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      Trump’s shock-and-awe approach to transition is both shocking and awful

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      “Welcome back,” Joe Biden told Donald Trump, his predecessor and successor, as the pair shook hands in the Oval Office. For Biden, it was important to show the world that America can still conduct a peaceful transfer of power. “A transition that’s so smooth it’ll be as smooth as it can get,” Trump said.It was an outward show of permanence and stability. But behind the two men a fire was burning fiercely in the grate. TV comedian Stephen Colbert observed: “I do think it was fitting that they held the meeting in front of a roaring metaphor for the future.”Trump will not be president for another two months but he is already dominating the Washington agenda again. This week a flurry of controversial and extremist picks for his cabinet and other high-ranking administration positions came at a hectic pace and with a level of provocation that made heads spin.The choices included a Fox News host, a tech billionaire, an anti-vaccine activist, an alleged apologist for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and a congressman once embroiled in a sex-trafficking investigation. The lineup raised fears of authoritarianism or chaos – or both – once Trump and his allies are back in the Oval Office.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Their entire political brand is shock and awe. Prior to Trump’s re-election it was notional. Now they have the power to execute all of their depravity with the full backing of American government power virtually unchecked. I don’t think the people who voted for Donald Trump, allegedly because of economic angst, have a full appreciation for what that means.”Trump, who has promised not to be a “dictator” except on “day one”, will enter office with far fewer guardrails and checks on his power than last time. He will return to Washington with a Republican-controlled Congress and a conservative supreme court, containing three justices he appointed, that ruled he is largely immune from prosecution.View image in fullscreenHe has said of his day one plans: “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.” The immigration issue animated his successful election campaign, often coupled with racist rhetoric and falsehoods. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News: “We know that on day one he is going to launch the largest mass deportation of illegal immigrants in American history.”To make it happen he is bringing back Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his first administration, as his “border czar”. Homan, 62, has said he will prioritise deporting immigrants illegally in the US who posed safety and security threats as well as those working at job sites.He will receive zealous ideological backing from Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy. An immigration hardliner, the 39-year-old was a vocal spokesperson during the presidential campaign for Trump’s priority of mass deportations. At a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, he adopted nativist language as he asserted that only Trump would stand up and say “America is for Americans and Americans only.”Trump also announced that Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, will serve as the next homeland security secretary, responsible for everything from border protection and immigration to disaster response and the Secret Service. Noem, 52, rose to national prominence after refusing to impose a statewide mask mandate during the coronavirus pandemic.View image in fullscreenA mass deportation effort could face logistical problems as well as a barrage legal challenges from immigration and human rights activists. But when Trump takes the oath of office on 20 January, his team will be expected to hit the ground running.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The world needs to strap in because the first day of the Trump administration has been in the planning for at least a couple of years and so the white papers, the executive orders are already in files and ready to be pulled out.“We can expect certainly that some of the most radical ideas about curtailing immigration into the United States and then the expelling of unauthorised immigrants within the United States will get a boost from the president making a speech or a press conference followed up with directives to the executive branch. That’ll be off and running day one.”Jacobs added: “We can also expect a pretty sharp attack on the independence of the judiciary. This is going to be a rupture in the generations-old practice of political independence in terms of the Department of Justice. That’s coming to an end.”Trump has long said the biggest mistake of his first term was choosing the wrong people. He had arrived in Washington as the first president without prior political and military experience and relied on others for personnel recommendations. He felt frustrated at and betrayed by officials who slow-walked or ignored directives they saw as ill-advised.Having beaten Vice-President Kamala Harris in the 5 November election, Trump is determined to avoid that mistake second time around. His blitz of announcements this week shows the premium he places on absolute loyalty.His early to-do list could include imposing sweeping tariffs on imported goods, pardoning supporters involved in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreement, reversing protections for transgender students in schools and fulfilling his campaign promise to end the war between Ukraine and Russia “in a day”.Some have been relatively mainstream selections reassuring to the political class. They include Susie Wiles, 67, who will be the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff, and Senator Marco Rubio, 53, now in line to become the first Latino in the role of secretary of state. Rubio is seen as a foreign policy hawk who has previously taken a hard line on foes including China, Iran and Cuba.View image in fullscreenElise Stefanik, 40, a Republican congresswoman and staunch Trump supporter, has been named as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. Mike Waltz, 50, a Republican congressman and retired Army Green Beret, is set to be his national security adviser. And John Ratcliffe, 59, a former director of national intelligence, will serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.But other picks have almost seemed to be political performance art, designed to goad and outrage Democrats (“owning the libs”) and impose a loyalty test on the Senate Republicans who will have to decide whether to confirm or reject Trump’s cabinet members, judges and ambassadors.On Tuesday night Trump picked Pete Hegseth as his defence secretary. The 44-year-old is a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend on Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Fox News network and once said he “hasn’t washed hands in 10 years” because “germs are not a real thing”. Hegseth, a military veteran, has opined that women should not serve in combat and expressed disdain for the so-called “woke” policies of Pentagon leaders.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn his recent book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth wrote: “The next president of the United States needs to radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership to make us ready to defend our nation and defeat our enemies. Lots of people need to be fired.”A day later Trump named Tulsi Gabbard, 43, a former Democratic congresswoman and critic of the Biden administration, as his director of national intelligence. Gabbard served in the army national guard for more than two decades, deploying to Iraq and Kuwait. But she secretly met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017 and blamed the US and Nato for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.View image in fullscreenRick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “So far the candidates range from the unserious to the terrifying. Tulsi Gabbard is going to send a shock wave through the intelligence community and not in a good way. I can tell you that her Putin sympathies being rather evident to everyone around her is going to become a major issue. I’m not sure Tulsi Gabbard can be confirmed.”Perhaps most outlandish, Trump selected Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman and “Make America great again” provocateur, for attorney general. The position of America’s top law enforcement official is potentially central to his plans to carry out mass deportations, pardon January 6 rioters and seek retribution against those who prosecuted him over the past four years.The decision prompted howls of derision and doubts over whether Gaetz, 42, will receive Senate confirmation. He was once the subject of a justice department investigation into sex-trafficking allegations involving underage girls, although it ended last year with no federal charges against him.The staunch Trump loyalist was also under scrutiny by the House ethics committee over allegations including sexual misconduct, although that investigation in effect ended on Wednesday when Gaetz resigned from Congress. Republican and Democratic senators on the judiciary committee that would review Gaetz’s nomination are calling for the findings to be made available to them.Senator Dick Durbin, the Democrat who currently chairs the judiciary committee, said Gaetz “would be a disaster” in part because of Trump’s threat to use the justice department “to seek revenge on his political enemies”. John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, described it as “the worst nomination for a cabinet secretary in American history”.Then, on Thursday, Trump delivered the coup de grace by saying he will nominate Robert Kennedy Jr, 70, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the world. Long advancing the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism, he has said vaccines have caused a “holocaust” and travelled the world spreading false information about the Covid-19 pandemic.View image in fullscreenKennedy, the nephew of President John F Kennedy, has also said he would recommend that water agencies stop adding fluoride to drinking water and made a variety of other claims not backed by science, such as questioning whether HIV causes Aids and suggesting antidepressants lead to school shootings.Adding to the mix, Trump named Mike Huckabee, 69, as ambassador to Israel. He has rejected a Palestinian homeland in territory occupied by Israel, calling for a so-called “one-state solution”. He has also denied that the West Bank, seized by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 six-day war, is under military occupation.Meanwhile the tech billionaire Elon Musk, 53, a campaign surrogate and increasingly close ally, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, 39, will lead lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency. Trump said the pair will reduce government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut waste and restructure federal agencies.Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, defended Trump’s team selection as an effort to bypass the establishment. “Einstein once said, thinking there’ll be a different outcome by doing the same thing over and over again is a sign of insanity,” he said.“We’ve been told now for decades that the American people think we’re on the wrong track. We keep hiring people who are marginally more off the track a half-inch and we get the same result. Well, Trump is going to move the track by many feet.”But the rapid-fire onslaught has left many in Washington dazed and confused about the prospect of Trump’s first day in office. Setmayer, co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee, said: “I expect chaos and a series of constitutionally questionable actions exponentially worse than what we saw on day one last time. It’s already started. There will be many of us who said, we warned you.”She added: “The Trump administration is going to plunge America into a cross between The Hunger Games and The Celebrity Apprentice, unfortunately at great expense to the future of our democracy and the humanity of millions of Americans who will suffer at the hands of this gallery of degenerates. The American electorate fucked around and now they’re going to find out.” More

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      Is this (finally) the end for X? Delicate Musk-Trump relationship and growing rivals spell trouble for platform

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      Was that the week that marked the death of X? The platform formerly regarded as a utopian market square for exchanging information has suffered its largest exodus to date.Bluesky, emerging as X’s newest rival, has amassed 16 million users, including 1 million in the course of 24 hours last week. Hundreds of thousands of people have quit the former Twitter since Donald Trump’s election victory on 6 November.The catalyst is X’s owner, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who transformed the social media site and used it as a megaphone to blast Trump into the White House.The US president-elect said Musk would head the new Department of Government Efficiency, the acronym for which, Doge, is a pun on the dog internet meme and the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, started as a joke by its creators, which jumped in value after Musk dubbed it “the people’s cypto” in 2021.Musk now sits at the heart of the US government, yet requires no Senate approval for his actions and can continue to work in the private sector. He’s allowed to keep X and his 204 million followers, as well as head his electric car company Tesla and rocket company SpaceX. For the first time in history, a big tech billionaire is now shaping democracy not just indirectly, via his media, but directly.“I’m not aware of any precedent for this approach,” said Rob Enderle, president of the technology analyst firm Enderle, who has worked with companies including Microsoft, Sony and Dell.View image in fullscreenAs recently as 2022, Musk tweeted that “for Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” He tweeted that “Trump would be 82 at end of his term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.”Months later, when Musk bought Twitter for $44bn, he fired content moderators and charged for account verification, which meant people could buy influence. Twitter was rebranded to X, shed millions of users and reinstated Trumps’s account, suspended after the White House insurrection in January 2021.The proliferation on X of alt-right diatribe, hate speech and bots, as well as Musk’s own clash with the UK government during the riots in August, have led to mounting disquiet among X users. The Guardian and Observer announced last week that their presence on the site was now untenable and they would no longer post. Stephen King, the author, left, saying it had become “too toxic”. Oscar-winners Barbra Streisand and Jamie Lee Curtis have departed the platform.“X has become effectively Truth Social premium,” said Mark Carrigan, author of Social Media for Academics, referring to Trump’s hard-right social media platform. And the talk in technology circles is that Trump’s Truth Social could be folded into X.If that happens, whose interests take priority? Would Musk suppress criticism of the authoritarian governments he does business with, or promote it? In the Donald and Elon media show, who is the puppet or paymaster?“If that happens, it will be the ultimate amplification machine for Trump’s ideas – a political super-app masquerading as social media,” said James Kirkham of Iconic, which advises brands including Uber and EA Sports on digital strategies. “Forget Facebook or Fox News; the true heart of the GOP’s digital strategy could be X.”“I’m expecting X and Truth Social to merge,” said Enderle. “But this could be one of the efforts that will come between Musk and Trump, given how overvalued Truth Social now is.”The bromance between the world’s two biggest egos is mutually beneficial only as long as the two transactional, power-hungry and impulsive men play nice. Trump is hawkish on China, one of Tesla’s most lucrative markets. Trump essentially campaigned against electric car manufacturing. Trump is protectionist; Musk opposes tariffs. On climate change, they are opposed.Jonathan Monten, a political science professor at UCL, is sceptical over the durability of their relationship.“Musk’s use to Trump was both private money and providing a platform, or using a platform, to a more favourable pro-Trump line,” he said.“It’s unclear what continued purpose or use Musk actually has to him. Yes, it’s sort of this celebrity story, but that’s Trump’s brand. He has one celebrity story today and tomorrow we’ll have another.”The early 2010s were the halcyon days of Twitter when activists, artists, lawyers, academics, policymakers, journalists and specialists of every flavour could connect, share information, exchange ideas and follow events in real time.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenIt would be easy to portray Musk as the bogeyman, but some argue that it was TikTok and the advent of the algorithmic timeline that fundamentally destroyed Twitter. As social media began optimising for scale and for profit at the expense of user experience, algorithms prioritised the “best” content – the content that shouted loudest or was most specifically tailored to users. Curated accounts to follow, and “most recent” content, fell by the wayside.“As much as I think Musk has acted in harmful ways, I think part of this is about the logic of social media platforms as they evolve,” said Carrigan. “The consequences of an advertising-based model incentivise certain ways of organising the platform that create negative effects.”Bluesky, which became the most popular app on the app store on Friday, is the choice for X refugees, although its 16 million users pale in insignificance compared to Meta’s Threads, which reported reaching 275 million monthly active users, and X with about 317 million..View image in fullscreenFor some tech nerds, the X-odus is not something to mourn, but could herald the era of decentralised social networks they have been dreaming of known as the “Fediverse”.Advocates of the “Fediverse” argue that there should be one account for any social media network in the same way that Gmail accounts can email any email addresses, or mobile numbers call users on any other network.In walling off social networks so users can’t leave, the platform has the power. Instead, newer social networks including Bluesky are being built on “ecosystems” that enable them to interconnect.No one knows what will happen to X, with predictions ranging from collapse, to flipping to an anti-Trump platform if Musk and the president lock horns, to becoming a training ground for Musk’s xAI venture. AI could gobble up social media, and xAI is valued at $40bn – almost the price Musk paid for Twitter. More

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      How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world | Carole Cadwalladr

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      1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.3 To name is to understand. This is McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools. It’s the dawn of a new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs.4 If that sounds scary, it’s because that’s the plan.  Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble. Fast. The chilling will be real and immediate.5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.6 Do not kiss the ring. Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until there’s an actual memo to that effect. WAIT FOR THE MEMO.7 Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris. In some weird celestial stroke of luck, he calls me as I’m writing this and I ask for his updated advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.12 Don’t buy the bullshit. A Securities and Exchange judgment found Facebook had lied to two journalists – one of them was me – and Facebook agreed to pay a $100m penalty. If you are a journalist, refuse off the record briefings. Don’t chat on the phone; email. Refuse access interviews. Bullshit exclusives from Goebbels 2.0 will be a stain on your publication for ever.13 Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion14 Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that. They’re not going to the dead drop by Uber or putting 20kg of crack cocaine on a credit card. In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Turn on disappearing messages.15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”16 Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter David Davis. Find threads of connection and work from there.17 There is such a thing as truth. There are facts and we can know them. From Tamsin Shaw, professor in philosophy at New York University: “‘Can the sceptic resist the tyrant?’ is one of the oldest questions in political philosophy. We can’t even fully recognise what tyranny is if we let the ruling powers get away with lying to us all.”18 Plan. Silicon Valley doesn’t think in four-year election cycles. Elon Musk isn’t worrying about the midterms. He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.19 Take the piss. Humour is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that. More

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      Second Trump reign could make life ‘a lot harder’ for EU’s far-right leaders

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      In the end Viktor Orbán didn’t, as he’d promised, celebrate Donald Trump’s win with “several bottles of champagne”. He was in Kyrgyzstan, he apologised, “where they have different traditions” – so it was vodka. But it was still a “fantastic result”.“History has accelerated,” Orbán crowed at an EU summit in Budapest last week. “The world is going to change, and change in a quicker way than before. Obviously, it’s a great chance for Hungary to be in a close partnership and alliance with the US.”Hungary’s illiberal prime minister – and the EU’s disrupter-in-chief, lauded by Trump as a “very great leader, a very strong man” – was not the only figure on Europe’s nationalist right to hail the president-elect’s larger-than-expected victory.Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Muslim firebrand whose Freedom party finished first in last year’s elections and is the senior partner in the ruling coalition, also posted his congratulations, jubilantly urging Trump to “never stop, always keep fighting”.Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, commended a “historic friendship” which “will now grow even stronger”, while Alice Weidel of Alternative for Germany (AfD) hailed a defeat for “woke Hollywood”, adding that Trump “is a model for us”.Europe’s fast-advancing far-right parties, in power in eight EU member states and knocking at the doors in more, have long seen in Trump a powerful ally who shares their populist, nation-first, conservative, Eurosceptic and immigration-hostile views.View image in fullscreenBut what can they actually expect to gain from Trump 2.0? For all their enthusiastic words, analysts and diplomats say, Europe’s mini-Trumps will probably not get much – and may even find themselves worse off. What’s more, some appear to realise it.Certainly, there may be some political upside to basking in reflected Trumpian glory. “The coming Trump presidency will most probably embolden Europe’s far right and illiberal actors,” concluded experts at the Centre for European Reform thinktank.“Trump will strengthen far-right parties not just by normalising and amplifying their ideas, but by boosting their electability.” His win legitimises their grievances and rubber-stamps their sovereigntist vision; history seems to be moving their way.Besides Orbán, Meloni, Wilders and Weidel, Europe’s longstanding Trump admirers include Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally (RN), Slovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico, Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić.They may well be joined after elections next year by Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic, and – with both France and Germany, the EU’s traditional powerhouse, weakened by domestic political crises – their influence is plainly on the rise.Some experts argue selected European far-right leaders could be strengthened personally by Trump’s win: Meloni, for example, has put in the groundwork, praising his brand of politics as a model for Italy and regularly travelling to his rallies.Common views on issues ranging from immigration to abortion, and her flourishing rapport with Elon Musk, could see her become Trump’s “main interlocutor in Europe”, said Lorenzo Castellani of Rome’s Luiss University.Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, expressed much the same ambition for Orbán. “We can have a good hope that Hungarian-American political cooperation will return to its peak form,” he said: Orbán and Trump have “similar thoughts”.But the dynamics are a lot more complicated than that. While Europe’s far-right leaders may align comfortably with Trump in their hostility to immigration and international institutions, there are also significant differences.View image in fullscreenMeloni’s staunch support for Nato and continued international aid to Ukraine in its struggle against Russia’s full-scale invasion, for example, will not be greeted with enthusiasm by the more isolationist voices in the incoming US administration.Similarly, Orbán’s cosy “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with China, which Hungary has welcomed with open arms as a key economic partner and foreign investor, is a long way from Trump’s aggressively hardline approach to Beijing.As US Republican Mitch McConnell put it, “when Chinese state enterprise says jump, Hungarian officials ask how high”. Those words “caution against any guarantee of deeper [US-Hungary] collaboration”, foreign policy expert Zsuzsanna Szelényi said.Trump’s promised America first trade policies could also prove complicated to negotiate for Europe’s far-right parties. As members of the EU’s single market, they could not respond individually to US-imposed tariffs and a likely trade war.Le Pen’s lukewarm response to Trump’s second triumph – in marked contrast to her joy at his first in 2016, which she hailed even before he had officially won – reflects widespread concern over the consequences of Trump 2.0 for EU industry and jobs.“Americans have freely chosen their president,” Le Pen said. “This new political era should contribute to the strengthening of bilateral relations and the pursuit of constructive dialogue and cooperation on the international stage.”Her protege, Jordan Bardella, even echoed French president Emmanuel Macron, saying that for “us French and Europeans, this US election should be a wake-up call … an opportunity to rethink our relationship with power and strategic autonomy”.Far-right voters in Europe are far from uncritical of Trump’s brand of politics, polls suggest: a pre-election YouGov poll found, for example, that people who backed Le Pen would rather have Kamala Harris in the White House than Trump.View image in fullscreen“Trump’s attitude towards Europe … will be harmful to far-right parties’ core electorate – think inflation, de-industrialisation, job losses,” said Catherine Fieschi of the European University Institute. “Trump is bad news for them.”The idea that Trump himself “gives a damn about building relationships with these people strikes me as very very unlikely”, Fieschi added. “He will think about them on a case-by-case basis, and see whether he can extract something.”Faced with the concrete threats to the continent posed by a second Trump presidency that promises to be even more radical than the first, the EU that Europe’s far-right parties have so long reviled may start to look a little less unattractive.Orbán may be strong at home, said Szelényi, “but Hungary is small, deeply integrated in the EU, and its people like being Europeans. The country’s progress and success is far more dependent on the success of the EU than on anything else.”Like other far-right leaders, said Catherine de Vries of Bocconi University in Milan, Orbán has “tried to play both sides, be strategically ambiguous. The thing about Trump is, he’s not going to let you do that. He’ll force you to make a choice.”Europe’s populists will continue to “say Trumpian things, especially if they have an election coming up”, De Vries said. “But when push really comes to shove – Europe’s security in Trump’s hands, Nato not guaranteed – then maybe quite a few are going to say, maybe we need to work on this in Europe.”Far from uniting Europe’s far right in triumph, Trump’s return could actually deepen the conflicts between them. Ultimately, concluded Fieschi, Trump “is going to make the lives of Europe’s far-right leaders, as Eurosceptics, a lot harder. They’re going to be caught between staying Eurosceptic, lining up with Trump and hurting their base – or lining up with the EU, shedding their specificity and losing voters. They’ve been ‘out-populist-ed.’”Additional reporting by Angela Giuffrida in Rome More

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      Trump picks oil and gas industry CEO Chris Wright as next energy secretary

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      Donald Trump said on Saturday that Chris Wright, an oil and gas industry executive and a staunch defender of fossil fuel use, would be his pick to lead the US Department of Energy.Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, an oilfield services firm based in Denver, Colorado. He is expected to support Trump’s plan to maximize production of oil and gas and to seek ways to boost generation of electricity, demand for which is rising for the first time in decades.He is also likely to share Trump’s opposition to global cooperation on fighting climate change. Wright has called climate change activists alarmist and has likened efforts by Democrats to combat global warming to Soviet-style communism.“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year.Wright, who does not have any political experience, has written extensively on the need for more fossil fuel production to lift people out of poverty.He has stood out among oil and gas executives for his freewheeling style, and describes himself as a tech nerd.Wright made a media splash in 2019 when he drank fracking fluid on camera to demonstrate it was not dangerous.US oil output hit the highest level any country has ever produced under Biden, and it is uncertain how much Wright and the incoming administration could boost that.Most drilling decisions are driven by private companies working on land not owned by the federal government.The Department of Energy handles US energy diplomacy, administers the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – which Trump has said he wants to replenish – and runs grant and loan programs to advance energy technologies, such as the Loan Programs Office.The secretary also oversees the aging US nuclear weapons complex, nuclear energy waste disposal and 17 national labs.If confirmed by the Senate, Wright will replace Jennifer Granholm, a supporter of electric vehicles and emerging energy sources like geothermal power, and a backer of carbon-free wind, solar and nuclear energy.Wright will also likely be involved in the permitting of electricity transmission and the expansion of nuclear power, an energy source that is popular with both Republicans and Democrats but which is expensive and complicated to permit.Power demand in the United States is surging for the first time in two decades amid growth in artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and cryptocurrencies.Trump also announced on Saturday that he had picked one of his personal attorneys, Will Scharf, to serve as his White House staff secretary. Scharf is a former federal prosecutor who was a member of Trump’s legal team in his successful attempt to get broad immunity from prosecution from the supreme court.Writing on Twitter the day after Trump’s election, Scharf greeted the news that Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted the former president for his attempt to subvert the 2020 election, was winding down the Trump case and planned to resign with the words, “Bye Jack.” More

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      Biden heads for last meeting with Xi Jinping before Trump takes office

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      Joe Biden will meet with Xi Jinping Saturday afternoon in what is expected to be the last time the two leaders meet before Donald Trump assumes the US presidency in January.The two leaders are attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Peru and are expected to have a meeting on the sidelines of the summit.The White House said that Biden will communicate that the two countries need to maintain “stability, clarity and predictability through this transition”.“Transitions are uniquely consequential moments in geopolitics. They’re a time when competitors and adversaries can see possible opportunity,” Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said earlier this week.Biden is expected to talk with the Chinese president about increasing Chinese efforts to halt North Korea’s escalating role in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. In recent weeks, the Pentagon and Nato confirmed that about 10,000 North Korean troops were sent to help Russia’s offense in Ukraine.Biden met on Friday with Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president, and Shigeru Ishiba, the Japanese prime minister, and affirmed the alliance among the three countries. The three leaders agreed that “it should not be in Beijing’s interest to have this kind of destabilizing cooperation take place in the region”, a senior administration official said in a briefing on background.Trump’s imminent return to the White House casts a dark shadow over the conversation as it remains unclear what his second term will mean for the relationship between the US and China.On the campaign trail, Trump touted a hawkish approach to China, promising to increase tariffs to 60% on Chinese imports, which could be as much as $500bn worth of goods. Trump has also promised to end Russia’s war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”, which some fear means decreasing the flow of military aid to Ukraine or pushing the country to lose territory to Russia. A general backing away from the conflict could give room for China to step up as an intermediary, increasing its presence on the global stage.Among Trump’s blitz of cabinet nominee announcements was the appointments of Florida senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Republican representative Mike Waltz as national security adviser, both of whom have have voiced hawkish views on China.Xi congratulated Trump on his election win earlier this month, saying that their two countries must “get along with each other in the new era”, in a statement.“A stable, healthy and sustainable China-US relationship is in the common interest of both countries and is in line with the expectations of the international community,” Xi said.But in prepared remarks at Apec earlier in the week, Xi took on a more foreboding tone, saying that the world has “entered a new period of turbulence and transformation” and proffered vague warnings of “spreading unilateralism and protectionism”.Adding more uncertainty to the relationship between the two countries, US officials have been on edge in recent weeks about an FBI investigation showing that the Chinese government tried to hack into US telecommunications networks to try to steal the information of American government workers and politicians. Officials said last month that operations linked to China targeted the phone of Trump and running mate JD Vance, along with staff of Kamala Harris. More

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      ‘A Russian asset’: Democrats slam Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence

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      Democratic lawmakers are slamming Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, saying their former House colleague is a vocal supporter of Russia who poses a threat to US national intelligence.Jason Crow, a House Democrat from Colorado and a member of the House intelligence committee, told NBC News that he has “deep questions about where her loyalties lie”.“We get a lot of intelligence from our allies, and there I would be worried about a chilling effect,” he said.Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a House Democrat from Florida, told MSNBC on Friday: “There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”Abigail Spanberger, another House Democrat on the intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer, said on X that she is “appalled” by Gabbard’s nomination.“Someone who has aligned herself with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad and trafficked in Russian-backed conspiracy theories is an unsuitable and potentially dangerous selection,” Spanberger wrote. “The objections to her nomination transcend partisan politics. This is a matter of national security.”Gabbard is just the latest of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks to garner alarm over her nomination. Questions and criticism have been raised by members of both parties over the qualification of other Trump nominees, including representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Robert F Kennedy Jr as secretary of health and human services and Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.It’s unclear whether all of Trump’s nominees will be able to get through a Senate confirmation, even with the chamber’s Republican majority.Moderate Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have voiced reservations about nominees like Gaetz, who Murkowski said is not “a serious nomination”. Former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy similarly said that “Gaetz won’t get confirmed”.“Everybody knows that,” he told Bloomberg.Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii from 2013 to 2021 and was the first Samoan and Hindu elected to Congress. She served in the military in Iraq and was once a surrogate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 primary campaign.She has since become a contributor on Fox News and said that she quit the Democratic party, which she said is run by an “elitist cabal of warmongers”. Gabbard has been a staunch critic of US foreign policy. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard accused the US of running biological weapon laboratories in Ukraine – a falsehood often touted by Russia.Michael Waldman, president of the Brenna Center for Justice, told the New York Times on Wednesday that Trump’s cabinet nominations “seem designed to poke the Senate in the eyes”.“They’re so appalling they’re a form of performance art,” he said. More

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      The ‘foolproof’ election forecaster who predicted Trump would lose – what went wrong?

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      Surely not even Nostradamus could get it right all of the time.Allan Lichtman had correctly forecast the result of nine of the past 10 US presidential elections (and even the one he didn’t, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). His predictive model of “13 keys” to the White House was emulated around the world and seemed all but indestructible.Until, that is, Donald Trump, the notorious human wrecking ball, came along and broke his crystal ball. Lichtman had prophesied that Democrat Kamala Harris would win eight of his keys, claiming the presidency, forcing him to face the harsh truth that his winning streak was over. Was it a big personal blow?“Of course,” the 77-year-old admits by phone. “But I care far less about the personal blow than I care about the blow to our democracy. Even before the election I said, ‘Look, if I’m wrong, the implications are vastly greater for our society than they are for the keys.’ It’s much more important to look at the broader implications.”Lichtman, a history professor who has been teaching at American University in Washington for more than a half a century, developed his keys to the White House in the early 1980s. With Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Soviet expert on earthquake prediction, he analysed elections in terms of stability (the party holding the White House holds it) versus earthquake (the party holding the White House is ejected).The pair devised 13 true/false questions: if six or more keys went against the White House party, it would lose. Lichtman used the model to successfully predict Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1984 and (nearly) every election that followed. After the 2016 election, he received a copy of his Washington Post interview with a message written in a Sharpie pen: “Congrats, professor. Good call. Donald J Trump.”The 2024 election was always going to be a tough test for Lichtman. Joe Biden dropped out in favour of Harris while Trump, who survived two assassination attempts, is a norm-busting figure who was bidding to become the first former president to win back the White House since Grover Cleveland in the 19th century.Why did he think Harris would win, and what went wrong? “The keys are premised on the proposition that a rational, pragmatic electorate decides whether the White House party has governed well enough to get another four years,” he explains. “Just as this kind of hate and violence is new, there are precedent-shattering elements now to our political system, most notably disinformation.“There’s always been disinformation but it has exploded to a degree we’ve never seen before. It’s not just Fox News and the rightwing media. It’s also rightwing podcasters and we have a brand new player, the $300bn guy, Elon Musk, whose wealth exceeds that of most countries in the world and has heavily put his thumb on disinformation.”Musk’s Super Pac reportedly spent about $200m to help elect Trump while his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, amplified rightwing propaganda. Musk was a leading Trump surrogate and has since become a near-permanent fixture at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Along with the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, he will now head an effort to reduce wasteful government spending.Lichtman continues: “It’s been reported that the disinformation that he disseminates has been viewed billion of times. The disinformation extends to every aspect of our society and our economy. Many people are living in an alternative universe and that calls into question the fundamental basis of political decision-making in this country.”That includes disinformation about inflation, jobs, employment, the stock market, growth, hurricane aid, the Ukraine war and undocumented immigrants, falsely portrayed as dangerous killers when in fact they commit crimes at far lower rate than native-born Americans.Another problem for Lichtman’s model was a presidential candidate who has constantly torn up the rulebook and defied categorisation. “We’ve seen Trump far more than we’ve ever seen in the history of this country channel the darkest impulses in American life – things that have always been with us but were increased exponentially this time: racism, misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism.“We’re seeing something new in our politics, which affected the prediction and could affect future predictions but has a much bigger message for the future of our democracy. George Orwell was 40 years too soon. He made it clear that dictatorships don’t just arise from brutality and suppression. They arise from control of information: doublethink. Famine is plenty, war is peace. We’re in the doublethink era and maybe we can get out of it, maybe not.”After Lichtman made his 2024 prediction, he and his wife received a backlash in the form of death threats, vulgar abuse and even people trying to breach their home. They were also the victims of swatting (false reports of a threat intended to draw a heavy police response at the target’s home) and doxing, in which their private information was published online.“I’ve been doing this for 42 years and I have never experienced anything remotely like this,” he says. “I haven’t had to call the police before ever; now they’ve been here several times. They’re on alert. They notified the FBI.”Once an idealistic 13-year-old who watched John F Kennedy speak in New York, Lichtman is dismayed that politics has come to this. “It tells me that America has fallen to an absolute new low,” he reflects.“All I have done is exercise my free speech and yet here I am, subject to all of this hate, attempts to breach the security of my family, and it’s consistent with what we heard from Donald Trump, who’s constantly invoking violence as legitimate, plus for dehumanising those he doesn’t agree with as vermin, scum, something less than human to be dealt with. We’ve never seen anything like this before in America.”Looking back at his 2024 miscalculation, Lichtman is not about to let Democrats off the hook. He had been a staunch defender of Biden until the end and condemned the party for forcing him to step aside in favour of Harris. He is now unimpressed by its epic blame game and self-flagellation over the election result.“They’re pointing the finger at everyone else but not taking any responsibility. This election proves what I’ve been saying for years. I can summarise American politics in one sentence. Republicans have no principles, Democrats have no spine.”As if to prove the point, Trump has nominated Matt Gaetz, a Maga bomb thrower once subject to a sex-trafficking investigation, as his attorney general. The post is currently held by Merrick Garland, whom Lichtman has known for 60 years.“I love the guy,” he says. “I thought he was maybe the greatest federal judge in America and he is now the poster child of the spineless Democrats who have let all this happen. He diddled for almost two years before appointing a special counsel [to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 insurrection].“We all knew on January 7 what Trump had done. Certainly we knew it by the time Merrick Garland was appointed in early 2021. If he had acted as he should have right away, everything would have been different. I believe Trump would have been convicted of serious federal crimes and either be in jail or be on probation and the whole political system would have been different.”Lichtman adds: “He epitomises the spineless Democrats. ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this because I might seem political and Republicans might criticise me.’ Didn’t he learn anything from his supreme court nomination? Republicans are going to do what they’re going to do.“It doesn’t depend on what you do. I always go by the mantra of: it’s not just the evil people who wreak havoc on this world, it’s the good people who don’t do enough to stop them. And Merrick Garland is right front and centre of that.”The Trump-Musk axis “broke my predictive model this year”, Lichtman admits, but he intends to pick himself up, dust himself down and try again in 2028. “I fully expect to adjust the keys according to what I see unfolding over the next several years,” he promises. “The beauty of being a presidential predictor is you have four years to correct your course.“Presuming I’m still around at 81 and fully engaged in my faculties, I will be very carefully monitoring developments over the next few years apropos of the keys and also speaking out in defence of our democracy. The keys are one thing – they’re totally non-partisan – but I have my own political views as well and I fully intend to express them. And when I think the Democrats are worthy of criticism, I don’t hold back.” More