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      The rise of pronatalism: why Musk, Vance and the right want women to have more babies

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      In his first address to the United States after becoming vice-president, JD Vance stood on stage and proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Weeks later, Donald Trump signed an executive order pledging support for in vitro fertilization, recognizing “the importance of family formation and that our nation’s public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children”.In late January, a Department of Transportation memo directed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And last week, it was reported that Elon Musk, the unelected head of the government-demolishing “department of governmental efficiency” and a man who has said that the “collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far”, had become a father of 14.Republicans have long heralded the importance of “family values”. But in these developments, many see mounting signs of a controversial ideology at work: pronatalism.Pronatalism is so contentious that people often struggle to agree on a definition. Pronatalism could be defined as the belief that having children is good. It could also be defined as the belief that having children is important to the greater good and that people should have babies on behalf of the state, because declining birth rates are a threat to its future. Perhaps most importantly, pronatalism could be defined as the belief that government policy should incentivize people to give birth.While people on the left might agree with some pronatalist priorities, pronatalism in the US is today ascendant on the right. It has become a key ideological plank in the bridge between tech bro rightwingers like Musk and more traditional, religious conservatives, like the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson – who once said in a House hearing that abortions were harming the economy by eliminating would-be workers.But there are plenty of widening cracks in that bridge and, by extension, Trump’s incoherent coalition.‘Hipster eugenicists’In the US, interest in pronatalism has historically coincided with growing anxiety over changing gender norms and demographics, according to Laura Lovett, a University of Pittsburgh history professor and the author of the book Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1930. In the 1920s, pronatalism’s prominence grew after women gained the right to vote, as people worried about women working and wielding power outside the home.“When Theodore Roosevelt uses the term ‘race suicide’, he actually blames women who are going to college for the first time for that eventual suicide of the right, white race. There’s this linkage between women’s educational and aspirational futures and the declining birth rate,” Lovett said. “There was this anxiety that white, native-born, middle-class women were having smaller families.”Historically, US pronatalism was also tied to an interest in eugenics – and some of the more tech-minded, modern-day pronatalists do want to use breeding to fashion a better human race. Malcolm and Simone Collins, parents of four who have become standard-bearers for the burgeoning popularity of pronatalism among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have championed “no-holds-barred” medical research to engineer the “mass production of genetically selected humans”. They have joked to Business Insider about making business cards declaring themselves “hipster eugenicists” – although they have also rejected the idea that they are performing eugenics, stressing that they think racism is “so dumb” and that the only bloodlines they are altering are their own.The Collinses, who support Trump, have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on in vitro fertilization (IVF) and screening their embryos for IQ, risk of depression and other markers. (Scientists aren’t convinced that it is possible to screen embryos for IQ.) These kinds of practices – which the Collins have called “polygenics” – draw a wedge between the Silicon Valley pronatalists who back Trump and his more traditional pronatalist supporters. The anti-abortion movement, which was critical to getting Trump elected in 2016, has long opposed IVF, largely because it can lead to unused or discarded embryos.In signing his pro-IVF executive order, Trump appears to be siding with the “tech right” (and the broader electorate, among which IVF remains extremely popular). When Musk recently brought his son X Æ A-Xii to the Oval Office, Trump called the four-year-old a “high-IQ individual”.View image in fullscreen‘Restructuring society’While the Collinses are avatars for the emerging pronatalist tech right, Lyman Stone is one of the highest-profile pronatalists from a more traditionally conservative background.“Pronatalism has to be disciplined by a commitment to human liberty and human flourishing – and this is coming out of work on reproductive justice, basically. People have a right to have the families they want to have, and for some people, that means no family,” said Stone, a demographer who in 2024 established the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies. “The focus of pronatalism, in my view, generally is not and certainly should not be on family gigantism, and instead should be on helping young people overcome the barriers and obstacles to romantic and family success in their life.”In practice, Stone said, pronatalists should help people get married earlier in life so that they can start having children younger. That could mean, he said, everything from improving mental health services to creating better childcare programs. Stone’s frequent collaborator, Brad Wilcox – a University of Virginia sociology professor and author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization – pointed to several policies that he thinks would help strengthen “family formation”, such as expanding the child tax credit and converting federal land into affordable housing.“Pronatalism is not just a fiscal program. It’s a program of restructuring society in a way that treats family goals as worthy, worth supporting and socially important,” Stone said.Asked if he supports abortion rights, Stone clarified: “No, I would draw the line at destruction of human life.”Many of these policy proposals could comfortably fit into a left-leaning political platform – in fact, they may be more at home on such a platform than within today’s Republican party. Although Vance said on the campaign trail that he would like to expand the child tax credit, a move that could cost trillions of dollars in federal spending, Republicans have instead committed to slashing the government budget by at least $1.5tn.Instead, elected Republicans have tended to invoke pronatalist rhetoric in support of their top culture-war causes.They have repeatedly condemned gender-affirming healthcare for allegedly “sterilizing” people; in 2022, as Idaho weighed whether to ban kids from accessing the care, one Republican state legislator said: “We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation.” When a Republican lawmaker from Michigan introduced a resolution to condemn same-sex marriage, he told reporters: “This is a biological necessity to preserve and grow our human race.” And last year, in a lawsuit to cut access to a common abortion pill, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri argued that access to the pill had “lowered birth rates for teen mothers”, leading to a falling state populations, “diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds”.In practice, pronatalism – especially when paired with anti-abortion policy – often overlooks the disproportionate effect that having more babies has on women, according to Elizabeth Gregory, director of women’s gender and sexuality studies at the University of Houston. Childbearing can reshape a woman’s entire future.“This idea that the child is the only person in the dyad loses a real understanding of how embedded and dependent children are on their mothers,” Gregory said. “Fertility affects many, many parts of culture and talking about it can’t be reduced to just a few soundbites.”Falling birth ratesBirth rates are, indeed, on the decline. To remain stable, populations must reproduce at a “replacement rate” of 2.1; in other words, each mother must have 2.1 babies. The US currently averages closer to 1.6. (South Korea, which maintains the world’s lowest fertility rate, had a rate of just 0.75 in 2024.)Experts are split over how to address this problem. The world’s population is at a record high, and immigration to rich countries could offset declines in fertility – but, as the medical journal the Lancet warned in a 2024 issue, “this approach will only work if there is a shift in current public and political attitudes towards immigration in many lower-fertility countries”. If countries remain hostile to immigration while their birth rates fall, they will probably end up with a shrunken labor force that is unable to support an ageing population.There is evidence that Americans would like to have more children. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 47% of Americans think an ideal family has one or two children, while only 2% said families should have zero. At the same time, a Pew poll that same year found that 47% of American adults under 50 say they are unlikely to ever have children. Of those, nearly 60% say they just don’t want kids. Nearly 40% said they couldn’t afford to have kids or that the “state of the world” had convinced them not to.“We’re living in a moment where – I would say, unfortunately – marriage and parenthood have become ideologically polarized,” Wilcox said. More

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      Threaten campuses, shut down debate: that’s what free speech looks like under Trump | Owen Jones

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      For those who fear Donald Trump is a despot in the making, don’t worry: he has an answer. “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” he triumphantly declared in his State of the Union address. “It’s back!” JD Vance scolded Europe in his speech at the Munich security conference last month, declaring that “free speech is in retreat” across the continent.Like all authoritarian creeds, Trumpism turns reality on its head and empties words of their meaning in an effort to sow confusion and disarray among its critics. On the same day Trump announced the revival of free speech in Congress, he posted on Truth Social that federal funding for educational institutions that allow “illegal protests” will be ceased. Notably, illegality was not defined, but the issue Trump is referring to, of course, is Palestine. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came,” he declared. “American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”Trump’s first target: Columbia University, which has had $400m of federal funding slashed because of what the government says is “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”. At least nine other campuses – including Harvard and the University of California – could be next. All were the sites of overwhelmingly peaceful encampments protesting over Israel’s genocidal attack against the Palestinian people. They weren’t simply opposing their government’s facilitation of this atrocity, through weapons, aid and diplomatic support, but demanding their colleges divest from companies linked to Israel.Just as Trumpism is no guarantor of free speech, nor is it a vanguard of anti-racism: it is, in fact, the opposite. The very real menace of antisemitism has been systematically conflated with any critique of crimes committed by the state of Israel. This is what is meant by “anti-Israel hate”, as Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick as new ambassador to the UN puts it, who became a rightwing icon after facing down university presidents over Israel. The president’s most powerful ally is Elon Musk, a man who in 2023 expressed his agreement with a tweet claiming Jewish communities were pushing “hatred against whites”, and recently performed Nazi salutes at a Trump rally.Trump himself declared that Jewish Americans who support the Democrats – that is, the vast majority – “hate their religion”, “hate everything about Israel” and “should be ashamed of themselves”, and menacingly said they would have a “lot” of blame if he lost the presidential election. The university protests, on the other hand, had a large Jewish presence, and hundreds of Jewish students signed a letter rejecting “the ways that these encampments have been smeared as antisemitic”.Indeed, Columbia in particular victimised its own students. The university banned Jewish Voice for Peace before the encampment began, ordered police raids which led to more than 100 students being arrested, disciplined and expelled, and targeted sympathetic academics.One was Katherine Franke, a professor who was publicly denounced by Stefanik and forced into retirement. Far from protecting Jewish students, Franke claims, this is about “radical advocates for Israel” lying about the campus protests. “This university has bent a knee and coddled bullies,” she says of Columbia’s repression of students’ free speech – and still it had its funding slashed.It gets more sinister. The Department of Homeland Security arrested one of the lead negotiators of Columbia’s encampment: Mahmoud Khalil, a US green card holder of Palestinian origin, married to a US citizen who is eight months pregnant. Unknown to his wife, he was sent more than 1,000 miles away to a notorious detention centre in Louisiana. The department’s claim: that “he led activities aligned to Hamas”, a blatant attempt to conflate Palestinian solidarity with the militant group responsible for war crimes on 7 October.Far from restoring free speech, Trump’s administration is incinerating the first amendment. When it comes to Palestine, free speech simply does not exist. Surely there is one man who will be particularly incensed by this outrage. After all, just last week he grandly proclaimed: “We have to ask ourselves the question as leaders: ‘Are we willing to defend people even if we disagree with what they say?’ If you’re not willing to do that, I don’t think you’re fit to lead Europe or the United States.” That was the vice-president, JD Vance.But the truth is, the US right never actually cared about free speech. It was simply a ruse, intended to stigmatise any attempt to rebut its bigotry against largely voiceless minorities. The Trump administration has escalated the biggest onslaught against free speech since McCarthyism: even before its assumption of power, those opposed to Israel’s genocide have faced being deplatformed, victimised and indeed targeted by institutions like Columbia.Yet it was not just the hardcore right who defamed these protests. Many self-described “liberals” and “centrists” joined in, smearing those opposed to some of the worst atrocities of the 21st century as hateful, dangerous extremists – Jewish Americans among them. In doing so, they helped legitimise the inevitable authoritarian crackdown that is now under way. Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of Jewish American campaign group IfNotNow, told me we are now seeing “the terrifying logical conclusion of smearing anyone calling for Palestinian freedom as an antisemite: a white nationalist administration carrying out its war on civil rights and free speech under the banner of ‘fighting antisemitism’. We are all endangered by this blatant assault on our democracy.”It would be deeply naive to believe this repression will end with the attacks on people expressing solidarity with Palestine. A precedent that is established can swiftly be expanded. As it is, the US media are increasingly menaced by – among other things – Trump’s libel actions, the threat of vexatious investigations and plutocrats like Jeff Bezos bending the knee to the would-be king. Free speech is being pummelled by those who claim to be its greatest advocates.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      Trump administration briefing: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention, ‘Trumpcession’ fears and gutting USAid

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      The Trump administration’s decision to have immigration authorities arrest pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil for alleged support of Hamas is an attack on free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union warned on Monday.“This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.“The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the US and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes. To be clear: the first amendment protects everyone in the US. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate.”Outrage after Palestinian student activist detainedFree speech organizations and advocates are expressing outrage after a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, was arrested and detained over the weekend. Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card, was taken into custody by federal immigration authorities, who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.Read the full storyArrest of Palestinian activist first of ‘many to come’, Trump saysDonald Trump said on Monday that the arrest of a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, is the “first arrest of many to come”.Read the full storyUS stocks register heavy falls as White House tries to talk up Trump tariffsThe US stock market continued to drop on Monday as the White House denied that Donald Trump’s trade policies were causing lasting chaos within the economy.The S&P 500 fell 2.7%, the Dow Jones dropped 2%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 4% as investors sold shares in the so-called “magnificent seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla. Tesla’s shares had their worst day since September 2020, falling 15%.Read the full storyRisk of ‘Trumpcession’ rising, economists say, as global markets fallThe risk that the US economy will enter recession this year is rising, according to economists, as Donald Trump’s chaotic approach to tariffs continued to hit markets.Read the full storyTrump tariffs policy ‘misguided’ and US economy ‘very wobbly’, ex-adviser saysDonald Trump’s focus on tariffs as an economic weapon is “misguided”, and the US economy is “very wobbly”, a former adviser and longtime supporter of the president said.Read the full storyOntario sets 25% surcharge on US energy exportsThe Canadian province of Ontario is imposing a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to the states of New York, Michigan and Minnesota in protest against Donald Trump’s tariffs, Premier Doug Ford said on Monday.Read the full storyCanada’s designated PM Mark Carney meets Trudeau as Trump threat loomsCanada’s incoming prime minister, Mark Carney, has met with Justin Trudeau as the pair discuss a transfer of power after the former central banker’s landslide victory at the Liberal party’s leadership race.The meeting on Monday sets the stage for an imminent federal election and gives Canada a fresh leader to square off against the US president, with the two countries locked in a bitter trade war provoked by Donald Trump.Read the full storyUS rebrands immigration app to CBP Home with ‘self-deport’ functionOn day one of his presidency, Donald Trump, issued a directive abruptly ending the government’s use of CBP One – an online application that had served as the primary means for people at the southern border to apply for asylum in the US. On Monday, the administration announced it has reimagined the app as a platform for “self-deportation”.Read the full story83% of USAid programs terminated after purgeThe Trump administration has finished a six-week purge of programs of the US Agency for International Development, cutting 83% of its programs, according to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.Read the full storyTop Washington Post columnist quits after piece critical of Bezos is scrappedWashington Post associate editor and top political columnist Ruth Marcus is reportedly resigning after the decision by the CEO, Will Lewis, to kill her opinion column critical of the billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’s latest changes to the paper.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      There is “no military solution” to the conflict in Ukraine, US secretary of state Marco Rubio has said ahead of high-stakes meetings on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia aimed at repairing a severely damaged relationship that has left embattled Kyiv without Washington’s support.

      JD Vance’s first cousin has called the vice-president and Donald Trump “useful idiots” to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

      A man pardoned by Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection who also was convicted of plotting to kill federal agents investigating him is still legally liable for the plot, a judge ruled on Monday.

      The US secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has directed the Food and Drug Administration to revise safety rules to help eliminate a provision that allows companies to self-affirm that food ingredients are safe. The move would increase transparency for consumers as well as the FDA’s oversight of food ingredients considered to be safe, Kennedy said on Monday.

      Poland’s prime minister called on “friends” to respect their allies in a post on X that mentioned nobody by name but came a day after an extraordinary social media spat between top officials in the US and Poland over Starlink satellites.

      A Virginia man who was detained by Ice agents despite being an American citizen says he is reconsidering his support for Trump.

      Wall Street fell significantly as traders grew concerned over the possibility that Trump’s trade war will send the US economy into a recession.

      A top state department official has a history of insulting his boss, Marco Rubio, in social media posts, among many other questionable statements. More

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      The Guardian view on Ursula von der Leyen’s first 100 days: the steepest of learning curves | Editorial

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      In a press conference on Sunday to mark 100 days since the beginning of her second term as European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen erred on the side of understatement when asked whether she still considered the US to be an ally. The answer was yes, she replied, before adding that “we have our discussion points without question”.Hard to argue with that. Regarding the war in Ukraine, international trade and existential questions concerning the future of European defence and security, the geopolitical landscape bears no resemblance to the one that Ms von der Leyen looked out upon on 1 December. As Mr Trump and his “America first” outriders have confounded cherished assumptions about the transatlantic alliance, they have also sought to encourage authoritarian nationalism in EU member states.In France and Germany, the fabled engine of European integration, this has been uncomfortably akin to knocking at an open door. In Paris, days after Ms von der Leyen reassumed office, Michel Barnier’s shortlived government collapsed when Marine Le Pen pulled the rug from under it. In Germany, well before Elon Musk and JD Vance championed its cause, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party had reached historically high levels of support that would see it finish comfortably second in February’s snap German election.As Ms von der Leyen put it on Sunday: “Our European values, democracy, freedom, the rule of law are under threat.” The response, from Brussels and in national capitals, needs to be both robust and more expeditious than is often the case in the labyrinthine world of EU policymaking. Happily, the initial signs are positive.The move last week by EU leaders to disapply the bloc’s fiscal rules to military spending, potentially freeing up £670bn, is a significant step towards achieving greater strategic autonomy from Washington. It followed the unveiling of extraordinarily radical proposals in the same week by Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz. Bypassing a constitutional restriction on state borrowing, these are designed to facilitate not only far greater spending on defence, but also on the modernisation of a stagnating economy.After decades in which EU economic policy has been skewed by Berlin’s traditional debt aversion – shared with other “frugal” member states such as the Netherlands and Denmark – this is a very different direction of travel. As Europe exits an era defined by an uncritical commitment to free trade and dependency on the US security umbrella, it is also the right one. Recognising the desire of many member states to formalise common borrowing arrangements introduced following Covid, Ms von der Leyen said “nothing is off the table” in relation to defence. But, as the Draghi report argued last autumn, the same kind of fiscal firepower is required to meet the challenge of the green transition and compete with the US and China for the jobs and future industries of the 21st century.Last month in Brussels, a different kind of centenary was marked when a bust of a former commission president, Jacques Delors, was unveiled. Born in 1925, Mr Delors became the preeminent champion of a “social” vision, in which common EU institutions would deploy pooled resources in order to build a Europe where solidarity and growth were intertwined. That perspective faded from view following the neoliberal turn in the 1980s. As Ms von der Leyen navigates the rest of her five-year term, its time has come again.

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      Sycophancy and toadying are de rigueur in Trump’s court of self-aggrandizement | Sydney Blumenthal

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      Sycophancy is the coin of the realm. In Donald Trump’s court, flattery is the only spoken language. He does not need an executive order to enforce it. Fear is the other side of the coin. Loyalty must be blind. Obedience is safety. Cronyism secures status. His whim is dogma. Criticism is heresy. Debate is apostasy. Expertise is bias. Objectivity is a hoax. Truth is just your opinion. Lies are defended to the death as articles of faith. New ones are manufactured on an industrial scale by his press office for social influencers to spread. Denying facts proves fealty. The rule of law is partisan. Russia is our trusted ally. Britain and France are “random counties”. Retribution is policy.The deeper the submission to madness, the greater his supremacy. The subjugation is more thorough if the things people are forced to accept are irrational or, better, the reverse of what they had believed. When previously held beliefs are abandoned to conform to their opposite, like the secretary of state Marco Rubio’s formerly adamant support of Ukraine, which went to his core as the son of refugees from Castro’s Cuba, the more Trump’s dominance is demonstrated. Rubio has gone full circle, from his family fleeing one kind of tyranny to Trump sneering at him as “Little Marco” to ambitious embrace of his tormentor. He finds himself as a supplicant to Trump complaining about Elon Musk’s mindless wreckage of the state department. Formally the ranking constitutional officer of the cabinet, Rubio is below Musk in Trump’s hierarchy.Each of the concentric rings of Trump’s court require different nuances of servility. At mid-level, the ethos is to mimic the irrational impulses of the ruler in order to be seen as his willing helper. In 1934, a middle-rank German minister explained that “it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish.” “Working toward the Fuhrer” – auf den Führer hinarbeiten – became the governing style, or else.At the cabinet level, Rubio’s renunciation is an essential conversion to prove subservient allegiance to the Fuhrerprinzip. “The higher one rose in the hierarchy, the more servile one became,” wrote Albert Speer, Hitler’s war manufacturing minister, in his memoir. At the height of power, in the innermost circle, at the leader’s right hand, sits JD Vance, who taunts and threatens on the leader’s behalf, demanding obsequious “respect” while slyly deploying his sycophancy to goad the leader.Upon passing through the gates of Trump’s White House, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, entered into a domain that would have been intimately familiar to him. It would have been reminiscent of the claustrophobic despotism in Ukraine under communism. It would have been a reminder of what was called “the Family” of kleptocratic oligarchs, lackeys and political operatives surrounding the Putin-backed Ukrainian ruler Viktor Yanukovych before he fled the country during the popular uprising of 2014 – a gangster culture that included the US consultant Paul Manafort, also Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, whom he would pardon for a host of criminal felonies.A western world shocked at Trump’s orchestrated humiliation of Zelenskyy should have seen the staged event as the culmination of hundreds of similar transgressions since he became president again. The difference between the rest of his rampage and his denigration of Zelensky was only in its momentousness. But not even Elon Musk systematically shredding the federal government approached the historic scale of Trump’s crime against Ukraine, which reduced the United States through a few insults to the lowest ebb of its international power and prestige since a century ago, when, in a spasm of partisan isolationism, the Senate rejected joining the League of Nations after the first world war. But, for the appalled and disoriented Europeans who must pick up the pieces as they adjust to the reality of an American president discarding them in order to forge a grand alliance with Russia, the revealing signs of Trump’s malignancy have been present in a never-ending series of less than world historical but dramatically squalid scandals.“I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized,” New York mayor Ed Koch once quipped. Now, Trump tried to erase the infamy of being a figure of ridicule in New York by planting his hooks into the current mayor, Eric Adams. A predator recognizes vulnerability. After ordering the Department of Justice to drop its corruption charges against Adams, Trump’s precipitate action prompted the resignation of the acting US attorney for the southern district of New York, Danielle Sassoon, who stated that it was “a quid pro quo” in exchange for supporting the Trump administration’s “enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed”, and which was followed by the resignations of seven prosecutors from the justice department’s public integrity unit, who refused to participate in the deal.With Adams under his heel, Trump next crushed the Republican Senate through the confirmation process of his unqualified collection of quacks for his cabinet. Intimidation and smears did the work of cowing the august senators. Then, through his installation of his largest donor, Elon Musk, as his self-advertised “Dark Maga” overlord, Trump launched the massacre of the entire federal government. Off with their heads everywhere. The purges have no trials. Tick off the execution list of Project 2025. Let the courts slowly try to catch up to the devastation.Trump’s repetitive compulsion to create disorder allows him to present himself as its would-be master. He can’t temper his impulses. His bedlam provides his only arena for self-validation. He must always fabricate scenes for the exaltation of himself through the humiliation of others to confirm that he is strong. Musk magnifies his abuse.In two speeches, one by the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, and the other by the vice-president, JD Vance, the Trump administration shifted the ground under Ukraine and the western allies to Russian advantage. On 12 February, at the Ukraine Contact Group in Brussels, Hegseth conceded conditions to Russia before any negotiations had begun. He stated the return of occupied territory “unrealistic”, opposed Nato membership and rejected US participation in a security force. Two days later, on 14 February, Vance delivered a second shock, reciting the talking points of the far-right parties in Europe in a virtual endorsement a week before the German election of the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany Party.Some Republicans appear to have a good idea about the agents of influence floating around the Trump administration. Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, said after Hegseth’s speech, “I don’t know who wrote the speech – it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” The former Fox News talkshow host, now with his own podcast, has deep ties to the regimes of Putin and Orbán of Hungary. A fount of Russian disinformation, he is at the center of a circle that includes Donald Trump Jr and JD Vance, bonded as lost boys, abandoned in childhood, and who persuaded Trump to name Vance as his running mate. Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard, a pro-Russian echo chamber, now the national director of intelligence, were brought into their orbit.Tucker Carlson’s son, Buckley Carlson, is Vance’s deputy press director. Jack Posobiec, a far-right conspiracy monger of Pizzagate and white supremacist, was invited to travel with Hegseth, to whom he is close, and has traveled with the secretary of the treasury, Scott Bessent, on his trip in February to Ukraine to meet with Zelensky.In 2017, according to a report of the Atlantic Council, Posobiec was a key player in aiding the Russian “coordinated attempt to undermine Emmanuel Macron’s candidacy, with a disinformation campaign consisting of rumors, fake news, and even forged documents; a hack targeting the computers of his campaign staff; and, finally, a leak – 15 gigabytes of stolen data, including 21,075 emails, released on Friday, May 5, 2017 – just two days before the second and final round of the presidential election”.In 2024, Posobiec addressed the Conservative Political Action Committee: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”Making nice with Trump has never proved to be a winning strategy. If Zelensky had bent to shine Trump’s shoes under his desk, he would still have been in a trap. Obsequious gestures to neutralize Trump have been repeatedly tried and failed. If anyone could cajole Trump, it would have been David Rubenstein, the billionaire founder of the Carlyle Group who built his firm with a bipartisan board. Rubenstein has been a pillar of the Washington community, who cherishes the constitution and has lent the National Archives his copy of the original Bill of Rights, personally paid for the restoration of the Washington Monument, and is a patron of the arts, the longtime chair of the Kennedy Center. He recently bought the Baltimore Orioles. Rubenstein wined and dined Donald and Melania Trump, attempted to ingratiate himself and bring them into his charmed circle. Rubenstein’s civilizing mission ran aground.Rubenstein presented Trump with a golden opportunity to gain the kind of acceptance he had sought for a lifetime. He has nursed his injury over rejection by the great and the good in New York, where his crudity, vulgarity and narrow greed constantly undermined his social ambitions. He was also a spectacular failure in the New York real estate market. But Trump still harbored resentment from the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors, when two of the recipients, choreographer Carmen de Lavallade and legendary TV producer Norman Lear, declined to attend a reception at the White House. Trump never appeared at any of the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term. He never came to a single of the thousands of the wide variety of cultural events there, not one. He was not boycotting; he had no interest in theater, music, dance, anything. He is a void.On 12 February, Trump unceremoniously fired its entire board, claimed that the national centerpiece of the performing arts in the capital was “woke” and a “disgrace,” denounced Rubenstein, who does “not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture”, and announced as his replacement “an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” Rubenstein was privately stunned and surprised at his shabby treatment. But Trump cared less for Rubenstein’s diplomatic approach than for acting out his endless drama of victimization and self-promotion.Trump’s interim director inserted at the Kennedy Center, Ric Grenell, a rightwing activist who was universally despised in Germany when he was ambassador there in the first Trump term, declared that to “make the arts great again” the Kennedy Center would stage a biblical pageant about the birth of Jesus. Trump named Melania’s former modeling agent, Paolo Zampolli, to the board. He held forth to an Italian newspaper, Il Foglio, about Zelenskyy: “He should rebuild Gaza with all the money he stole.”Trump’s meeting with Zelenskyy was preceded two days, earlier on 26 February, by his first cabinet meeting that rehearsed scenes of belittlement, disparagement and deprecation. It was a sham cabinet meeting without any proper presentations by the secretaries of their departmental work, a scene of collective submission. (I had been present in many cabinet meetings during the Clinton administration, where informative review and discussion were the regular order.) Trump’s meeting was a made-for-TV more-than-hour-long reality show with the cabinet as props, two among the 21 Fox News personalities appointed to administration posts.At his cabinet meeting, Trump began by calling on Scott Turner, the secretary of housing and urban development, the only Black person in his cabinet, a former journeyman professional football player, briefly a far-right Texas state legislator and a motivational speaker. “Thank you God for President Trump,” prayed Turner. “So Scott Turner’s a terrific young guy,” said Trump. Turner is 53 years old. “He is heading up HUD and he’s going to make us all very proud, right?” Turner did not speak again in the meeting.Trump introduced Musk, who took control of the meeting, declaring the country would “go bankrupt” if he were not allowed to destroy the government untrammeled. He stood above the cabinet secretaries, wearing all black, a T-shirt reading “Tech Support”, a black Maga cap, and condescended: “And President Trump has put together, I think, the best cabinet ever, literally.” The questions came from the reporters in the room. The nervous cabinet members sat silently, worried about not one but two overlords. Musk was asked questions about his demand that federal employees justify their work every week and wondered how many “you’re looking to cut, total”. Musk gave no answer. Trump intervened: “We’re bloated, we’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job. We have a lot of people that don’t exist. You look at social security as an example. You have so many people in social security where if you believe it, they’re 200 years old.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt the end of the meeting, as the press was led out, Trump jeered, “Thank you. Thank you very much. Pulitzer prize.” JD Vance mocked them with a sarcastic rhetorical question: “Sir, how many peacekeepers are you going to send … ” Trump joined in: “What will you do? How will it be?” Vance continued his mocking merriment. “How will you dress them?” The cabinet members nervously tittered. Vance was the king’s goad and jester. Trump called to one reporter, “Lawrence. Look at Lawrence. This guy’s making a fortune. He never had it so good. He never had it so good. Lawrence, say we did a great job, please. OK? Say it was unbelievable.” The tone for the meeting for Zelenskyy was already on display.That day, Trump banned the traditional press pool chosen by the correspondents that cover the White House. From then on, the pool covering him would be selected by Trump’s press office. The Associated Press and Reuters would continue to be banished altogether for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, following Trump’s order. Those news organizations had failed to meet the threshold of submission.Both Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer, one after another, arrived in advance of Zelenskyy to butter up Trump without losing their dignity. They treated him with delicacy as a borderline personality. Yet both corrected Trump’s central falsehood that the US had given $350bn to Ukraine while the Europeans gave loans of $100bn for which they were repaid, when in fact the US expended $120bn, most of which went to US weapons manufacturers, and Europe spent $250bn and had not been repaid a euro. Macron touched Trump’s sleeve as he corrected him. Starmer gestured in that direction but never made the physical contact. Trump was undeterred in lying about it afterward.Starmer presented the coup de grace, a handwritten invitation for a state visit from King Charles III to Donald I, royalty to faux royalty. Trump carefully opened the envelope and held up the letter. “Beautiful man, wonderful man,” he said. But there was trouble brewing in paradise when the vision of another man, Vladimir Putin, crossed his mind. His attitude passed from the ecstasy of Charles’s letter to the agony of “the Russia hoax”. “We had to go through the Russian hoax together,” Trump said. “That was not a good thing. It’s not fair. That was a rigged deal and had nothing to do with Russia. It was a rigged deal with inside the country and they had to put up with that too. They put up with a lot. It wasn’t just us. They had to put up with it with a phoney story that was made up. I’ve known him for a long time now.”Trump’s blurted non sequitur after non sequitur was the beginning of his self-revelatory statements about his relationship with Putin, whose actual nature he has devoted decades to covering up. Trump said he had known Putin for “a long time”. How long he did not say. The “phoney story”, which was a true one about Russia’s extensive efforts to interfere in the US election on Trump’s behalf involving hundreds of contacts between Russian agents and the Trump campaign, was stressful not only for Trump but, according to Trump, also for Putin. They went through the “hoax”, the incomplete investigations, “together”. The Mueller report concluded with a referral of 10 obstructions of justice committed by Trump to block its inquiry, but they were never prosecuted. The Senate intelligence committee report contained a lengthy section on Trump’s sexual escapades in Russia creating “compromising information” that could be used by the Russians and “posing a potential counterintelligence threat”. Babbling away about his sympathy for Putin, Trump did not understand that he was engaging in an oblique confession. “Russia, if you’re listening … ”After Trump was shut out of the New York banks, Donald Trump Jr remarked, in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Trump’s architect Alan Lapidus stated in 2018: “He could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”Trump turned to Deutsche Bank, the only financial institution willing to do business with him. The bank served as a conduit for Russian money-laundering operations and in 2017 was fined $630m by American and British financial regulators for a $10bn scheme. In 2008, the bank sued Trump for non-payment for $40m on a $640m loan, and Trump counter-sued. Contrary to all normal practices, they settled and continued to do business. But after the January 6 insurrection even Deutsche Bank cut ties with him. His debt to the bank was more than $300m.Trump’s plot to switch sides, punish Zelenskyy, ditch the allies and partner with Putin was hatched before Zelenskyy flew to the US grudgingly to sign a deal for raw earth mineral rights in his country. Trump’s initial exorbitant insistence on $500bn may have been a ploy to get Zelenskyy to reject the deal out of hand. No rational leader could agree to such terms. Though the details of the next contract are not publicly known, Zelenskyy’s acceptance and willingness to negotiate might have come as a surprise. Terminating military and intelligence support for Ukraine required a different pretext. If one pretext doesn’t work, another could be contrived, even a flimsy one.After Putin invaded Ukraine, Trump called him a “genius”. He has always admired the Russian strongman as a model. He has been hostile to Zelenskyy personally since Trump’s “perfect phone call” to him in July 2019 to blackmail him into providing false dirt about Joe Biden in exchange for releasing already congressionally authorized missiles: “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” Trump’s attempt at coercion led to his first impeachment.On 18 February, Trump launched into a tirade of old Russian talking points, that Zelenskyy was a “dictator”. You never should have started it,” Trump said about the war. And, he added, “I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings.” Zelenskyy’s response that Trump’s remarks were “disinformation” helped set the stage for the meeting on 28 February.The meeting was a wide lens on Trump’s small mind, incapable of grasping any ideas and their practical applications, like alliances, coalitions, national sovereignty or the western world. His ignorance of history is fairly complete. He sees the world like a map of Manhattan real estate that his apologists project as the revival of Great Power politics. He’ll take the West Side Highway development. Putin can get an East River stake. Trump is insistent that Ukraine owes the US money. He sees the country is a vulnerable debtor – “you don’t have the cards.” He may be influenced by his losses and liability stemming from the E Jean Carroll sexual assault and New York state financial fraud cases, where he accrued enormous penalties.Trump once again voiced his identification with Putin. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phoney witch-hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia … You ever hear of that deal?”JD Vance triggered the implosion with his charge that Zelenskyy was “disrespectful”. He scolded Zelenskyy for not “thanking the president”. He accused him of bringing observers to Ukraine for “a propaganda tour”. Vance’s demand for “respect” was a knowing self-abasement to awaken Trump to Zelenskyy’s absence of sycophancy. Vance’s ultimatum that Zelenskyy degrade himself revealed his own posture. But Vance is the corrective to Mike Pence, who failed at the critical moment on January 6 (“Hang Mike Pence!”). Vance ingratiated using Zelenskyy to manipulate Trump.Zelenskyy fell into the trap, trying to explain the rudiments of 20th-century history, that the geographic isolation of the US could not protect it. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel,” Trump snapped. “You don’t have the cards right now.” Zelenskyy replied, “I’m not playing cards right now.” Trump repeated a common Russian talking point: “You’re gambling with world war three.” Vance jumped in: “Have you said thank you once?” “A lot of times. Even today,” said Zelenskyy. In fact, he offered thanks six times in the conversation, with a “God bless you”.Trump kept talking about “the cards”. He brought up how he had given Zelenskyy missiles. He clearly wanted Zelenskyy to exonerate him for the high crime of his first impeachment. “You got to be more thankful because let me tell you, you don’t have the cards with us.” And the confrontation wound down. “This is going to be great television. I will say that,” said Trump.So the fate of Ukraine and the western alliance turned on the issue of flattery. Despite Trump’s obliviousness to history, the scene recalled Edward Gibbon’s comment in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The emperors, secure from contradiction, were abandoned to the intoxication of unlimited power, which their flatterers encouraged with the vilest servility.”

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      ‘They brought it on themselves’: a new low in US-Ukraine relations

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      There was an audible gasp in the room at the Council on Foreign Relations as Keith Kellogg, the White House’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, characterised the US decision to cut off intelligence sharing and military aid to Kyiv as like beating a farm animal with a piece of wood.“Very candidly, they brought it on themselves, the Ukrainians,” Kellogg said as the veteran diplomats, academics, and journalists in the room recoiled in surprise. Several held their hands in their faces. “I think the best way I can describe it is sort of like hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose,” he continued. “You got their attention, and it’s very significant, obviously, because of the support that we give.”The collapse in US-Ukraine relations since the White House summit between Trump and Zelenskyy has been precipitous. Those around Trump viewed as the strongest supporters of Ukraine – including secretary of state Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Kellogg – have become vocal sceptics of continued US support or been sidelined entirely.“We know that [the Maga wing] are just waiting for something they can use to pounce,” said a former senior US diplomat. “And I think that’s where you get the posturing by Rubio, Kellogg and also Waltz, which disturbs people who understand America’s interest in preventing a Putin win in Ukraine.”It has been matched by a rise in the people around Trump who hold vocally Eurosceptic views: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and JD Vance, the vice-president who seized his moment in the Oval Office and provoked a greater conflict between Trump and Zelenskyy.Vance has made several key interventions meant to sow divisions with Europe. He appears to have planned ahead of time. His team briefed European media before he spoke up during Trump’s meeting with Keir Starmer to complain about “infringements on free speech” in the UK. And when Zelenskyy disregarded advice from Kellogg, Republican senators, and others, not to clash with Trump during the White House meeting, Vance once again poured petrol on the fire.“First Zelenskyy needs to keep silent in public about concerns with Trump’s policy moves, even though those concerns are justified,” the former senior official said. “It would be good for him to send a team to the meeting in Riyadh which is not at his level. I think he needs to sign the mineral agreement in any form that the Trump administration wants.”Fiona Hill, a former White House official during Trump’s first term, said the speculation on the part of many European officials was that “this was set up by Vance … that he wanted to sideline the Rubios, the Waltzes, the Kelloggs.”These were supposed to be the adults in the room for this administration. Rubio was confirmed 99-0 by senators who believed he would help keep Trump’s foreign policy on track. Waltz was expected to be a centrist ally as national security adviser. And Kellogg, while sceptical of piecemeal support for Kyiv, was seen as a firm supporter of Ukraine.View image in fullscreenInstead, they have followed Trump into putting pressure on Ukraine. Rubio last week said: “Frankly, it’s a proxy war between nuclear powers – the United States, helping Ukraine, and Russia – and it needs to come to an end.”That was a vision closely aligned with the Kremlin’s. Dmitry Peskov reacted positively to Rubio’s words, saying: “We can and want to agree with it, and we agree with it. That’s the way it is. We have said this repeatedly. We have said that this is actually a conflict between Russia and the collective west. And the main country of the collective west is the United States of America.”That’s not the only way in which the US is adopting Russia’s views on the war. In his speech, Kellogg broke ground in describing how Trump sees the conflict: the US wants to position itself as a neutral arbiter between Russia and Ukraine, and Trump recognises that the US needs to “reset relations with Russia” to secure US national security. “The continued isolation and lack of engagement with the Russians as the war in Ukraine continues is no longer a viable strategy,” he said.That portrayal is a radical realignment of US policy interests in the conflict. For three years, Washington has provided considerable financial and military support to Kyiv to allow it to stay in the fight. But under a new Trump administration, those who supported the previous policy have quickly pivoted to back Trump as he seeks to end the war by putting pressure on Ukraine.“Kellogg has some people around him who do know what they’re doing,” said Hill, who worked with him during the first Trump term. “He’s 80 years old. He fought in Vietnam. He knows his stuff. He’s no fan of Russia. He’s a total cold warrior. He’s trying to thread the needle there but he also works for the commander in chief, so he’s trying to interpret, in the best way that he can, what’s going on here? And he will not stray away from what Trump does or says, that’s why he is still there.”Yet Kellogg was left off the list for a key summit between Ukrainian and US officials this week in Saudi Arabia in an attempt to repair the relationship. Waltz, Rubio, and Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff are set to travel for talks with Zelenskyy’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak and his team. The path forward is unclear – although both pro-Ukraine Americans and European officials believe that there is no alternative to US support in the conflict.European officials are hopeful that Zelenskyy and the Trump officials can manage to hold a meeting that won’t erupt into open conflict. That may lead to a quick renewal of intelligence support, which European officials have not lost hope for.But there are broader discussions about whether or not the US remains a viable longterm partner for the Ukraine. For now, the Ukrainian side has few options except to make amends. More

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      There are 1,000 grotesque memes of JD Vance – and they’re all more likable than the real thing | Marina Hyde

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      You may well be aware that Backpfeifengesicht is the German word for a face that is worthy of being slapped. Even so, how has this not been internationalised? Or at the very least Americanised, where its dictionary definition would presumably be adorned by a picture of the face of US vice-president JD Vance – already faultlessly playing the role of worst American at your hotel. You can immediately picture him at breakfast, can’t you? Every single other guest on the terrace with their shoulders up round their ears, just thinking: “Where is he now? How unbearable is he being NOW?” Next, imagine breakfast lasting four years.I say the Backpfeifengesicht definition would be accompanied by JD Vance’s face … but then again, what is the face of JD Vance? The internet is awash with people suffering an acute case of not being able to remember it any more, having seen so many hideous comic distortions of Vance that those meme versions are not simply the only results on the first page of your own mental Google search, but stretch deep beyond the second and into the third. Somewhere on page four, where you might as well publish the nuclear codes or pictures of Taylor Swift giving cocaine to babies, is an unmodified snap of what JD Vance actually looks like. Or at least what he looks like with eyeliner.Before you get there – and you don’t, really – your synaptic filing systems throw up every variety of Photoshopped Vancefake: swollen manboy, face wearing a Minion suit, a bearded egg … I’m hoping that sooner or later, an American news outlet will accidentally use a modified photo, because even the picture editor has forgotten what the vice-president looks like, and then we can have one of those massively self-regarding legacy media-blow-ups, where the entire staff has to resign after a remorseless investigation by the executive editor reveals Vance isn’t actually a big purple grape. “This is a stain on our newspaper’s history. A big purple stain.”Vance is more meme than man, now, and it is, of course, something of a consolation that he is so extremely online that he can’t help but have noticed this. The VP is like a one-man government troll-feeding programme – please don’t cut him, Elon! – which is probably why people have become so heroically committed to taking the piss. The probability of the vice-president seeing you insulting him is basically one.Just as previous holders of his office like Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon once did, Vance spent a notable amount of this week both denying he suggested Britain and France were random countries that hadn’t fought a war in 40 years, and replying to random X posters called things like “Jeff Computers” to counter the suggestion that he wasn’t loved and feted on his recent skiing holiday.View image in fullscreenOver on this side of the Atlantic, it must be said that the latter vignette in particular serves as a helpful reminder of the cultural differences between our great nations – and indeed between our great anti-elitists. British politicians would rather admit they’d sexually harassed an intern than gone skiing. (You can, of course, do both – and many do.) If a British cabinet minister were to sally forth on to social media like Vance did, and honk that actually, he had a great time on the ski slopes, it would probably be the end of him. Let’s face it, our rightwing politicians still make time twice a week to do a drive-by on “latte drinkers”, seemingly unaware that the only thing left in most high streets, and quite a lot of people’s lives, is a hot milky drink at a Costa. Yet in our country, would-be populists treat having the temerity to order a coffee like it’s Marie Antoinette skiing past a workhouse – which is a useful illustration of why we don’t have growth, and why our many political failures speak to near-empty rooms at conservative conferences in the US.Anyway: Vance. On or off skis – and I would prefer him to sod offski – the vice-president can be judged successful in his deliberately adopted mission to become mesmerisingly awful. On British army talkboards this week, I spent some very enjoyable time watching veterans of the US’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan offer their thoughts on JD, who I believe was some kind of military journalist for about 15 minutes. Though that wasn’t quite how they put it, naturally. Real soldiers can be hilariously creative with their insults, while Vance is drawn towards the artless, perhaps most neatly embodied in his decision to whine at Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “Did you even say thank you?”Then again, while I’m sure that the memes will keep us warm in the event of an unscheduled nuclear winter, it must be said that other forms of digital manipulation are passing notably without the comment they used to, even until very recently. So perhaps the moral slippage has not been entirely one-sided.I noticed this week that people who only a couple of years ago were hand-wringing about the horror AI deepfakes could wreak upon democracy were now cheerfully sharing synthetic scenes of Zelenskyy slapping Donald Trump in the Oval Office, or Trump crying like a baby, or some other eerie piece of fakery that felt qualitatively different from a still of a lollipop-wielding kiddie Vance. I think people used to think this stuff was bad and corrosive and potentially politically dangerous? Maybe they still do – or maybe only when the other side do it.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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      Europe can’t just hope for the best with Trump. Ukraine needs all the arms we can send | Frans Timmermans

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      After US vice-president JD Vance’s speech in Munich last month, most European leaders came to the conclusion that our world has fundamentally changed. The Pax Americana that long ensured peace, security and freedom in Europe is over. Anyone who still doubted this will hopefully now realise, after the disgraceful treatment Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy endured last Friday at the White House, that we can no longer rely on the Americans for our collective security.We must hope for the best, but hope is not a policy. We – the Netherlands, the EU, and all western countries standing with Ukraine – must prepare for the worst. The question is this: how do we keep Ukraine free and independent, and how do we protect our economy, our freedom and democracy, and our borders?This begins with the awareness that our security is already directly threatened by Russia. Trump wants to do business over our heads with this country. It appears that he and Vladimir Putin have divided Europe into spheres of influence like two mob bosses in a low-budget movie. As the saying goes: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.The Netherlands is not an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; we are fully exposed when geopolitical and economic storms brew on our continent. It is the Russian aggression in Ukraine that has made our energy prices rocket. We cannot batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to pass. We are a medium-sized country with significant European and international interests. It is high time we acted accordingly.But political divisions at the heart of our government are leaving us exposed. The biggest party in the coalition governing the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom (PVV), led by Geert Wilders, has a history of pro-Kremlin rhetoric. While other parties, such as the centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), formerly led by Mark Rutte, are staunch advocates of unwavering support of Ukraine. Combined with an unelected prime minister, Dick Schoof, who serves no specific political party, the coalition government is rudderless and unstable.It is abundantly clear that our national scale is far too small to make a real difference. Today, we need the EU more than ever before. We must also work on closer ties with countries that share our sense of urgency and are not EU members, primarily the UK and Norway, but also Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The EU will also need to take a much firmer stance against member states such as Hungary that spare no effort in promoting Putin’s (and Trump’s) agenda.View image in fullscreenThe most urgent priority now is to support Ukraine. We must fill the gaps that Trump is leaving behind. Financially, this should not be too complicated, but in military terms, this is a different challenge. Russia will now intensify its attacks, so all available military equipment must be sent to Ukraine as quickly as possible. With additional financial support, we can also get the Ukrainian defence industry up and running at full capacity.The Russians are struggling more than it appears at first glance; sanctions are damaging the country, the losses are significant, and the war economy is creating large gaps elsewhere. Sanctions need to be scaled up much further, and all frozen Russian assets in the EU must be transferred to Ukraine immediately.EU member states must wake up and stop squabbling over trivial matters. The same goes for the Schoof cabinet. It is all hands on deck now. This means thinking creatively about European war bonds and finding the fastest possible way to bolster our defence in preparation for a confrontation in which the Americans may leave us to fend for ourselves. This requires investing in areas that the Americans currently cover within Nato. Moreover, it is vital for the overall resilience of Dutch society that defence investments do not come at the expense of our social safety net.In the longer term, we must first establish a partnership that provides the collective security guarantee of Nato without having to rely on the US. Crucial to this is the involvement of Britain and possibly Canada, and European countries that are not members of the EU. Therefore, it should go beyond the EU and perhaps also exclude countries, if these, such as Hungary or the nominally neutral Austria and Ireland, for example, do not want to participate.Second, it is of national security interest to make progress on a genuine energy union. High energy prices constitute the primary economic threat to this continent. This requires much more collective investment in energy networks, renewable energy, and also joint procurement of gas for as long as we need it.The Netherlands can play a leading role in all these areas, but it is not doing so. Because the coalition is deeply divided, the prime minister speaks too hesitantly, too late, and too ambiguously. Because the coalition is not allocating additional funds for Ukraine and is implementing utterly nonsensical cuts to the contributions to the EU, the words of support are literally and figuratively cheap. Because the largest coalition party is at best ambiguous and usually sides with Trump – who is now also siding with Putin – our government is adrift.Fortunately, there is still hope. The rudderless government may be on the brink of despair, but the people are not without hope, and our country is certainly not without prospects. The Dutch people see that the world order is changing. In such extraordinary, dangerous times, they deserve a decisive, united government.

      Frans Timmermans is the leader of the leftwing alliance of the Dutch Green party and the Labour party (GroenLinks/PvdA)

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