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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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      The founding fathers baked reason, truth and free speech into the US. That’s all gone now | Will Hutton

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      The founding fathers of the USA – James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and more – were quintessential disciples of the European Enlightenment. Their intent was to embed Enlightenment values into the government and culture of the New World. America would be a republic of laws. Its constitution would ensure governance of the people, by the people, for the people. Through checked and balanced branches of government, it would expunge the possibility of monarchical discretionary power and inaugurate proper democracy.It would celebrate all liberties, from freedom of speech to freedom of worship. Their belief in science “for the benefit of mankind in general”, in Franklin’s words, would imbue the republic’s commitment to reason, the scientific method and the pursuit of truth. The dynamic economy and society that emerged, however imperfect, reflected those values. It has inspired billions and, for all its falls from grace, has been a force for good.Donald Trump’s presidency is widely deplored for everything from his unilateral imposition of swingeing tariffs to his public humiliation of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and siding with Russia over the war. He is guilty of all those things, and of an impulsiveness and unpredictability as he seeks retribution, respect and, as he would put it, reciprocity. But this misses the larger point: he draws not only on a constituency that shares his views but also on a well-developed body of thought that wants a decisive rupture with those Enlightenment values and all that spring from them.There is now genuine fear in US civil society – in business, finance, academia, the media and the Republican party – that to speak out will bring cruel retribution or even personal harm: this from the apostles of “free speech”. The US has gone mute. Its Enlightenment-based constitution and the accompanying values once held to be universal are being torched in near silence. Only fealty to Making America Great Again, by repudiating its notable traditions, is permitted – at home and abroad. The profundity of this is beginning to be recognised. Canada finds itself fighting for its life. Friedrich Merz, the incoming German chancellor, says for Europe it is “five to midnight”. He is driving through an extraordinary €1tn commitment to raise German defence and infrastructure spending over the next 10 years. The EU is bracing itself for attacks on its trade and its capacity to set standards and regulations for all goods EU citizens buy – so-called non tariff barriers – that Trump plans to launch “soon”. The EU’s high product standards, he argues, discriminate against lesser-regulated US exports. Even VAT is anti-American. The EU’s very being as a self-governing, multinational organisation is under threat.Multilateral organisations like the EU and the UN, expressing the same Enlightenment values as the US constitution, are in Trump’s crosshairs. The unashamed project is to reshape the world economic and political order so it serves only the interests of the US – as if it did not already. Can Britain really be a bridge between this vision and Europe, as Keir Starmer wants? These differences are unbridgeable.Trump’s court at Mar-a-Lago, high on power and much else, has reportedly worked on a draft contract for countries to sign that reverses the alleged rip-off of the US. Instead, they will have to agree to boost US industry by accepting one-sided trade deals and appreciating their currencies. In return, they will be offered degrees of US security. Countries are said to be colour coded green, yellow and red, depending on the degree to which they might wholly accept vassalage, bargain for a compromise or are deemed to be enemies – with China the number-one target, and also including Canada, Mexico and the EU. Nato and the World Trade Organization be damned.Stephen Miran, the new chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers, won his job as the author of an extraordinary paper – A User’s Guide to Restructuring the World Trading System. Trump can reshape the global economic and trade order, he argues, through creating targeted tariff policies aimed at countries to which the US objects. The tariff regime must be designed to maximise fear and uncertainty; last week’s imposition, then withdrawal, of car tariffs on Mexico and Canada was a prime example. The bulk of any economic costs will be displaced on to the countries at the receiving end by forcing them to raise their currencies against the dollar. He writes approvingly of Scott Bessent, now Trump’s treasury secretary, last year publicly arguing for putting countries into varying Mar-a-Lago style buckets corresponding to their readiness to comply with Washington’s will.Self-pity at the US’s alleged victimhood pervades Trumpite thinking. Even on Miran’s own numbers, the US still accounts for the same 25% of world GDP now as it did in 1980 – a phenomenal achievement. America is as great as it ever was. Only 19% of its GDP is imports, but these are blamed entirely for the fall in manufacturing employment as if robotisation, automation and the emergence of a service-based economy were irrelevant. Many working-class Americans have certainly suffered from these changes – but that needed an enlightened domestic policy response. China has re-industrialised by electrifying and decarbonising its economy. This is dismissed as woke.Adam Smith, the great Enlightenment economist, inspired the founding fathers as much as Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine. He praised the invisible hand of the market and open trade as pathways to the common good of greater prosperity – but none of that is for the Trumpites. They come from the mobster, cowboy, might-is-right, make-a-deal-on-my-terms strain of US culture and society. The humbling of Zelenskyy is the tip of this anti-Enlightenment iceberg. They are the masters now, and will gladly bend the US electoral system to stay that way. As some judges stir themselves, and political dissenters start to be braver, it’s an open question if they will succeed – but going back, if at all, is likely to be only partial.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStarmer’s tactics so far have been hard to fault. His level-headedness, decency and pragmatism have been assets. But he faces an unavoidable choice: Britain cannot achieve economic growth by remaining a vassal state to the US while abjuring closer trade relations with Europe. Trump does not want Britain to grow US-competitor great tech companies, which are essential to economic growth. Nor does he want to defend Ukraine and Europe. It is brutally stark. The UK must make common cause with Europe to defend not only our economic and defence interests but, more importantly, our values. They live only in Europe now. More

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      If Britain must rearm, how to pay for it? Stiffen the sinews; summon up the taxes | Polly Toynbee

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      “A new era is upon us.” Ursula von der Leyen was not holding back. This is a world turned upside down, changed beyond recognition. Leaders across Europe are echoing the alarm sent out by the European Commission president, and rippling across the continent, Canada and elsewhere: that we face a “clear and present danger on a scale that none of us has seen in our adult lifetime”. She has proposed a plan that would offer €800bn (£660bn) for immediate rearming, with a European sky shield to protect Ukraine.The hooligan Russian asset in the White House has changed everything so profoundly that it is hard to keep track. The US, whose coat-tails we clung to, whose culture we revelled in, whose cleverness dazzled and stupidity confounded, is now the enemy. The shock feels viscerally personal because American culture is deep in our veins at all ages, from Sesame Street to Marvel, from Philip Roth to Philip Glass, the Oscars to Silicon Valley, like it or not. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we obediently followed their blunders, and 642 British soldiers died, as Keir Starmer adroitly reminded JD Vance in parliament. Our glamorous friend has turned fiend. How do we cauterise that off us? Or reconfigure the map of the world in terms of friends and foes?Former UK ambassadors to Washington ruminated over this “seismic” shift, which has shaken every norm from their Foreign Office days. “This is not a blip in the relationship, something fundamental is going on,” one old knight warned a Lords select committee, while another cautioned that the US giving up on Europe in favour of Russia was likely a “current reality”. Sir David Manning pinpointed Britain’s specific anguish at this moment, the downside of the so-called special relationship: as Europe galvanises to rearm, unlike our continental neighbours, we depend on the US for our defence.With every new shock wave, Britain feels this trauma in its marrow. Yet there is hesitancy in government about addressing the nation with a call to arms, as French president Emmanuel Macron has done, warning: “the innocence of these 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall is over.”Look at the remarkable response of Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, lifetime financial conservative and fiscal dogmatist, as he grasps the severity of the times: he will reverse all his previous fiscal policies and his nation’s usual dread over borrowing, breaking their “basic law” with a huge €500bn loosening of debt rules to rearm. This amounts to “one of the most historic paradigm shifts in German postwar history”, according to Deutsche Bank. German borrowing costs shot up, but so have predictions of German growth from a sluggish 0.8% to 2%, with investors sending industrial stocks soaring. But note this: in his fiscal sea change, rearming will not be accompanied by any cuts to German social spending.How about Britain? Our government has announced no change to fiscal policy. Living within our self-imposed straitjacket, our rearming will be paid for by cuts to aid, benefits and most departments, as Rachel Reeves this week sends her plans to the Office for Budget Responsibility to prove the books are balanced. Yet the promises the government has made are impossible to keep: no more borrowing, no more tax rises and no return to austerity. These are terrible choices – the aid cut already breaks a manifesto pledge – destroying trust whichever way Labour turns. But which is the least bad?A copy of Duncan Grant’s portrait of John Maynard Keynes hangs by my desk, a reminder to reach for his 1940 prescription How to Pay for the War, a book that spelled out the necessary financial sacrifices of the time. Emergency action needed then was draconian, rapidly increasing production while drastically reducing consumption, introducing rationing and diverting everything to the war effort. In comparison, what’s needed in this new emergency is a pinprick, to raise the 3% of GDP for defence spending that Starmer is aiming for. Take just this one measure: in a disgraceful (and failed) act of crude election bribery, Jeremy Hunt cut 4p off employees’ national insurance. Restoring that would cover the cost of this extra defence spending alone, says Ben Zaranko of the Institute for Fiscal Studies; so would 2p more on income tax for all.Labour’s Treasury team winces at the very thought of any further tax rises, after the walloping Reeves got for the £40bn tax rise in October’s budget. They are jumpy: remember Liz Truss’s mini-budget, maxi-catastrophe, they say. Look how even small tax changes such as the farmers’ inheritance tax can create a storm; some policies make absolute sense in economic and fairness terms, but crash politically. Besides, tax rises that cut people’s spending money risk stunting growth, they say – but then so do cuts to public spending. Borrow more? That adds to the mammoth £100bn a year we spend servicing existing debt, they say. But we are now on the hunt for the least-worst option – and Britain still pays less tax than similar countries.Starmer has risen to the needs of the hour. But he has yet to address his citizens on what rearming means, and what it requires of them. We like to think of ourselves as warlike, and at the ready. We are good at displays of national pride and national parades, with a four-day celebration planned for the 80th anniversary of VE day in May. But tax and financial sacrifice were essential parts of that victory. The alternative – miserable cuts to benefits for the weakest, and stripping yet more from threadbare stricken public services – is the worst of all the bad options. In our finest hour, Britain shed its traditional tax-phobia. If ever there was a moment to stiffen the sinews and summon up the taxes, it is now: for the defence of the realm.

      Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist More

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      Starmer is at his best right now – but he must accept there is no going back with Trump’s US | Martin Kettle

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      Keir Starmer, it turns out, is at his best in a crisis. He has faced two since he became prime minister last year, one domestic, the other international. The first came with the riots that followed the Southport killings, when Starmer’s response was impressive and effective. The second is Donald Trump’s attempt to stitch up Ukraine, where Starmer has been surefooted in trying to hold the line against a sellout to Russia. In both cases, he has looked like the right person in the right place at the right time.There was another example of this deftness on Wednesday in the Commons, when Starmer went out of his way to mark the anniversaries of the deaths of UK service personnel in 2007 and 2012. A total of 642 died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars alongside their US allies. They would not be forgotten, he said. The name of JD Vance was not mentioned. Nor was the US vice-president’s contemptuous “some random country” insult this week. But Starmer’s reprimand was unerring.It is far too soon to say whether Starmer’s response to Trump’s embrace of Russia and to the US administration’s denunciations of Europe will be effective in the long run. What can be said is that, in public and private, the prime minister has so far led with tact and clarity and has scored one or two apparent successes against the run of play. Nevertheless, these are very early days. Trump boasted to Congress on Tuesday night that he was “just getting started”.Starmer’s ability in a crisis is an unexpected contrast with his leadership in the ordinary business of politics. Since July 2024, Starmer’s calm, methodical, long-game approach has succeeded only in squandering much of Labour’s election-winning goodwill, and in making him seem out of his political depth. But his deployment of these same unflashy tactics at moments of acute crisis, as in the case of Ukraine, could be gold dust. It has at least given the prime minister’s ratings a boost. There are echoes here of the rallying around Boris Johnson at the start of Covid. But remember where that ended up.It is useful to note that this low-key approach marks a notable break. Throughout the postwar period, British leaders faced with international crisis modelled themselves on Winston Churchill in 1940. Margaret Thatcher saw herself this way during the Falklands war. Tony Blair echoed it after 9/11 and over Iraq. Johnson pretended he was Churchill when Russia invaded Ukraine. Starmer’s calm approach evokes Clement Attlee more than Churchill. In every way he is unTrump.Yet Starmer has not got much to be calm about. The world of 2024 no longer exists. Trump has triggered a crisis in the North Atlantic alliance. At stake are two epochal things. First, whether Russia’s main western border will henceforward be with Ukraine, with Poland or with Germany. Second, whether the US accepts any role in ensuring future European stability. These are not small questions.There are three levels on which Starmer can try to deal with Trump, both now and for the coming four years. All of them tacitly and sometimes openly recognise the vast seriousness of the moment. All of them are predicated on the undesirability of what Trump is doing and the need to create alternatives. All of them, however, also rest on a determination not to make an enemy of the US.The first is to firefight the immediate problems that Trump creates. This involves constantly engaging with the US administration by whatever means are available to prevent or mitigate crises. It means building up defence spending. It means working with allies and so-called coalitions of the willing. It means using any leverage to earn a hearing. Essentially, it is an attempt to manoeuvre Trump to follow a different or less extreme course, while avoiding confrontation or denunciation. But it is all done under the pretence that nothing fundamental has changed.View image in fullscreenThis is essentially the strategy that Starmer is now pursuing on Ukraine. It is why he keeps talking to Trump – three times in the past week, perhaps contributing to Trump’s relatively polite mention of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the speech to Congress. It is why he deploys King Charles’s soft power. It is why, perhaps, he will soon return to Washington with Zelenskyy and Emmanuel Macron in an overwhelmingly important effort to restore military aid and intelligence support to Ukraine.The second approach is to decide to suck it all up for four years, in the hope that things will then get easier. This means accepting the likelihood, though never saying so publicly, that Trump is always going to be destructive and mean-spirited. At the same time, it means working to keep US links – especially military and intelligence links – strong enough to be revived more effectively after 2028, when Trump is due to step down.For Starmer, this could mean a lot of firefighting over the next four years, without any certainty of a post-Trump dividend or British public approval. Such fires could break out on any number of issues, including not just Ukraine but also the Middle East, bilateral trade, Nato, US-EU relations and, judging by this week’s speech, Canada, Greenland and the Panama canal. Much will depend on Friedrich Merz and on Macron’s 2027 successor, too. Starmer and his national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, are also likely to have an intense under-the-radar interest in the candidates vying to succeed Trump.Which leaves the third strategy. This is to accept that Trump’s approach is now the US’s new normal and that there will be no comforting return to past arrangements. Whoever comes after Trump may be friendlier, more rational and less rude. Either way, US exceptionalism, isolationism and disengagement from Europe are likely to be here to stay. So too are the immensely tough consequences for countries like Britain, which can no longer rely on a US security and intelligence shield against Russia or any other hostile states. Rearmament is back. This will require something close to a war economy, and it cannot be created overnight.At present, Starmer has one foot in the first approach and another in the second. But it is the third approach that will loom largest as an option as the next four years unfold. None of these is a soft option, and all of them overlap. Starmer is right, for example, to oppose false binary choices between Europe and the US.Nevertheless, if Trump’s speech to Congress is to be taken seriously, this is a president who has changed sides in the battle of values between democracy and authoritarianism. Starmer may feel he has to tell Europe that Trump will still “have our backs”. But Trump could just as soon stab Europe in the back too. After all, that’s exactly what he just did.

      Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist More

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      What Trump did during week 6: Gaza AI video and Zelenskyy meeting meltdown

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      During his sixth week back in office, Donald Trump and the vice-president, JD Vance, hosted Ukrainian president for what devolved into a shocking and explosive meeting.Trump accused Volodymyr Zelenskyy of “gambling with world war three” while Vance berated the Ukrainian president in a storm of accusations and falsehoods about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Elsewhere in the Trump administration, Elon Musk again demanded that federal workers send an email detailing their recent accomplishments.Here’s what else happened last week.2 March 2025Day 42The fallout continued from Trump and Zelenskyy’s disastrous Oval Office meeting, as the Ukrainian leader sought to recalibrate and insisted a minerals deal was ready to be signed during a diplomatic visit to London. While Europe rallies behind Ukraine, Trump’s Republican allies, including the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said Zelenskyy may have to resign, a suggestion Senator Bernie Sanders called “horrific”. The Democratic senator Chris Murphy said Trump’s White House had in effect become “an arm of the Kremlin”.Also on Sunday:

      The health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, urged Americans to get the MMR vaccine in response to a growing measles epidemic in Texas, days after Kennedy, who has long sowed skepticism with his endorsement of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, downplayed the situation as “not unusual”.
      1 March 2025Day 41A federal judge in Washington blocked Trump from ousting the leader of a federal watchdog agency, ruling that the effort to terminate the official without cause was “unlawful”. The decision by the US district judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington allows Hampton Dellinger to remain the head of the office of special counsel, which protects federal whistleblowers. In her ruling, Jackson wrote that upholding the president’s ability to fire Dellinger would give him “a constitutional license to bully officials in the executive branch into doing his will”. The case is likely to be decided by the supreme court. View image in fullscreenAlso on Saturday: 

      Musk renewed his demand that every federal employee send an email detailing their recent accomplishments, a week after the original demand sparked chaos and confusion across the government workforce.

      Trump signed an executive order establishing English as the official language of the US.

      Supporters of Ukraine protested against the Trump administration across the US, including a Vermont ski resort where Vance was vacationing with his family.
      28 February 2025Day 40In an explosive Oval Office meeting, Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, assailed and berated Zelenskyy in a storm of accusations and falsehoods about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The tense exchange ended with Zelenskyy leaving the White House early, without signing a controversial minerals deal that was seen as key to unlocking US security guarantees for European peacekeepers in Ukraine. During the exchange, which played out publicly on live TV, Trump said Zelenskyy was “gambling with world war three” and told the Ukrainian president to come back “when he is ready for peace”. Hours later, Zelenskyy sought to de-escalate the situation in an interview on Fox News, but Trump appeared unmoved as he departed Washington for his Mar-a-Lago resort. View image in fullscreenAlso on Friday: 

      European leaders and Democrats rallied around Zelenskyy, voicing continued support for Ukraine, while Trump’s Republican allies demand the Ukrainian leader apologize.

      The White House said that classified documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago in 2022 had been returned to Trump.

      The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that Trump had “asked Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians to depart the White House” after their contentious exchange in the Oval Office. 

      The Democratic party sued Trump over a recent executive order it says violates federal election law by giving him too much power over the independent federal election commission.
      27 February 2025Day 39Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, arrived at the White House bearing a letter from King Charles as he quietly appealed to Trump not to abandon Ukraine as the US president searches for a speedy end to Russia’s brutal invasion of the country. In remarks, Starmer praised Trump for “changing the conversation” and making peace possible in Ukraine while Trump denied calling Zelenskyy a dictator, despite having done so, and suggested Vladimir Putin could be trusted. En route to Washington, Starmer pledged to raise the country’s defense spending, a commitment seen as a way to persuade Trump to provide a “backstop” for European security in Ukraine. And in a major relief for the British premier, Trump indicated that he would not slap harsh tariffs on the UK. View image in fullscreenAlso on Thursday: 

      A federal judge found that the mass firings of probationary employees as part of the Trump administration’s government downsizing effort were likely unlawful.

      The ruling came on the same day that the Trump administration moved to terminate hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency housed within the Department of Commerce.

      Senate Democrats publicly – and some Republicans privately – raised concerns over the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid and cuts to USAid. 
      26 February 2025Day 38Donald Trump used the first full cabinet meeting of his second term to heap praise on Elon Musk and his billionaire ally’s mission to dramatically reduce the size of the federal government. Though not a member of Trump’s cabinet, Musk attended and took center stage as the secretaries sat mostly silently for the hourlong meeting. The tech mogul defended Doge’s actions, which have stoked confusion and backlash, but conceded that the team would make mistakes, citing a decision to cancel an Ebola prevention effort that was “quickly” reinstated. During the summit, Trump also threatened to slap 25% tariffs on the European Union and announced that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would visit the White House to sign a minerals deal with the US.View image in fullscreenAlso on Wednesday: 

      A new White House memo instructed federal agencies to submit plans for “a significant reduction” in their staff by 13 March, potentially setting the stage to shrink the government workforce by tens of thousands more in the coming weeks. A top Senate Democrat warned that Trump may be pursuing a mineral rights deal with Vladimir Putin and Russia as well as Zelenskyy and Ukraine.

      A Pentagon memo filed in court on Wednesday said transgender service members would be separated from the US military unless they receive an exemption.

      The supreme court handed the president his first victory, granting the Trump administration’s request to pause a lower court’s deadline for the government to resume nearly $2bn in foreign aid payments.
      25 February 2025Day 37In a dramatic vote, House Republicans unified behind a budget blueprint, taking a major step toward advancing Donald Trump’s “big BEAUTIFUL” tax cut and immigration agenda. But vulnerable Republicans face a brewing backlash over the plan, which would almost certainly require significant reductions to social safety net programs that serve the poor. House Democrats plan to hammer Republicans over their support for the measure and the potential cuts to Medicaid required to pay for it as they plot a return to power in next year’s midterms. But Trump’s fiscal plan is far from guaranteed: Republican negotiators from both the House and Senate must now reconcile their competing budget blueprints to move forward.Also on Tuesday: 

      The White House said it would pick which media outlets are allowed to participate in the presidential press pool, drawing sharp condemnation from the White House Correspondents’ Association, which warned: “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

      The Trump administration announced that immigrants in the US without authorization could face fines and prison time if they fail to submit their personal data to a government registry while the president floated the creation of a “gold card” visa that would give wealthy foreigners a pathway to citizenship for a $5m fee.
      24 February 2025Day 36The US office of personnel management told agency officials that federal workers were not required to respond to billionaire Elon Musk’s demand that they defend their recent accomplishments or risk being fired, even as Donald Trump indicated support for the ultimatum. The email sparked widespread chaos and confusion amid ongoing turmoil Musk’s Doge has inflicted on the federal workforce. After government departments gave their employees differing instructions as to whether they should respond to the message, OPM, which manages the federal workforce, announced that compliance with the email was voluntary and that failing to do so by midnight would not be considered a resignation, as Musk had warned.Also on Monday: 

      France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, warned Donald Trump against a “surrender” of Ukraine during a visit to the White House, as the US president said Vladimir Putin would accept European peacekeepers in Ukraine as part of a potential deal to end the conflict. (The Kremlin has pushed back on this.)

      Earlier in the day, the US joined Russia, Belarus and North Korea in voting against an EU-Ukrainian resolution condemning Russia on the third anniversary of its full-scale invasion, another sign of Trump’s sharp turn toward Putin.  
      The Guardian is tracking the presidency’s first 100 days. Find days 1-35 in our full guide. More

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      Trump has utterly changed the rules of engagement. World leaders must learn this – and quickly | Simon Tisdall

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      It’s not only about Donald Trump. It’s not just about saving Ukraine, or defeating Russia, or how to boost Europe’s security, or what to do about an America gone rogue. It’s about a world turned upside down – a dark, fretful, more dangerous place where treaties and laws are no longer respected, alliances are broken, trust is fungible, principles are negotiable and morality is a dirty word. It’s an ugly, disordered world of raw power, brute force, selfish arrogance, dodgy deals and brazen lies. It’s been coming for a while; the US president is its noisy harbinger.Take the issues one at a time. Trump is a toxic symptom of the wider malaise. For sure, he is an extraordinarily malign, unfeeling and irresponsible man. He cares nothing for the people he leads, seeing them merely as an audience for his vulgar showmanship. His undeserved humiliation of Ukraine’s valiant leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was, he crowed, “great television”. As president, Trump wields enormous power and influence. But Potus is not omnipotent. America’s vanquished Democrats are slowly finding their voice. Connecticut senator Chris Murphy shows how it should be done. Don’t bite your lip. Don’t play by rules Trump ignores. When Trump tried to blame diversity hiring policies for January’s deadly Potomac midair collision, Murphy hit back fiercely.“Everybody in this country should be outraged that Donald Trump is standing up on that podium and lying to you – deliberately lying to you,” Murphy fumed. Trump was at it again when he mugged Zelenskyy last week. But it is not passing unchallenged. Street protests in Britain and the US followed. A campaign gathers pace to block Trump’s planned UK state visit. Opinion polls show growing opposition.It seems strange to talk about “resistance”, as if a Nazi-style wartime occupation is under way. Yet resisting Trump is what our leaders must do. The world’s most admired democracy is held hostage by a far-right clique of thugs and chancers. Its leader calls himself “king” and talks of a presidency for life. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon raise stiff-armed salutes. European neofascists drool adulation from afar.Trump’s minions attack or subvert the agencies of government, the judiciary and free press, terrorising and intimidating those whose loyalty they impugn. Their propagandists, so-called tech barons, have a reach Joseph Goebbels would envy. And just like Vladimir Putin, Russia’s dictator, JD Vance, Trump’s loudmouth hitman, fights a regressive, anti-democratic culture war for “Christian values” and a narrow, bigoted orthodoxy.Ukraine, despite Trump’s betrayal, remains the epitome of resistance. The Ukrainian people are fighting for freedom, sovereignty and democratic self-determination. The issue is simple. Since the US cannot any longer be relied upon, Europe’s leaders know what they must do: supply more and better weapons for Kyiv, such as Taurus missiles; provide more humanitarian aid and finance, obtained by seizing $300bn in frozen Russian funds; and collectively raise their defence spending. From leaders such as Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, we need less polite subservience and more honest defiance.To be effective, European leaders need to put concerted pressure on the US government to provide credible, long-term security guarantees for Ukraine and a backstop for any force that the UK and Europe deploy to monitor the ceasefire. It’s reasonable to expect the US to support a European peace initiative. If it does not, an open rupture with Washington should not be dodged. Equally, they need to put more pressure on Russia, too, to halt its daily slaughter and bombing in Ukraine’s cities. Putin could stop this war today – after all, he alone started it. The fact he refuses to do so is proof, if it were needed, of Zelenskyy’s contention that he cannot be trusted in anything he says. He must be squeezed further.Right now, the opposite is happening. Military analysts warn that a gleeful Kremlin, encouraged by western discord, may step up its offensive in the east and try to capitalise on Ukraine’s demoralisation, perhaps even reinstating Putin’s original plan to seize the whole country. To deter such scenarios, EU leaders, meeting again in Brussels on Thursday after their London weekend talks, must finally bury their differences and draw a line.Starmer says that he and Macron are now developing a plan. Good. The leading European Nato powers should demand an immediate halt to all fighting in Ukraine and Kursk. They should launch a peace process inclusive of all interested parties, without preconditions or prior concessions. If Putin balks, they must withdraw their diplomats, close borders with Russia, move to interdict its exports, mobilise their armed forces – and set a deadline for providing defensive air cover for all unoccupied Ukrainian territory. Russia must be reminded that the west has teeth, too – and will, if forced, resist Putin’s unlawful aggression with everything it has got. Enough of Trump’s scaremongering nonsense about a third world war. Putin is a mass murderer, not a mad murderer. He’s also a coward.Given Trump’s treachery and threats to cut military aid, only a strong, united Europe stands a chance of preventing Ukraine’s defeat on the battlefield. Were Ukraine forced to capitulate to a Kremlin deal and lose its sovereignty, it would set a disastrous precedent for free people everywhere, from Taiwan and Tibet to Moldova, Estonia, Panama and Greenland.Marco Rubio, Trump’s obsequious secretary of state, spoke revealingly last month about his vision of a 21st-century world dominated by the US, Russia and China, and divided into 19th-century geopolitical spheres of influence. It was necessary to rebuild US relations with Moscow, Rubio argued, to maintain this imperious tripartite balance of power. This is the partitioned future that awaits if Trump’s surrender strategy prevails and he and Putin carve up Ukraine.Such a global catastrophe was foretold. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a nightmare world divvied up between three great empires or superstates, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, which deliberately stoke unceasing hostilities. Their shared characteristics: totalitarianism, mass surveillance, repression, immorality, gross inhumanity. Sound familiar? Annalena Baerbock, foreign minister of Germany, a country that knows much about fascism, past and present, recently said that a “new era of wickedness has begun”. Ukrainians, under occupation, are only too familiar with the evil that has descended upon their heads. This is the violent, lawless dystopia towards which the Americans in the Oval Office are leading us. Unless they are stopped. Unless we fight. Unless Europe resists.

      Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator More

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      Starmer struggles to remain upright under the weight of his contradictions | Zoe Williams

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      If I were Volodymyr Zelenskyy, I’d be thinking, either Keir Starmer has a fiendishly intelligent and subtle mind, or he is bananas. Starmer channelled the giants of British history (everyone we’re not embarrassed of; basically, Winston Churchill) on Sunday. He said we were at a “crossroads in history”.He used the phrase “we are gathered here today”, which I suppose was literally true, as they were, but also had a strange church-y overtone, as if he were trying to borrow the actual authority of God, and he explicitly yoked together the peace and security of Ukraine with that of everyone – all of Europe, but also “us” – Justin Trudeau was there, so presumably Canada’s, too. Pictures of him hugging Zelenskyy ahead were almost tear-jerkingly sincere.He was then asked by journalists following Saturday afternoon’s statement – who came at the question from many directions – whether he considered the US to be inside or outside his plan for a durable peace, and he was trenchant.“Europe and the US have to stand together and that position must be strong”; “I do not accept that the US is an unreliable ally”. It was an absolute head-scratcher – because the US does not seek a sovereign Ukraine, safe in perpetuity from Russian aggression.Donald Trump and JD Vance showed the world what they think of this war on Friday, and they are in an opposite world, Zelenskyy is the one risking the lives of ordinary people, and the war is for him to end – while giving up his nation’s mineral rights to the US and thanking them for the privilege.That meeting in the White House was easily the most gruesome display of bullying and manipulation that televised geopolitics has ever put on. So in what world does the guy you just hugged get to walk away proud and sovereign, with US backing? In what conceivable world is Trump on the same team as these assembled leaders?Starmer was under considerable pressure in his short speech, which we have to hope was just because history had its eyes on him, and not because he’s overwhelmed by the weight of his own contradictions.Words were mangled into non-words, “step” became “stet”, “presume” got funked with “preserve”. And yet, his lawyerly clarity remained. He had five points, they were all different, they all made sense, he said them all in the right order.“We will keep the military aid flowing … to strengthen Ukraine now,” he said, adding that the £2.2bn loan to Zelenskyy would come from frozen Russian assets, and the £1.6bn of UK export finance would be channelled straight back into the UK economy via the air defence industry in Belfast.“Any lasting peace,” he continued, “must ensure Ukraine’s sovereignty and security and Ukraine must be at the table”. It’s a simple and defensible point, but it also goes head to head against Trump, who has argued throughout that all it’ll take for a peace deal is him, Putin, a copy of The Art of the Deal and a box of cigars.Third, “in the event of a peace deal, we will keep boosting Ukraine’s own defensive capabilities”, Starmer said, which, again, sounds fair enough and yet at the same time runs directly counter to any of the noises coming out of Washington.Fourth, he will assemble “a coalition of the willing, to defend a deal in Ukraine. Not every nation will feel able to contribute but that can’t mean that we sit back.” Here’s the kicker: “this effort must have US backing”.Well, OK, but who on earth would assume that backing? And what would it cost? Do we have to watch Zelenskyy get beaten up live on air, for the US to fall in with the crowd but still feel like it won?Peter Mandelson had told ABC News earlier that “President Zelenskyy [must give] his unequivocal backing to the initiative that President Trump is taking to end the war and to bring a just and lasting peace to Ukraine,” and seriously, all we can do in the face of that counter-messaging is hope that Mandelson’s forgotten he’s the UK’s diplomat to the US and thinks he’s just a guy on a podcast.Starmer’s fifth point was a bit muddled: “Leaders must meet again very soon. We are at a crossroads in history today. This is not a moment for more talk.” What are they going to do at the meeting, if not talk more? Never mind. Don’t pick holes. We need to believe there’s a grand plan behind all this, because the alternative is just horrendous. More

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      Starmer’s diplomatic flurry puts him at centre of attempts to shape Ukraine-Russia deal

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      As Keir Starmer and his aides huddled to discuss their response to Friday’s calamitous White House meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the prime minister’s team pondered whether to issue a statement on social media.Already messages of support were flooding in for the Ukrainian president from other European leaders, including Emmanuel Macron of France and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.But the prime minister decided to stay silent and instead display his backing with action rather than words. After a series of phone calls on Friday night, Starmer brought forward a planned visit by Zelenskyy to London, giving him the opportunity for a symbolic meeting at Downing Street followed by an audience with King Charles.“I picked up the phone to President Trump, and I picked up the phone to President Zelensky,” Starmer told the BBC on Sunday. “That was my response.”Starmer’s flurry of diplomatic activity has resulted in a Franco-British peace effort which puts the prime minister at the centre of European attempts to shape any deal between Moscow and Kyiv.“Starmer’s was a big gesture,” said Bronwen Maddox, the director of the Chatham House thinktank. “Having Zelenskyy here, having that meeting, mattered. There is no need to go rushing around tweeting. He’s now trying to be a bridge between the US and Zelenskyy and Europe, which is a reasonable ambition.”Some even believe this could be Starmer’s “Falklands moment”, referring to the way Margaret Thatcher took on Argentina over the Falkland Islands and in doing so rebooted her flagging premiership. By Sunday morning, Starmer was being backed by the leaders of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.“It’s really important that this summit the prime minister is having today goes well and we support him in that,” the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, said on Sunday.Starmer’s calls with Trump and Zelenskyy on Friday night focused on trying to get the minerals deal between the two countries back on track.One Downing Street official said: “We need to ensure there is a minerals agreement and there is a plan for stopping the fighting and giving Ukraine the security guarantees it needs. The minerals deal is still on the table.”View image in fullscreenOfficials rejected reports that Starmer’s call with Zelenskyy had been “emotional”, but said the Ukrainian president had clearly found his encounter with Trump “bruising”. The two men agreed that Zelenskyy would visit London 24 hours earlier than planned, allowing him time for a longer meeting in Downing Street before a trip to Sandringham on Sunday to meet King Charles.Officials said the visit to see the king was a deliberate message to Washington, where Trump is eagerly awaiting his own audience with the monarch, with US officials pushing for a state visit as soon as this year.Starmer then spent Saturday around the cabinet table in discussions with Jonathan Powell, his national security adviser, and other senior officials. They had come to the conclusion there was little they could do to restart US-Ukrainian talks, so decided to come up with an alternative plan to help shape the peace deal.The plan they hit upon was a separate set of discussions, this time involving Britain, France, Ukraine and potentially one or two others, to formulate their own prospective deal to present to the US. The talks would provide a counterbalance to those between the US and Russia which have excluded Ukraine and European countries.Starmer called Macron, who welcomed the idea. But there was one more hurdle to clear: the prime minister had to call the US president for the second time in two days to make sure he was not opposed.Officials briefed on the call would not say what Trump’s reaction to the idea was, or even whether he indicated he would not stand in the way. But the prime minister was sufficiently emboldened by the conversation that he decided to announce the talks on the BBC on Sunday morning.“The second Trump call was much more focused on not wanting to go back over what has happened, but saying, if we move forward with this other plan, would you be interested in us doing that?” said one British official. “There is no point in us doing this if the US didn’t feel there was space for that. Clearly we are doing it, so we thought it was a worthwhile exercise.”Saturday evening culminated with Starmer’s Downing Street talks with Zelenskyy. In front of the assembled press, the prime minister took the unusual step of leaving No 10 to greet Zelenskyy from his car, before walking him back down the street again after their meeting.View image in fullscreen“And as you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom,” Starmer told his Ukrainian counterpart. “We stand with you, with Ukraine, for as long as it may take.”Sunday was yet another intense day of diplomacy for the prime minister, who began by speaking to the leaders of all three Baltic states and then hosted the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, at Downing Street. Meloni, who arguably has the best relations with Trump of any European leader, has called for an immediate summit between the US, EU and other allied countries to discuss Ukraine.From there, Starmer travelled to Lancaster House for his defence summit, which was attended by representatives from across Europe, as well as officials from Turkey and Nato.British officials are aware that all this activity may result in very little. They have yet to secure their main objective – a promise from Trump to offer military backing to any British and European troops posted to secure a new border between Russia and Ukraine.But for now, Downing Street is delighted that the prime minister has managed to navigate the turbulent geopolitics of a Trump-led US, and in doing so prove that post-Brexit Britain can still play a global leadership role.“It’s a testament to the relationship the prime minister has with the presidents of both America and Ukraine that he was able to host Zelenskyy and speak to Trump not once but twice over the days,” said one official.Additional reporting by Angela Giuffrida in Rome More