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    ‘Completely out of touch’: golf and dinners for ‘king’ Trump as economy melts down

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    After lighting a fuse under global financial markets, Donald Trump stepped back – all the way to a Florida golf course. A week later, having just caved to pressure to ease his trade tariffs, the US president defended the retreat while hosting racing car champions at the White House.Trump had spent the time in between golfing, dining with donors and making insouciant declarations such as “this is a great time to get rich”, even as the US economy melted down.It was a jolting juxtaposition that prompted comparisons with the emperor Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned, or insane monarchs who lost touch with reality. It also provided a clear illustration of how Trump governs during his volatile and extreme second presidency: erratically, with little attention to convention, and often on the hoof from one public engagement to another surrounded by courtiers who never disagree with him.“He’s certainly living up to the caricature of being a mad king,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “When you’re addressing a ballroom in a tuxedo, telling people to take the painful medicine, or on your umpteenth golf vacation while economic chaos is rippling throughout this country and others, at best you’re completely out of touch.“At worst, you’re a sociopathic narcissist who doesn’t give a crap about anyone suffering. Ultimately there will be a political price to pay for that.”Trump had swerved past April Fools’ Day to make 2 April his so-called “liberation day”. Against a backdrop of giant US flags in the White House Rose Garden, he announced sweeping tariffs – taxes on foreign imports – on dozens of countries, using a widely discredited formula to upend the decades-old order of global trade.Trump did not decide on the final plan until less than three hours ahead of his splashy event, according to the Washington Post newspaper, but found Vice-President JD Vance and other staff constantly deferential. The Post quoted a person close to his inner circle as saying: “He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck any more. Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a fuck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”A day later, with markets suffering trillions of dollars in losses, Trump boarded Air Force One bound for Miami, Florida. He arrived at his Doral resort for a Saudi-funded LIV Golf event in a golf cart driven by his son Eric Trump.Trump woke up on Friday at Mar-a-Lago, his gilded private club in Palm Beach, Florida, and donned a red “Make America great again” cap and white polo shirt. His limousine glided down a street lined with palm streets and cheering fans before arriving at his golf club.He also spent the morning defending himself on his Truth Social media platform and vowing to stay the course. “TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE,” he wrote.Trump remained in Florida during the dignified transfer of four US soldiers killed during a training exercise in Lithuania, sending Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to Dover air force base in Delaware to represent him. Instead the president attended a candlelit dinner for Maga Inc, an allied political organisation, reportedly charging $1m a plate.Maggie Haberman, a Trump biographer and New York Times reporter, commented on CNN: “I think long ago he stopped caring about certain optics, and he’s made very clear during this presidency, he’s going to do what he wants … He is not messaging this in a way that suggests that he understands what average people might be going through right now.”On Saturday, Trump played at another family golf course, in Jupiter, Florida, prompting an official White House announcement: “The president won his second round matchup of the senior club championship today in Jupiter, Fla., and advances to the championship round on Sunday.”When Sunday came the president played on even as his cabinet members scrambled to political TV shows and offered conflicting signals, with some insisting that his tariffs were set in stone and others suggesting that he remained open to negotiation.Trump returned to Washington and a growing chorus of dissent from allies, captains of industry and his own Republican loyalty, pleading with him to change course before a potential recession turned into a depression. Yet his first public event was a celebration of baseball’s World Series winners, the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he was presented with a “Trump 47” baseball shirt.On Tuesday, in bow tie and tuxedo, Trump told a fundraising dinner in Washington: “I know what the hell I’m doing.” He claimed that the tariffs were forcing world leaders to negotiate with him, boasting: “I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal.”But the following day, Trump blinked. He posted on Truth Social that, while escalating tariffs on China, he would pause others for 90 days to allow space for negotiation. His bubble of wealth and power had finally been punctured.Trump has often proved impervious to the kind of scandals or gaffes that would damage another politician, but his casual attitude even as the markets were on fire suggested a man uniquely detached from the anxieties of ordinary people, including his own voters.Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Let them eat cake: Marie Antoinette kind of fits. He won his own golf tournament at his own club. How about that? Bill Clinton also cheated at golf a lot and people would let him win because he was president. It’s just the way they are. Rules don’t apply.”This is not the first time that Trump, accused by critics of demanding absolute loyalty from courtiers, pursuing vengeance against perceived enemies and displaying scorn for his subjects, has been likened to a monarch.Speaking at the Politics and Prose bookshop in Washington last weekend, Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist and author of the book Notorious, compared the president to William Shakespeare’s Richard III.“Richard III comes up to the edge of the stage and wraps the audience into the bad thing he’s about to do,” Dowd told the Guardian during a question and answer session. “He tells them and he uses humour so that he’s supposed to be the villain, but the humour kind of counters it so you don’t think of him as badly.“Trump does the same thing … He has this kind of wacky side so then when he does the very authoritarian stuff you get deflected by the crazy side he has. I think the SNL [Saturday Night Live] mimic captures this where he’s sort of being funny, so then when he turns authoritarian, you’re thinking: wait, is he really doing what I think he’s doing?” More

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      While Trump slashes jobs, his golf trips are costing taxpayers millions | Mohamad Bazzi

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      It’s no secret that Donald Trump loves to golf, especially at his own resorts. But Trump’s habit is costing US taxpayers tens of millions of dollars – even as he decries fraud and claims to slash waste in federal spending.Since he took office, Trump has fired tens of thousands of federal workers and tried to shut down agencies, part of his effort to unilaterally dismantle the government. He has also made seven trips to Florida and the golf courses he owns there.This weekend, Trump made his seventh visit to Florida and his sixth to his waterfront mansion and private club at Mar-a-Lago since his inauguration on 20 January. As Richard Luscombe noted in the Guardian last week, Trump’s frequent trips to his own properties not only cost taxpayer funds, but they benefit him directly – his businesses have charged the US government to house Secret Service agents and other White House staff. In other words, American taxpayers pay the Trump Organization for the right to protect Trump and his family.During Trump’s first term, his properties had a history of overcharging the Secret Service, by as much as 300% beyond the authorized government hotel rates, according to a report issued by Democrats in Congress last year. The report found that the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service as much as $1,815 a room per night to stay at the Trump International hotel in Washington DC – billing the US government significantly more than the hotel did for “rooms rented by the Qatari royal family and Chinese business interests”.It’s difficult to gauge exactly how much the Secret Service and other agencies spent at Trump properties, since various reports and audits focus on specific time periods instead of his full four years in office. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) estimated that the Secret Service paid nearly $2m to Trump-owned properties. Trump visited his properties an astounding 547 times during his first term, according to an analysis by Crew. That included 145 trips to Mar-a-Lago, 328 visits to Trump’s various golf courses and 33 visits to the Trump hotel in Washington, which his company sold in 2022 but is now negotiating to buy back.The cost to US taxpayers for Trump’s jaunts to Mar-a-Lago, which he calls his “winter White House”, far exceeds renting rooms for the president’s security entourage. A 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which examined four trips that Trump took to his Palm Beach resort during his first term, put the total cost at $13.6m, or about $3.4m for each visit. That includes flying Air Force One, along with a separate cargo plane that carries the presidential motorcade, between Washington and the Palm Beach international airport. With seven trips so far into his current term, the US government has likely already spent more than $23m on Trump’s golf outings.And that estimate doesn’t capture the full costs to taxpayers. The GAO report does not account for additional federal funds to reimburse local law enforcement agencies for protecting Trump while he’s in Florida. The Palm Beach county sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, has said that his department spends $240,000 a day to help the Secret Service protect Trump. Bradshaw recently asked county commissioners for $45m in additional funds to provide security for Trump’s visits through the rest of this year – and the county is asking Congress to reimburse those costs.Trump often conducted official business and brought other senior US officials on his golf-focused trips to his properties – and he is repeating this pattern early in his second term, when he has visited Mar-a-Lago nearly every weekend. Trump’s frequent trips to his golf clubs send the message to foreign leaders, business executives, lobbyists, Republicans in Congress, and others who want to curry favor with the Trump administration that his properties are open for business. Throughout his first term, Trump dodged accusations that he was violating the US constitution’s emoluments clause as his businesses accepted money from foreign governments or lobbyists connected to them. Trump’s businesses received $7.8m from at least 20 foreign governments during his first administration, according to a report issued by congressional Democrats last year, although a later analysis by Crew estimated that payments from foreign governments reached $13.6m.At Mar-a-Lago, business leaders were recently offered one-on-one meetings with Trump for $5m, while others paid $1m a seat for a small-group candlelight dinner with the president. Those funds seem to be going to Make America Great Again Inc, a Super Pac that spent more than $450m on Trump’s presidential campaign last year, and is now expected to raise funds for a presidential library that would be built after Trump leaves office.Previous US presidents enjoyed playing golf, including Barack Obama and George W Bush. In fact, as a private citizen, Trump mocked Obama dozens of times for leaving Washington to play golf during his presidency. In August 2016, during his first presidential campaign, Trump pledged he wouldn’t have much time to hit the greens. “I’m going to be working for you,” he told a rally in Virginia. “I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”Of course, Trump ended up spending far more of his first term as president playing golf than Obama had. And Trump’s problem is not how often he plays or how many weekends he takes off. Because Trump refuses to divest from ownership of his family business, his frequent golf outings go beyond questionable government spending – the president is enriching himself through payments that US agencies make to Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties.The president is exempt from conflict of interest laws that ban federal employees from taking actions that would directly benefit them. Since the 1970s, US presidents have voluntarily abided by these laws, and put their financial holdings in a blind trust. But Trump refused to divest from his extensive business interests during his first term, creating a web of conflicts and potential corruption. Today, Trump is more emboldened to ignore US laws and norms set by past presidents, partly thanks to last year’s supreme court ruling that concluded that Trump has “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts”.Since taking office in January, Trump and his allies, especially the billionaire Elon Musk, rushed to dismantle many of the safeguards put in place after the Watergate scandal to monitor government corruption and punish officials involved in ethics violations. Trump fired 17 inspectors general who served as watchdogs over federal agencies, and he gutted a unit at the justice department that was created in 1976, after Watergate, to prosecute public corruption cases.In his first term, Trump did not suffer any consequences for playing a lot of golf – and using the presidency to enrich himself and his family. Now, he seems determined to spend even more time shuttling back and forth to his golf courses at taxpayer expense, with a chunk of that money going to his businesses.

      Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies, and a journalism professor at New York University More

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      US Senate narrowly confirms Kash Patel as next FBI director

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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.That objective to implement the Trump administration’s mandate has already taken hold at the justice department, which oversees the bureau and last week forced through the dismissal of corruption charges against Eric Adams, the New York mayor, in order to get his help to deport undocumented immigrants.The greatest challenge for recent FBI directors has been the delicate balance of retaining Trump’s confidence while resisting pressure to make public pronouncements or open criminal investigations that are politically motivated or that personally benefit the president.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 also 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.Patel ultimately clarified, in something of a partial admission under close questioning from senator Cory Booker, that although he witnessed Trump issue a declassification order for some documents, he did not actually know whether they applied to the documents found at Mar-a-Lago.Democrats have unanimously considered Patel’s track record in the first Trump administration, his incendiary remarks criticizing the bureau he was nominated to lead and more generally his role in the classified documents case to be disqualifying.When Trump tapped Patel last year, Democrats largely believed it would lead to a backlash that would sink his nomination. No resistance ever materialized, in part because Patel was less controversial than some of Trump’s other nominees, such as Pete Hegseth for defense secretary.Patel was formerly a public defender in Florida before joining the justice department in 2014 as a line prosecutor in the national security division.In 2017, Patel became a top Republican aide on the House intelligence committee, where he authored a politically charged memo accusing the FBI and the justice department of abusing surveillance powers to spy on a Trump adviser. The memo was criticized as misleading, though an inspector general later found errors with aspects of the surveillance.His efforts impressed Trump, who brought him into the administration and quickly elevated him to national security and defense roles. By the end of Trump’s first term, he was the chief of staff to defense secretary Chris Miller and briefly considered for CIA director.While John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Trump, found a catalog of mistakes by prosecutors in the Russia investigation, he found no evidence that officials had been motivated by political animus and brought no charges – contrary to claims by Trump and Patel. More

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      Trump justice department fires officials who worked for prosecutor Jack Smith

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      The acting attorney general, James McHenry, on Monday fired more than a dozen federal prosecutors who worked on the two criminal cases against Donald Trump, saying they could not be trusted to implement the president’s agenda for the justice department, two people familiar with the matter said.The precise extent of the firings were unclear because the department did not disclose names. At the time the cases were dismissed last year, after Trump won the election, special counsel Jack Smith had 18 prosecutors attached to his team.The purge was not unexpected given Trump had vowed, on the campaign trail, to fire Smith. But the abrupt firings were jarring as the acting attorney general took aim at career prosecutors who had served at the department who in theory had civil service protections for their jobs.Smith charged Trump in two criminal cases: in Florida, for mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and defying a subpoena commanding their return; and in Washington, for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.In the termination notices transmitted to the prosecutors who worked on Smith’s team, McHenry wrote that they were being let go as a result of their “significant role in prosecuting President Trump” which meant they could not be trusted to “assist in faithfully implementing the president’s agenda”.The termination of Smith’s team comes as major personnel changes shook the deputy attorney general’s office, where the top career official, Brad Weinsheimer, was informed he could either be reassigned to a less powerful post or resign, according to a person familiar with the matter.Weinsheimer, a highly respected veteran of the justice department, was appointed to his current role on an interim basis by Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, which was made permanent by Trump’s final attorney general, Bill Barr.But Trump has since soured on Sessions and Barr, and their endorsements appear to have been of no help to Weinsheimer as the new Trump administration moves to clear the senior leadership of the justice department as they prepare to use it to enforce Trump’s personal and political agenda.The White House and a justice department spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment on the personnel moves, which were earlier reported by Fox News.Shortly after Trump announced his presidential bid in November 2022, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed Smith to serve as a special counsel overseeing the investigation of Trump. Smith resigned before Trump took office.In a report released this month, Smith concluded that the president engaged in an “unprecedented criminal effort” to hold on to power after losing the 2020 election, but was thwarted in bringing the case to trial by Trump’s November election victory. Smith also investigated Trump’s retention of classified documents after he left the White House, filing a second federal lawsuit in Florida.Trump’s lawyers have called Smith’s report politically motivated. The president denies any wrongdoing in the cases, both of which Smith dropped shortly after Trump’s election win, citingThe two special counsel investigations resulted in indictments, but Smith dropped the cases against Trump after the election, citing a longstanding justice department policy that prohibits the prosecution of a sitting president.In a separate development, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that a Trump-appointed prosecutor had opened an internal review of the justice department’s decision to charge hundreds of January 6 defendants with felony obstruction offenses in connection with the 2021 attack on the US Capitol. More

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      Are US women protesting Trump by ‘swearing off sex with men’? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Have rumours of a US sex strike been greatly exaggerated?Sex sells. Sex strikes, meanwhile, make for an irresistible headline. Ever since Donald Trump overwhelmingly won the election, there have been endless headlines about how American women are emulating South Korea’s fringe 4B movement (which encourages heterosexual women not to date, procreate, marry or have sex with men) and “swearing off sex with men” in protest.“A Sex Strike Is a Losing Strategy for American Women,” a recent op-ed in the New York Times proclaimed, for example.“No sex. No dating. No marriage. No children. Interest grows in 4B movement to swear off men,” a PBS headline declared.“Ahead of Trump’s Second Term, Calls for a Sex Strike Grow Online,” the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) wrote.It’s certainly true that there has been a spike in US interest in the 4B movement. Voluntary celibacy was growing in popularity long before the election but Trump’s victory gave it a huge boost. There are more than 100,000 videos about 4B on TikTok and there has been a surge in Google searches relating to it. There have also been various viral calls for women to withhold sex in order to protest against Trump. (Just in case you’re wondering if you have a severe case of deja vu, there were also calls for a sex strike during Trump’s first term.)But is this online chatter actually translating to offline action? It doesn’t seem that way yet. There is zero evidence that there are large-scale sex strikes protesting against Trump happening in the US. All the hand-wringing by the likes of the New York Times seems to be over something that doesn’t actually exist. The headlines treating women as some sort of monolith also obscure the fact that, according to AP VoteCast, 53% of white women voted for Trump this year.Still, that doesn’t mean that growing interest in 4B should be written off as some sort of meaningless fad. On the contrary, engagement with the movement points to the fact that many women are not taking Trump’s victory lying down. While there may be no proof of widespread strikes in the sheets, there have been plenty of demonstrations on the streets. Meanwhile, online sales of emergency contraceptives and abortion pills are rocketing before the “reproductive apocalypse” that will be Trump’s second term. With rights being rolled back and pregnancy growing increasingly dangerous in the US, women are also reconsidering whether they want to have children.Let’s say that sex strikes did actually take off, however. Might they be effective? The most famous sex strike certainly was. In the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes, women withhold sex in an attempt to end the Peloponnesian war and the ruse pays off: peace is declared. Since then, there have been plenty of other real-world sex strikes with varying results, waged everywhere from Belgium to Liberia. A small town in Colombia held a “crossed legs” protest in 2011, for example; women refused sex with their husbands until the government paved a road linking their town to the rest of the province. The protest is widely considered to have been successful.Less headline-worthy forms of protest, however, tend to be rather more effective. This, by the way, is the rather less talked-about message in Lysistrata itself. As the cultural critic and classicist Helen Morales told the Guardian back in 2022, the play isn’t just about sex strikes: “There are elder women seizing control of the treasury and the younger women withdraw their unpaid labour at home. They’re much more a model for effecting political change.”How the Taliban are erasing Afghanistan’s women – photo essay“It was important for us to look beyond the traditional representations of Afghan women as passive victims of the Taliban and show them as active players in their own lives,” say journalist Mélissa Cornet and photographer Kiana Hayeri in this piece for the Guardian.Argentina votes alone against UN resolution combating misogynistic online violenceWhich is not a huge surprise as Argentina’s President Javier Milei is incredibly rightwing and a vocal critic of the UN.Gender-fluid Mary, Queen of Scots ballet to debut at Edinburgh festival 2025It’s the latest example of a trend of gender-neutral casting in artistic productions. You can guarantee that this will drive the usual suspects completely bonkers.Armie Hammer’s mother gifted him a vasectomy for his birthdayThe disgraced actor, who has been accused of sexual abuse by multiple women, has returned to public life via a podcast. He seems to be having trouble rustling up guests so recently had his mum on the podcast, where she shared this little snippet of info.What happened to Palestinian-Egyptian actor May Calamawy’s role in Gladiator II?When Calamawy was originally cast (long before 7 October 2023) it was reported that she’d have an “important” or leading role. Now it seems like she has been all but cut from the movie – relegated to a tiny non-speaking background part. There has been a lot of speculation that this is punishment for her pro-Palestinian advocacy. As we have seen, talking about a genocide and ethnic cleansing can be a real career-killer.Sydney Sweeney says female solidarity in Hollywood is ‘fake’Wait, you’re telling me that Hollywood – a place that fetishizes unrealistic beauty ideals and where women over 40 struggle to find roles – isn’t a utopia of intersectional feminism? You’re kidding me!Iran announces ‘treatment clinic’ for women who defy strict hijab laws“It won’t be a clinic, it will be a prison,” one young woman from Iran told the Guardian.Sweden’s minister for gender equality is terrified of bananasAs someone who also hates bananas with a passion, I would like to extend my solidarity to Paulina Brandberg, whose banana-phobia has made international headlines. As one of her colleagues noted, we should be focusing on her work to help vulnerable women rather than her hatred for an alarmingly yellow fruit.The week in pawtriarchyJust in case you were wondering whether the US could get any more dystopian, it turns out that robot dogs are guarding Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Still, probably better to have robots rather than the real thing considering how close Trump is to Kristi Noem. The South Dakota governor, whom Trump has just picked for head of homeland security, famously wrote about shooting and killing her family dog, Cricket, and an unnamed goat. More

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      Loyalists and jesters fill Trump’s ‘winter White House’ for court of King Donald

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      View image in fullscreenThe shutters are down, the curtains are open, and Donald Trump’s opulent, waterfront palace of intrigue is open for business once more. A succession of ambitious, ultra-loyal subjects has paraded through, vying for attention and seeking favors from the throne. Servants fall over themselves to indulge their master’s every whim. And then there are the jesters …Given this week’s extraordinary developments at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, as he builds the cabinet with which he will govern in January, it is difficult to escape the notion that the operation is being run something akin to a royal court.Trump certainly gives the appearance of acting as America’s first monarch since the official end of the revolutionary war in 1783, plotting, scheming and playing favorites, and setting individuals against each other as his courtiers are assembled.His unexpected nomination as attorney general of the Mar-a-Lago regular Matt Gaetz, the controversial Florida congressman under investigation for sexual misconduct, was a power move that wrong-footed even his closest advisers, and threw a gauntlet to Republicans in the US Senate who must confirm the appointment.It followed Trump’s equally astonishing choice a day earlier of a weekend presenter from the rightwing TV station Fox News to be the US defense secretary in charge of the world’s largest and most potent military: Pete Hegseth, the ultimate entertainer who caught the eye of the king.Public health experts decried the choice of the vaccine denier Robert F Kennedy Jr as health secretary. And perhaps the most bizarre spectacle of all is the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, a billionaire who has been elected to precisely nothing, strutting around the expansive resort’s perfectly manicured lawns and flaunting his new bromance with the next supposed leader of the free world.Reports say Musk has accompanied Trump almost every day since the election, joining telephone calls to multiple world leaders, offering advice on policy and staffing decisions, playing golf with Trump family members, and dining with them on the open-air patio.Musk received a standing ovation from assembled guests on the other side of the red velvet rope, according to the New York Times, and joined Trump and the classical singer Chris Macchio in a cringy rendition of God Bless America at a Thursday night gala.On Tuesday, five days into his tenure as Trump’s most favored house guest, Musk was named joint head of the freshlycreated Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), where he will generate plans to “slash and burn” government spending. It remains to be seen if any proposed cuts extend to the billions of dollars in lucrative government contracts and subsidies enjoyed by his own companies, SpaceX and Tesla.“He loves Mar-a-Lago. Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him,” Trump joked to Republicans on Wednesday in his first return to Washington DC since the election, before adding ominously: “Until I don’t like him.”Observers say it is no surprise that these machinations are playing out at Mar-a-Lago, the $1m-a-head private members’ club haughtily branded his “winter White House” by Trump during his first term, where he handed out ambassadorships to wealthy friends and donors, and where he took policy advice from regulars written on cocktail napkins.“A lot of action will get done down there during Trump’s second term, as we’re seeing right now with the transition,” said the political historian Matt Dallek, professor of political management at George Washington University.“It’s really a hub. People come in and out of there all the time, he spends a great deal of time there, and as he famously likes to do, he has multiple people telling him different things and he talks to a lot of people.“He’ll be talking to his wealthy friends, and people who come to the resort from around the world to pay homage to him there. He partly likes it because it’s kind of a shrine to him, and it’s his best version of himself, his best vision of himself and the kind of power that he wants to cultivate. He loves the attention. He loves the people coming in and around him.”Dallek noted that Trump also thrived on the atmosphere of unpredictability his presence at Mar-a-Lago creates. This was evident this week by his unorthodox cabinet hiring and procession of hopefuls desperate for an interview in a hastily assembled war room at what CNN called the “chaotic epicenter” of his transition.“There’s a certain amount of chaos that has long surrounded Trump, that Trump really cultivates, and that is a core part of his political identity. And Mar-a-Lago has been a center of that chaos,” Dallek said.“It’s been a kind of hothouse of fringe figures who’ve come there. He dined there with Ye, the antisemitic rapper, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist. There have been foreign spies who have attempted to penetrate the resort. It’s where he stored some of the most highly classified documents on the planet in his bathroom.“We don’t need to look very far back in time to get a sense of the goings-on, how freewheeling and just how bonkers it is. He’s dealing with these incredibly important matters of life and death, of national security, and doing it in this unsecured, chaotic atmosphere where people are coming and going all the time, and where some of his more memorable, and memorably unhinged, moments have occurred.”Dallek, and others, expect Trump to spend considerable time at Mar-a-Lago during his second term. During his first four years in office, the Washington Post calculated in 2021, he was there for all or part of 142 days, and played an estimated 87 rounds at his Trump International golf club in West Palm Beach. Mar-a-Lago’s 128 guest suites are always full when he is in residence.“It’s possible that some people just want to hang out with the president and the people who are around the president, but I think people were explicit about it and the first presidency was an opportunity to be able to tell him what your thoughts were, but also to seek favor,” Robert Weissman, president of the Washington DC-based pro-transparency group Public Citizen, told the Guardian in August.“There are profound and systemic issues regarding ethics, and big money, and access for the rich, but Trump is in a category by himself.”As well as operating Mar-a-Lago as his command center ahead of his second administration, Trump is also reaping a significant financial windfall.Mar-a-Lago is expected to be at full occupancy until January’s inauguration, and CNN reported that members had been offered money by outsiders eager to accompany them on to the grounds to get face time with him.Even after he takes office, return trips to Mar-a-Lago will keep Trump’s coffers swollen. In October, it was revealed that Trump properties had overcharged the Secret Service by 300% for rooms occupied by agents providing security for Trump and his family.“Of course it’ll be a money-making opportunity for him,” Dallek said. “Which he’ll never pass up.” More

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      Man charged with threatening judge in Florida district that heard Trump case

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      A man from Illinois has been charged with making violent threats against a federal judge in the Florida district that has handled Donald Trump’s classified documents case, according to an indictment made public on Thursday.Eric James Rennert, 65, is facing five federal charges in the indictment which accuses him of communicating interstate threats and threatening to assault, kidnap and murder a federal judge.The communications also included threats to injure or kidnap members of the judge’s family, prosecutors allege.Court documents do not name the judge who received the threats but indicate they occurred in St Lucie county, Florida. US district judge Aileen Cannon, who presided over the criminal case accusing Trump of illegally retaining classified documents, is based in that county along with another federal magistrate judge.Representatives for the US attorney’s office in Miami, which brought the indictment, and the federal court in the southern district of Florida did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The threats, which were made on three occasions in May and July, were intended to retaliate against the judge “on account of the performance of official duties”, according to the indictment.Rennert has been arrested and will be transported to Florida for his next court appearance, according to court records. He has not yet entered a plea.Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump during his presidency, and her approach to the classified documents case drew intense scrutiny. She dismissed all charges in July based on a finding that lead prosecutor and special counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed to the role.Prosecutors are appealing Cannon’s ruling with the hopes of reviving the case. If they were to succeed, any trial would not take place until well after the 5 November presidential election, in which the Republican Trump faces Vice-President Kamala Harris.Cannon was also recently assigned to preside over the case of a man accused of attempting to assassinate Trump last month at his Florida golf course. A woman in Texas was sentenced to more than three years in prison in February after admitting to threatening Cannon, court records show.Federal judges have faced a rise in threats as part of an overall surge in violent rhetoric directed toward public officials in the United States. More

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      American rule of law is vanishing at the tips of Trump-appointed judges’ pens | Moira Donegan

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      Donald Trump stole thousands of classified documents when he left the White House in 2021, according to prosecutors, and shoved them in unsecured areas around the tacky Florida golf club where he lives. He kept them in basements, bathrooms and ballrooms; they were often unlocked, accessible to anyone who happened to wander by, as dozens or hundreds of people do, every day, at Mar-a-Lago. Trump refused to return the documents when asked; he also lied about what he had.On at least one occasion in 2021, he was recorded showing off one of the classified documents to a visitor, apparently for the sake of his own aggrandizement. “It is like highly confidential. Secret,” Trump said to the man, who was not authorized to see the information. “See, as president, I could have declassified it. Now, I can’t, but this is still a secret.”Aileen Cannon, a US district court judge in Florida whom Donald Trump appointed during his last year in office, has done everything in her power to make sure Trump is never held accountable for the theft of the documents. Since the special counsel Jack Smith’s case – widely considered to be the most legally airtight of the several criminal prosecutions against the former president – was formally assigned to Cannon in June 2023, she has often acted as if she was a member of the defense team; denying routine motions from the prosecutors, antagonizing Smith and his team personally, and dragging on the proceedings in endless rounds of briefings and delays, all surely meant to postpone the case until after Trump retakes the White House.On Monday, she dismissed the case entirely, throwing out all the document-related charges against Trump. Her purported reasoning? That special counsels such as Jack Smith are unconstitutional. Smith signaled that he plans to appeal the decision.Cannon’s ruling flies in the face of decades of precedent, going back to the Watergate era, wherein courts, including the US supreme court, have repeatedly reaffirmed the constitutionality of special counsels and their appointments. But although Cannon wears a robe, she is not interested in the law, which is a mere pretext for her bald effort to advance and protect Trump’s interests. She is not a judge any more than the man who works at the mall every December is Santa Claus. She has the trappings and the power, but none of the expertise, none of the obligations and none of the shame.Cannon’s dismissal of the Trump documents case was predictable: the prosecution, widely considered to be doomed, came at the end of months of strategic moves on her part meant to provide Trump maximum leeway to message publicly about the case, and minimum threat to his electoral process. When Trump lied about the FBI raid on his home, saying that it was a plot on his life orchestrated by the Biden administration, Smith, fearing violence and public misperception, asked for a gag order. Both the sensitivity of the case and the egregious danger posed by Trump’s conduct should have made it an easy call; but Cannon denied it, allowing Trump to continue lying about the raid.At one point during preliminary proceedings, Cannon outright refused to let prosecutors see the documents that had been seized from Mar-a-Lago, a move that prompted a reversal and rare rebuke from the appeals court above her, Atlanta’s 11th circuit. That 11th circuit warning seems to have prompted the first instance in which another federal judge urged Cannon to recuse herself from the case. It would not be the last.Cannon’s single-handed nullification of the classified documents case demonstrates the core problem with what has been, until now, the dominant theory of how to hold Trump accountable for his crimes: with the law. Increasingly, it seems prosecutions in the federal courts are a futile exercise when it comes to the former president. And that’s because the courts are packed with Republican partisans, Trump appointees and personal Trump loyalists, and large numbers of other right-leaning judges who aim to use their seats to roll back the social progress of the past century, further Trump’s authoritarian agenda, and shield him permanently from consequence. To the extent that they are controlled by these actors, the federal courts will never provide a check to Trump’s power. They will only augment it.This reality was underscored on 1 July. The supreme court’s last decision of the term, Trump v United States, created, out of thin air, a vast and near-absolute immunity from criminal prosecution that the court’s conservative justices say applies to presidents – or, at least, applies to their favorite former president.That decision stemmed from another of Smith’s prosecutions, in the January 6 case; in his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing alone, signaled that he thought that perhaps special counsels such as Smith might not be legal after all. It was less like a real, considered legal position than like a set of instructions for Cannon: throw the documents case out on these grounds. Her argument mirrors Thomas’s; she took her marching orders straight from the top.The 11th circuit is likely to reverse Cannon’s dismissal, and it’s possible that Smith will get a chance to re-file his charges – possibly in Washington, closer to the site of the original illegal conduct, which will have the benefit of permanently removing his case from Cannon’s court. But the case will not be heard before the election, and so it may never be heard at all.Even prosecuting Trump might turn out to offer little more than a delay of the inevitable: the complicity of the courts in Trump’s criminality reveals an institutional rot that even locking him up would not solve. If the courts cannot hold the president accountable – or rather, if they choose to exempt one man from their authority, and instead bend themselves to his will – what, exactly, is the check on the presidency? How can a powerful criminal be held to account? Where does the rule of law apply, and where does it vanish?We have at least one answer: the rule of law vanishes at the tip of a Trump judge’s pen.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Judge grants defense hearing on breached client privilege for Trump classified documents case

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      The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case of former president Donald Trump granted a defense request for a hearing on whether prosecutors improperly breached attorney-client privilege when they obtained crucial evidence from one of Trump’s ex-lawyers.But US district judge Aileen Cannon also denied a request for a hearing on a separate Trump team claim that the Justice Department had submitted false or misleading information in an application for a warrant to search the Republican ex-president’s Florida estate for classified records two years ago.The order amounts to a mixed result for both sides and ensures further delays in a criminal case that has already been snarled by significant postponements, resulting in the indefinite postponement of a trial that had been set to begin on 20 May in Fort Pierce, Florida.In a bid to suppress as evidence the classified documents seized by the FBI during the 8 August 2022 Mar-a-Lago search, defense lawyers have said the US justice department omitted or misrepresented certain facts in its application to a magistrate judge to obtain a warrant. They argued, for instance, that the application should have noted that a senior Federal Bureau of Investigation official proposed seeking the consent of Trump’s lawyers for a search rather than obtaining a court-authorized search warrant.But Cannon sided with special counsel Jack Smith’s team in finding that neither that nor any other of the alleged omissions raised by the defense had any bearing on whether or not prosecutors had sufficient probable cause to search the property.“Even accepting those statements by the high-level FBI official, the Motion offers an insufficient basis to believe that inclusion in the affidavit of that official’s perspective (or of the dissenting views of other FBI agents as referenced generally in his testimony) would have altered the evidentiary calculus in support of probable cause for the alleged offenses,” Cannon wrote.But her order was not a complete win for the government, as she said she would schedule a separate hearing to consider the question of whether prosecutors had improperly obtained the cooperation of Trump’s lawyers through an exception to attorney-client privilege.Defense lawyers are ordinarily shielded from being forced to testify about their confidential conversations with their client but can be compelled to do so if prosecutors can show that their legal services were used in furtherance of a crime – a doctrine known as the crime-fraud exception.Beryl Howell, then chief federal judge in the District of Columbia, agreed with Smith’s team that the exception applied and ordered grand jury testimony from two of Trump’s lawyers. She also directed one of his lawyers, M Evan Corcoran, to turn over audio recordings that documented his impressions of conversations he had had with Trump about returning the documents. Those conversations are repeatedly cited in the indictment and held up by prosecutors as incriminating evidence.“It is the obligation of this Court to make factual findings afresh on the crime-fraud issue,” Cannon wrote. “And a standard means by which to make such findings – as is customary in criminal suppression litigation – is following an evidentiary hearing at which both sides can present evidence (documentary and testimonial, as applicable).” More