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      Bullying, berating Trump shows his worst self in Zelenskyy ambush

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      “This is going to be great television,” Donald Trump remarked at the end. Sure. And the captain of the Titanic probably assured his passengers that this would make a great movie some day.Trump has just presided over one of the greatest diplomatic disasters in modern history. Tempers flared, voices were raised and protocol was shredded in the once hallowed in the Oval Office. As Trump got into a shouting match Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a horrified Europe watched the post-second world war order crumble before its eyes.Never before has a US president bullied and berated an adversary, never mind an ally, in such a public way. Of course reality TV star and wrestling fan turned US president had it all play out on television for the benefit of his populist support base – and a certain bare-chested chum in the Kremlin.Zelenskyy had come to the White House to sign a deal for US involvement in Ukraine’s mineral industry to pave the way for an end to three-year war in Russia. There was a hint of trouble to come when he arrived at the West Wing, wearing black – not a suit – and Trump greeted him with a handshake and sarcasm: “Wow, look, you’re all dressed up!”Inside the Oval Office, which has seen much but never anything quite like this, Zelenskyy thanked Trump for the invitation. At first all was sweetness and light as they fielded questions from reporters.There was a minor wrinkle over how much Europe support has given Ukraine, which ended with smiles, a playful but pointed tap on Zelenskyy, and ominous words from Trump: “Don’t argue with me.”But the last 10 minutes of the nearly 45-minute meeting devolved into acrimony and chaos. Zelenskyy found himself ambushed by Trump and his serpentine vice-president, JD Vance. He was expected to sit back and take a beating from Nurse Ratched and Miss Trunchbull. He refused.Vance said Joe Biden’s approach had failed and that diplomacy was the way forward. Zelenskyy challenged “JD” on this, noting Russia’s betrayals of trust in the past.Vance, who once declared he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine, was riled. Finger jabbing, he told Zelenskyy: “Mr President, with respect. I think it’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”Uh-oh. The politicians and journalists in the room could surely tell this was going off the rails. At one point the Ukrainian ambassador would put her head in her hands. She was all of us.Zelenskyy tried to push back, asking if Vance had ever been to Ukraine. Vance got angry and spoke of “propaganda tours”. Zelenskyy tried to answer but Trump interjected: “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”The men spoke over each other. Raising his voice, the president said: “You don’t have the cards right now.”Zelenskyy responded: “I’m not playing cards.”Trump, pointing an accusing finger and descending into his worst self from the presidential debates, admonished: “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with world war three and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should have.”TV pro tip: Trump has spent so many campaign rallies warning about world war three that the phrase has lost its shock value.Trump and Vance tried to scold Zelenskyy like an ungrateful child. Vance – who recently went to Munich to condemn Europe as being on the wrong side in the culture wars – demanded: “Have you said ‘thank you’ once?”Zelenskyy tried to respond. Trump told him his country was in big trouble. He went on: “The problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States and your people are very brave. But, you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out.“And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out and I don’t think it’s going to be pretty… But you’re not acting at all thankful, and that’s not a nice thing.”Zelenskyy looked shellshocked and Trump commented on what great TV it will be.No deal was done and a planned press conference was cancelled. Zelenskyy drove away empty-handed, having just endured own diplomatic Chernobyl. As for the rest of Europe, a bust of Winston Churchill, looming over the shoulders of Trump and Vance, may have shed a tear or two. More

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      Trump’s ‘Gulf of America’ debacle is no joke – this is how authoritarians get started

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      Last week, the Associated Press sued White House officials for violating its free press rights by punishing the organization for defying Donald Trump’s executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. Unfortunately, on Monday, a federal judge refused to immediately strike down the White House’s retaliatory treatment of the AP. But the case is far from over.Granting access to the White House on the suppressive conditions set by the Trump administration is a blow to the first amendment and the free press. If the retaliation against the AP is allowed to stand, more restrictions on the press are certain to follow, creating Kremlin-like conditions that will affect all Americans who might question, or be suspected of questioning, the Trump party line.This is why a seemingly trivial issue – what to call the Gulf – is freighted with importance. Trump’s renaming of the Gulf unmistakably delivers his “America first” message. He has every right to his message. But he doesn’t have the right to turn the press into his messenger.The controversy began on Trump’s first day back in office, when he issued a unilateral order that an international sea, known for centuries as the Gulf of Mexico, henceforth be named the Gulf of America. Certain organizations, such as Google, immediately complied by changing the Gulf’s name on Google Maps and redirecting searches for “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America”.However, the AP, along with several other news organizations, resisted. Noting that the Trump order had no effect outside the US, the AP made an editorial judgment that its status as an international reporting agency was best served by continuing to refer to the Gulf by the name known to global readers.The Trump administration retaliated by barring AP reporters from the press pool that covers media events at the White House or on Air Force One, and on Tuesday it went further, announcing it would determine which organizations had access to the pool – traditionally the job of the White House Correspondents’ Association. While limited seating capacity may give the White House some discretion about who gets to be in the press pool, the first amendment does not permit that discretion to be used to punish the press or to limit access to outlets favorable to Trump. As the AP stated in its complaint: “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government. The Constitution does not allow the government to control speech” by controlling access.As tempting as it is to follow Shakespeare in shrugging the shoulders at “what’s in a name,” we should turn to history to learn what follows when authoritarian leaders start out with seemingly harmless verbal imperialisms. One of the first actions Hitler took after seizing power in 1933 was to scrub streets and public spaces of names that reflected Jewish influence or Weimar republicanism in favor of tributes to National Socialism. Stalin celebrated his own greatness by changing Tsaritsyn, now Volgograd, to “Stalingrad”. Before Stalingrad, there was the switch from Petrograd to Leningrad. In today’s China, the name “Tibet” has disappeared from Chinese maps in favor of the Mandarin name, “Xizang”.It is hard to know how seriously to take Trump’s flagging of territorial, as well as verbal, imperialism. He has suggested the US reclaim the Panama Canal Zone, buy Greenland from Denmark, incorporate Canada as a 51st state, and take over the Gaza Strip for resort real estate development. Even if these are mere paper ambitions, the disdain Trump shows for international law is already doing irreparable harm.Appealing to his Maga base with the “America first” rhetoric in the Gulf, he is selling out Ukraine to Putin’s Russia in ways reminiscent of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in 1938 by ceding parts of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Ignoring this lesson of history – in Munich of all places – this month, JD Vance stopped short of endorsing the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party by name, but made clear that the Trump administration would be happy if Europe adopted the same anti-immigrant policies that Trump’s renaming of the Gulf signaled.The ripple effect of Trump commandeering global waters reaches beyond the sea to all Americans. His actions must be considered alongside his other executive orders on his first day back in office, declaring the arrival of immigrants at the southern border an “invasion” and suspending grants of asylum, no matter how dire the situation of refugees. When we let Trump scapegoat vulnerable immigrants for this country’s – and the world’s – problems, we are in fascist territory. That is why Trump’s renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America is no laughing matter. It expresses a level of disrespect for Mexico that could well be a precursor for how strongmen treat peoples whom they first strip of dignity. Substitute Jew, Catholic, Turk, Armenian, Arab, gay or transgender for Trump’s talk of an invasion of aliens across the Gulf, and you get the point.What the Gulf needs is not more nationalistic power grabs but international cooperation to tackle its most pressing problems – worsening pollution, rising sea levels from the climate crisis, intensifying hurricanes, crumbling infrastructure, and loss of shoreline and habitat. Far from squabbling over what to call the Gulf, the US and Mexico should recognize that no one owns the Gulf; it belongs to nature.In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet made her “what’s in a name” speech to declare love for Romeo even though he bore the family name of her family’s blood enemy. It didn’t turn out well for Juliet, and it won’t turn out well for us if we let Trump intimidate the AP because its editors had the courage to stand up to his bullying.

      Jeffrey Abramson is author of Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought. Jack E Davis is the author of The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2018. More

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      Trump’s bullshit blitz has Europe on its knees | Stewart Lee

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      Was it really only a month ago that the pole-dancer patron, fridge explorer, Brexit get-doer, model bus maker, sofa-strainer, wall-spaffer, current Daily Mail columnist and former British prime minister Boris Johnson eulogised the inauguration of Donald Trump in the Mail, recounting how, as the “invisible pulse of power surged” from the battered bible into the hand of Trump: “I saw the moment the world’s wokerati had worked so hard to prevent.”I hope Johnson is pleased with the way things have worked out. Because now the foolish wokerati have been schooled beyond Johnson’s wettest dreams. It’s the Trump-Putin-bin Salman party! An adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster, and a man who sanctioned a chemical warfare hit, killing a British citizen on British soil, have met at the luxury Saudia Arabian hotel of another man, who, according to the US, reportedly approved the murder and subsequent dismemberment of a journalist, to discuss the similarly brutal dismemberment of Ukraine, without consulting either Ukraine itself or the countries most directly affected by the legitimisation of Putin’s territorial anxieties. Don’t worry, Poland! Stable genius Trump has got this covered, so break out the bone saws, pop the cork on the novichok and grab the girls by the pussy! There are 1970s Italian slasher films with less gruesome plotlines. Well said, Boris Johnson! That’s certainly stuck it to the wokerati!If only Johnson, and Trump’s other cheerleaders in the rightwing press and on the right of the house, could be brave enough to call out Trump for what he is. If only Johnson had the moral courage of Ed Davey from the Liberal Democrats. In what newly warped reality does that sentence even exist? But, on balance, the whitewashing of the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainians is a small price to pay for the delight Trump has bought to the smiling faces of people who hate the transgender community, wild swimming enthusiasts and Guardian readers. Sniffing mineral rights in the air, like the smell of napalm in the morning, Trump has grabbed Ukraine by the pussy and he ain’t gonna let go. Trump is, unequivocally, the worst thing to happen to human civilisation since Hitler. And Ricky Gervais’s After Life.European politicians more rational and less self-serving than Johnson are trying to formulate the correct response to Trump’s rapid and reckless redrawing of the postwar world disorder in his own, and Russia’s, interests. The correct response is to shit your pants. On Tuesday, Trump even blamed Ukraine itself for being invaded, which is a bit like blaming E Jean Carroll herself for being sexually abused in a department store changing room. Couldn’t she have cut a pre-emptive deal before things escalated? Victims! Always blaming someone else. But Trump has put the idea that the invasion of Ukraine is Ukraine’s fault out there now, on the world stage, amplified by his collaborators in the tech bro media, and it will gradually calcify into one of those persistent alternative facts. By Wednesday he’d called Zelenskyy a dictator (and a mediocre comedian, which in my opinion is even worse).And it’s that kind of reshaping of reality that needs a coherent European response. Recently, the US vice-president, JD Vance, who has the exact same face-beard as the main male oppressor in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, came and told the Munich security conference that Scotland had made it illegal to pray silently in your own home. Many things are illegal in Scotland. Fruit, for example, and cushions, which are deemed too soft by the Scottish Cushion Committee. But not silent private prayer. Largely ignoring dead-in-the-water Ukraine, Vance also told Europe we had some kind of moral duty to allow unchecked, factually inaccurate bullshit to clog our infosphere via Trump’s tech bro acolytes’ social media platforms, his inflammatory comments about illegal Scottish prayer in the same speech proving exactly why such regulation is required. And I think he knows this.Predictably, Vancewas one of the three main early investors in Rumble, the social media site for all the people whose conspiratorial untruths and borderline criminality make them too toxic for other social media sites – Russell Brand, Alex Jones and Darth Vader etc – so he personally stood to profit from this sort of popularisation of inflammatory actionable crap. As did fellow Rumble original main investor Peter Thiel, the man behind Palantir, the big tech company Wriggling Wes Streeting is keen to hand all our NHS data to, revealing an interlocking and endless web of bad influence that only “cat woman” Carole Cadwalladr had the persistence of vision to apprehend, and she’s currently shunting off to a subscription Substack site, a crowdfunded Cassandra in an era busy eating its own brainstem.For a brief period around teatime on Monday, Keir Starmer, who once left his “village and went to the city of Leeds” and “discovered a whole new world of indie bands – like Orange Juice and the Wedding Present” delusionally imagined he could be some kind of go-between twixt observable reality and Trump. But did West Yorkshire jangle-pop pioneers the Wedding Present radically retool their signature sound for 1991’s Seamonsters album just so Starmer could become a Neville Chamberlain for the cover-mounted fanzine flexidisc generation?We have staved off outright fascism throughout most of Europe pretty well for 80 years now, but outright fascism in Europe was never quite so well funded and promoted as it is now, since the US government and the social media platforms that do its bidding decided backing outright fascism was a good way to smash the EU. Think what Hitler could have achieved if he’d had Twitter, currently X, and Google at his disposal. He wouldn’t have needed the V2 rocket, Lord Haw-Haw and Hugo Boss. He could have razed half of Europe with a Hulk Hogan meme, some persuasive online misinformation and a dozen jauntily askew baseball caps.

      Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July. He appears in a benefit show for Just Stop Oil at Walthamstow Trades Hall, London, on 8 April More

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      No matter how distasteful we find Trump and Vance over Europe, they speak a blunt truth | Simon Jenkins

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      It’s tough being rightwing these days. You have to find something nice to say about Donald Trump. That is hard. He thinks Kyiv started the Ukraine war and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a “dictator”. But what about JD Vance? The US vice-president thinks that Europe’s “threat from within”, which is putting “free speech … in retreat”, is worse than any threat from Russia or China. These men are deranged. What more is there to say?The answer is quite a lot. John Stuart Mill warned that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”. We must try to understand the case they are making, whether we agree with it or not.Yes, these men are mendacious and hypocritical. Trump claims that Zelenskyy “refuses to have elections” and that he is “very low in the polls” despite recent polling showing that he still has a majority of Ukrainian support. As for the threat to free speech “from within”, the Associated Press is banned from White House briefings for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”, and Trump’s friend Elon Musk thinks CBS’s “lying” journalists “deserve a long prison sentence”.Trump/Vance have cut through half a century of consensual waffle about the US’s God-given destiny to lead the world to goodness and freedom. Whether the issue is peace and war, immigration or tariffs, they claim to seek the US’s self-interest and nothing else. Why should Americans fork out billions each year to defend a Europe that fails to defend itself? Why should they arm distant nations to fight their neighbours, or tip staggering amounts of aid into Africa’s basket cases?If the rest of the world has screwed up – while the US has stayed free and rich for two and a half centuries – that is the world’s problem. Americans have spent a fortune these past 50 years trying to improve life on Earth and, frankly, it has failed. To hell with diplomatic etiquette.As for Ukraine, enough is enough. Putin is not going to invade the US, nor has he any intention of invading western Europe. If Europe wants to pretend otherwise, champion Vladimir Putin’s foes, sanction and enrage him, it can do so alone.Nato was a Hitler/Stalin thing. It was just another device to make the US pay for Europe’s defence. Not any more. The US, says the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, “is no longer the primary guarantor of security in Europe”. Bang goes plausible nuclear deterrence.In reality, these talking points are not new, though they have not previously been expressed so brutally by an administration. In various guises, they have lurked beneath the surface of US isolationism for more than a century. To win an election, Woodrow Wilson swore that the first world war was “one with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us”. Franklin Roosevelt promised the same of the second. He promised American mothers “again and again and again, your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”. Neither kept his word.US public opinion can be patriotic when a war is on, as during Vietnam. But otherwise it has been persistently anti-interventionist. Kennedy might have pleaded global sacrifice and to “ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man”. But that was largely fine words for foreign consumption.What Trump/Vance are now saying to western Europe is get serious. The cold war is over. You know Russia has no desire to occupy western Europe. This proclaimed threat is a fantasy got up by what a wise president, Dwight Eisenhower, called the US’s military-industrial complex, long practised at extracting profit from fear. If Keir Starmer really wants “to give priority to defence”, he can slash his own health and welfare budgets to pay for it. But is he really that threatened, or does it merely sound good?Joe Biden was meticulous in the degree of help he extended to Kyiv. Now is the inevitable moment of extrication, but it will require a very difficult ceasefire to precede it. Without a substantial guarantee from Washington, it is hard to see anything other than eventual defeat for Kyiv. Ukraine could yet prove a rerun of the US in South Vietnam.With a minimum of delicacy, Trump/Vance have decided to expose the mix of platitude, bluff and profiteering that underpinned much of the cold war. Nato’s victory in 1989 suggested the need for a shift to a more nuanced multipolar world, one that was never properly defined.Trump/Vance are right that a realignment is badly needed. They have chosen the worst possible moment and the worst possible way to say it. We can be as rude to them as we like, but they will have US democracy on their side.

      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More

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      Kash Patel confirmed as FBI director despite fears he could use powers to pursue Trump opponents – live

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      The US Senate has confirmed Kash Patel as the next FBI director, handing oversight of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency to an official who has declined to explicitly say whether he would use his position to pursue Donald Trump’s political opponents.Patel was narrowly confirmed on Thursday in a 51-49 vote, a reflection of the polarizing nature of his nomination and what Democrats see as his unwillingness to keep the bureau independent from partisan politics or resist politically charged requests from the president.Notably, at his confirmation hearing, Patel refused to commit that he would not use his position to investigate officials he portrayed as Trump’s adversaries in his book, and affirmed that he believed the FBI was answerable to the justice department and, ultimately, the White House.Patel’s responses suggest that his arrival at FBI headquarters will usher in a new chapter for the bureau as a result of his adherence to Trump’s vision of a unitary executive, where the president directs every agency, and willingness to prioritize the administration’s policy agenda.You can read more about Patel’s confirmation here:A vaccine policy committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will not meet as scheduled next week, just days after vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr was sworn in as head of Health and Human Services.Kennedy criticized the panel, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, during his confirmation hearings. The committee is currently on a list of advisory groups currently under review, according to an executive order issued by Trump yesterday.Kennedy, who promised Senator Bill Cassidy that he would not touch the childhood vaccine schedule during the confirmation process, told HHS employees they would investigate the schedule when he began work this week. The vaccine schedule includes shots that prevent measles, polio and other dangerous diseases.Attendees of the White House’s Black History Month reception have broken out into cheers of “four more years”, referring to Donald Trump’s suggestion that he should extend his presidency beyond the constitutionally allowed two terms.Donald Trump has announced he will install a new statue of Prince Estabrook, an enslaved man who was wounded at the Battle of Lexington, in “our new National Garden of American Heroes”.He added that “the Garden will predominantly feature incredible women like Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and Coretta Scott King” alongside “some of the most beautiful works of art in the form of a statue for men like Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, Jackie Robinson, what a great athlete, Martin Luther King Jr, Muhammad Ali … and the late Kobe Bryant.”Addressing guests at the White House, Donald Trump struck an uneasy tone celebrating Black History Month while also criticizing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.“We now have more Black Republicans serving in the US House than at any time since 1870,” he said. As the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding approaches, he added “we’re going to look forward to honoring the contributions of countless Black Americans who fought to win, and protect and expand American freedom from the very, very beginning.”Trump went on to say, “The last administration tried to reduce all of American history to a single year, 1619, but under our administration, we honor the indispensable role Black Americans have always played in the immortal cause of another date 1776.”Trump’s mention of 1619 appeared to be a reference to the New York Times’ 1619 Project which marked the year enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas.Donald Trump has just taken the stage at the White House’s Black History Month reception, alongside golfer Tiger Woods.Woods said “it was an honor” to be at the White House with Trump. Trump gave Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2019, which Woods was wearing at the reception today.“Today we pay tribute to the generations of Black legends, champions, warriors and patriots who helped drive our country forward to greatness. And you really are great, great people. What a great, nice group of … ,” Trump said.Trump also shouted out Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner, and Senator Tim Scott.One of the more intriguing groups at CPAC this year is the Third Term Project, which says it is exploring the case for reconsidering presidential term limits – in other words, changing the constitution so Donald Trump can run again.“Drawing on historical examples like Franklin Delano Roosvelt’s four-term presidency and international cases such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, the discussion will highlight how sustained leadership fosters policy continuity, national stability, and long-term progress,” the project said ahead of a press conference on Thursday.Republican congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee has already put forward a bill proposing a constitutional amendment allowing for a president to serve up to three terms, provided that they did not serve two consecutive terms prior to running for a third.Wearing a “Trump 2028” sticker, Amber Harris of the Third Term Project said: “You need more than four years to enact some of the things he wants to do and giving him the two consecutive terms to do it could get this country back on track.”She dismissed concerns over Trump turning into an emperor or king as “fearmongering” and was unworried by the fact he would be 82 in 2028. “I’m not an ageist kind of person. I don’t worry about somebody’s age if they’re mentally competent to do the job. I would fully support it.”However, an unscientific Guardian survey of eight CPAC attendees found little enthusiasm for the proposal, with most preferring the idea of Trump passing the torch to a rising star such as Vice-President JD Vance.Here’s a recap of the latest developments:

      The Senate confirmed Kash Patel as the next FBI director, handing oversight of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency to an official who has declined to explicitly say whether he would use his position to pursue Donald Trump’s political opponents. The Senate voted to confirm Patel in a 51-49 vote, with senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska the only Republicans to oppose Patel.

      Mitch McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky, announced he will not run for re-election next year. McConnell formally announced his retirement in a Senate floor speech on Thursday, on his 83rd birthday, bringing an end to a decades-long career for a Republican leader who marshaled his party through multiple administrations with a singleminded focus on power that enraged his critics and delighted his allies.

      Mike Waltz, the White House national security adviser, said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy should sign a deal handing over half of the country’s mineral wealth to the US. Trump is “obviously very frustrated” with Zelenskyy, Walz said, adding that “some of the rhetoric” and “insults” about Trump were “unacceptable”. Waltz also noted that the US “fully supports” Article 5 of the Nato alliance but that its European partners need to increase their spending.

      Donald Trump will host his first official cabinet meeting at the White House next Wednesday. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also confirmed that Trump will host the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on Monday and the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, on Thursday.

      JD Vance marked the Trump administration’s one month since its return to power with a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The vice-president claimed uncontrolled immigration was “the greatest threat” to both Europe and the US, and suggested that the US’s military commitment to European allies could be contingent on their domestic policies, particularly targeting Germany.

      The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will lay off thousands workers in Washington and around the country beginning on Thursday, according to reports. The layoffs reportedly affect probationary employees with roughly one year or less of service at the agency and largely include workers in compliance departments.

      A Senate committee voted to advance Linda McMahon’s nomination as Donald Trump’s education secretary. The Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions voted 12-11 along party lines to advance the nomination of McMahon, the billionaire co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), to the Senate floor.
      Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, whose 18-year prison sentence following the 6 January 2021 attack was commuted by Donald Trump, is roving the corridors of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).Wearing a black patch on his eye and a Trump tattoo on his arm, Rhodes told reporters:
      I’m the new spokesman for Condemned USA to advocate for the other J6ers who are still in prison and then other political prisoners like Tina Peters, the election worker in Colorado, once again targeted simply for exercising her rights to question an election.
      Last year Peters, a local elections official in Colorado, was sentenced to nine years in prison for leading a voting system data-breach scheme inspired by the rampant false claims that fraud altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.Rhodes, 59, from Granbury, Texas, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, told the Guardian that he owns the trademark for the Oath Keepers. “I can do what I want with it,” he said. “We’ll see what I want to do with it. I’m thinking about it.”Richard Barnett, a January 6 rioter who put his feet on House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk and was sentenced to more than four years in prison, showed off his “certificate of pardon” from Trump.The 64-year-old retired firefighter, wearing a sweater emblazoned with “J6” “political prisoner” and “376369”, said of Trump’s first month in office:
      “Awesome, baby. Keep it coming. Keep it coming. Absolutely. Let’s get some arrests on the books. There’s a lot of treason going on in this country. It’s time to clean it up.
      Donald Trump has appeared to embrace a proposal to share a portion of the cuts in US government spending made by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) with all US households in the form of checks.Trump addressed the idea in a speech at an investment conference in Miami on Wednesday, telling attendees:
      There’s even under consideration a new concept, where we give 20% of the Doge savings to American citizens, and 20% goes to paying down debt.
      Trump suggested the policy would incentivize Americans to “participate in the process of saving us money” by reporting suspected government waste to boost their own share of the funding cuts.The greatest challenge for recent FBI directors has been the delicate balance of retaining Donald Trump’s confidence while resisting pressure to make public pronouncements or open criminal investigations that are politically motivated or that personally benefit the president.Kash Patel is unlikely to have difficulties, such is his ideological alignment with Trump on a range of issues including the need to pursue retribution against any perceived enemies like former special counsel Jack Smith and others who investigated him during his first term.The new leadership at the FBI comes as questions about the far-reaching nature of his loyalty to Trump remain unresolved. At his confirmation hearing, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee tried in vain to elicit answers about his role as a witness in the criminal investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.During the investigation, Patel was subpoenaed to testify about whether the documents the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago had been declassified under a “standing declassification order”, as he had represented in various public comments at the time.The Guardian reported at the time that Patel initially declined to appear, citing his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. He later testified after the chief US district judge in Washington authorized Patel to have limited immunity from prosecution, which forced his testimony.That loyalty, to resist federal prosecutors, endeared him to Trump and is understood to have played a factor in him ultimately getting tapped for the FBI director position after Trump struggled for weeks to decide who he wanted at the bureau, a person familiar with the matter said.As we reported earlier, Kash Patel has been narrowly confirmed by the Senate as the next FBI director.The Senate voted to confirm Patel by a 51-49 vote. Two moderate Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined all Democrats in opposing Patel.Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell, who earlier today announced he was not seeking re-election, voted to confirm Patel. He has voted against three of Trump’s most controversial nominees.In a statement before the vote, Collins said Patel had made “numerous politically charged” statements discrediting the FBI.These statements “cast doubt on Mr Patel’s ability to advance the FBI’s law enforcement mission in a way that is free from the appearance of political motivation”, she said.Murkowski’s statement said her reservations with Patel “stem from his own prior political activities and how they may influence his leadership”.“I cannot imagine a worse choice,” Democratic senator Dick Durbin said before the vote this afternoon.Another Democratic senator, Richard Blumenthal, said he was “absolutely sure of this one thing: this vote will haunt anyone who votes for him. They will rue the day they did it.”Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse had some harsh words for Kash Patel and his Republican colleagues who voted for his confirmation earlier today.Whitehouse said Patel is the “first senior law enforcement official in American history to have plead the fifth, and he’s been unwilling to even explain to the judiciary committee what crimes it was that he was concerned about that caused him to plead the fifth.“Kash Patel, mark my words, will cause evil in this building behind us. Republicans who vote for him will rue that day.”Kash Patel’s confirmation was a close one.If more than three Republican senators voted against him, Patel wouldn’t have been confirmed.Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski announced earlier today on X that she planned to vote against Patel’s nomination, largely due to his refusal to cooperate with January 6 investigations.“My reservations with Mr. Patel stem from his own prior political activities and how they may influence his leadership,” Murkowski wrote.“The FBI must be trusted as the federal agency that roots out crime and corruption, not focused on settling political scores. I have been disappointed that when he had the opportunity to push back on the administration’s decision to force the FBI to provide a list of agents involved in the January 6 investigations and prosecutions, he failed to do so.” More

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      Vance poses immigration as ‘greatest threat’ to US and Europe in CPAC speech

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      JD Vance marked one month since the Trump administration returned to power on Thursday by again claiming uncontrolled immigration was “the greatest threat” to both Europe and the United States.The vice-president took the stage at the country’s largest conservative voters conference in National Harbor, Maryland, to double down on his criticism that stunned European leaders last week when he accused them of suppressing free speech and “running in fear” from voters’ true beliefs.“The greatest threat in Europe, and I’d say the greatest threat in the US until about 30 days ago, is that you’ve had the leaders of the west decide that they should send millions and millions of unvetted foreign migrants into their countries,” Vance told the crowd.His rhetoric represents the administration’s dramatic U-turn in long-standing American domestic and foreign policy priorities, making clear the aim is to bolster border security with more agents and be more cautious about European military commitments.Vance also made the extraordinary claim, without evidence, that the month-old administration was about to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict in decades.“I really believe we are on the cusp of peace in Europe for the first time in three years,” he said about the war in Ukraine. “How are you going to end the war unless you are talking to Russia? You’ve got to talk to everybody involved in the fighting.”The remarks landed well at a transformed Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where establishment Republicans that once dominated the stage have been replaced by nationalist figures including Steve Bannon, Britain’s Nigel Farage, and the tech billionaire and “department of government efficiency” operator Elon Musk.The conference’s shift over the years mirrors the broader changes in Republican politics since Trump’s first nomination – at the 2016 event, Trump finished third in the conference’s straw poll with just 15%, behind Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.This year, thousands of conservatives near and far have flocked to CPAC, many donning “Make America great again” (Maga) apparel and America-centric costumes, including a Statue of Liberty outfit and flag shirts.The nationalist vibe at CPAC was further reflected by the presence of prominent European rightwing and Trump-friendly figures, including András László, a Hungarian member of the European parliament and president of the Patriots for Europe foundation.Speaking to the Guardian on the sidelines of the conference, László defended the Trump administration’s existential stance on European politics.“We need to have honest discussions, even if they are difficult to have,” László said, echoing Vance’s criticisms of European speech restrictions. “What are we fighting for? Sovereignty and democracy for Ukraine if we don’t practice it at home? We need to stop stifling freedom of speech, have more discussion, even if sometimes that might be painful for some people.”His organization, which launched last year and is now the third-largest group in the European parliament, with 86 members from 13 states, has been gaining influence across the continent, reflecting the same nationalist currents reshaping American conservatism.The conference also drew Liz Truss, Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, who crashed the UK economy with tax cuts for the wealthy before resigning after just 49 days in office. Reinventing herself as a rightwing populist, Truss used her CPAC platform to claim her political failures were actually the fault of shadowy elites.“The British state is now failing, is not working. The decisions are not being made by politicians,” Truss said, claiming her country was controlled by a “deep state” while calling for a British version of Trump’s movement. “We want to have a British CPAC.”Hours before his appearance at CPAC, Vance had posted a lengthy critique of traditional US and European foreign policy writ-large on X, dismissing concerns about the administration’s stance on Ukraine as “moralistic garbage” and defending its push for peace negotiations.“President [Donald] Trump and I have made two simple arguments: first, the war wouldn’t have started if President Trump was in office; second, that neither Europe, nor the Biden administration, nor the Ukrainians had any pathway to victory,” Vance wrote.Vance got more specific on the CPAC stage, suggesting that the US’s military commitment to European allies could be contingent on their domestic policies, particularly targeting Germany.“Germany’s entire defence is subsidised by the American taxpayer. There are thousands upon thousands of American troops in Germany today,” he said. “Do you think the American taxpayer is going to stand for that if you get thrown in jail for posting a mean tweet?” More

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      The US and Europe are at a crossroads. A new world order is emerging

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      Over the past week, the foundations of US-European relations shifted dramatically.In a series of highly controversial interventions, Donald Trump’s administration outlined a new US approach to Europe. It revolves around negotiating a rapid end to the war between Ukraine and Russia, handing Europe the lead responsibility for its own defense, and forging a new transatlantic alliance of populist forces on the right. After 25 years of working on transatlantic relations, I am aware of the tendency of crisis moments like this to fade and relationships to trend back toward historical norms. But this time is different.At the Munich Security Conference, Trump officials hurled a series of rhetorical bombs at their European counterparts. As the electricity crackled through the cramped rooms of Munich’s Bayerischer Hof hotel over the weekend, the historic stakes were clear. Would Europe manage, after years of talk, to pull together and defend itself or would it simply be a pawn in the US and Russia’s larger game? Would Ukraine avoid being overrun by the Russian army and emerge with its sovereignty intact? For the rest of the world, what would it mean for the west to truly fracture, Russia to be rehabilitated, and the war in Ukraine to end?The reverberations began last Wednesday when the US president announced that he and Vladimir Putin had made a plan to negotiate an end to the war. Europe and Ukraine were frightened to the bone that the future of their security would be decided without them.Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense, said at Nato headquarters in Brussels that Europe would need to provide for Ukraine’s defenses once the war was over – and with only limited support from the United States. Europeans fear they are woefully unprepared for this task. In a reversal of official US policy, Hegseth added that Ukraine would not join Nato. Ironically, it was the Republican George W Bush who had first insisted that it would in 2008 – over the objections of his German and French counterparts, who thought doing so would provoke Russia.When the US vice-president, JD Vance, strode on to the Munich stage, the throng in the Bayerischer Hof thus waited with bated breath. What, exactly, was Trump’s plan for Ukraine? What they got instead will go down as one of the most controversial speeches an American political leader has ever given in Europe.With little discussion of Ukraine’s future, Vance launched into a harangue that alleged that Europe was repressing free speech and undermining democracy by holding back rightwing nationalist movements like the Alternative für Deutschland. This dropped like molten lead. Here was a vision of democracy sharply at odds with his audience’s.Vance clearly aimed to shock. Whether he aimed to insult is unclear, but in the end he did both.Afterward, European leaders hastily rewrote their own remarks to attack Vance’s and call for European unity in the face of American betrayal. Some were more realistic than others about what they might achieve.On the realistic side was Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, who spoke publicly in many forums about the need to turn a possible Yalta moment, in which Russia and the US remake European security without Europe’s input, into a Helsinki moment, in which the principles for a future peace and detente are put in place.Others, however, still in a state of shock, continued to call for Europe to push back against the US, go its own way, and win the war for Ukraine on its own. Talking points like these worked well three years ago, but their unrealistic nature today risks undermining Europe’s ability to pull together and ensure its vital interests are protected.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Asia’s two giants – China and India – watched this remaking of the west with optimism. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, took a tranquil, almost beneficent tone in his remarks as he surveyed the chasms that had emerged. China, after all, has itself long sought to provoke such divides. India’s foreign minister, S Jaishankar, was perhaps more circumspect, but still optimistic. For these countries, the crackup of the west is only another sign that the rest of this century will be theirs.The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has since met in Saudi Arabia with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to prepare the way for Putin and Trump’s next discussion on the future of Ukraine – and by extension Europe. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has convened European heads of state in the hope of forging the consensus they will need to protect their world in this moment of crisis. This will be very hard.Years as an observer and participant in the making of Europe’s relations with the US leave me innately wary of ever judging a single crisis to mark a definitive shift. The structural features of the transatlantic relationship are deep and often guide us away from crises toward a median line – whether over Iraq, Libya or Iran. The challenges to negotiating an end to this war are moreover enormous and history could cleave in more directions than one as the process unfolds.The United States is not decoupling from Europe, but this past week must be viewed as the opening salvo in a major US effort to renegotiate the terms of its bond with Europe. How far the Trump administration will get cannot be known, but this foundational relationship of US statecraft, which was born in the moment of the US’s rise to global superpower status, will change in fundamental ways. With it, the future of modern democracy, itself born of Europe and sustained by the transatlantic bond for decades, is in play. A new world order is emerging.

      Christopher Chivvis is senior fellow and director of the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served as the US national intelligence officer for Europe from 2018 to 2021 More

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      Afflicted with liberal angst in the age of Trump? Take a leaf from Bridget Jones’s diary | Rafael Behr

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      When future generations study creative works that capture the unsettled spirit of our age, they might easily neglect Bridget Jones 4: Mad About the Boy. The movie isn’t about the historical inflection point that coincides with its release. It doesn’t feature Donald Trump, his vandalism of US democracy or his dissolution of the transatlantic alliance. Such things are not the stuff of romantic comedy. Also, they hadn’t yet happened in 2013, when Helen Fielding wrote the book on which the film is based.But the lack of intentional allegory doesn’t prevent us projecting one on to the story. Or maybe it was just me, experiencing a sentimental hallucination induced by events outside the cinema. Indulge me a moment (and forgive any plot spoilers), as I explain.The first three volumes of the Jones diaries are picaresque chronicles of professional and sexual misadventure that resolve themselves in the reassuring arms of Mark Darcy, a human rights barrister: stolid, emotionally reticent, honourable and kind. That on-and-off romance sweeps Bridget from twentysomething anxiety to thirtysomething neurosis; from post-adolescent insecurity to early midlife crisis, unplanned pregnancy and, in the happy ending, marriage.Allowing for some chronological elasticity (with lags between books being written and adapted for cinema), Jones’s relationship with Darcy unfolds against a political and economic backdrop that hindsight reveals to be exceptionally benign. It is that period sometimes called the Great Moderation: roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the global financial crisis in 2007-09.Democracy sprawled eastwards across Europe. Captive peoples were liberated from communist dictatorship. The dissolution of the Soviet threat generated a “peace dividend” for western governments, permitting a diversion of budget resources from defence to social spending.There was a viable Middle East peace process. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands over the Oslo accords on the White House lawn. Apartheid was dismantled in South Africa, which held its first free, multiracial elections in 1994. The Good Friday agreement brought peace to Northern Ireland in 1998. The UK was then well into an economic boom that had another nine years still to run.View image in fullscreenLondon was basking in its status as capital of “Cool Britannia” – a powerhouse of art, music and self-congratulation. This was the context in which Bridget Jones’s diary first appeared as a weekly newspaper column in 1995. Her avid readership was the same generation that hit their young adult stride in that bright springtime of liberal metropolitan complacency.Jones was not very political, which made her an eloquent exponent of the zeitgeist. “It is perfectly obvious that Labour stands for sharing, kindness, gays, single mothers and Nelson Mandela,” she wrote on the eve of Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide election victory. The Tories were “braying bossy men having affairs with everyone shag shag shag left right and centre and going to the Ritz in Paris then telling all the presenters off on the Today programme.”We know also from a one-off column published in 2019 that Jones was a remainer in the Brexit culture wars. To break the legislative deadlock in parliament, she proposed that Queen Elizabeth, David Attenborough and Joanna Lumley join forces, urging the nation to reconsider the referendum question.It makes perfect sense that the love of Bridget’s life should be a distinguished lawyer who battles global injustice. It was a match made in the late 20th century, when human rights were a byword for all that was virtuous in western democracy. A career dedicated to their defence was the obvious device for a comic novelist wanting to signal intimidating levels of moral uprightness in a character. (It is often said that Darcy was modelled on a younger Keir Starmer. Fielding acknowledges uncanny likenesses in profession and manner, while insisting they are coincidental.)In the opening minutes of Mad About the Boy, we learn that Darcy is dead. He was killed in the line of duty, of course, on a humanitarian mission overseas. His widow is struggling to restart her life and raise two children alone.If, like me, you succumb easily to cinematic schmaltz, this is already an affecting scenario. What I found unexpectedly poignant was the thought that Darcy’s untimely death also functions as a metaphor for the demise of political certainties that defined the world in which Bridget Jones’s generation came of age. Her heartbreak is a parable of political bereavement, describing liberal angst at the sudden unravelling of institutional and legal norms underpinning European security. (Plus sex and jokes.)In the week that the movie was released, the US president reached over the heads of his country’s former Nato allies to embrace Vladimir Putin. He sketched the outline of a deal to end the war in Ukraine that was part territorial capitulation to the aggressor, part gangster extortion – offering Kyiv protection in exchange for mineral wealth. Vice-president JD Vance gave an ominously unhinged speech at the Munich security conference. He claimed that freedom is more imperilled by imaginary culture-war spectres haunting European democracies than it is by a Russian dictator whose tanks are churning up the sovereignty of a neighbouring state.In case of any lingering doubt that the Trump regime has authoritarian ambitions, the president also asserted on social media last week that “he who saves his country does not violate any law”. It is a signal that judges, courts and constitution should all be subordinate to a leader whose personal preference is synonymous with the national interest. Coming from the man who fomented insurrection to overturn the 2020 election, Trump’s aphorism should be read as a hint that the spirit of Maga patriotism is vested in thugs and militias, not statutes.This was the advertised programme. None of it should surprise the US’s allies. But it was easier to hope there might be momentum in the old order than to work out how to live in the new one. Now European leaders are scrambling to convene summits, scraping the sides of their depleted defence budgets, flexing atrophied military muscle in panicky gestures of continental solidarity.There is no going back to Darcy’s world. The idea that human rights are universal and the principle that no one is above the law are losing ground to older axioms – big nations extract tribute from smaller ones; a strongman ruler makes the rules.Pained by these existential challenges, it is hard not to reach for the anaesthetic balm of nostalgia, mythologising the late 90s and early 21st century as a golden age of liberal democratic primacy. In reality, that was a cosy bubble around one generation in one corner of the world: a historical fluke. To move on, we have to get through denial, anger and the other stages of grief to acceptance. We need to recognise that we live for the foreseeable future in a world without a friend in the White House, and that this points to a destiny for Britain much closer to Europe.And we need politicians who will dare to say as much aloud. This, too, is something that occurred to me as I left the cinema last weekend. Maybe if we had leaders capable of expressing the magnitude of the crisis, and rising to the challenge, I wouldn’t have to look for messages of solace between the lines of Bridget Jones’s diary.

      Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist More