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      Can we keep the Elon Musks of the world out of British politics? Only if we act now | Oliver Bullough

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      It is an inevitable consequence of the inequality inherent to the “special relationship” that, as soon as someone wins the election in the US, the British government has to swallow its objections to anything they do. Donald Trump may have been “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” six years ago, but it’s 2024 now and the once and future president has become “a very gracious host” with a soft spot for the royal family. Tech billionaire Elon Musk might compare Keir Starmer’s Britain to Stalin’s Russia but, as long as he’s Trump’s new best friend, “he’s far too important to ignore”.This kind of toadying must be as embarrassing for the politicians doing it as it is for those of us watching it, but it is at least understandable. Being friends with the US is not just the foundation of our national security policy, it’s pretty much the whole thing.What is not understandable is successive governments’ failure to learn from the US experience, and to act to prevent our own democracy from being drowned in dark money. British politicians will no doubt say that overhauling regulations around political donations isn’t a priority, that they’re focused on delivering policies that will improve ordinary people’s lives instead.But reports now suggest Musk is considering giving $100m to Reform UK as what has been described as a “f*** you Starmer payment” that would in effect install Nigel Farage as leader of the opposition. The Guardian reported on Monday that Labour might consider closing some of the loopholes that make such a wild suggestion possible – but only in the second half of this parliament, which can only mean the government has failed to understand how urgent this is.For any US billionaire, let alone the richest man in the world, spending on British politics would be like the owner of a Premier League club deciding to invest at the bottom end of the football pyramid: he could buy not only an awful lot of players, but in short order he’d probably own the whole competition.Total spending on the US presidential and congressional elections this year topped $15bn. In Pennsylvania alone, the two main parties spent almost $600m on advertising, so Musk’s $100m wouldn’t make much difference. In Britain, on the other hand, it would be transformational. The Electoral Commission is yet to publish its report on 2024’s general election, but it is unlikely that any of our parties spent much more than that – on central costs, candidate costs and staff costs – in the whole country over the whole year.A pressing need, therefore, is to limit how much political parties can spend. We do already have restrictions, which were introduced after the 1990s “cash for questions” scandal. But, under Boris Johnson, the Tories increased the limits by almost half to a combined total of about £75.9m on the central party and its candidates. The increase was transparently intended to help the Conservative party since, in the 2019 election, no other party came close to raising enough money to reach the previous threshold.The government must reduce the limit back to its old level. As with a football league, healthy competition and financial propriety suffer when one or two participants can vastly outspend the others, and the stakes are far higher in democracy than they are in sport.If politicians are constantly battling to raise more money than each other, then they will be focused on raising funds for themselves rather than on solving the problems of everyone else. They will also, inevitably, be tempted to offer their donors concessions in exchange for that money. It is in the interests of everyone – apart, of course, from the big donors – to stop that from happening.We also need to reduce the amount that any individual can give. If one man can give £5m to a political party, it inevitably undermines trust. Wealthy people may be different, but few ordinary voters would give away that kind of cash without expecting something in return. In an excellent analysis of the past two decades of political giving published this week, Transparency International suggests a yearly donation cap to any one party of £10,000, while the Labour-aligned thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research apparently intends to recommend a higher limit ofAlthough these changes might stop Musk from throwing his $100m molotov cocktail into the House of Commons, it would not stop him – or other ill-intentioned foreign billionaires – from giving money at all, and this is where I think we need to be radical.The US culture of massive electoral spending has deep roots, but the problem was super-sized in 2010 when the supreme court ruled that corporations have the right to free speech, that spending is a form of speech, and therefore that stopping companies from making donations was unconstitutional. The result was a huge increase in donations to groups supposedly independent of political candidates, but in practice closely aligned with them.In the UK, only individuals registered to vote can donate money to political parties, but this restriction (along with others) can be avoided by making donations via a British-registered company, partnership or “unincorporated association”, an obscure kind of structure that can allow you to disguise who you are.Many observers have proposed complicated arrangements to plug these loopholes, but rich people have lawyers to circumvent complicated arrangements, so I would just ban corporate giving altogether. Companies are not people. They can’t vote, and I see no reason why they should be able to fund political campaigns either. Our democracy belongs to the voters, to no one else, and we need to keep it that way.The final step to plutocrat-proof our political system would be to re-empower the Electoral Commission, which was defanged – again, by Boris Johnson – in 2022. It needs to have its independence from government restored, and to be able to impose the kind of fines that would make even a US billionaire think before seeking to undermine the integrity of our elections. We also need to toughen the law to impose serious criminal penalties for anyone who breaks the law anyway.Democracy is in retreat everywhere, and we cannot be complacent that Britain’s version will survive today’s challenges just because it has in the past. But if we use Trump’s election as the impetus to finally build defences for our political system against dark money and its owners, then at least some good will have come out of it.

      Oliver Bullough is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals, and Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back More

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      What does it actually mean when we talk about the American ‘working class’? | Rebecca Solnit

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      In the aftermath of the election, the working class was constantly invoked and rarely defined – invoked as a badge of authenticity, as the people who really matter, as the salt of the earth, the ones politicians should woo or be chastised for failing to woo sufficiently. Who exactly is in this category? I asked around, and the definitions didn’t just vary – they wobbled, clashed and blurred.The more nebulous something is, the more it can mean anything useful to the speaker or writer. I thought of Alice Through the Looking Glass:
      ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
      ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
      When a word means whatever you choose it to mean, it becomes a cudgel for your cause, while it fails to do what I want words to do, which is to describe the world in ways that make things more clear and coherent.So what is the working class? Is it income levels or education, when some who work in the trades earn splendid annual incomes and some white-collar work mires people in poverty? Is it the kind of work or the status of being an employee, when the person who works for a construction company may go on to become a contractor herself?A Marxist told me it’s about whether or not you own the means of production, but this theoretical contractor, like many a construction worker, owns a F250 pickup truck and a lot of tools and maybe a garage workshop, just as many farmers own or inherit land.Someone else said it meant being paid by the hour, rather than salaried, but lawyers and legal experts bill (lavishly) by the hour. And more and more people work in the gig economy or are otherwise casual labor seen as self-employed or as subcontractors, not employees. Someone else insisted it’s about whether or not you have unearned income, but many a union person or employee of a big firm has a stake in a pension fund invested in the stock market.Another criterion was education levels, though quite a few people’s time in college netted them little but debt to be paid off via pink- or blue-collar work. In California, our public universities claim a lot of first-generation students, but the community college system defines that as people whose parents did not go to college at all, while the University of California system defines it as anyone whose parents didn’t graduate from college. The California State University system, meanwhile, has wobbly definitions: “In one scenario, 31% of CSU students are considered first generation; according to another definition, 52% are.”What’s clear about first-generation students is that some who grow up in blue-collar families become white-collar professionals and thereby have a foot in both worlds and sometimes an identity in tension with their current status. A lot of us worked entry-level jobs before entering a profession – before I was 21 I supported myself as a salesperson, a dishwasher, a data processor and a waitress. Upward economic mobility is central to the American dream and the draw for immigrants; downward mobility, debt peonage and destitution have been at the heart of the American nightmare set up by Reaganomics and the other forces creating a super-elite and a desperate underclass.One thing that’s been dismally obvious since 2016 is that by working class some speakers really mean white men, and imagine that group in nostalgic terms, as hardhat wearers and factory workers or as red-blooded rural Americans, even though much of the lower-income population is not white or male or rural. It’s janitors and nail salon workers and hotel maids, casual labor and delivery people and home healthcare aides.I’m not arguing that the working class doesn’t exist, and there are a lot of workers we would probably all agree belong to this class – but the borders and thereby the definitions are blurry, and the frame is too often invoked for other agendas.The idea that the working class is white men too readily becomes a justification for politics that pander to white male prejudices and entitlements, since white men are the single most right-leaning demographic. Framed that way, it often seems to mean: shut up about rights for women and non-white people. Meanwhile about 92% of Black women, a great many of whom meet most of these definitions of working class, voted for Kamala Harris, which is a reminder that talking about class without talking about gender and race flattens out a complex terrain (the same goes, of course, for talking about gender or race without the other two).Harris mostly spoke about the middle class, which many identify with whether or not they fit some of these criteria for the working class; I don’t think her rival used the term “working class” at all but pandered to white racism, misogyny and transphobia, each of which can fracture solidarity and even the perception of common ground, including economic common ground.In the end, all that’s clear is that we had an election in which the party that was supposed to be elitist was not the party whose candidate was a billionaire, the one put back in office in no small part through the machinations of the richest man in the world because they agreed on an economic agenda of cutting taxes for the rich and further impoverishing the poor.“Elite” is another nebulous word that pretends that somehow human rights are an upscale product like designer handbags or that the majority of us in this country – if you add up women, Bipoc, queer and trans people, immigrants, etc – are a special interest group. In this framework, the 26% or so that is white and male is imagined as the majority, perhaps because they once owned and ran nearly everything.White male grievance is a powerful force that cuts across class, as exemplified by the habitual whining of the billionaires. Those billionaires also own too many of the means of information production, from Twitter and Facebook to the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. Those and other means encouraged people to perceive themselves by many criteria that don’t include class or economics, but do include a lot of kinds of resentment.This was part of a package deal, of a whole lot of people getting a lot of misinformation about the sources of their problems and the potential solutions, which encouraged many of them to vote against their own and their economic peers’ self-interest. The lack of clarity about what the working class is is only one part of the ongoing problem of misinformation and missing information.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      AI expert Marietje Schaake: ‘The way we think about technology is shaped by the tech companies themselves’

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      Marietje Schaake is a former Dutch member of the European parliament. She is now the international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence. Her new book is entitled The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley.In terms of power and political influence, what are the main differences between big tech and previous incarnations of big business?The difference is the role that these tech companies play in so many aspects of people’s lives: in the state, the economy, geopolitics. So while previous monopolists amassed a lot of capital and significant positions, they were usually in one sector, like oil or car production. These tech companies are like octopuses with tentacles in so many different directions. They have so much data, location data, search, communications, critical infrastructure, and now AI can be built on top of all that assembled power, which makes these companies very different animals to what we’ve seen in the past.Peter Kyle, the UK’s technology secretary, recently suggested that governments need to show a “sense of humility” with big tech companies and treat them more like nation states. What are your thoughts on that? I think it’s a baffling misunderstanding of the role of a democratically elected and accountable leader. Yes, these companies have become incredibly powerful, and as such I understand the comparison to the role of states, because increasingly these companies take decisions that used to be the exclusive domain of the state. But the answer, particularly from a government that is progressively leaning, should be to strengthen the primacy of democratic governance and oversight, and not to show humility. What is needed is self-confidence on the part of democratic government to make sure that these companies, these services, are taking their proper role within a rule of law-based system, and are not overtaking it.What do you think the impact will be of Donald Trump’s presidency? The election of Donald Trump changes everything because he has brought specific tech interests closer than any political leader ever has, especially in the United States, which is this powerful geopolitical and technological hub. There’s a lot of crypto money supporting Trump. There’s a lot of VCs [venture capitalists] supporting him, and of course he has elevated Elon Musk and has announced a deregulatory agenda. Every step taken by his administration will be informed by these factors, whether it’s the personal interests of Elon Musk and his companies, or the personal preferences of the president and his supporters. On the other hand, Musk is actually critical of some dynamics around AI, namely existential risk. We’ll have to see how long the honeymoon between him and Trump lasts, and also how other big tech companies are going to respond. Because they’re not going to be happy that Musk decides on tech policy over his competitors. I’m thinking rocky times ahead.Why have politicians been so light touch in the face of the digital technological revolution? The most powerful companies we see now were all rooted in this sort of progressive, libertarian streak of counterculture in California, that romantic narrative of a couple of guys in their shorts in a basement or garage, coding away and challenging the big powers that be: the publishers of the media companies, the hotel branches, the taxi companies, the financial services, all of which had pretty bad reputations to begin with. And surely there was room for disruption, but this kind of underdog mentality was incredibly powerful. The companies have done a really smart job of framing what they are doing as decentralising, like the internet itself. Companies like Google and Facebook have consistently argued that any regulatory step would hurt the internet. So it’s a combination of wanting to believe the promise and not appreciating how very narrow corporate interests won out at the expense of the public interest.Do you see any major politicians who are prepared to stand up to big tech interests? Well someone like [US senator] Elizabeth Warren has the most clear vision about the excessive power and abuse of power by corporations, including the tech sector. She’s been consistent in trying to address this. But broadly I’m afraid that political leaders are not really taking this on the way they should. In the European Commission, I’m not really seeing a vision. I’ve seen elections, including in my own country, where tech didn’t feature as a topic at all. And we see those comments by the UK government, although one would assume that democratic guardrails around excessively powerful corporates are a no-brainer.Have politicians been held back by their technological ignorance? Yes, I think they are intimidated. But I also think that the framing against the agency of governments is a deliberate one by tech companies. It’s important to understand the way in which we are taught to think about technology is shaped by the tech companies themselves. And so we get the whole narrative that governments are basically disqualified to deal with tech because they’re too stupid, too outdated, too poor in service delivery. The message is that if they can’t even process the taxes on time, what do you think they’re going to do with AI? It’s a caricature of government, and government should not embrace that caricature.Do you think the UK has been weakened in its position with big tech as a result of leaving the EU? Yes and no. Australia and Canada have developed tech policies, and they’re smaller in numbers than the UK population. I don’t know if it’s that. I think it’s actually much more of a deliberate choice to want to attract investment. So maybe it’s just self-interest that transcends Conservative and Labour governments, because I don’t see much change in the tech policy, whereas I had anticipated change. I was obviously overly optimistic there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYou talk about regaining sovereignty. Do you think most people even recognise that any sovereignty has been lost? One of the reasons why I wrote this book is to reach average news readers, not tech experts. Explaining that this is a problem that concerns people is a huge undertaking. I’m curious to see how the impact of the Trump government will invite responses from European leaders, but also from others around the world who are simply going to think we cannot afford this dependence on US tech companies. It’s undesirable. Because, essentially, we’re shipping our euros or pounds over to Silicon Valley, and what do we get in return? More dependency. It’s going to be incredibly challenging, but not doing anything is certainly not going to make it better.

      The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake is published by Princeton University Press (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      Thanksgiving in America, when obsequious Trumpers genuflect to the president-elect | Arwa Mahdawi

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      JD Vance is being weird againMelania Trump has made it clear that her second stint at being first lady will be conducted entirely on her own terms. It’s been reported that she’s unlikely to move back to the White House and will spend a lot of the next four years flitting between New York and Florida. Maybe she’ll write another coffee table book. Maybe she’ll develop another caviar-infused skincare line. Who knows. But whatever she does, it’ll be in the service of her own interest, rather than the country’s.With Melania not particularly interested in being by Donald’s side, there’s a void to be filled. And it looks like JD Vance and Elon Musk are furiously competing to win the incoming president’s affections. Musk has basically been camping out at Mar-a-Lago since the election, and has earned “uncle status” according to Trump’s granddaughter Kai.The tech billionaire also had a seat at the Trump family table for Thanksgiving dinner, where he bopped to YMCA and presumably had a little giggle over a bizarre AI-generated video Trump tweeted which showed Donald popping out of a turkey Joe Biden was about to carve and gyrating. It’s not clear if Musk, who spent the rest of the day tweeting self-aggrandizing videos of himself, had any quality time with his children over the holiday but that seems to be his MO: urging people to have multiple kids while ignoring his own.JD Vance may be the next vice-president but from the looks of it, Musk very much seems to be Trump’s number two. Vance looks keen to change that, however, and celebrated Thanksgiving with a weird tweet of his own. The vice-president-elect posted an edited image of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Thanksgiving painting Freedom from Want with Trump’s face Photoshopped on the patriarch and Vance Photoshopped over the wife. (To be clear: it’s not explicitly stated who the matriarch figure is in the painting but, while Rockwell’s cook is the model, the woman is often interpreted as being the wife of the man she’s standing next to.) In the original painting, the matriarch is holding up a turkey. In Vance’s version he – clad in an apron and blue dress – is holding up a very red map of America. Once upon a time Vance compared Trump to Hitler; now he’s eagerly doctoring pictures so he can depict himself as Trump’s trad wife.Why would Vance embarrass himself like this? Former Kamala Harris adviser Mike Nellis reckons “Vance is worried about Elon having more influence than him, so he thought posting this weird ass meme would win him favor again.” I’m not sure anyone should listen to a Democratic strategist about anything ever again but this interpretation does seem about right.While I couldn’t tell you exactly what went through Vance’s head when he posted an image of himself as an aproned matriarch, I can very confidently say that we have (at the very least) four more years of these sorts of posts. Forget the banality of evil, the Trump administration represents the inanity of evil: we’re going to see the passing of inhumane policies, the rollback of reproductive rights, and the gutting of public services alongside idiotic memes designed to “own the libs”. The online trolls have crawled out from below the bridge and now advise the president; the shitposters are in charge now.I guess it’s totally fine to threaten Muslim congresswomen in the US nowSpeaking of trolls, Trump-endorsed congressional candidate and Florida state senator Randy Fine tweeted a casual death threat to Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar – the only Muslim women in Congress – this week. “The Hebrew Hammer is coming,” Fine tweeted. “[Rashida Tlaib] and [Ilhan Omar] might consider leaving before I get there. #BombsAway.” Can you imagine if Tlaib or Omar had delivered a similar message to Fine? It would be front-page news and Biden would have made an outraged statement. This was barely covered. Fine is the same guy, by the way, who cheered the murder of 26-year-old American citizen Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, an activist reportedly killed by the Israeli forces while peacefully protesting illegal settlements in the West Bank.Blue Origin deletes video of female astronaut after sexist commentsAstronaut and MIT-trained engineer Emily Calandrelli became the 100th woman in space when she joined six space tourists in a Blue Origin launch. An Instagram video of her excited reaction to being in space was inundated with misogynistic comments, which led to Blue Origin taking it down. Being a woman in the public eye is a real barrel of laughs!A fifth woman has died as a likely result of abortion bansAccording to ProPublica, Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old Texas woman, is the fifth woman who is known to have died because their medical care was delayed after miscarriages or because they couldn’t undergo legal abortions.Fox News’ Jesse Watters: ‘Trump’s going to treat Denver like a woman. He’s going to protect the city whether they like it or not’Poor Denver.Brazilian congressional committee votes for bill to ban abortion in all casesThat includes in cases of fetal deformation, rape or when the mother’s health is in danger. The proposed bill has to go to a special committee before it can advance further but the fact it has got this far is alarming.Walmart is the latest company to abandon its DEI initiativesThe right has declared war on DEI and it looks as if they’re winning. Not a good time for my (satirical) company Rent-a-Minority, I’ve got to say.Gen Z isn’t a big fan of dating apps“There is a growing romanticisation of in-person meeting and interaction,” one expert told the Guardian.Former ICC chief prosecutor says she faced threats and ‘thug-style tactics’Fatou Bensouda has said she experienced direct threats to herself and her family just for doing her job. Meanwhile, the US government and its allies continue to undermine the ICC and international law.Israel’s finance minister proposes ‘thinning out’ Gaza’s population“It is possible to create a situation where Gaza’s population will be reduced to half its current size in two years,” the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on Monday. (While these remarks were covered by the Israeli press, they strangely didn’t seem to be deemed newsworthy by a lot of the US press.) Israeli settlers are already preparing to occupy the strip and build new houses next to mass graves.The week in pawtriarchyWould you like to see a picture of a poorly penguin named Flop who learned to walk again because zoo staff made her a bespoke baby bouncer and treadmill? Of course you do. This Guardian piece is guaranteed to make you pen-grin. More

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      Trump cabinet criticized as hodgepodge team unified only by ‘absolute fealty’ to him

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      During Donald Trump’s first administration, his vice-president became the target of an angry mob amid calls for him to be hanged. His top diplomat was fired via Twitter and branded “dumb as a rock”. His first attorney general was given his marching orders and called “very weak” and “disgraceful”.Despite it all, Trump has had no trouble recruiting a team eager to serve when he returns to the White House in January, even if his initial pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, was forced to back out amid allegations of sexual misconduct.Trump’s cabinet for his second term is nearly complete just three weeks after his stunning election victory over Kamala Harris. To his Maga (Make America great again) followers it is a team of all the talents, poised to enforce an agenda of mass deportations, gutting the federal bureaucracy and “America first” isolationism.To critics with memories of Trump’s first cabinet, however, it is an ideological hodgepodge glued together only by unquestioning fealty to the incoming 78-year-old commander-in-chief. Some have compared it to the gathering of exotic aliens in the Star Wars cantina. Others predict they will soon be fighting like rats in a sack as different factions compete for Trump’s attention.“The same thing that happened last time will happen this time,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. “He cannot resist chaos. It is his drug. He will eventually start doing what he always does and turn on different people and start sandbagging his own choices for these various jobs.“It’s that pattern he has. He comes out one day and says, ‘I love so and so,’ and then the next he’s talking to his friends saying, ‘Hey, you think Tillerson’s doing a good job or is he screwing me over?’ Those things are patterns we’ve seen in Trump’s personal life, his business life and his prior administration. An 80-year-old man is not going to be a changed person.”Eight years ago, Trump arrived in Washington as a political neophyte in need of a helping hand. He appointed a cabinet that included traditional conservatives of whom he knew little. This time, he returns as a former president who has transformed the Republican party and prioritises unwavering loyalty and adherence to his agenda over qualifications and experience.This was most obvious sign of this was the selection of Gaetz for attorney general, a position key to Trump’s plans to deport undocumented immigrants, pardon January 6 rioters and seek retribution against those who prosecuted him over the past four years. Gaetz’s replacement, Pam Bondi, is a longtime ally who declared after Trump was criminally charged that the “investigators will be investigated”.View image in fullscreenThere was a similar motivation behind the choice of Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, for defence secretary despite him having no track record in government. Hegseth fits with a drive to purge perceived “woke” policies from the military. He has denied allegations made in a police report that he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017 at a conference in California.Trump’s selections are sending mixed economic signals. The nomination of the Wall Street billionaire Scott Bessent to head the treasury implies an attempt to reassure markets (it is also notable because Bessent used to work for George Soros, the target of countless rightwing conspiracy theories). But Howard Lutnick, nominated for commerce secretary, has praised the president-elect’s proposed use of tariffs. Vice-president-elect JD Vance is also among those pushing a more protectionist agenda on trade.And Trump’s pick of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a congresswoman from Oregon, as labor secretary could be one of the rare selections that draws bipartisan support. She is considered one of the most union-friendly Republicans in Congress, and her selection was viewed as a way for Trump to reward union members who voted for him.On foreign policy, Trump made a relatively conventional choice in Marco Rubio for secretary of state. The Florida senator has advocated in the past for a muscular foreign policy with respect to foes including China, Iran and Cuba. But the president-elect also intends to put Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who has previously made statements sympathetic to Russia, as director of national intelligence.Other picks include Brooke Rollins, president of the America First Policy Institute thinktank, as agriculture secretary; Doug Burgum, a wealthy former software company executive, as interior secretary; and Linda McMahon, former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, as education secretary – overseeing an agency that Trump pledged to eliminate.Then there is Robert Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaccine activist and sceptic of established science. Kennedy’s career as an environmental lawyer could put him at odds with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” philosophy and figures such as Lee Zeldin, set to lead the Environmental Protection Agency with a mandate to slash environmental regulation. Kennedy has also been condemned by Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and other social conservatives for supporting abortion rights.Outside the cabinet, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, while lacking official authority, signals a strong push for drastic budget cuts and deregulation. And despite campaign trail denials, Trump has embraced Project 2025, a controversial plan from the Heritage Foundation thinktank, by appointing figures such as Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe person who will have to make sense of it all is Susie Wiles, a longtime Florida political operative who will become the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff. She will hope to avoid the fate of chiefs of staff who failed to last the course of Trump’s first term as, like a sports coach, she seeks to make disparate players gel into a cohesive whole.In an analysis for the New York Times, David Sanger, who has covered five US presidents, identified “a revenge team”, “a calm-the-markets team” and “a government shrinkage team”, commenting: “How these missions will mesh and where they will collide is one of the biggest unknowns of the incoming administration.”But others argue that the cabinet’s range of experiences and worldviews will pale into insignificance when set against their devotion to the Trump cult. Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “Regardless of whatever individual ideological leanings these people have had at varying points in their adult lives, it’s largely irrelevant because the only litmus test we have seen put forward is absolute fealty to Donald Trump.“As we have seen in the Republican party overall, absolute fealty to Donald Trump overshadows any ideological belief. We could take almost every issue that used to be a part of the Republican party and show how the party has moved to a diametrically opposite position. This is not a party governed by ideology any more. It is governed by personality. It is governed by loyalty to Donald Trump.”Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide, added: “They’re all going to get in a room and they’re just going to go: ‘Here’s what we think. What do you think, boss? Oh, OK, well, that’s what we’re all going to do.’ The idea that there’s going to be ideologically rooted debate, vigorous debate happening in the Trump administration is absurd. It’s laughable.”Notably, Trump’s cabinet is more diverse than in his first term, although it again has only three people of colour in secretary positions. Rubio would be the first Latino to serve as America’s top diplomat; Bessent could become the first openly gay Republican cabinet member confirmed by the Senate; Gabbard would be the first director of national intelligence from the Pacific Islander community.But seasoned Trump watchers detect no method in the madness and suspect that the former reality TV star will once again act on impulse and thrive on conflict. Chris Whipple, the author of The Gatekeepers, a book about White House chiefs of staff, said: “I don’t think there’s any evidence that Trump has learned anything about governing since his first term.“There’s a lot of wishful thinking among a lot of commentators that OK, he’s had four years in office, he learned a lot, he’s had all this time to plan with Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute and he’s got his act together. I just don’t think that’s true. I don’t see any evidence that there’s any sort of plan here other than ‘this guy looks good for that job, and Robert F Kennedy Jr has got a cool last name’.” More

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      Trump cabinet picks shaped by new power centers in his orbit

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      Donald Trump’s picks for the incoming administration are being shaped by a combination of different power centers including one-man influences like top Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and combined groups led by chief of staff Susie Wiles and vice-president-elect JD Vance.The president-elect appears to have settled on a number of cabinet nominees himself without being aggressively pushed by advisers, including Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget.But for other cabinet roles or major White House positions for which Trump did not have a clear preference or a frontrunner in mind, a handful of individuals with outsized influence have come to dominate the decision-making in meetings and interviews being held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.There are still factions, according to half a dozen people involved in transition planning, though they have been nowhere near as concrete as they were in 2017, when there were clear demarcations between Trump’s family, the Republican National Committee, establishment Republicans and people allied with Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon.And in recent months, the previously distinct camp informally led by Wiles, who has had influence over West Wing picks and some cabinet roles, and the other camp led by Vance have combined and engulfed the wider Trump orbit, the people said.“It’s ever-shifting sands of allegiance. The people who you think are your friends may not be the case in 24 hours. We’re all friends but none of us are friends,” said one person adjacent to the Trump team.Although there are people in Trump’s orbit who disagree with Epshteyn, there is universal acknowledgment that he has had significant influence in the first weeks of the presidential transition, a reflection of Trump’s appreciation for his help in coordinating the defeat of the criminal cases against him.When Trump floated the idea of having the congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Epshteyn was supportive of him during a round-trip flight from Palm Beach, Florida, to Washington when the president-elect announced he was nominating Gaetz.View image in fullscreenAfter the Gaetz nomination sank in the face of holdout Senate Republicans refusing to confirm him over sexual misconduct allegations, Trump nominated as a replacement former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi – who has been friendly over the years with Epshteyn.Epshteyn has also played key roles in finalizing the leadership at the justice department, recommending that Trump keep his personal lawyers in key jobs: Todd Blanche for deputy attorney general, Emil Bove for the principal deputy position and John Sauer for solicitor general.One through-line about those lawyers was that they were successful in delaying until after the election the federal criminal cases against Trump, which were dismissed on Monday. But the other was that they were all recruited by Epshteyn.Epshteyn, whose physically imposing presence is regularly fitted into a navy three-piece suit, has flexed his power away from the department as well, recommending Bill McGinley to be the next White House counsel.Epshteyn has told associates that the choices are for Trump to make. Some of the picks he has suggested have been names endorsed by other allies or people who have appeared on his longtime friends Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.From the outside, Bannon pushed for McGinley to be White House counsel and may yet get another victory if Trump picks Kash Patel, a regular guest on War Room, for the FBI director or the deputy FBI director roles for which he remains in the running, the Guardian has reported.Bannon lobbied for Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget and, in a particularly audacious play, managed to get Sebastian Gorka, the deeply polarizing national security aide from the first Trump administration, into the incoming team as the senior counter-terrorism director.He also played an instrumental role in bringing Scott Bessent to the fore, according to a person directly familiar with the matter. Bannon made the first introduction to Trump years ago, while his allies have advocated for him at Mar-a-Lago and pushed his agenda.View image in fullscreenBut a main power center for cabinet picks is widely seen to rest with JD Vance’s crew, which pushed for Bessent to be named as treasury secretary and Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission, among others.The Vance crew is informally said to involve Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr – who pushed for Vance to be his father’s running mate – and Don Jr’s close advisers including Arthur Schwartz and Andrew Surabian, as well as former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.In addition to being seen as getting Bessent the nod when Trump still had his doubts, the Vance crew have earned additional juice with Trump in probably securing enough Republican votes for Hegseth to be confirmed as defense secretary, despite another set of sexual misconduct allegations.For West Wing picks, the incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has extended her personal influence with Trump. Wiles has mostly been able to get the staff of her choosing without having to fight against competing interests.Wiles’s top aides have landed in deputy chief of staff roles, including James Blair for legislative policy, Taylor Budowich for presidential personnel and Steven Cheung as communications director – although the factions are amorphous and Budowich and Cheung are also close to the Vance crew.Then there are individuals – relative newcomers to the Trump orbit – who have been in transition meetings at Mar-a-Lago as a result of their unique situations: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, who is also the co-chair of the Trump transition team.By weighing in on major cabinet picks, Musk has gotten on the nerves of some Trump loyalists, including Epshteyn, who have complained that the billionaire knows little of the Trump agenda they are trying to bring about and has little idea about who would be best placed to enact it.Lutnick has retained his authority through his transition co-chair role, although he recently engaged in some accidental self-sabotage by pushing too hard to be treasury secretary and appeared to have been caught in a leak investigation over the nominee for secretary of agriculture.Trump was irritated by Musk’s post on X pushing Lutnick for treasury secretary, which gave an opening for his main rival Bessent to secure the job instead. Still, Lutnick has continued to be close to Trump and last week was named commerce secretary.Musk, who is staying off-site in Palm Beach, has become more judicious with his interactions with Trump since that episode and after he secured himself his own role to lead the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”. More

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      Elon Musk calls to ‘delete’ US finance consumer watchdog agency

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      Elon Musk has said he wants to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a federal watchdog that helps protect consumers from predatory financial practices.The tech billionaire, who has been tapped to run a “Department of Government Efficiency” in the incoming Donald Trump administration, posted “Delete CFPB” on X, the social media site he owns. He added a declaration that the agency, which employs 1,700 people and has an annual budget of close to $700m, is an example of “too many duplicative regulatory agencies” in Washington.The CFPB is an independent watchdog agency with oversight over banks and other financial institutions, created after the financial crash of 2008 and charged with overseeing consumer protection in the industry.Musk’s post came in response to a recent podcast clip from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a significant Trump donor, who said the agency’s primary purpose is to “terrorize financial institutions”.But it was soon reported that Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horwitz, was among other investors who had backed LendUp, an online consumer payday lender, that was shut down by the CFPB in 2018.The CFPB director, Rohit Chopra, said the company’s lending operations were shuttered “for repeatedly lying and illegally cheating its customers”.Trump announced a plan for Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to run a new advisory agency, known by the acronym Doge, earlier this month. Musk has said he would like the newly formed commission to cut $2tn from federal government running costs – approximately a third of all government spending.Trump has said Doge and its new “efficiency” tsars would “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” to “restructure Federal Agencies”.Ramaswamy and Musk – whose X bio is now headlined: “the people voted for major government reform” – outlined plans for a “drastic reduction” in regulations and “mass head-count reductions” last week in the Wall Street Journal.The men said they would rely on two recent US supreme court rulings that limited the authority of federal regulatory agencies to “liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress”.They said Doge would target more than $500bn “authorised by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended”, including $535m in funding for public broadcasting, $1.5bn in grants to international organisations and nearly $300m given to progressive groups including Planned Parenthood.DOoge would also carry out audits of government contracts to “yield significant savings” and “identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions”.“Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require Congress to shrink,” they wrote, referring to the healthcare programs covering more than 150 million Americans.How far Ramaswamy and Musk will be able to influence cuts to federal programs and spending before running into legislative opposition is yet to be determined. Many have warned them that cutting bureaucracy is difficult and time-consuming.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Wednesday, Musk asked in a poll on X what should happen to the budget for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the agency responsible for collecting federal taxes. The most popular result was to have its budget “deleted”. He later replied positively to a post that called for the IRS itself to be audited by Doge.But dismantling the CFPB would be a signal of broader plans for disruption. The agency was formed after the financial crash of 2008, which was caused by insecure or predatory lending to “subprime” mortgage borrowers.Safeguards to prevent a repeat of the disaster included regulatory financial reforms and the formation of CFPB. The agency reports that its work has resulted in over $20.7bn in compensation, cancelled debt and other forms of monetary relief for consumers and has requested responses from companies involved in more than 5.6m consumer complaints.It has also drawn the attention of the conservative policy blueprint known as Project 2025, which called for CFPB to be abolished.“The CFPB is a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency. It is unconstitutional,” the document said. “The next conservative President should order the immediate dissolution of the agency”.Musk last week also posted on social media naming several specific people and jobs that he aims to eliminate, targeting relatively obscure posts and otherwise unknown government employees.“These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees, told CNN. “It’s intended to make them fearful that they will become afraid to speak up.” More

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      Will the Democrats finally realize that Big Tech is not an ally? | Zephyr Teachout

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      As Democrats think about how to counter the Trump administration, they need to accept a very simple lesson from the last eight years. Big tech and big business are part of the political opposition working on behalf of Donald Trump, not the Democrats’ allies working against Trump and Trumpism.It shouldn’t seem necessary to point out what seems to be an obvious fact. Nonetheless, there are some Democrats trying to stay close to big tech, or downplaying the importance of anti-monopoly policy when it comes to authoritarian risks. For example, a few days ago, Priorities USA, the largest Democratic party Super Pac, held a big resistance strategy session hosted by “our friends at Google”.As another example, Adam Jentleson, a political writer and a former chief of staff for US senator John Fetterman, wrote a recent piece for the New York Times that among other things criticized fighting monopolies as a “niche issue”. He argued that there’s a dichotomy between kitchen table issues and challenging corporate power, and we should focus on the former.The belief that big tech, and more broadly big business, is helpful to Democrats has already been tried – and found to be untrue.When Trump was elected in 2016, one central pillar of the Democratic resistance involved using big tech platforms as a counterweight. If you remember, the CEO of Google even joined anti-Trump protests. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and pre-Elon Musk Twitter were scolded for using technologies that enabled extremism, but instead of aggressively moving to regulate the algorithmic design, change liability rules or break them up, Democrats focused on nudging platforms on editorial policy.The assumption was they could be corralled into the “right” set of editorial practices, ones that would help defeat Trump and Maga-ism, and limit the reach of his rhetoric in the short term. This was the context in which the “misinformation and disinformation” framework was born.We use the phrases all the time now, but it is worth reflecting on how strange they are. Sometimes misinformation refers to inadvertent lies, and disinformation describes purposeful lies, but sometimes the terms encompass factually correct but misleading information, or as Barack Obama argued in 2022, the “suppression of true information” if such suppression was done for, among other things, “political gain” or “targeting those you don’t like”.Not only did these new categories infuriate those who were caught in the broad, fuzzy definitions, but they focused Democratic attention away from questions of power. The mis/disinformation framework fit part and parcel with joining with big tech as an anti-fascist alliance. “We”, the science-grounded Democrats, would successfully work hand in hand with the biggest tech companies in the world to protect America.Eight years later, the Democrats have lost the White House, House of Representatives and Senate. The big tech platforms are awash in extremist content. Big tech should not look like the ally anymore. Not only is Musk fully ensconced at the head of the power table, right next to Trump, but the CEOs of Meta, Alphabet, Apple and Amazon all reached out to Trump before the election, perhaps taking seriously his threat to put Mark Zuckerberg in jail if he opposed him, perhaps just realizing that Trump is a deregulatory juggernaut.Musk reportedly joined a recent phone call between Trump and the CEO of Google. We can anticipate dozens of such meetings at the highest levels, and strong relationships being born. And instead of repeatedly insisting that tech titans have too much power, we have spent eight years arming them with language that can be used to suppress dissent.Repeated polling has shown that voters actually hate corporate monopolies, and antitrust politics are extremely popular. I don’t want to overclaim the point – antitrust politics disappeared in America for the 30 years between 1980 and 2020, and it is fair to argue that anti-monopoly policy, especially against big tech, can use more experimentation in how we talk about it. On the substance, however, we should be very concerned.Facebook, Google and Amazon have destroyed the actual bulwark against autocratic leaders – local journalism – while cozying up to actual autocracy. They now control the digital ad industry. According to one recent research report, if they paid news organizations what they make off them by standing as a middleman between readers and writers, they would be handing over between $12bn and $14bn a year. The very journalists and news organizations we rely on for fact-finding and fact-checking are scared of being shadowbanned – Jeff Bezos’s fear of Trump being exhibit A of how that can impact editorial content.Google, thankfully, has officially been called an illegal monopolist by a court, thanks to the work of the Department of Justice under assistant attorney general Jonathan Kanter, and other antitrust cases regarding Facebook and Amazon are winding their way through the court system. But even if Google is forced to divest Chrome, which seems possible, the failure of Democrats in power to put serious tech-busting legislation to a vote now seems grotesque. It looks like we didn’t even try to stop the incoming power couple of Trump and tech.While pundits are trying to sort through the messaging lesson of how Kamala Harris lost what seemed like a winnable election, we would do well to look further back, and remember the real lessons from 2016: joining hands with big tech oligarchs is joining hands with the destruction of the Democratic party and democracy.

      Zephyr Teachout is a professor at Fordham Law School and the author of Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money More