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      What is this era of calamity we’re in? Some say ‘polycrisis’ captures it

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      Two months into 2025, the sense of dread is palpable. In the US, the year began with a terrorist attack; then came the fires that ravaged a city, destroying lives, homes and livelihoods. An extremist billionaire came to power and began proudly dismantling the government with a chainsaw. Once-in-a-century disasters are happening more like once a month, all amid devastating wars and on the heels of a pandemic.The word “unprecedented” has become ironically routine. It feels like we’re stuck in a relentless cycle of calamity, with no time to recover from one before the next begins.How do we make sense of any of this – let alone all of it, all at once?A number of terms have cropped up in the past decade to help us describe our moment. We’re living in the anthropocene – the era in which humanity’s impact is comparable to that of geology itself. Or we’re in the “post-truth” era, in which we no longer share the same sense of reality. We’re facing a permacrisis, an endless state of catastrophe.But perhaps the word that best describes this moment is one that emerged at the turn of the millennium, picked up steam in the 2010s and has recently been making the global rounds again: polycrisis.Not to be confused with a “perfect storm” or the perhaps less scientific “clusterfuck”, “polycrisis” – a term coined by the authors Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – refers to the idea that not only are we facing one disaster after another, but those messes are all linked, making things even worse. Or, as Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and public intellectual who has championed the term, put it: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”Our globalized world is built on interconnecting systems, and when one gets rattled, the others do too – a heating climate, for instance, increases the risk of pandemics, pandemics undermine economies, shaky economies fuel political upheaval. “There’s a kind of larger instability, or a larger system disequilibrium,” the researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon says. To illustrate the situation, Homer-Dixon uses a video of metronomes on a soft surface. Though they’re all started at different times, they end up synchronized, as each device’s beat subtly affects the rest. When people see it for the first time, “they don’t actually see what’s happening properly. They don’t realize the forces that are operating to cause the metronomes to actually synchronize with each other,” Homer-Dixon says.In much the same way, it’s often unclear even to experts how global systems interact because they are siloed in their disciplines. That limits our ability to confront intersecting problems: the climate crisis forces migration; xenophobia fuels the rise of the far right in receiving countries; far-right governments undermine environmental protections; natural disasters are more destructive. Yet migration experts may not be experts on the climate crisis, and climate experts may have limited knowledge of geopolitics.That’s why Homer-Dixon thinks better communication is essential – not just to create consensus around what we call our current predicament but also how to address it. He runs the Cascade Institute, which is fostering “a community of scholars and experts and scientists and policy makers around the world who are using this concept [of polycrisis] in constructive ways”.“Constructive” is a key word here. “You’ve got to get the diagnosis right before you can go to the prescription,” he says. Finding that diagnosis means looking at how stresses on various systems – climate, geopolitics, transportation, information, etc – intersect and identifying what his team calls “high leverage intervention points”: “places where you can go in and have a really big impact for a relatively low investment”.The Cascade Institute’s proposals target what they have identified as key drivers of the polycrisis, such as polarization and climate change, by, for instance, improving school curricula to bolster students’ understanding of disinformation and expanding the use of deep geothermal power.In addition to bringing people with disparate expertise together, the Cascade Institute, part of Royal Roads University in British Columbia, has developed an analytical framework for understanding the polycrisis, and it operates a website, polycrisis.org, which serves as a hub for the latest thinking on the issue – including critiques of the concept, Homer-Dixon says. The site contains a compendium of resources from academia to blogposts that explore the polycrisis, reflecting, for instance, on what’s already happened in 2025 (a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, California wildfires, Trump upending the global order, an AI-bubble selloff, and the outbreak of bird flu).View image in fullscreenThere has been some backlash to the idea of the polycrisis. The historian Niall Ferguson has described it as “just history happening”. The political scientist Daniel Drezner says its proponents “assume the existence of powerful negative feedback effects that may not actually exist” – in other words, when crises overlap, the outcome might not always be bad (for instance, the pandemic lockdowns might have had some short-lived environmental benefits). Some point to past crises as evidence that what we are experiencing is not new.Homer-Dixon disagrees. “We’ve moved so far and so fast outside our species’ previous experience that many elites don’t have the cognitive frame to grasp our situation, even were they inclined to do so,” he wrote in 2023, when the term was the talk of Davos.It’s all a bit overwhelming, as Homer-Dixon acknowledges. “If you’re not really scared by what’s going on in the world, you’re braindead,” he says.On the other hand, “t​​he crisis can actually be a moment for really significant change,” he says, “because it kind of delegitimizes the existing way of doing stuff, the existing vested-interest stakeholders who are who are hunkered down and don’t want anything to change”. For instance, while Homer-Dixon sees Donald Trump as an “abominable” figure, he also notes that, “like an acid”, the president dissolves norms around him. That creates the risk of disaster but also offers opportunities to change the world for the better.“This really is a critical moment in human history and things can be done,” Homer-Dixon says. “We don’t know enough about how these systems are operating to know that it’s game over.”And the term itself, as terrifying as it is, can also be a strange comfort. “I think that’s useful, giving the sense a name. It’s therapeutic,” Tooze told Radio Davos. When the world feels like a nightmare, identifying the condition gives us something to hold on to – a kind of understanding amid the chaos. More

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      Trump ordered to reinstate thousands of agriculture department employees

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      An independent federal board has ordered the US Department of Agriculture to temporarily reinstate nearly 6,000 employees who were fired as part of Donald Trump’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce.The decision, issued on Wednesday by Cathy Harris, chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board – responsible for reviewing federal employee firings – orders the USDA to reinstate the roughly 5,600 terminated probationary employees for a period of 45 days while it continues to investigate the firings.The order applies to probationary workers who received identical termination letters, which stated that based on their performance, they had not demonstrated that their further employment “would be in the public interest”.Harris wrote in the order that during the 45-day period, the recently fired workers will be “placed in the positions that they held prior to the probationary terminations”.Harris indicated that she had found reasonable grounds to believe that the agency terminated the employees in violation of federal laws and procedures.The “45-day stay will minimize the adverse consequences of the apparent prohibited personnel practice”, Harris said.J Ward Morrow, the assistant general counsel at the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents some of the reinstated workers, described the order to Reuters as “great news”.Morrow also emphasized the need for similar action to be done “with all impacted agencies with similarly situated employees as fast as possible”.Tens of thousands of government workers have been laid off since Trump took office at the end of January, largely as a result of directives from billionaire Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge), aimed at reducing the federal workforce.While this order issued on Wednesday specifically applies to the USDA, it may have the potential to set a precedent for additional rulings that could impact other agencies, according to Politico.But, this ruling may not be the final word on the legality of the federal mass terminations, Politico reports. The news site notes that the administration might have options to put reinstated workers on leave or terminate them once more during a formal “reduction in force”.The merit systems board’s ruling on Wednesday follows a similar decision from last week that temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ordering the US defense department and other agencies to carry out the mass firings of workers including probationary employees who typically have less than a year of experience.There are an estimated 200,000 probationary workers across federal agencies.The ruling on Wednesday also emerged as the merit systems board is currently dealing with its own suspension issues and legal battles, as Trump is attempting to dismiss Harris, who is a Democrat from her position.A federal judge intervened on Tuesday and blocked Trump from firing Harris and from removing her from the board without just cause before her term expires in three years, according to Reuters. The administration is currently appealing that decision. More

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      White House to overhaul $42.5bn Biden-era internet plan – probably to Elon Musk’s advantage

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      The Trump administration is preparing to overhaul a $42.5bn Biden-era program designed to connect tens of millions of rural Americans to reliable and affordable high-speed internet, in a move that is expected to benefit billionaire Elon Musk.Howard Lutnick, the commerce department secretary who has oversight of the federal program, recently told senior officials inside the department that he wants to make significant changes to the federal program, sources with knowledge of the matter told the Guardian.Instead of promoting an expensive buildout of fiber optic networks – as the Biden administration sought to do – Lutnick has said he wants states to choose the internet technology that would be low cost for taxpayers.That, experts agree, would favor satellite companies like Musk’s Starlink. Musk, whose company owns about 62% of all operating satellites, has not hidden his disdain for Biden-era program, telling voters last year that he believed it should be brought down to “zero”.Sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.Experts generally agree that using satellite services costs less to connect difficult-to-reach homes than fiber. But fiber also provides a more reliable, faster and less expensive option for consumers.Any change to the program could face substantial pushback from states and Congress, including Republican senators who have previously sought assurances from administration officials that the federal program, which is expected to generate billions of dollars in long-term economic growth across some of the poorest states in the US, would largely be left alone.The so-called Bead program (which stands for “Broadband Equity Access and Deployment”) was passed with bipartisan support in 2021 and aimed to connect 25 million Americans to high-speed internet. Under the Biden plan, states were left to make their own plans, request federal funding and hold competitive bids for internet service providers that would build the network. Given different choices of how to connect homes to high-speed internet, the Biden administration said it wanted states to build fiber optic networks, which are expensive to set up but are considered reliable and can offer affordable rates to consumers. In cases where fiber optic networks were too expensive to build, states could opt for cheaper options, like using satellite.“I don’t think there is doubt that Bead will continue,” said Blair Levin, policy advisor to New Street Research, a telecommunications and technology analysis firm. “What is in doubt is whether people get a long-term solution or something that is definitely good for Elon Musk.”Lutnick has told commerce officials that he wants Bead to be “tech neutral”, which means not favoring one technology over another. It is unclear whether Lutnick would try to force states to choose satellite service over others.Such changes – which would probably be challenged by individual states – would radically alter a program that has faced some criticism but has generally been embraced by both Republican and Democratic governors across the US, who have been expecting to receive billions of dollars in federal funding. The funds would provide an economic lifeline that would connect an estimated 56m household in mostly rural communities who are unserved or underserved to high-speed internet. It is estimated that the program, as it stands now, would generate at least 380,000 new jobs and fuel more than $3tn in economic growth.The commerce department did not respond to a request for comment.“The driving force behind Bead was parity. Can you get internet service in rural Wyoming what you can get in suburban Denver?” said one analyst who requested anonymity because they are providing advice to some states on the issue. “Fiber is utterly critical. If the internet is the most important infrastructure asset a state has, and you are using satellite, then it means you are not building something in your state. It can be turned on and off by the satellite provider.”Any dramatic change to the federal program also raises legal questions. States have spent years planning for Bead, including holding competitive bids for companies to build fiber networks. It is unclear whether the commerce department can force these states to restart their planning from scratch. The overriding criticism of the Biden program is that the bureaucracy took too long, and that not a single household has yet been connected to high-speed internet yet. The Trump administration might argue that states may as well start again to benefit taxpayers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor states like Louisiana, which was poised to receive $1.355bn under the Biden program and was the first state to get full approval for its plan, any change could upend estimates that the fiber optic build-out would drive $2bn to $3bn in economic growth for the state and between 8,000 and 10,000 new jobs. Planned investments, like a $10bn AI center that is poised to be built by Meta in Richland parish, a poor farming region in the north-east corner of the state, would depend on fiber optic connections. In a recent letter to Lutnick, the Louisiana governor, Jeff Landry, said the state would be ready to break ground on its fiber optic network within the first 100 days of the administration.The top Louisiana official working on the program, Veneeth Iyengar, has said about 95% of the state’s funds will be used to build fiber, and the remaining 5% will be used for cable, fixed wireless and satellite.Trump administration officials have balked at the program’s price tag.Musk made his views about the program clear at a town hall meeting in Pittsburgh last October, before the election. When he was asked about what he would do to help make the government more efficient, Musk immediately raised Bead as an example of a program he would cut.“I would say that program should be zero,” he quipped at the time, while also suggesting that his own satellite company, Starlink, could provide internet connectivity to rural homes at a fraction of the connectivity cost.Starlink did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Some Republican senators asked Lutnick about his views on Bead during his confirmation hearing, but he offered no promises. When Republican senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska asked Lutnick whether he could assure him that commerce would not rely on Starlink “as a solution to all of our problems”, Lutnick declined to answer, saying only that he would work to pursue the “most efficient and effective solutions for Alaskans”.Do you have a tip on this story? Please message us on Signal at +1 646 886 8761 More

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      While our eyes are on the welfare state’s destruction, Trump is building a police state | Judith Levine

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      Last week, the federal human resources department sent out a seven-page memo ordering agencies to submit detailed plans on how they will work with the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to slash their payrolls. To do this, they were to eliminate whole job categories – except one. Untouchable were positions “necessary to meet law enforcement, border security, national security, immigration enforcement, or public safety responsibilities”.While we’ve had our eyes on the wrecking ball–Doge pulverizing social services, environmental protection and scientific research, we’ve hardly taken notice of what is being constructed. In the footprint of the already shabby, now half-demolished US welfare state, the Trump administration is building a police state.In spite of Doge’s cuts to the FBI, the agency’s director, Kash Patel, is gearing up to turn the agency – whose job has always been to spy on US citizens, including enemies of the state as identified by the government in power – into Donald Trump’s personal secret police. At the state level, lawmakers are compiling their own enemies lists and filing bills to reward those who snitch on abortion seekers, transgender people, undocumented immigrants and school librarians suspected of harboring the wrong books.The Republican House budget includes $300bn in new funding for defense and border control. Among the Senate budget committee’s announced priorities are finishing the border wall, increasing the number of immigrant detention “beds”, hiring more border patrol agents, and investing in state and local law enforcement to assist in “immigration enforcement and removal efforts”. While no figures are provided in the attached budget, the Senate budget committee assures Americans that any new spending will be offset by reductions.Some of those reductions involve firing immigration judges and cutting federal supports to local police. Clearly, the right hand doesn’t know what the other right hand is doing. Still, cuts are not always cuts. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has instructed senior staff to shave 8% off the department’s $850bn annual expenditures. Programs addressing the climate crisis and “excessive bureaucracy” are high on the list, of course. But, as the Intercept points out, savings will be repurposed for the president’s pet projects. For instance: the Iron Dome, an enormously complex, costly – and, critics say, unfeasible, unnecessary and even futile – space-based missile-defense and “warfighting” system that has been a fantasy of tech-drunk Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan. In keeping with Trumpian décor and his “golden age of America”, the Iron Dome has recently been rechristened the Golden Dome.The Golden Dome might also be a symbol of what a state devoted to protecting itself from enemies real and imagined offers corporate America. Because as the civil service shrinks, private industry – particularly the overlapping defense and tech sectors – will fill in the blanks. Project 2025, which is essentially being cut and pasted into Trump’s executive orders, calls on the administration to “strengthen the defense industrial base”, stockpile ammunition and “modernize” the nukes, while streamlining procurement from private contractors and involving them in decisions about what to produce. With Tesla and SpaceX contracts worth $38bn and of course, control of Doge, Elon Musk is already at the table. SpaceX practically owns Nasa’s rocket launch and space travel programs, freaking out engineers familiar with its bargain-basement manufacturing practices – and failures. Next up: artificial intelligence to replace human expertise.Trump’s war on immigrants also promises a windfall. During his first term, and Joe Biden’s as well, the creation and operation of a “smart” border wall – comprising mobile towers, autonomous drones, thermal imaging, biometric data collection and artificial intelligence – funneled billions of taxpayer dollars to Silicon Valley and Wall Street. A 2022 report by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights on border militarization and corporate outsourcing called border security a “for-profit industry”, which perpetuates itself by lobbying for ever more draconian crackdowns on migrants.Those profits are about to explode. “The border security market is projected to reach $34.4 billion by 2029, from $26.8 billion in 2024,” with Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics the biggest beneficiaries, according to the market research firm MarketsandMarkets.Private prison companies – the two largest contractors are GEO Group and CoreCivic – anticipate unprecedented revenues too. Implementation of the Laken Riley Act, which mandates locking up undocumented people charged not just with violent crimes but with offenses as trivial as shoplifting, will require a huge buildout of detention facilities; Project 2025 recommends 100,000 available beds daily. Flying deportees to their home countries could generate $40m to $50m of business, according to GEO’s executive chairperson. “We believe the scale of the opportunity before our company is unlike any we’ve previously experienced,” crowed the chief executive officer, J David Donahue, on the company’s quarterly earnings call.The removal of millions of migrants will necessitate more than software, planes and prisons. It will need personnel. And wouldn’t you know it, an enterprising group of military contractors including the CEO of Blackwater has submitted a proposal to the Trump administration to deputize a mercenary border patrol of 10,000 private citizens. The plan also recommends payments to bounty hunters. Estimated cost: $25bn.These surveillance technologies and tactics are not targeted solely at foreign and extraterrestrial invaders, however. Government drones kept watch over the Black Lives Matter protests of 2017; at a protest against Israel’s war on Gaza at New York University, a student called my attention to a police drone circling above. In 2021 SpaceX signed a $1.8bn contract with the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office for a network of low-orbiting spy satellites called Starshield. “A US government database of objects in orbit shows several SpaceX missions having deployed satellites that neither the company nor the government have ever acknowledged” but were identified by experts as Starshield prototypes, Reuters reported. It is unclear whether the network will be used for military or domestic spying, but its reach is vast. Said one Reuters source: “No one can hide.”The transformation of the US government is not just a matter of replacing an accountable civil service with self-interested private contractors. “It seems like they are using [Doge] to reshape the purpose of the government rather than execute it more efficiently,” Max Stier, president of the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service, told the Washington Post.That purpose, Trump tells us, is public safety from threats without and within. But a capitalist police state redefines public safety. Safety does not include housing or food security, disease prevention or disaster relief. The state protects companies, not workers, consumers or the environment. The “public” in “public safety” also attains new meaning: it embraces only native-born practitioners of the state religion, political loyalists and favored profiteers.As this inner circle shrinks, the outside expands. There are citizens and what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “margizens”, those who live in a country but do not benefit from its rights or protections. Not only are the margizens denied safety; they are deemed dangerous. To keep the nation “proud and prosperous and free”, as Trump described his America, the state will need to humiliate, impoverish, pursue, imprison and punish almost everyone.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist and the author of five books. Her Substack is Poli Psy More

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      Out-of-date polls to wrong aid amounts: factchecking Trump’s Congress address

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      Donald Trump’s marathon address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday was littered with false claims, many of them falsehoods he has previously stated, been corrected on, and continued to repeat regardless. Here are some of the main statements he made that are just not true.The United States has not given Ukraine $350bn since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022The president repeated one of his new favorite lies: that the United States has given Ukraine $350bn since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, and Europe has given just $100bn.In fact, as Jakub Krupa and Pjotr Sauer reported for the Guardian last month, a running tally kept by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy shows that the US has spent about $120bn, while Europe – counted as the sum of the EU and individual member states – has allocated nearly $138bn in help for Ukraine. When the contributions from non EU countries, like the UK, are included, Europe’s share is even larger.Last week, on three consecutive days, three visiting world leaders corrected Trump on this false statement while sitting next to him in the Oval Office: the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Trump did not stop ‘$45m for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma’One in a litany of spending on foreign aid projects that Trump presented as ridiculous was “$45m for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma”.There is no evidence that any such scholarships were planned. As the former representative Tom Malinowski pointed out, when this claim was first made by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”, this appears to be a reference to a very different program, USAid’s Lincoln Scholarships, which helped educate young people struggling for freedom against Burma’s military dictatorship.It is not clear why Trump or Musk wrongly thought that these were “diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships, but, as Malinowski noted, the USAid project description did specify that the scholars were Burmese students “from diverse backgrounds”. That seems like an important policy, given that the military dictatorship in Burma has exploited ethnic and religious divisions to stay in power.Trump wrongly suggested that millions of dead people might be getting social security paymentsTrump drew attention to the fact that a Social Security Administration database includes millions of people who would be over 110 years old.But, as the Guardian has reported previously, when Musk claimed that “a cursory examination of social security,” showed that “we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old”, this is a deeply misleading way of talking about about real flaw in the social security system which could enable fraud, but apparently does not.That flaw was revealed in a 2015 report by the independent inspector general for the social security administration who discovered that the agency did not have death records for millions of people who had passed away. As of 2015, the inspector general found, there were “approximately 6.5 million numberholders age 112 or older who did not have death information” on their files.According to the report, social security payments were still being made to just 13 people who had reached the age of 112. At least one of those people was certainly still alive, and tweeting, at the time the report’s data was compiled in 2013.When the report was issued in 2015, the oldest person with a social security number and no death record on their file was born in 1869, but there was no record of payments still being made to that person, who would have been nearly 150.In fact, the social security administration already has in place a procedure to conduct interviews with anyone who reaches the age of 100, to verify that they are alive and their account is not being used by someone else to collect fraudulent payments.Trump incorrectly claimed that a middle school in Florida had ‘socially transitioned’ a 13-year-old childTrump said that January Littlejohn, a mother from Tallahassee, Florida, had discovered that her 13-year-old child’s middle school had secretly socially transitioned her from female to non-binary without notifying the parents.While Littlejohn made that case in a lawsuit, the suit was dismissed by a federal judge, and emails obtained by the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper showed that Littlejohn had written to the school in 2020 to notify a teacher that her child wanted to change pronouns.The emails showed that Littlejohn worked with a teacher to determine how best to navigate the situation, and thanked the teacher for their help.Trump cherrypicked an out-of-date poll to suggest that most Americans say the US is now going in the right direction“Now, for the first time in modern history,” Trump proclaimed early in his address, “more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction”.In fact, Trump appeared to be citing a single poll, published three weeks ago by the Republican-leaning polling firm Rasmussen, which showed a 47%-46% edge for the right direction over the wrong direction. However, that same polling firm’s most recent survey, this week, shows that 45% of Americans now say the country is on the right track, and 50% say it is on the wrong track.As the polling expert Nate Silver noted last year, when it was revealed that Rasmussen was secretly showing its results to the Trump campaign, “this sort of explicit coordination with a campaign, coupled with ambiguity about funding sources, means that we’re going to label Rasmussen as an intrinsically partisan (R) pollster going forward”.Other polling firms, not associated with the Republican party, show that more Americans say that the country is on the wrong track now than on the right track.The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, in late February, shows that 49% of Americans say that the country is headed off on the wrong track, and just 34% say that the country is headed in the right direction.An Economist/YouGov poll last week found that 50% of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction, with just 38% saying it is on the right track.The most recent Morning Consult poll, published on Sunday, shows that the current spread is 56% wrong to 44% right. In the final week of the first Trump administration in 2021, Morning Consult found that 81% of Americans said the country was on the wrong track, with just 19% saying it was on the right track.Trump falsely claimed Musk’s cost-cutting had ‘found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud’Since the start of its work, Musk’s “department of government efficiency” initiative has repeatedly claimed to have uncovered “fraud” only to have examples it cited turn out to be incorrect of invented. The most eye-catching example, that the government planned to spend $50m to send condoms to Gaza, turned out to be completely fictional.As the New York Times reported on Monday, receipts posted online by Musk’s “department of government efficiency” document less than $9bn in savings from cancelled government contracts, none of which involved fraud. More

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      Trump declares administration ‘just getting started’ in address to Congress

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      Donald Trump on Tuesday declared that his administration was “just getting started”, boasting in a marathon address to Congress that his efforts to slash the size of the federal workforce, reorient US foreign policy and escalate a risky trade war marked the beginning of the “most thrilling days in the history of our country” as Democratic lawmakers protested with placards that read “lies” and “false”.“America is back,” Trump declared, opening the his primetime speech to a joint session of Congress, the first of his second term and the longest in American history. Republicans broke into a boisterous chant of “USA”.Throughout the prime-time address, which lasted about one hour and 40 minutes, a jocular Trump touted his administration’s “swift and unrelenting action” and praised the work of his billionaire adviser, Elon Musk, who has led his administration’s efforts to dramatically downsize the federal government through his so-called “department of government efficiency”. “Thank you, Elon,” Trump said, gesturing to Musk, who was seated in the House gallery overlooking the chamber where Democrats waved paddles that read “Musk steals”.Trump seized the high-profile moment to defend his administration’s action during the first weeks of his return to power, including, according to his tally, nearly 100 executive orders and more than 400 executive actions.“The people elected me to do the job, and I am doing it,” he said, making no mention of the legal challenges that have stalled many of his actions and deepening fears that his trade war will plunge the country into economic turmoil.Trump also expanded on his “America First” foreign policy vision, just days after a dramatic Oval Office meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, spiraled out of control as Trump and JD Vance berated him over a perceived lack of respect. During his remarks, Trump recited from a letter Zelenskyy shared earlier in the day, indicating that he was ready to return to the negotiating table to end Russia’s three-year war. The US had simultaneously received “strong signals” from Russia that Moscow is “ready for peace,” Trump said. “Wouldn’t that be beautiful?”Elsewhere, Trump envisioned the US expanding. He declared that his administration was in the process of “reclaiming the Panama Canal” and repeated his threat to take control of Greenland: “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.”With performative flair, Trump offered a sampling of initiatives he said Musk’s team had identified as wasteful, among them the creation of an Arab Sesame Street, “making mice transgender” and promoting LGBTQ+ rights in Lesotho, the African country he said “nobody has ever heard of”.“This is real,” he exclaimed, drawing laughs from half of the chamber. But Trump’s claim that Musk’s cost-cutting efforts had identified “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud”. But Trump’s estimate vastly overstates the savings Doge says it has generated, which itself is based on accounting that multiple reports have found is riddled with errors and distortions.Early in the night, as Trump bragged about the size of his electoral college and popular vote victory – “a map that reads almost completely red for Republican” – Democrats heckled and booed, prompting House Speaker Mike Johnson to bang his gavel and demand decorum. “You don’t have a mandate,” shouted Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas. When the congressman, who last month filed articles of impeachment against Trump, refused to be seated, the Speaker ordered him removed from the chamber.View image in fullscreenTrump claimed a mandate for “bold and profound change”, though his 1.5 point popular vote was the smallest margin of victory for any successful presidential candidate since Richard Nixon in 1968.Trump’s address to Congress came just hours after he launched a trade war against three of its top trading partners that sent financial markets spiraling and raised fresh concerns of inflation. Just after midnight on Tuesday, the US slapped 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada and doubled to 20% the levy he imposed on Chinese products last month. Trump vowed a tit-for-tat retaliation – “whatever they tariff us, we tariff them” – and insisted the new levies would grow the economy and create jobs, even as economists warn the polices could harm consumers and make inflation worse.“Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again,” Trump said, adding a caveat: “There’ll be a little disturbance, but we’re OK with that. It won’t be much.”New tariffs would take effect on 2 April, Trump said, one day later than he preferred to ensure the announcement wasn’t mistaken for an April Fools joke. However, he conceded that there may be “a little bit of an adjustment period”.He blamed the soaring price of eggs on his predecessor’s energy policies while pledging his “National ENERGY Emergency” would help usher in a new era of domestic drilling.In accordance with tradition, Trump’s arrival in the chamber was announced by the sergeant-at-arms. As he walked to the dais, Trump appeared to revel in the cacophonous applause of Congressional Republicans, who have declined to rein in the president even as he threatens their authority as an independent branch of government.Seated behind the president, Vance and Johnson could barely contain their glee, as they stood to applaud Trump’s every promise, boast and threat.Past presidents have used the first major speech as an opportunity to reach across party lines and offer areas of common ground. Trump did the opposite. He taunted his political foes, blaming his predecessor for the price of eggs and claiming his victory ushered in a wave of tech investments that wouldn’t have happened if Kamala Harris had won the election. At one point he called Joe Biden the “worst president in American history,” drawing applause from Republicans.“Why not join us in celebrating so many incredible wins for America,” Trump chided stone-faced Democrats. At least a handful of Democrats walked out of the speech early.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump celebrated his clampdown on the US immigration and asylum system and called on the Republican-led Congress to deliver additional federal funding to expand his border crackdown and extend his first-term tax cuts. Some Democrats held signs that said “Save Medicaid” to highlight the social safety net programs that could be at risk under a Republican budget blueprint to deliver Trump’s sprawling agenda.The president also ticked through many of his controversial actions, from renaming the Gulf of Mexico to making English the country’s official language, and banning trans women from women’s sports.“Our country will be woke no longer,” he declared.The speech was riddled with falsehoods and misleading claims, including a riff about millions of centenarians aged “110 to 119” receiving social security benefits.“We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby,” he quipped, referencing Robert F Kennedy Jr, his recently installed secretary of Health and Human Services, who leads the vaccine-skeptical “Make America Healthy Again” movement.The 15 guests who joined Melania Trump, the first lady, to watch the address included the widow and daughter of Corey Comperatore, the firefight who was killed at the campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump survived an assassination attempt as well as Marc Fogel, the American teacher that Trump helped free from a Russian prison last month. Other guests were intended to highlight the administrations’ policies, including family members of Americans killed by men in the US without legal status and anti-trans advocates.There were poignant moments. Trump paused his remarks to sign an executive order renaming a wildlife refuge near Houston for an animal-loving 12-year-old girl who prosecutors say was killed by two Venezuelan men in the country illegally. Turning to another guest, 13-year-old Devarjaye “DJ” Daniel, who was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2018, Trump directed his Secret Service Director to make him an honorary US Secret Service agent.The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, had encouraged his members to attend the address in order to demonstrate a “strong, determined and dignified Democratic presence in the chamber”. Many did attend, bringing fired federal workers and Americans who rely on social safety net programs threatened by Republicans’ budget proposal.But several Democrats chose to skip the event, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who instead shared her live reactions to the speech on the social media platform BlueSky. Ahead of the address, several Congressional Democrats and elected officials joined a virtual pre-buttal, “Calling BS,” to slam the Trump administration’s actions so far.“I don’t need to legitimize his lies by being in the room,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said on the livestream, adding that Democrats need to make clear that the president is “transparently and brazenly lying to the American people”.View image in fullscreenSenator Ed Markey of Massachusetts said he plans to attend Trump’s speech as a way to show solidarity with Americans who are “rejecting Donald Trump’s hateful vising for our country”.Following Trump’s address, the newly elected Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin of battleground Michigan delivered her party’s formal rebuttal.“We’ve gone periods of political instability before,” she said. “And ultimately, we’ve chosen to keep changing this country for the better.” More

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      The Guardian view on the US suspension of military aid: Ukraine and Europe’s race against time | Editorial

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      How long do Ukraine and Europe have to respond to US betrayal? When Russia launched its full-scale invasion three years ago, each day that Kyiv held out was a victory. The west rallied to Ukraine’s support at equally remarkable speed.Now, as the Trump administration turns upon the victim, and embraces the aggressor, Europe is accelerating nascent plans to bolster Ukraine and pursue security independence. Trump allies blame Friday night’s extraordinary Oval Office confrontation between Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Donald Trump and JD Vance for the shocking halt to all US military aid. Others suspect that the administration was seeking a pretext for the suspension. Mr Zelenskyy pledged on Tuesday to “work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts” and expressed gratitude for his first-term approval of Javelin missile defence systems sales.That may or may not be enough. The suspension concluded a fortnight in which Mr Trump attacked Mr Zelenskyy as a “dictator”, the US sided with Russia against western allies at the UN, and the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, suspended offensive cyber operations against Moscow. There are reports that the US is preparing plans for loosening the economic pressure on Russia – even as it imposes punitive tariffs on allies. Little wonder the Kremlin crows that Washington “largely coincides with our vision”. Vladimir Putin has reportedly offered to mediate US-Iran nuclear talks. Observers were braced for further developments in the US president’s address to Congress on Tuesday.Analysts suggest that Ukraine’s forces should be able to continue fighting at their current rate for a few months if US aid does not resume, depending on what it has stockpiled. Though it is far less dependent on the US than three years ago, key elements like Patriot air defence missiles will be hard to replace. If US logistical and intelligence assistance and Elon Musk’s Starlink’s services were suspended, those would be further punishing blows.Mr Trump is in a hurry – hence his angry threat that Mr Zelenskyy “won’t be around very long” if he doesn’t cut a deal. This came after the Ukrainian president suggested on Sunday that the end of the war was “very, very far away”. Yet he has also squandered leverage he might have exerted on Moscow before reaching the table. He has emboldened Russia to pursue further territorial gains, especially if it can shape a deal with the US before a ceasefire.The US has already undermined central pillars of Sir Keir Starmer’s approach – maintaining military support for Kyiv and economic pressure on Moscow, and creating a “coalition of the willing” to guarantee Ukrainian security. Mr Vance derided “20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years”, then claimed that he was not referring to Britain or France.European leaders must continue trying to buy time, deferring further US perfidy, and hasten rearmament for themselves and Ukraine. On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, announced a proposal, including changes to EU fiscal rules, which she said could mobilise nearly €800bn for defence spending. A rival operator to Starlink is in talks with European leaders about satellite services.But this is an administration which moves abruptly and erratically. Ukraine and Europe are racing against the clock, not knowing when zero hour will arrive. It is likely to be sooner rather than later. More