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      Musk and Trump put on lovefest in Sean Hannity interview

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      Donald Trump and his wealthiest backer, the multi-billionaire Elon Musk, expressed gushing admiration for each other in a Fox News interview in which each accused a critical media of trying to drive them apart.Interviewed together in the White House, the pair spoke of each other in such warm terms that the interviewer, Sean Hannity, was moved to say: “I feel like I’m interviewing two brothers here.”The united front was maintained to reject accusations that Musk’s so-called “department of government of efficiency” (Doge) – which has upended huge swathes of the federal bureaucracy in a supposed attempted to find “waste, fraud and corruption” – is a violation of the US constitution, saying their critics were themselves guilty of this.They also dismissed complaints that Musk, who has billions of dollars of government contracts through his ownership of companies such as SpaceX and Tesla, had serious conflicts of interest that could lead him to skew federal spending in his favour.Asked by Hannity how he would respond if he saw a conflict, Trump said: “He wouldn’t be involved.” Musk followed up by saying: “I’ll recuse myself. I mean, I haven’t asked the president for anything, ever.”The interview was aired after a chorus of criticism of Musk’s prominent role in Trump’s administration and suggestions from critics that he was usurping the president’s power, earning the appellation of “President Musk” in some quarters, including the cover of Time magazine.Amid speculation of incipient tensions supposedly fueled by Trump’s known dislike of sharing the limelight, the pair went to great lengths to show personal fealty to each other.“I love the president, I just want to be clear about that,” Musk said. “I think President Trump is a good man. The president has been so unfairly attacked in the media, it’s really outrageous.”Trump described Musk in equally flattering terms, several times describing him as “caring” and “amazing” before delivering a soaring personal testimonial near the end of the interview.“This guy’s a brilliant guy. He’s a great guy. He’s got tremendous and scientific imagination,” the president said, as Musk sat by his side. “But he’s also a good person. He’s a very good person, and he wants to see the country do well.”He said Musk, who described himself as “tech support” to the president, had been of practical value in ensuring that the avalanche of executive orders signed by Trump since his inauguration on 20 January were implemented – although many of them have been subjected to legal challenges and been blocked by court rulings.Musk had also brought “high IQ” young people to his Doge team who were dedicated to changing the country, Trump said.The pair mocked media speculation that their partnership was destined to end in an acrimonious split.“Actually, Elon called me and said, you know, they’re trying to drive us apart.,” Trump said. He went on: “Now they said: ‘We have breaking news. Donald Trump has ceded control of the presidency to Elon Musk.’ And I say it’s just so obvious, so bad. I used to think they were good at it. They’re actually bad at it because if they were good at it, I’d never be president – because nobody in history has ever got more bad publicity than I’ve had.”He predicted that Musk would be able to cut$1tn of government spending, but added that it would only be a small percentage of the waste and fraud that existed. Key programs such as social security, Medicare and Medicaid, would remain untouched, he insisted – except in cases where they went to “illegal migrants”. (Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for such benefits). More

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      Trump administration gives schools deadline to cut DEI or lose federal funds

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      The Trump administration is giving the US’s schools and universities two weeks to eliminate diversity initiatives or risk losing federal money, raising the stakes in the president’s fight against “wokeness”.In a memo on Friday, the education department gave an ultimatum to stop using “racial preferences” as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring or other areas. Schools are being given 14 days to end any practice that treats students or workers differently because of their race.Educators at colleges nationwide were rushing to evaluate their risk and decide whether to stand up for practices they believe are legal. The sweeping demand threatens to upend all aspects of campus operations, from essays on college applications to classroom lessons and campus clubs.It’s meant to correct what the memo described as rampant discrimination in education, often against white and Asian students.“Schools have been operating on the pretext that selecting students for ‘diversity’ or similar euphemisms is not selecting them based on race,” said Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights. “No longer. Students should be assessed according to merit, accomplishment and character.”The guidance drew sharp backlash from civil rights groups and university groups. Some believe its vague language is meant to have a chilling effect, pressuring schools to eliminate anything touching on the topic of race even if it may be defensible in court.“Creating a sense of risk around doing work that might promote diverse and welcoming campuses is much more of the goal than a clear statement of existing law,” said Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice-president of government relations at the American Council on Education, an association of college presidents.The memo is an extension of Donald Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs. As legal justification, it cites the 2023 supreme court decision barring race as a factor in college admissions.“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” it said.On Monday the education department announced it also cut $600m in grants for organizations that train teachers. The programs promoted “divisive” concepts such as DEI, critical race theory and social justice activism, the department said.Confusion around the implications of Trump’s anti-DEI order was apparent at last week’s confirmation hearing for education secretary nominee Linda McMahon. Asked whether classes on African American history would run afoul of Trump’s order, McMahon said she wasn’t certain.The California School Boards Association is awaiting legal guidance so it can advise schools on the Trump administration’s deadline, spokesperson Troy Flint said.“At this point there is not enough information for a step-by-step playbook that tells school districts if you were doing A then now you should do B, or perhaps eliminate the whole program entirely,” he said. “I know people want that granular level of detail. But this is a new era, with some novel civil rights theories and there is no definitive reference for what’s happening now.”The new guidance takes aim directly at college admissions, suggesting colleges have sought to work around the supreme court’s decision.College essays, for instance, cannot be used to predict a student’s race, the guidance says. In the supreme court decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said nothing prevents colleges “from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life,” though he warned that colleges couldn’t use essays as an indirect workaround to consider students’ race.The memo also said it’s unlawful for colleges to eliminate standardized testing requirements “to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity”. Dozens of colleges across the US have dropped SAT and ACT requirements in recent years, citing concerns the exams favor students from high-income families.Practices that have long been commonplace could become legal liabilities, including recruiting in underrepresented areas or buying lists of potential students with certain academic and demographic information, said Angel B Pérez, the CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.“Colleges and universities are going to find themselves between a rock and a hard place,” Pérez said. “They know that what they’re doing is not illegal, but they are worried that if they do not comply, not having federal funding will decimate them.”Some universities said they expect little change. At Oregon State University, a legal review concluded that its programs “are fully compliant with all state and federal laws”, according to a campus message from Rob Odom, vice-president of university relations and marketing.The department memo appears to take aim at scholarships for students from certain racial backgrounds. There’s been legal debate about whether the supreme court decision extends to financial aid, with some schools and institutions deciding to scrap racial requirements for some scholarships.The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators said there’s no consensus on the question, and the group is trying to understand how the memo could affect student aid.“The last thing students need when making plans about how to pay for college is uncertainty over when or whether they will receive financial aid they’ve been relying on,” the group said in a statement.Trump has called for the elimination of the education department, and Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has slashed dozens of contracts deemed wasteful.The Doge team won a legal victory on Monday when a federal judge declined to block it from federal student loan records. The judge said the plaintiff, the University of California Student Association, failed to prove it was harmed by Doge’s access to the data. More

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      Musk is just an adviser with no power to make decisions, White House claims

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      Billionaire Elon Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s second presidential administration is as an Oval Office employee and senior adviser to the president – and is not an employee of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and has no decision-making authority, the White House said in a court filing on Monday.According to a filing signed by Joshua Fisher, director of the office of administration at the White House, Musk can only advise Trump and communicate the president’s directives.“Like other senior White House advisers, Mr Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” it said.Fisher’s filing, made in a case brought against Musk by the state of New Mexico, said that Musk was not an employee of the US Doge Service, or the US Doge Service Temporary Organization, and added: “Mr Musk is not the US Doge service administrator.”Doge has swept through federal agencies since Trump began his second term as president in January and put Musk, the chief executive of the carmaker Tesla, in charge of rooting out wasteful spending as part a dramatic overhaul of government that has included thousands of job cuts.Despite Monday’s court filing, ProPublica recently reported that a number of people who have previously worked with Musk have Doge roles. More

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      A Trump-Putin carve-up of Ukraine is indefensible | Letters

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      I look with horror and outrage not only at the patronising and hypocritical words of JD Vance in Munich (JD Vance stuns Munich conference with blistering attack on Europe’s leaders, 14 February) but also at the apparent attempt by Donald Trump to effect peace between Ukraine and Russia without including either Ukraine or Europe more generally (Trump says he has spoken to Putin and agreed to negotiate Ukraine ceasefire, 12 February).A peace that prevents any more bloodshed can only be a good thing, but it cannot be a carve-up in which Vladimir Putin achieves the victory that Ukrainians have so gallantly deprived him of on the battlefield. Or in which Ukraine is impoverished and emasculated by a greedy US and irredentist Russia.Moreover, if Europe and, by extension, the UK, are to be excluded from negotiations on the future of Ukraine and the continent, under no circumstances should British or other European troops be used in a peacekeeping role.The idea that Trump thinks he can cut a deal with Putin, rob Ukraine of her mineral wealth and then leave Europe to pick up the pieces is disgraceful beyond belief. We should not fall for it.It is unacceptable that British lives be risked for the knavery of Trump and his acolytes. If the US wants European troops on the ground, we get a place at the negotiating table. No ifs, no buts. No taxation without representation: is that not a founding principle of US democracy?William SeafordNewport If Donald Trump is determined to upend post-1945 international structures, as seems likely given his vice-president’s speech, then both sides of the Atlantic need to contemplate the full meaning of a transactional approach to security. Maybe British politicians will stop kidding themselves about the so-called special relationship, which has only ever been special to the Americans when it suited them. At the same time, perhaps someone can inform Trump that it is a mistake to evaluate defence alliances like real-estate deals.Should the president pay a visit to the UK, as Keir Starmer seems to hope, I suggest he be taken to visit the Iraq and Afghanistan memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens, London, where he’ll be reminded of the 626 UK military personnel who died in furtherance of American wars in those countries between 2001 and 2014. Given the popular reverence for veterans in the US, the Maga movement might find our military sacrifice is one of the few aspects of the North Atlantic alliance it can’t easily dismiss.If Trump then still ditches Europe in favour of deals with Putin, it needs to be made clear that self-interest works on both sides. The US won’t be able to expect its former allies to fall in line behind it in the same way it has commanded since the end of the second world war.Mark CottleMaesygwartha, Monmouthshire As Simon Tisdall pointed out a year ago in the Observer, the UK cannot maintain its Trident nuclear deterrent without the active support of the United States. There now appears a high risk that the US will want to be able to veto the use of Trident by the UK and/or to extract a high price for any continued support. Isn’t it time to think about mothballing Trident and redirecting that funding to conventional defence capacity in Europe?Simon RewLondon More

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      Musk’s rampage through government shows us how we can finally close the book on what Trumpism is all about | Osita Nwanevu

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      It is humbling to realize, almost a decade into his tenure at the center of American politics and life, that Donald Trump still has the power to surprise us. As recently as inauguration day, the conventional wisdom on Elon Musk’s role in the administration was that he’d been given a meaningless post at a powerless agency whose name itself was a joke. From the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, it was said, Musk would issue easily ignored recommendations the gullible would take as evidence that Trump was streamlining the federal bureaucracy – a promise reliably made and broken by countless presidents. Instead, in a turn of events magazine cover artists have delighted in, Musk as a “special government employee” has seemingly taken the reins of the executive branch ⁠– a de facto co-president or perhaps a vice, while JD Vance busies himself with his duties delivering social media clapbacks and jeremiads about wokeness to European leaders.For weeks now, the Doge’s fleas have been hopping from agency to agency, gaining access to key administrative and financial systems, including databases filled with sensitive information on ordinary Americans and infrastructure at the treasury that disburses trillions in payments across the federal government. One member of the team Musk installed there, Marko Elez, resigned after it was revealed he had written posts supporting, in his words, “Indian hate” and a “eugenic immigration policy” as recently as December. After defenses from Vance and Trump, he was reinstated. Meanwhile, fired leaders across the government are now seeking employment; about 75,000 federal workers have accepted a buyout from the administration. USAid has been gutted, putting the health and sustenance of countless vulnerable people around the world in immediate jeopardy, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education are now under assault. Words and whole areas of inquiry are being banned for researchers; government-wide, anything that smacks even vaguely of diversity and equity recruitment and training isn’t long for this world. What’s more, all of this comes on the heels of Trump’s extraordinary freeze on federal loans and grants ⁠– justified as a step towards rooting out “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies” in government ⁠– which threatened programs like Medicaid, Head Start and even Meals on Wheels before it was blocked in court.There and elsewhere, those hoping to put the brakes on the administration’s moves are relying on lawfare to restore order. But this blitzkrieg is working anyway ⁠– the federal government has been weakened and all Trump and Musk have left standing is being remade in their image. Meanwhile, outside DC, Trump’s deportation campaign has begun with alarming departures even from the barbarism of Trump’s first term, like the provisions being made to house migrants at Guantánamo Bay and to send detainees, perhaps including American citizens, to prison in El Salvador.It’s on tariffs, though, that Trump’s ambitions seem to have been significantly impeded. When Canada and Mexico struck border security deals to pause the administration’s threatened levies for a month, the White House was quick to frame them as victories for its trade agenda.But anyone who’s bothered to examine the Canadian and Mexican concessions closely knows that Trump delivered next to nothing ⁠– his ploy won a Canadian border plan that had already been announced and a reshuffling of Mexican troops to bolster the 10,000 already stationed at that border to little effect as far as the flow of fentanyl is concerned. Even the 10% tariff on China now in effect is much lower than the 60% levy Trump promised during the campaign.It will take some time before all the dust settles and the rest of the Trump domestic agenda shapes up. But these early days have given us enough of a glimpse at what will matter most to the administration that we can finally close the book on what Trumpism is all about. Nearly 10 years have been spent parsing Trump’s policies and rhetoric to identify points of departure from the Republican party of old. In columns and essays, academic symposiums and cable news bull sessions, it’s been argued that Trumpism has less to do with conservatism as we’ve known it than with other more interesting -isms ⁠– post-liberalism, post-neoliberalism, populism and, yes, fascism. It ought to be clearer to us now ⁠that the reality is much simpler. Donald Trump, a Republican president backed by Republican voters and the Republican party as an institution, is using extralegal means to enact longstanding parts of the Republican agenda and the conservative project ⁠– including, chiefly, the crippling of the federal government. The most significant standing policy accomplishment of his first term in office was a large tax cut Republicans are hoping to extend. This Trump administration promises to be more innovative to the same ends. The tasks of deregulation and privatization are themselves being deregulated and privatized ⁠– turned over substantially to Musk, who seems willing to shrink and weaken government in ways Republican politicians and bureaucrats in administrations past were unwilling to try themselves, a crusade legal scholars and government officials are calling illegal.As Musk and conservative movement veterans like office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, work away at all this, Trump’s tariff agenda ⁠– long scoffed at by Republican business leaders and donors ⁠– is faltering. And on immigration, it bears repeating that Trump’s supposedly distinctive nativism has precedents in Republican politics. The more immigration-friendly George W Bush-era that the Trump years are often unfavorably compared with were preceded by a period in the 1990s when the right, including establishment figures like William F Buckley Jr, strongly backed restrictionism. They were followed, in the years just before Trump fully entered the picture, by a period when candidates like the now-sainted Mitt Romney leaned into restricting immigration so strongly that Republican leaders openly feared they would be permanently uncompetitive with Latino voters.That never came to pass for reasons the 2024 election underscored clearly ⁠– many Americans, of all ethnicities, are plainly through with politics as usual. Decades of rhetoric from mainstream politicians about how Washington is broken and in need of candidates willing to bust things up and Get Stuff Done, whatever the Stuff may be, have culminated in the re-election, by a genuine plurality, of a candidate willing to abrogate the constitution to that end ⁠– one who has also promised to finally deliver on another standard bit of political pablum, the idea of “running the government like a business”. This is essentially what Musk has been brought on to do. The move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley is breaking the federal infrastructure; whether they recognize it or not, workers across many industries have faced the very same situation federal workers do now, with their agency and very livelihoods being sacrificed on the altar of supposed efficiency.The Democrats who have been roused to action on their behalf ⁠– feebly and belatedly, per usual ⁠– have centered the argument that Trump’s and Musk’s rampage through the federal government is unlawful and unconstitutional. “What Trump and Musk have done is not only wrong, it’s illegal,” the Virginia congressman Don Beyer said at a rally outside USAid’s offices earlier this month.“USAid was established by an act of Congress, and it can only be disbanded by an act of Congress. Stopping this will require action by the courts and for Republicans to show up and show courage and stand up for our country.” Republicans, wouldn’t you know it, have gotten rather blase about the whole constitution thing in response. Last week, John Kennedy, the Oxford-educated senator from Louisiana who does a mean Foghorn Leghorn impression for his constituents and the press, defended the constitutionality of Musk’s activities immediately before dismissing the idea that their constitutionality mattered at all. “[T]he issue, anyway, is not process,” he said. “The issue is substance. Did they find wasteful spending, or not?” The North Carolina senator Thom Tillis was more direct ⁠– while Musk’s attack on Congress-approved spending “runs afoul of the constitution in the strictest sense”, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”Just how much bellyaching about the constitution should Democrats actually be doing? All that’s happening now is happening in large part because the men who wrote the constitution more than two centuries ago failed to anticipate anything like contemporary political parties, much less parties that would adopt the ironic disposition towards the document that Republicans now have. Its checks and balances simply weren’t designed to withstand the skulduggery of organized political factions willing to sacralize the document instrumentally and disregard it as necessary. It should never be forgotten that Trump was brought to power by an ugly mutant of the founders’ electoral college to begin with. The longstanding Republican structural advantage in the Senate and constitution’s supermajoritarian threshold for an impeachment conviction allowed Republicans to defend him from the consequences of his actions twice ⁠– the second time despite a simple majority of senators voting to convict in the wake of his scheme to steal the 2020 election and the resulting attack on Congress.In November, voters either enthralled by his seeming invincibility or resigned to it sent him back to the White House. And the major legal challenges to all he’s done and will do this time around will inevitably wind their way to a supreme court dominated by conservatives Trump himself and the Republican party successfully installed, in full keeping with the constitution’s rules, to give themselves their best possible odds of winning their policy fights and hobbling Democratic governance. Topping it all off, Musk’s seat at the heart of the federal government has been handed to him as a reward for the more than $250m ⁠– a mere sliver of his wealth ⁠– that he contributed to Trump’s re-election effort, a sum only made possible by the supreme court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, which allowed donors, corporations and interest groups to raise and spend unlimited amounts on elections through Super Pacs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy now, it should be clear to all who don’t have an emotional, political or professional investment in believing or pretending to believe otherwise that the American constitutional order has developed a kind of autoimmune disease. The very mechanisms the founders crafted to protect the republic are now an existential threat to it; in their greed and determination to implement the conservative agenda, Trump, Musk and Republicans empowered by those mechanisms are happily ignoring or working to override the parts of the constitution that don’t advantage them or suit their ends. As a matter of substance, this is a system that needs to be dramatically reformed or reimagined rather than rescued; as a matter of politics, one of the central lessons of this past election is that critical constituencies Democrats need to improve with in order to stay competitive federally care far less about protecting our sickly institutions than they care about a great many other things that they hoped Donald Trump would accomplish. As of now, even amid the mess in Washington, voters aren’t giving him marks that are all that terrible – a recent CBS poll found solid majorities of Americans describing his leadership so far as “tough”, “energetic”, “focused” and “effective”.The legal fights against the administration being waged on constitutional grounds should obviously continue; like Republicans, liberal lawyers seeking liberal ends should avail themselves of whatever arguments stand the best chance of prevailing in the courts. Politically though, Democrats need to refocus. If appeals to our norms and constitution were politically potent enough on their own to work against Trump, he wouldn’t be in the Oval Office waging war against the administrative state today. Put more simply, no one watches a game for the referees.Democrats should be positioning themselves not as the guardians of America’s institutions but as the defenders of the American people’s concrete interests ⁠– showing and telling voters about all the federal government does for them every day and how the conservative agenda Trump, Musk and the Republican party are pursuing threatens and has always threatened them. The perversity of a man getting to rework their government purely because he happens to be the wealthiest person in the world and financially backed Trump’s campaign should, of course, also be underscored.The especially ambitious might even try arguing to the American people that all the goings-on in Washington illustrate the danger of having so much wealth accumulate in the hands of a few in the first place. Elon Musk is gliding towards becoming the planet’s very first trillionaire. His access to the levers and gears of the federal government now could help him along in myriad ways. Even an improved political system would struggle to constrain the amount of power he possessed as a private citizen and has now leveraged into a public office; democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up. Right now, that project is succeeding.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Elon Musk keeps bringing his kids to work – and the reasons aren’t cute at all | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Welcome to the White House, where every day seems to be bring-your-kid-to-work-day if you’re Elon Musk. The tech billionaire, fascist-salute-enthusiast, and de facto president of the US hasn’t just moved himself into government digs – he has seemingly moved in a selection of his kids as well. Over the last couple of weeks, mini-Musks have been popping up at high-profile political events, generating a steady stream of memes, headlines and analysis.Three of Musk’s young children were at a meeting with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi last Thursday, for example. Why were Musk and Modi meeting? Good question. Even Trump doesn’t seem to know, but told reporters he assumed Musk “wants to do business in India”. Which, considering Musk has burrowed his way deep into the US government, sounds a teeny bit like a conflict of interest. But let’s not focus on that, eh? Let’s focus on Musk’s parenting instead! Don’t ask any difficult questions, just look at the cute pictures – disseminated widely – of Modi showering Musk’s kids with gifts. Adorbs.Musk’s four-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii (often called “X”), is something of a seasoned statesman now. Just a few days before the Modi meeting, X joined Musk and Trump for a press conference in the Oval Office. While Musk rambled about democracy and walked back a despicable lie about $50 million’s worth of condoms going to Gaza, X looked as if he would rather watch Paw Patrol. At one point he appeared to say – perhaps to Trump – “I want you to shush your mouth”. (Where did he hear that, one wonders?) And, at another point, X (who Musk once described as his “emotional support human”) seemed to pick his nose and then wipe the results on Trump’s desk. The nose-picking is very normal for a little kid. The standing by the president of the US, while your dad, who seems to think he is king of the world, makes outlandish claims? Not so much.Musk’s recent spate of in-your-face parenting has divided public opinion. His acolytes seem to think it’s super-cute and a sign that the billionaire isn’t just the saviour of America and human civilisation, but also the world’s best dad – gallantly putting his pronatalist views into practice. Other people (normal people) seem to think it’s a cynical and exploitative PR strategy designed to humanise Musk and distract from all his meddling in democracy. After all, having a kid on your shoulders makes you seem less like a robber baron with a weird breeding fetish and more like a fun dad.No prizes for guessing which camp I’m in: I don’t think there is anything cute about Musk parading his poor children in front of the cameras. Rather, it feels completely self-serving. Bringing your kids to work so you can spend more time with them amid your busy schedule is one thing. Carrying them around like props for photo opportunities, as Musk seems to be doing, is quite another.To be clear: I’m not saying politicians should always keep their kids hidden away. Having leaders parent in public can send a powerful message. In 2018, for example, the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern became the first world leader to attend the UN general assembly meeting with her baby in tow. Ardern was broadly praised for showing people that a woman can be a mother and a leader.What Musk is doing, however, feels very different. Not least because Grimes, who has three children with Musk, including X, has said multiple times that her young son “should not be in public like this” (or variations on the theme). Grimes also claimed she didn’t see one of her kids for five months while she and Musk were engaged in a battle for parenting rights and said her own “Instagram posts and modelling” were weaponised as reasons she shouldn’t have care of her children. Last year, Grimes’s mother similarly accused Musk of withholding her grandchildren’s passports so they couldn’t visit their dying great-grandmother. There are plenty of phrases that seem to describe what Musk is doing here and “dad of the year” is not one of them.Anyway, I have to wrap this up now because I brought my kid to work today, too. That’s not for PR points, to be clear. It’s because I work in the living room and the child is off school. She hasn’t been wiping her nose on my desk but she has put Play-Doh in my socks. More

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      To the CEOs who’ve joined Trump’s fight against diversity, I say this: you’re making a big mistake | Stefan Stern

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      The mask has slipped and the gloves are off. A company which in 2022 boasted that it had exceeded its target, “spending $1.26 billion with US certified diverse suppliers”, is now ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.That company is Meta (formerly known as Facebook), whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced DEI dismantling shortly before he had a prominent seat at Donald Trump’s recent inauguration. Perhaps from that privileged spot he was able to imbibe some of the “masculine energy” he says he wants to see at work.Meta is not alone in signalling a shift from its previous position. Amazon, McDonald’s, Accenture, Google, General Motors, Pepsi, Walmart and Boeing are among the corporate giants who are downplaying or removing altogether references to DEI and public commitments to it. The consultancy Deloitte used to declare that “diversity, equity and inclusion are core to our values”. But, the FT reports, the page those words appeared on has been wiped from its website.It is possible these decisions were taken partly on legal advice. Zuckerberg seems to have pre-empted the attorney general, Trump’s Florida favourite Pam Bondi, as she recently declared that there should be an end to what she called “illegal DEI” and “accessibility” discrimination. You can imagine that in-house counsel had anticipated legal trouble and so were moved to suggest caution on DEI issues. Zuckerberg is not merely being cautious, however. He has moved Maxine Williams, former chief diversity officer, to a role concerned with “accessibility and engagement”. Whether that restructuring will be enough to satisfy the Maga overlords remains to be seen.Some of the changes at other companies may be merely symbolic or presentational. And not everyone is backing down. The investment bank Goldman Sachs stated: “We strongly believe that organisations benefit from diverse perspectives” – although this belief has not stopped them from removing one of their former requirements for diversity in their clients. Goldman Sachs is still “committed to operating our programmes and policies in compliance with the law”, it says. Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan Chase, dared anti-DEI activists to challenge his bank’s pro-diversity stance. (But he is taking a hard line on forcing people to return to the office, despite remote working being key for modern diverse workforces.)All the same, the overriding effect of seeing that array of (newly) admiring CEOs lining up in Washington to salute the incoming chief was to recall the timeless Marxist dictum (Groucho, not Karl): “Those are my principles and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.”View image in fullscreenMaybe the pressure has finally got to some of these top bosses. A recent article from senior partners at McKinsey noted that “CEOs are on the job 24/7, responsible for addressing an ever-shifting array of problems and threats”.But perhaps part of the problem is feeding already narcissistic CEOs the sort of grandiose advice offered by the blue-chip consultants in their article. Likening the boss to an “elite athlete”, the authors argue that CEOs need to use their time purposefully (like LeBron James, the basketball star), “perfect the art of recovery” (like the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo), keep learning (like the golfer Bryson DeChambeau), embrace data and analytics (like a Formula One grand prix driver) and be adaptable and resilient (like the gymnast Simone Biles and … Muhammad Ali).The end product sounds like a remarkable person indeed: “This is how leaders can … build their resilience muscle, and become … ready to thrive in the 21st century, while staying humble, celebrating noble failures, and always helping team members.” Yep, nobody I know, either.In fact, bosses risk being cut off from the everyday concerns of their staff. An academic study into this phenomenon looking back decades, published in the American Journal of Sociology and called The Great Separation, draws on evidence from a dozen countries. The highest earners inhabit the same narrow terrain, and have limited contact with lower earners, the researchers found. This can affect how elites engage with the rest of society, and how in turn lower earners see them. This “great separation” may have had an impact on “the key social and political challenges of our time”, the study says. Brexit, Trump, populism and the rise of the new right may all be symptoms.Can the media do anything to help? The new media business Semafor has just launched a weekly newsletter called The CEO Signal, available (for free!) to bosses running companies with annual turnover of at least $500m (£400m). Its editor, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, says there is a need for such a specially targeted publication: “There’s a place here in the market for something that’s much more tightly focused to the people at the very top of the org chart – who are actually trying to run exceedingly complicated organisations, at an increasingly complicated time,” he told the Press Gazette.“And there’s nobody in any organisation who faces the same list of challenges as the CEO does,” he added. “It’s a cliche to say that it’s lonely at the top, but there is something to that.” The venerable Harvard Business Review is also about to launch a new service specifically for the “C-suite” – that is, for people whose job title begins with the word “chief”.How these new publications will help to mitigate some of the problems highlighted by the “great separation” study is not immediately clear. I am, however, reminded of what Laura Empson, a professor at Bayes Business School in London, has observed: that if a leader complains it is lonely at the top then they “are not doing it right”.Rather than an ever-narrowing elite of CEOs becoming more and more detached from their workforce, we would do better to try to reconnect. Companies and workplaces should be vibrant and cohesive communities of people.The ghastly alternative could be seen at the White House last week, when Elon Musk cavorted around the Oval Office firing off wild and unsubstantiated accusations against public officials, while Trump looked on calmly. Musk confidently asserted, without offering any evidence, that some officials at the now gutted USAid had been taking “kickbacks”. This is not model CEO behaviour. And this is not the leadership we need.

      Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre. His latest book is Fair or Foul: the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition
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      There are many ways Trump could trigger a global collapse. Here’s how to survive if that happens | George Monbiot

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      Though we might find it hard to imagine, we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure.There are several possible mechanisms. Let’s start with an obvious one: their assault on financial regulation. Trump’s appointee to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Russell Vought, has suspended all the agency’s activity, slashed its budget and could be pursuing Musk’s ambition to “delete” the bureau. The CFPB was established by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, to protect people from the predatory activity that helped trigger the crash. The signal to the financial sector could not be clearer: “Fill your boots, boys.” A financial crisis in the US would immediately become a global crisis.But the hazards extend much further. Musk, calling for a “wholesale removal of regulations”, sends his child soldiers to attack government departments stabilising the entire US system. Regulations, though endlessly maligned by corporate and oligarchic propaganda, are all that protect us from multiple disasters. In its initial impacts, deregulation is class war, hitting the poorest and the middle classes at the behest of the rich. As the effects proliferate, it becomes an assault on everyone’s wellbeing.To give a couple of examples, the fires in Los Angeles this year are expected to cost, on various estimates, between $28bn and $75bn in insured losses alone. Estimates of total losses range from $160bn to $275bn. These immense costs are likely to be dwarfed by future climate disasters. As Trump rips down environmental protections and trashes federal responsiveness, the impacts will spiral. They could include non-linear shocks to either the insurance sector or homeowners, escalating into US-wide economic and social crisis.If (or when) another pandemic strikes, which could involve a pathogen more transmissible and even more deadly than Covid-19 (which has so far killed 1.2 million people in the US), it will hit a nation whose defences have been stood down. Basic public health measures, such as vaccination and quarantine, might be inaccessible to most. A pandemic in these circumstances could end millions of lives and cause spontaneous economic shutdown.Because there is little public understanding of how complex systems operate, collapse tends to take almost everyone by surprise. Complex systems (such as economies and human societies) have characteristics that make them either resilient or fragile. A system that loses its diversity, redundancy, modularity (the degree of compartmentalisation), its “circuit breakers” (such as government regulations) and backup strategies (alternative means of achieving a goal) is less resilient than one which retains these features. So is a system whose processes become synchronised. In a fragile system, shocks can amplify more rapidly and become more transmissible: a disruption in one place proliferates into disaster everywhere. This, as Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, has deftly explained, is what happened to the financial system in 2008.A consistent feature of globalised capitalism is an unintentional assault on systemic resilience. As corporations pursue similar profit-making strategies, and financialisation and digitisation permeate every enterprise, the economic system loses its diversity and starts to synchronise. As they consolidate, and the biggest conglomerates become hubs to which many other enterprises are connected (think of Amazon or the food and farming giant Cargill), major failures could cascade at astonishing speed.As every enterprise seeks efficiencies, the system loses its redundancy. As trading rules and physical infrastructure are standardised (think of those identical container terminals, shipping and trucking networks), the system loses both modularity and backup strategies. When a system has lost its resilience, a small external shock can trigger cascading collapse.Paradoxically, with his trade wars and assault on global standards, Trump could help to desynchronise the system and reintroduce some modularity. But, as he simultaneously rips down circuit breakers, undermines preparedness and treats Earth systems as an enemy to be crushed, the net effect is likely to make human systems more prone to collapse.At least in the short term, the far right tends to benefit from chaos and disruption: this is another of the feedback loops that can turn a crisis into a catastrophe. Trump presents himself as the hero who will save the nation from the ruptures he has caused, while deflecting the blame on to scapegoats.Alternatively, if collapse appears imminent, Trump and his team might not wish to respond. Like many of the ultra-rich, key figures in or around the administration entertain the kind of psychopathic fantasies indulged by Ayn Rand in her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, in which plutocrats leave the proles to die in the inferno they’ve created, while they migrate to their New Zealand bunkers, Mars or the ocean floor (forgetting, as they always do, that their wealth, power and survival is entirely dependent on other people). Or they yearn for a different apocalypse, in which the rest of us roast while they party with Jesus in his restored kingdom.Every government should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But, as they do with climate and ecological breakdown, freshwater depletion, the possibility of food system collapse, antibiotic resistance and nuclear proliferation, most governments, including the UK’s, now seem to hope for the best and leave it there. So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems.Start with this principle: don’t face your fears alone. Make friends, meet your neighbours, set up support networks, help those who are struggling. Since the dawn of humankind, those with robust social networks have been more resilient than those without.Discuss what we confront, explore the means by which we might respond. Through neighbourhood networks, start building a deliberative, participatory democracy, to resolve at least some of the issues that can be fixed at the local level. If you can, secure local resources for the community (in England this will be made easier with the forthcoming community right to buy, like Scotland’s).From democratised neighbourhoods, we might seek to develop a new politics, along the lines proposed by Murray Bookchin, in which decisions are passed upwards, not downwards, with the aim of creating a political system not only more democratic than those we currently suffer, but which also permits more diversity, redundancy and modularity.Yes, we also – and urgently – need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it’s beginning to look as if no one has our backs. Prepare for the worst.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More