highest murder rate of environmental activists. Unionists, students, journalists, and women’s and peasant rights activists are assassinated at a regular clip. Yet organizing continues. In Brazil during the four-year presidency of the Trump-like Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), the Landless Workers’ Movement, already the largest social movement in the world, grew even larger.When it comes to interstate relations, Latin America is one of the most peaceful regions. There is no nuclear competition, thanks to one of the most successful arms control treaties in history, the 1967 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.In 1945, Latin American diplomats drew on their long history in opposing Washington’s interventionism to play a key role in founding the liberal multilateral order, the global system of governance now upended by Trump. Most importantly, the region’s leaders insisted that nations should be organized around the premise of cooperation, not competition, that diplomacy should be used to settle differences, and that war should be a last resort. Their post-cold war counterparts have loudly defended these principles, first against George W Bush during the war on terror, and more recently against Joe Biden and Trump, insisting that the art of diplomacy must be relearned. “Brazil has no enemies,” the country’s defense minister once said, notable considering that the Pentagon has marked out the entire globe as a battlefield.Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, among others, have criticized the return to power politics and balance-of-power diplomacy. If the past teaches anything, they say, it is that opening a belligerent multi-front balance of power – with the United States pushing against China, pushing against Russia, with all countries, everywhere, angling for dominance – will lead to more confrontation, more war. As with the United States’s shapeshifting, amorphous domestic culture war, there is no clear endgame to this new era of militarized economic competition, of war by proxy and privateer, which only increases the odds of conflict spinning out of control.One need not romanticize Latin America. To recognize the strength of the social democratic ideal in Latin America does not require one to celebrate all those who call themselves socialists, in Nicaragua and Venezuela, for example. And even those we might celebrate, such as Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum or Chile’s Gabriel Boric, preside over states loaded with significant amount of repressive power, often directed at some of their country’s most vulnerable, such as Mapuche activists in southern Chile.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut there is no other region of the world that so persistently continues to insist on taking the Enlightenment at its word, whose leftwing politicians and social movements win by advancing a program of universal humanism. Trump has transformed the United States government into a predator-state, a tormenter of citizens and non-citizens alike. Latin American social democrats – Lula in Brazil and Mexico’s Sheinbaum, Uruguay’s Yamandú Orsi, and Petro in Colombia, among others – do what they can to use state power to fulfill an obligation: the ideal that all people should live in dignity.The forcefulness in which Latin American leaders such as Lula and Sheinbaum defend social rights contrasts with the timidity of the Democratic party. Biden did pass legislation suggesting it was breaking with the old neoliberal order. But Biden’s team couldn’t find its voice, unable to link a reinvestment in national industry with a renewed commitment to social citizenship. Democrats are shrill in denouncing Trump’s extremism even as they are timid in offering an alternative.Confronted with a existential crisis that people feel in their bones, the Democratic party puts forth weak-tea fixes in an enervating technocratic jargon, its counselors saying the lesson of Kamala Harris’s loss is that the party has to think even smaller, has to shake off its activist constituencies and move to the center.A recent op-ed in the New York Times urged Democrats to lay out their own Project 2029, to counter the conservative thinktank Heritage Foundation’s influential Project 2025. What did the author of the op-ed believe should be in this new project? A call for national healthcare? No. Affordable housing? No. Paid vacations, universal childcare or an increase in the minimum wage? None of that. He suggested that the Democrats promise to streamline regulations and improve “the quality” of “customer-service interactions”.Woodrow Wilson imagined a world without war. FDR imagined a world without fear or want. Today’s would-be governing liberals in the United States imagine nothing. They treat the promise of a humane future – or of any future at all – like a weight from the past, hard to bear, easy to toss aside.Democrats in the United States can’t simply mimic social democrats in Latin America; they operate in vastly different political contexts. But Latin America is a useful mirror, reflecting the considerable distance Democrats in the US have drifted from New Deal values. They might want to read Roosevelt’s Faith of the Americas speech, where he said that the best way to defuse extremism was to use government action to ensure “a more abundant life to the peoples of the whole world”.Latin America social democrats today – and not the Democratic party in the United States – are the true heirs of FDR’s vision. They know that if democracy is to be something more than a heraldic device, it must confront entrenched power. Latin American reformers know that the way to beat today’s new fascists is the same as it was in the 1930s and 1940s: by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising, in a voice simple, clear and sure, to improve the material conditions of people’s lives.“People have to have hope again,” as Lula put it in his most recent successful run for re-election, “and a full belly, with morning coffee and lunch and dinner”.What’s giving me hope nowWhat gives me hope is that in a place like Latin America, where the forces of reaction are so fierce, social movements led by feminists, peasants, first peoples, and gay and trans activists continue to fight back against fierce repression with enormous courage. Political theorists like to measure “democracy” according to institutional stability and free elections, and by that standard, many places in Latin America come up short. But if we measure democracy by courage, by a tenacity to continue to fight for universal, humane values, for a more sustainable, more equal, more human world, then Latin America carries forward the democratic ideal.

    Greg Grandin, the C Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale, is the author of the recently published, America, América: A New History of the New World, from which parts of this essay were based. More

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    China’s top leaders pledge to oppose ‘unilateral bullying’ in global trade in veiled rebuke to Trump – US politics live

    China’s top leaders pledged on Friday to step up support for the economy and oppose “unilateral bullying” in global trade, offering a veiled rebuke of hefty tariffs recently imposed by US president Donald Trump.The world’s two largest economies are engaged in a high-stakes tit-for-tat trade war that has spooked markets and spurred major manufacturers to reconsider supply chains.Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has slapped most trading partners with 10% tariffs. But China has received the worst, with many products from the country now facing a 145% tariff. Beijing has responded with new 125% tariffs of its own on US goods.A spokesperson for Beijing’s commerce ministry said on Thursday that “there are currently no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States”. But hours later, asked about the state of negotiations with Beijing, Trump maintained: “We’ve been meeting with China.”Chinese financial news outlet Caijing reported on Friday that Beijing was considering the exemption of certain US semiconductor products from recent additional tariffs, citing sources familiar with the matter. Beijing’s commerce ministry did not immediately respond to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) request to confirm the reports.Meanwhile, the Hill reports that China cancelled 12,000 metric tons of US pork shipments, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), with Bloomberg News reporting that this represents the biggest cancellation of pork orders since the Covid-19 pandemic.More on this story in a moment, but here are some other recent developments:

    US defense secretary Pete Hegseth had an unsecured internet connection set up in his Pentagon office so that he could bypass government security protocols and use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer.

    Donald Trump directed his attorney general to investigate the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue based on an unsubstantiated rightwing claim.

    Federal judges blocked several aspects of Trump’s agenda that he has tried to enact through executive orders, which do not carry the force of law. One judge blocked his efforts to add a proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form, a change that voting rights advocates warned would have disfranchised millions of voters.

    Another judge ruled the Trump administration’s attempt to make federal funding to schools conditional on them eliminating any DEI policies erodes the “foundational principles” that separates the United States from totalitarian regimes.

    On immigration, a judge ordered the Trump administration to make “a good faith request” to the government of El Salvador to facilitate the return of a second man sent to a prison there back to the US, saying his deportation violated a court settlement. Another judge blocked the Trump administration from withholding federal funding from several so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that have declined to cooperate with the president’s hardline immigration crackdown.

    Trump issued a rare rebuke against Vladimir Putin, and said he has his own deadline for the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump said that he still thinks the Russian leader will listen to him.

    The Trump administration is loosening rules to help US automakers like Elon Musk’s Tesla develop self-driving cars so they can take on Chinese rivals. US companies developing self-driving cars will be allowed exemptions from certain federal safety rules for testing purposes, the transportation department said on Thursday.

    The Trump store is now selling “Trump 2028” hats to fans of the president, who is barred by the US constitution from serving a third term, despite the fact that a new poll from Reuters/Ipsos found that three-quarters of respondents said Trump should not even try to run.
    The US justice department says it did not fire a former pardon attorney, Liz Oyer, after she refused to recommend reinstating Mel Gibson’s gun rights.But in the latest episode of Politics America Weekly Oyer tells Jonathan Freedland a different story, one she believes points to a wider crackdown by the Trump administration on the rule of law in the US.You can listen to the podcast here:A US push to approve deep-sea mining in domestic and international waters “violates international law”, China warned on Friday, after a White House order to ramp up permits, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).“The US authorisation … violates international law and harms the overall interests of the international community,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said.President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to “expedite the process for reviewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits in areas beyond national jurisdiction”.Private companies and governments have long considered the mineral and metal resources found in stretches of the ocean floor, but they have mostly held off while waiting for the International Seabed Authority (ISA) regulator to devise rules – a process that began in the 1990s.The US never ratified the agreements that empowered the Isa’s jurisdiction and is not a member of the UN-affiliated body, reports AFP.Trump’s order demands Washington become a “global leader” in seabed exploration and “counter China’s growing influence over seabed mineral resources”.Beijing, which has so far held off mining in international waters while awaiting Isa rules, warned Trump’s orders “once again expose the unilateral approach and hegemonic nature of the United States”.US peace envoy Steve Witkoff is in Moscow today for further talks with Russia, including president Vladimir Putin, on Donald Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine.Hoping to get results before Trump’s 100 days in the office next week, Witkoff will have to find a way to convey the sense of the president’s frustration with the Russian attack on Kyiv on Thursday, while hoping to make good progress as Washington tries to put pressure on Kyiv to agree to its proposal.During a gathering of the Chinese Communist party’s top decision-making body focused on economic work and attended by president Xi Jinping, leaders acknowledged that “the impact of external shocks is increasing”, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP), citing state news agency Xinhua.They also said they would seek to “work with the international community to actively uphold multilateralism and oppose unilateral bullying practices”, said Xinhua.Last year saw China achieve record exports, providing a key source of economic activity as domestic challenges in the property sector and deflationary pressure persisted.Friday’s politburo meeting “shows the government is ready to launch new policies when the economy is affected by the external shock”, Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist of Pinpoint Asset Management, wrote in a note, reports AFP.However, Zhang noted “it seems Beijing is not in a rush to launch a large stimulus at this stage”. “It takes time to monitor and evaluate the timing and the size of the trade shock,” he added.China’s top leaders pledged on Friday to step up support for the economy and oppose “unilateral bullying” in global trade, offering a veiled rebuke of hefty tariffs recently imposed by US president Donald Trump.The world’s two largest economies are engaged in a high-stakes tit-for-tat trade war that has spooked markets and spurred major manufacturers to reconsider supply chains.Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has slapped most trading partners with 10% tariffs. But China has received the worst, with many products from the country now facing a 145% tariff. Beijing has responded with new 125% tariffs of its own on US goods.A spokesperson for Beijing’s commerce ministry said on Thursday that “there are currently no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States”. But hours later, asked about the state of negotiations with Beijing, Trump maintained: “We’ve been meeting with China.”Chinese financial news outlet Caijing reported on Friday that Beijing was considering the exemption of certain US semiconductor products from recent additional tariffs, citing sources familiar with the matter. Beijing’s commerce ministry did not immediately respond to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) request to confirm the reports.Meanwhile, the Hill reports that China cancelled 12,000 metric tons of US pork shipments, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), with Bloomberg News reporting that this represents the biggest cancellation of pork orders since the Covid-19 pandemic.More on this story in a moment, but here are some other recent developments:

    US defense secretary Pete Hegseth had an unsecured internet connection set up in his Pentagon office so that he could bypass government security protocols and use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer.

    Donald Trump directed his attorney general to investigate the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue based on an unsubstantiated rightwing claim.

    Federal judges blocked several aspects of Trump’s agenda that he has tried to enact through executive orders, which do not carry the force of law. One judge blocked his efforts to add a proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form, a change that voting rights advocates warned would have disfranchised millions of voters.

    Another judge ruled the Trump administration’s attempt to make federal funding to schools conditional on them eliminating any DEI policies erodes the “foundational principles” that separates the United States from totalitarian regimes.

    On immigration, a judge ordered the Trump administration to make “a good faith request” to the government of El Salvador to facilitate the return of a second man sent to a prison there back to the US, saying his deportation violated a court settlement. Another judge blocked the Trump administration from withholding federal funding from several so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that have declined to cooperate with the president’s hardline immigration crackdown.

    Trump issued a rare rebuke against Vladimir Putin, and said he has his own deadline for the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump said that he still thinks the Russian leader will listen to him.

    The Trump administration is loosening rules to help US automakers like Elon Musk’s Tesla develop self-driving cars so they can take on Chinese rivals. US companies developing self-driving cars will be allowed exemptions from certain federal safety rules for testing purposes, the transportation department said on Thursday.

    The Trump store is now selling “Trump 2028” hats to fans of the president, who is barred by the US constitution from serving a third term, despite the fact that a new poll from Reuters/Ipsos found that three-quarters of respondents said Trump should not even try to run. More

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    Bill Maher calls Larry David’s satire of his Trump dinner ‘kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews’

    Bill Maher has responded to Larry David’s satirical essay in the New York Times that compared Maher’s glowing account of having dinner with Donald Trump to dining with Adolf Hitler.Maher, a vocal critic of Trump in the past, had dinner with the US president and a group of his high-profile supporters, including their mutual friend Kid Rock, on 31 March. On an episode of his talkshow Real Time on 11 April, Maher described Trump as “gracious” and “much more self-aware than he lets on”, saying: “Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was – I swear to God – absent, at least on this night with this guy.”The New York Times then published a satirical piece written by the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator, a first-person account from a critic of Hitler who accepts a dinner invitation from the Führer and ends up deciding “we’re not that different, after all”.“I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship,” David wrote.“But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side – even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.”Appearing on Piers Morgan’s talkshow Uncensored on Thursday, Maher said: “First of all, it’s kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews … It’s an argument you kind of lost just to start it. Look, maybe it’s not completely logically fair, but Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil.”Maher told Morgan he considered David a friend, and didn’t know about the piece until his publicist told him it had been published. “This wasn’t my favourite moment of our friendship,” he said.“Nobody has been harder, and more prescient, I must say, about Donald Trump than me. I don’t need to be lectured on who Donald Trump is. Just the fact that I met him in person didn’t change that. The fact that I reported honestly is not a sin either.”Maher told Morgan he didn’t want to “make this constantly personal with me and Larry”, saying: “We might be friends again.”“I can take a shot and I can also take it when people disagree with me. That’s not exactly the way I would’ve done it.“Again, the irony: let’s go back to what my original thing was. There’s got to be a better way than hurling insults and not talking to people. If I can talk to Trump, I can talk to Larry David too.” More

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    Trump can’t withhold funds from sanctuary cities, says federal judge

    The Trump administration cannot deny federal funds to cities and counties that have passed laws preventing or limiting cooperation with US immigration officials, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.The US district judge William Orrick issued a temporary injunction sought by San Francisco, Santa Clara county and and more than a dozen other municipalities with “sanctuary” policies, and declared that portions of Donald Trump’s executive orders were unconstitutional.“The cities and counties have also demonstrated a likelihood of irreparable harm,” Orrick wrote in his order. “The threat to withhold funding causes them irreparable injury in the form of budgetary uncertainty, deprivation of constitutional rights, and undermining trust between the cities and counties and the communities they serve.”On his first day in office, the US president issued an order directing the attorney general and homeland security secretary to withhold federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions as part of his administration’s crackdown on immigration. In another order, he directed the federal government to ensure funds to state and local governments don’t “abet so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies that seek to shield illegal aliens from deportation”.Meanwhile, on Thursday the US transportation department threatened states with the loss of federal funding if they do not comply with US immigration enforcement efforts.Under the judge’s order, the federal government is prohibited “from directly or indirectly taking any action to withhold, freeze, or condition federal funds”. The Trump administration must provide written notice of his order to all federal departments and agencies by Monday.The plaintiffs have argued the orders amounted to overreach and that the Trump administration was attempting to force cities to participate in its “reckless and illegal mass deportation efforts”.“The federal administration is illegally asserting power it does not have, as courts already determined during the first Trump Administration,” David Chiu, the San Francisco city attorney, said in a statement.“They want to commandeer local police officers as federal Ice agents, while strong-arming local officials with threats of withholding federal funds that support our police department, our efforts to address homelessness, and our public health system.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe federal government has not yet attempted to withhold specific amounts or lay out conditions on specific grants, and during a hearing on Wednesday attorneys for the justice department argued it was too soon for the judge to issue an injunction for that reason.Orrick, who was nominated by Barack Obama, said government lawyers made the same argument during Trump’s first term when the Republican issued a similar order.“Their well-founded fear of enforcement is even stronger than it was in 2017,” Orrick wrote. He pointed to the executive orders and directives from Pam Bondi, other federal agencies and justice department lawsuits filed against Chicago and New York.San Francisco successfully challenged the 2017 Trump order and the ninth US circuit court of appeals agreed with the lower court that Trump exceeded his authority when he signed an executive order threatening to cut funding for “sanctuary cities”.The cities and counties who sued to stop the administration’s most recent orders praised the judge’s decision.“At a time when we continue to see tremendous federal overreach, the court’s ruling affirms that local governments can serve their mission and maintain trust with the communities they care for,” said Tony LoPresti, counsel for Santa Clara county, in a statement.Associated Press contributed to this report More