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    Why Trump’s speech to US military top brass was such a disaster | Sidney Blumenthal

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    No dictator or would-be dictator on day one has ever assembled before him in one room the entire senior officer corps of his armed forces in order to have them belittled as failures and humiliated for their slovenly personal appearance, while degrading whole classes serving in the army, navy and air force degraded as inferior and unworthy. No dictator has ever pleaded for generals and admirals to applaud his remarks, followed by deafening silence.Donald Trump is used to entering to the din of a mob jazzed up with YMCA. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” Trump said when he addressed the country’s highest-ranking military leaders at the Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday. “Don’t laugh. Don’t know if you’re allowed to do that.” He was trying to force some tittering, an old lounge act gag to rouse a dead audience. “You know what? Just have a good time.” The comedian who felt his routine was bombing before he even began sought to relax the room. Then Trump instinctively replaced the ingratiating gestures with threats. “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”Trump’s syllogism perfectly encapsulated his psychology of victimhood and politics of retribution. If you do not bend the knee to him, he is personally wounded. Your failure to worship him must be punished. Your slight of his majesty condemns you to ruin.Trump cannot grasp that the silence of the commanders during his unprecedented address to them demonstrated their highest duty. Their discipline showed fidelity to uphold their oath to the constitution. By their stillness they presented themselves as models for the rest of the officer corps and the troops. They are not loyal to Trump or any cult of personality, but to his constitutional role. They were being used as a backdrop for a campaign-like rally, but they were resistant to serving as partisan players.Trump’s inability to understand their stolidity in the face of his provocations showed his incomprehension not only of the military but the presidency under the law. When he took offense at their stoney silence his rebuke disclosed that he saw them merely as his pawns. They were to his mind no different from his personal attorneys he had installed at the Department of Justice to do his bidding, including the suppression of the Epstein files.Trump had come on an urgent mission for them to carry out. He was there to tell the military chiefs they were to be his unquestioning agents for the greatest reversal of military strategy since the “war on terror” –a new war to be waged against his perceived political opponents at home in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the domestic deployment of the US military as a police force.All the senior generals in all the world had been gathered for the unprecedented event at the Marine Corps Base Quantico on the order of secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. They had no inkling for what momentous occasion they were being summoned. They dared not speculate that Hegseth brought them to be his captive audience for his self-referential vanity Ted talk attempting to rehabilitate his image and assert his authority. That would have seemed too stupid for words.But the commanders could have gotten more than a hint that they were being rounded up for the latest episode of It Can’t Happen Here, by reading Trump’s executive order of 22 September, Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization, an “organization” that does not exist. This was followed by a National Security Presidential Memorandum No 7 on 25 September citing the murder of Charlie Kirk and a series of disparate events as pretexts: “This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns … ”According to NSPM-7, a new “national strategy” would be implemented against an ideology of “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Jimmy Kimmel was not mentioned.These vapors were not a description of an ideology so much as a hodgepodge of Maga shibboleths. If there were any ideology expressed it was an inchoate fascism based on a repressive impulse that conjured up an all-purpose enemy called “Antifa”. Any sense of irony, of course, was completely missing. In fact, January 6 was the last attempt to overthrow the US government, incited by Donald Trump. The leadership of Trump as a paragon of “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” defies satire and only underscores the recurrent demand for the release of the Epstein files.The theatrical presentation at Quantico began with Hegseth darting back and forth on the stage. He was a motivational speaker as a drill sergeant with a book to hawk – and a warm-up act for the headliner. Observing him was like seeing the negative of a photograph. The darkest parts were reflections of his own grievances at the criticism and censure provoked by his past behavior.The former national guard major said he had been been “deemed an extremist”; he was flagged as a possible “insider threat” by fellow officers. (Hegseth has denied that he is an extremist). Despite numerous accounts of his alcoholism, he told Megyn Kelly in an interview: “I never had a drinking problem,” but then reportedly promised a senator that he would “not touch alcohol while I have this position”. Hegseth was accused of sexual assault in 2017, and settled a lawsuit brought by the woman who had accused him. (The settlement terms were confidential. Hegseth has said the allegations were false).As a Fox News host, Hegseth had been a prominent advocate for pardoning or granting clemency to service members accused or convicted of war crimes. Hegseth described them as “warriors” rather than “war criminals”. “If he committed premeditated murder, then I did as well … Put us all in jail,” he said about one of them. Hegseth voiced support for members of his own unit in Iraq killing three unarmed detainees who were told to run and then shot. Once Hegseth was confirmed, he purged the top-rank judge advocate general. He’s pushing a plan to send many of the rest to work in immigration courts.Hegseth said that the military should not “fight with stupid rules of engagement”, his long-time complaint against rules designed to protect civilians and enforce military law against war crimes.Now, in his speech, Hegseth declared he was clearing away “the debris”. He encouraged loosening regulations aimed at preventing forbidden violence within the armed forces. He announced the “overhauling” of the inspector general and whistleblower complaint process, which would undermine legal protections and shield violent or reckless offenders from accountability. He would, he said, impose discriminatory measures of “gender-neutral” or “male level” physical standards for combat roles, stating: “If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.” (In 2023, more than 17% of the military force was composed of women, with thousands in combat roles.)Hegseth swaggered in front of the commanders, barking obscenities – “Fafo”, or Fuck Around and Find Out. “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that shit.”The generals sat expressionless at his vulgarity that could be charged under the Uniform Military Code of Justice as a violation against indecent language that “neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline”.According to Pete, it was the flabby generals who needed to work out like Pete. “It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look,” he said. “No more beardos.” That means you, Gen Grant.Hegseth, at last, was seemingly getting his revenge for being tagged as an “insider threat”. He shouted: “No more side-tracking careers, no more walking on eggshells.” He accused the brass of harming the military by evaluating the mental stability of officers: “We’ve weeded out so-called toxic leaders under the guise of double-blind psychology assessments, promoting risk-averse, go-along-to-get-along conformists instead.” Then he plugged his book: “You might say we’re ending the war on warriors. I heard someone wrote a book about that.” The title of his book was The War on Warriors.Not once did Hegseth mention “Russia” or “Ukraine”. He made not the slightest reference to Russia’s huge missile attacks bombarding Ukraine, Russia’s drones over Romania, Estonia and Denmark, the tensions over US wavering within the western alliance, or utter anything that might be construed as a strategic thought.After his menacing speech, Hegseth made way for Donald Trump. Trump displayed his usual contempt for the military by baiting them with an array of partisan barbs to which they remained rigidly motionless. He slipped into a whirlpool of self-celebration followed by anxiety. There were bits about the “Gulf of America”, calling Joe “the autopen” and watching the 1950s TV series Victory At Sea, before Trump came to his worry of falling down stairs. “Every day, the guy is falling downstairs,” Trump said about Biden. “We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs,like, I’m on stairs, like these stairs, I’m very – I walk very slowly.” He could not contain his envy of Barack Obama. “So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on. I said, it’s great. I don’t want to do it.”In the middle of his stream of consciousness, he dropped his new mission for the military against the “enemy from within”, with major American cities as the “training grounds … the ones that are run by the radical-left Democrats … And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.” Silence.The next day, 1 October, in Memphis, Hegseth appeared as a member of a posse with attorney general Pam Bondi and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to speak before a rally of Ice agents and federal marshals in anticipation of the arrival of a contingent of national guard troops. Miller delivered his imitation of Patton. “The gangbangers that you deal with – they think they’re ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough? They have no idea how tough we are. They think they’re hardcore? We are so much more hardcore than they are.” Miller, not any mere general, gave the order. “You are unleashed.”You could tell Stephen Miller embodied the new “warrior ethos”. No beard. Shaved head, too. And lawless.

    Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to 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. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      When will US generals stand-up to Trump? | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      At what point will the US’s top military brass decide that enough is enough, that loyalty to the constitution and the rule of law supersedes blind fealty to job and Donald Trump?The question is hardly academic. The president has been rapidly intensifying military operations on United States soil during his second term. In April, he began expanding the military presence along parts of the US’s southern border by establishing so-called “national defense areas”. Troops are now authorized to search, question and detain people in those zones, dangerously muddling the line between military rule and civilian law enforcement.By the summer, Trump sent in the marines and the national guard to Los Angeles, against the wishes of the governor, and later to Washington DC. Similar deployments of the national guard, also against the wishes of the respective state governors, are expected for Chicago and Portland, Oregon.Needless to say, US law, under the Posse Comitatus Act, generally prohibits the use of the military in civilian law enforcement roles. A federal judge ruled in September that Trump’s troop deployment in Los Angeles violated the act, but Trump is doing it anyway. And he expects the military to follow him.Not just follow him. He expects the military to venerate him. Trump turned a 250th Anniversary Parade for the Army, which we already didn’t need, into his own 79th birthday celebration, which we definitely didn’t need. (Both anniversaries were on the same day. Attendance at the parade was not only sparse, but was dwarfed by the estimated 5 million people who turned out for the “No Kings” demonstrations across the country on the same day.)And most recently, he joined his recently renamed secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, in an abruptly summoned meeting of the country’s military commanders on 30 September. (“I love the name,” Trump said, referring to the Department of War. “I think it’s so great. I think it stops wars.”) At the meeting, Trump told the leadership: “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” His evidence was that “Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape,” even though all the cities he listed – San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles – have some of their lowest levels of violent crime in decades. And then he said: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”Trump and Hegseth are attempting to reshape the US military into a partisan force committed to preserving Trump’s power, a prospect which is not only anathema to our tradition but should also worry all Americans. And they want to make this restructuring into a spectacle. Everything Hegseth said at this highly publicized and very expensive meeting could have been issued by memorandum, and in fact was. But Hegseth in particular needs a rebrand. He is, at this point, much less known for leading military operations than he is for leaking them. For Hegseth, the very public lecture was a vainglorious attempt at buffing his own tarnished image. Unfortunately for him, it came across more like a condescending Ted talk that had possibly been directed by the ghost of Leni Riefenstahl.But far more significant, and infinitely more troubling, was Trump’s foreshadowing of even greater numbers of troops on our American streets. So, I return to my initial question: when will the nation’s top military brass decide that enough is enough?There’s every reason to believe that high ranking members of the military might already be worried about getting sacked by this president, either for being insufficiently loyal to Trump, insufficiently white, or insufficiently male, based on past actions from this administration. Within weeks of assuming office, Trump sacked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Air Force Gen CQ Brown, only the second Black man to hold the position. Adm Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to be named to chief of naval operations, the US Navy’s highest rank, was also dismissed.Trump also got rid of judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force, and fired Gen Tim Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, reportedly at the request of far-right activist Laura Loomer, who claimed Haugh was insufficiently loyal to the president. There are many more examples.While it’s true that every administration does some house cleaning upon assuming power, it’s also true that the scale and mission to restructure the military during this administration is unprecedented. As Peter Feaver and Heidi Urben write in Foreign Policy: “No previous administration exercised its power in this dramatic fashion for fear that doing so would effectively treat the senior officer corps as akin to partisan political appointees whose professional ethos is to come and go with changes of administration, rather than career public servants whose professional ethos is to serve regardless of changes in political leadership.”Hegseth claimed that he will also now get rid of “stupid rules of engagement”. Those rules, however, define what is lawful and unlawful behavior by the military, a line made more difficult to discern as the administration decimates the legal wing (the judge advocate generals) of the military. Clearly, there has been plenty of illegality in the US military behavior from its inception until today. But if you are a member of the military, you have the right, if not the duty, to refuse illegal orders.The Trump administration is currently engaged in blatantly illegal acts being carried out by the US navy. Lethal strikes are being launched against vessels in the Caribbean that the US claims are drug smuggling boats. No evidence has been provided, and now the administration is claiming the US is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels and the people who were murdered by the US in the strikes are “unlawful combatants”.This is ludicrous, of course, and is reminiscent of the worst legal reasoning developed during the early War on Terror era. Even if the people on those boats were participating in drug smuggling (which is quite unlikely), being involved in the sale of a controlled substance does not rise to the standard of engaging in hostilities, as noted by Geoffrey Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer and formerly the army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues.When a state intentionally kills a person outside of armed conflict and without due process, it’s a form of murder. It’s already happening in the Caribbean Sea. Is that the path we’re headed down on the streets of our own cities? Trump may have drawn up his own battle plans for his purposes, but it’s the members of the military who will have to carry them out. With all our institutions currently on the line, including the military, we need a much stronger defense against his idea of war.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More

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      What do Trump and Hegseth’s inflammatory speeches to military generals signal? | Moira Donegan

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      Shortly after Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s defense secretary, summoned all the military’s generals to Quantico, Virginia, from their positions around the world in an unusual demand for an in-person assembly, Ben Hodges, a retired general, took to social media to evoke a bit of history. “July 1935,” Hodges said. “German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weiman constitution was void and that they would be required to swear a personal oath to the Führer. Most generals took the new oath to keep their positions.” Hegseth’s account replied to Hodges post: “Cool story, General”.Yet when the meeting finally happened on Tuesday morning, the army generals and navy admirals were treated to a 45-minute speech by Hegseth, followed by a rambling, hour-long address by Trump, which confirmed at least some of what Hodges seemed to fear. The defense secretary emphasized the army’s appearance, decrying “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon”, and signaled his intent to reshape the military’s culture so as to purge “wokeness” and evoke a more masculine image. “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses,” he said. “No more division, distraction and gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before, and will say again: We are done. With that. Shit.” The military, Hegseth suggested, would become an advertisement for the Trump regime’s preferred cultural style, and this transformation will evidently involve many changes to what the armed forces look like when they are photographed.To this end, Hegseth announced that he would also be eliminating or drastically curtailing the equal opportunity, whistleblower, inspector general and complaint procedures that allow military personnel to report harassment and misconduct. The changes seemed designed to particularly roll back efforts undertaken over the course of the 2010s to reduce sexual assault in the military and end its impunity.“No more frivolous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more smearing reputations,” said Hegseth, who settled a lawsuit brought by a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2020. (The settlement terms are confidential. Hegseth has said the allegations were false). “No more walking on eggshells.” One former official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told CNN: “I think what this is, is people are sick and tired of not being able to make inappropriate or sexually explicit jokes at the staff meetings.” Hegseth, it seems, is committed to restoring this treasured freedom.Hegseth similarly declared that he would be changing procedures that have allowed the military to be more diverse – such as eliminating special permissions for soldiers to grow beards, frequently used by Black soldiers, and raising physical fitness standards for specialized, often high-pay and high-status combat roles to what Hegseth seemed to believe is a threshold only men will meet. Hegseth, who has opposed women serving in combat roles, said that candidates for such jobs will be held to the “highest male standard”, which he also said was “gender neutral”. “If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” Hegseth said. “That is not the intent,” he added, questionably. “But it could be the result.”As for the officers themselves, a group which included several Black men and women of various races, Hegseth seemed to offer what he evidently thought was a flattering assessment of their masculine violence and virility. “You kill people and break things for a living,” Hegseth said to the assembled generals. “You are not politically correct and do not necessarily belong always in polite society.” The speech was repetitive and heavy on moments of self-conscious macho posturing. “To our enemies,” Hegseth said at one point “FAFO” – or, fuck around and find out. The defense secretary paused, seeming to wait for applause, but nobody clapped.Trump, meanwhile, also signaled that he seeks to transform the military into a partisan tool of his regime, repeatedly telling the assembled leaders that they would be tasked with missions targeting Americans. “America is under invasion from within,” the president said. “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out. It’s war from within.” Trump, who just days ago deployed 200 national guard troops to Portland, Oregon, with orders to use “full force, if necessary” offered that he had instructed Hegseth to use American cities as “training grounds”. At other times, Trump meandered, as he often does, into off-script comments that were difficult to parse. “But they’re not going to stand in our way, ever again,” Trump said. “You’re not going to see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people that ran that should have never been there. Because we have the United States military, the best, the boldest, the bravest, that the world has ever seen, that the world has ever known.”Trump, like Hegseth, sometimes paused, seeming to expect the generals to clap or laugh. But the laughs were not forthcoming; the military audience was largely silent.There is something pathetic about Hegseth and Trump, who have schemed and failed their way into positions of power and prestige that are comically outsized to their character. It is telling that Hegseth is so preoccupied with making the military into a photogenic spectacle of masculine strength – an anxious fixation on surface and spectacle that only highlights the US’s declining influence abroad.It is telling, too, that Trump can barely string sentences together, appearing distracted, sleepy, and barely coherent as he tells the armed forces to train their guns on his own people. There is no pretext that can sustain the delusion that these are serious people, or that their instructions to the military come from any motive other than their own desire for narcissistic gratification.They do not want to be strong to pursue the nation’s interests; they do not want to be strong to pursue any principles; they certainly do not want to be strong so that they can ensure the safety of the innocent. They want to be strong so that they can look big and important on TV. And for that, they flew the generals in from around the world, at tremendous taxpayer expense, to force them to sit as a captive audience for a pair of speeches that sounded like poor imitations of an action movie monologue.But as Hodges suggested, the ostentatious idiocy of these men does not mean that the generals and admirals assembled will not follow their orders. These military leaders have received the signal that their troops are to become whiter and more male; they have received the instruction that their next missions will involve suppressing domestic dissent. They have a choice between following their orders and keeping their jobs, or following an abstract set of principles, and leaving them. Most of them will choose the former.The US military, for all its wreckage and violence it imposes abroad and for all the cruelty and exploitation of the poor that it inflicts at home, has one consistent virtue: it has always been under quite firm civilian control. Most of the time, that’s a good thing.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump says ‘no choice’ but to cut federal workers if government shuts down as midnight deadline looms – live

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      When asked by a reporter during his executive order signing, why it’s necessary to cut more federal jobs in the event of a government shutdown, the president said it’s something you “have to do”.“No country can afford to pay for illegal immigration, healthcare for everybody that comes into the country. And that’s what they [Democrats] are insisting,” Trump said. “They want open borders. They want men playing in women’s sports. They want transgender for everybody. They never stop. They don’t learn. We won an election in the landslide. They just don’t learn. So we have no choice. I have to do that for the country.”On the Senate floor, Patty Murray – who serves as the senior senator from Washington, and vice-chair of the influential appropriations committee – just said that she hopes Republicans will “come to their senses and come to the table”.“If Republicans want to avoid a shutdown like Democrats want to avoid a shutdown, then stop spending so much time saying you will sit down with us on healthcare later,” Murray said. “Spend that time working with us right now.”Attorney general Pam Bondi is set to appear before the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, 7 October, as turmoil in the justice department continues.Last week, federal prosecutors indicted former FBI director James Comey. This despite the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, Erik Siebert, finding insufficient evidence to prosecute him.The president, then moved to fire Siebert and installed White House staffer and his personal attorney, Lindsey Halligan.When asked by a reporter during his executive order signing, why it’s necessary to cut more federal jobs in the event of a government shutdown, the president said it’s something you “have to do”.“No country can afford to pay for illegal immigration, healthcare for everybody that comes into the country. And that’s what they [Democrats] are insisting,” Trump said. “They want open borders. They want men playing in women’s sports. They want transgender for everybody. They never stop. They don’t learn. We won an election in the landslide. They just don’t learn. So we have no choice. I have to do that for the country.”The president signed an executive order today to “accelerate” pediatric cancer research by using artificial intelligence.This includes doubling a $50m investment in the childhood cancer data initiative.“For years, we’ve been amassing data about childhood cancer, but until now, we’ve been unable to fully exploit this trove of information and apply it to practical medicine,” Trump said.It’s worth noting something that Donald Trump said earlier, during his announcement in the Oval Office.“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible. Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like,” the president said, seemingly in reference to the memo sent out by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last week that told federal agencies to prepare for layoffs in the event of a government shutdown. “And you all know Russell Vought. He’s become very popular recently because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn’t do any other way.”Vought, who is the director of the OMB, was standing beside the president during today’s announcement.In response, top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer said the president “admitted himself that he is using Americans as political pawns”.“He is admitting that he is doing the firing of people, if god forbid it [the shutdown] happens,” Schumer added. “Democrats do not want to shut down. We stand ready to work with Republicans to find a bipartisan compromise.”In terms of who stands to be affected if Congress fails to pass a funding extension today, my colleague Lauren Gambino notes that approximately 750,000 federal employees will be furloughed each day of a government shutdown, according to an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office released on Tuesday.Operations deemed essential – such as social security, military duties, immigration enforcement, and air traffic control – continue, but other services may be disrupted or delayed. Mail delivery and post office operations will continue without interruption.Agencies have been releasing updated contingency plans in the event of a shutdown. The Department of Education said nearly all its federal employees would be furloughed, while most of the Department of Homeland Security workforce would remain on the job.The effect can be wide-ranging and potentially long-lasting. Previous shutdowns have closed national parks and the Smithsonian museums in Washington; slowed air travel; delayed food safety inspections and postponed immigration hearings.Lauren notes that while the broader economy may not feel the effects immediately, analysts warn that a prolonged shutdown could slow growth, disrupt markets, and erode public trust.Read Lauren’s full primer on the looming shutdown below.Qatar, Egypt and Turkey are urging Hamas to give a positive response to Donald Trump’s proposal for ending Israel’s war in Gaza, Axios is reporting, citing two sources with knowledge of the talks.Trump said earlier this morning that he was giving the group “three or four days” to respond. “We have one signature that we need, and that signature will pay in hell if they don’t sign,” Trump told US generals and admirals in Quantico, Virginia. Yesterday the president made clear that he would support Israel continuing the war if Hamas rejects the proposal, or reneges on the deal at any stage.According to Axios’s source, while Trump presented the plan at a press conference yesterday alongside Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, Qatari PM Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani and Egyptian intelligence chief Hassan Rashad were presenting it to Hamas leaders in Doha – and both urged Hamas to accept.Per Axios’s report: “Al-Thani advised the Hamas leaders that this was the best deal he was able to get for them and it won’t get much better, the source told the news agency. He also stressed that based on his conversations with Trump, he was confident the US president was seriously committed to ending the war. He said that was a strong enough guarantee for Hamas. The Hamas leaders told al-Thani they would study the proposal in good faith.”They met again on Tuesday, this time along with Turkish intelligence director Ebrahim Kalin, the source told Axios. Ahead of that meeting, al-Thani told Al-Jazeera he hopes “everyone looks at the plan constructively and seizes the chance to end the war”. He said Hamas needs to get to a consensus with all other Palestinian factions in Gaza before issuing an official response. “We and Egypt explained to Hamas during yesterday’s meeting that our main goal is stopping the war. Trump’s plan achieves the main goal of ending the war, though some issues in it need clarification and negotiation,” the Qatari PM added.The US is set to deport some 400 Iranian people back to Iran in the coming months as part of a deal with the Iranian government, the New York Times (paywall) reports.Iranian officials have told the paper that a US-chartered flight carrying about 100 people departed Louisiana last night and will arrive in Iran via Qatar in the next few days.The deportation to Iran, which has one of the harshest human rights records in the world, marks “one of the starkest efforts yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants no matter the human rights conditions in countries on the receiving end”, the NYT’s report reads.“The identities of the Iranians on the plane and their reasons for trying to immigrate to the United States were not immediately clear,” it notes. But Iranian officials add “that in nearly every case, asylum requests had been denied or the [deportees] had not yet appeared before a judge for an asylum hearing”.Earlier today, the homepage of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud) was changed to a message in bold, claiming “the Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands. The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people.”The partisan message comes after whistleblowers at the agency claimed they were fired for raising concerns about the agency dismantling efforts to enforce fair housing laws.Here is my colleague Alice Speri’s story on today’s ruling from a federal judge that found the Trump administration’s policy to detain and deport foreign scholars over their pro-Palestinian views violates the US constitution and was designed to “intentionally” chill free speech rights.In a short while, Donald Trump is expected to sign executive orders at 3pm EST in the Oval Office.As of now, it’s closed press, but we’ll keep you updated if anything changes.With the potential for another contentious government shutdown looming large, national park leaders and advocates are concerned the Trump administration could again push for leaving America’s parks open when they are unstaffed.“National parks don’t run themselves. It is hard-working National Park Service employees that keep them safe, clean and accessible,” 40 former superintendents said in a letter issued to Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, this week, urging him to close the parks if a shutdown occurs. “If sufficient staff aren’t there, visitors shouldn’t be either.”Irreversible damage was done at popular parks, including Joshua Tree in California, following a month-long shutdown in Trump’s first term, when his administration demanded parks be kept open while funding was paused and workers were furloughed.Without supervision, visitors left behind trails of destruction. Prehistoric petroglyphs were vandalized at Big Bend national park. Joshua trees, some more than a century old, were chopped down as trash and toilets overflowed. Tire tracks crushed sensitive plants and desert habitats from illegal off-roading vehicles in Death Valley. There were widespread reports of wildlife poaching, search-and-rescue crews were quickly overwhelmed with calls and visitor centers were broken into.There were 26 pages of listed damages, according to Kristen Brengel, senior vice-president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, who added that those effects happened in late December and January – a season when many parks are typically quieter.The autumn months, and October especially, still draw millions of visitors even as the peak of summer visitation begins to slow. In 2024, there were more than 28.4m recreational visits in October alone, according to data from the NPS.One House Democrat told me, on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, that the “best thing” for Democrats right now is that their Republican colleagues are “refusing” to negotiate on healthcare, and “forcing the American people to get hammered with these consequences of what they’ve done”.This Democrat added that if GOP lawmakers were to “cut some kind of deal on health care” it would “inoculate them to some extent, for the midterms in 2026”.The Hill is reporting that the Senate is expected to vote on the Republican and Democratic versions of a stopgap funding bill at 5pm EST today.A reminder that both failed to achieve the 60 votes needed to clear the chamber prior to last week’s congressional recess.At the time of writing this post, government funding is set to expire in under 10 hours.A federal district court judge in Massachusetts today ruled that the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty members for pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the first amendment.Judge William Young said that today’s ruling was to decide whether noncitizens lawfully present in the US “have the same free speech rights as the rest of us”.“The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally ‘yes, they do.’ ‘No law’ means ‘no law’,” he said.The lawsuit, brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University after activist Mahmoud Khalil’s was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in March, alleged the Trump administration was conducting an “ideological deportation” that was unconstitutional. It resulted in a nine-day trial in July.Coming soon to Miami: the Donald J Trump presidential library.Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and his cabinet voted Tuesday morning to hand over a lucrative parcel of land for the venture, the first formal step towards a building intended to honor the legacy of the 45th and 47th president.The unanimous vote by DeSantis and three loyalists, including the unelected Florida attorney general James Uthmeier, conveys almost three acres of prime real estate in the shadow of the Miami Freedom Tower, the iconic and recently reopened “beacon of freedom” that saw tens of thousands of Cubans enter the US during its time as an immigration processing center.On Monday, protestors at the site, currently a parking lot for Miami Dade College’s downtown campus, highlighted the juxtaposition with a building celebrating a president who has implemented the biggest crackdown on immigration in the nation’s history.“I look forward to the patriotic stories the Trump Library Foundation will showcase for generations to come in the Free State of Florida,” Uthmeier said in a statement following the vote.Eric Trump, the president’s son, celebrated the news in a post to X. “It will be the greatest Presidential Library ever built, honoring the greatest President our Nation has ever known,” he wrote.Critics of the venture note that college trustees voted a week ago to transfer ownership of the land, estimated to be worth $67m, to the state without knowing what DeSantis intended to do with it.On CNN today, Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, said that “sometimes you’ve got to stand and fight” in regard to the looming shutdown.“A fight to protect Americans who can’t afford their healthcare, is a fight worth having,” she added.The president said that he didn’t see Democrats “bend” at all when they discussed healthcare provisions in his meeting on Monday. He spoke with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries.But when asked to clarify what he means when he talks about Democrats fighting for undocumented immigrants’ access to federal healthcare programs, when they aren’t eligible to access them, Trump didn’t answer the question.Instead he listed off, what he described as, several achievements by the administration to curb illegal migration.Donald Trump has just said that the government will “probably” shut down, while addressing reporters in the Oval Office.“They want to give Cadillac Medicare to illegal aliens … at the cost to everyone else,” the president said. This is a false claim that Trump and congressional Republicans have repeated since lawmakers have failed to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. A reminder, this lapses tonight.Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to enroll in subsidized programs like Medicaid, Medicare or the Affordable Care Act. More

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      US military brass brace for firings as Pentagon chief orders top-level meeting

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      US military officials are reportedly bracing for possible firings or demotions after the Trump administration’s Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, abruptly summoned hundreds of generals and admirals from around the world to attend a gathering in Virginia in the upcoming days.The event, scheduled for Tuesday at Marine Corps University in Quantico, is expected to feature a short address by Hegseth focused on military standards and the “warrior ethos”, according to the Washington Post.The order to attend the meeting, which has been described as unusual and unprecedented, was reportedly issued with little explanation – and prompted military personnel stationed overseas to have to make last-minute travel arrangements.The Pentagon has not disclosed details about the meeting or its agenda. But a senior Trump administration official told the New York Times on Friday that Hegseth intends to deliver a “rally the troops” message – and that one of the primary goals of the gathering is to “get our fighters excited” about the new posture of what was recently rebranded the Department of War.A White House official told CNN that the event is intended as a “show of force of what the new military now looks like” during Donald Trump’s second presidency.“It’s about getting the horses into the stable and whipping them into shape,” the military official familiar with the planning told CNN. “And the guys with the stars on their shoulders make for a better audience from an optics standpoint. This is a showcase for Hegseth to tell them: get on board, or potentially have your career shortened.”Hegseth’s team reportedly plans to record and publicly release the address later, according to CNN, which cited three of its sources.A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed the upcoming gathering to the Guardian, saying that Hegseth “will meet with his senior military leaders”, but did not provide any further details.According to the Times, the Pentagon informed congressional committees overseeing the military on Friday that Hegseth intends to use the gathering to share with “most senior service members his intent for the department”, including new guidance on “military fitness standards and several other areas of interest”.Sources cited by the Post say that Tuesday’s address will be the first of three short lectures by Hegseth. The second, the Post reported, will reportedly focus on the defense industrial base, and the third on deterrence.The meeting has reportedly stirred unease and anxiety among some military officers, especially given Hegseth’s efforts to reshape the Pentagon and his recent firings of several senior officers.In May, he ordered a 20% reduction in the number of four-star generals and admirals across the military and a 10% cut in the number of flag and general officers. And in recent months, he has dismissed more than a dozen senior military officials, according to the Times.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an interview on Thursday on MSNBC, retired army Lt Gen Mark Hertling described Tuesday’s planned gathering as highly unusual, adding that it was something he had “never seen before”.“There are a couple of reasons why he might be calling this meeting,” Hertling said. “It could be about a shifting national security strategy, or cuts to the general officer corps, which is something he has talked about several times – he’s floated it, to shrink the number of flag officers in the military. It could be a preparation for a potential budget stalemate next week, or it could be concerns over information leaks.”“Secretary Hegseth has fired 12 senior ranking general officers, so he could be firing more,” Hertling added. “Or is it performative theatre?”In a post on social media on Friday, Lt Gen Ben Hodges of the army compared Tuesday’s gathering to a 1935 “surprise assembly in Berlin” where German generals were “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer”, Adolf Hitler, in the lead-up to the Holocaust and the second world war.Hegseth, a former army national guard officer and ex-Fox News host, responded to Hodges by writing: “Cool story, General.” More

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      Hegseth says Wounded Knee massacre soldiers will keep Medals of Honor

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      Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that 20 US soldiers who took part in the 1890 massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee will keep the Medals of Honor that were awarded to them.The move is the latest in a number of contentious actions taken by the Trump administration to reinterpret US history.The long debate over the events at Wounded Knee includes a dispute over its characterization as a “battle” given that, according to historical records, the US army killed about 250 Lakota Sioux people – many of whom were unarmed women and children – despite fighters in the camp having surrendered.“We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals,” Hegseth said, announcing the move in a video on social media on Thursday. Calling the men “brave soldiers”, he said a review panel had concluded in a report that the medals were justly awarded. “This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.”Hegseth’s Democratic predecessor at the Pentagon, former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the honors in 2024 after Congress called for it in the 2022 defense bill. Announcing the review, the Pentagon said Austin wanted to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor”.But in Thursday’s video, Hegseth – who has a history of Christian nationalist sympathies – said his predecessor had been “more interested in being politically correct than historically correct”. It is unclear if the report will be made public.Hegseth’s move also halts a push from Democratic lawmakers to revoke medals tied to the massacre at a camp on what is now the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. For Native Americans, the massacre marked a devastating climax to the tragedy of Indigenous removals from their land.“We cannot be a country that celebrates and rewards horrifying acts of violence against Native people,” senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement earlier this year after reintroducing the proposed Remove the Stain Act.After the massacre, 19 soldiers from the seventh cavalry were awarded the Medal of Honor for their “bravery” and “gallantry” over actions ranging from rescuing fellow troops to efforts to “dislodge Sioux Indians” hiding in a ravine.Native Americans have long pushed for revocation of the medals. As time has gone on, the isolated site has become a place of mourning for many tribes, symbolizing the genocidal history of brutality and repression they have suffered at the hands of the US government. While Congress issued a formal apology in 1990 to the descendants of the massacre, the medals were left in place and no reparations offered.Thursday’s announcement is the latest move to sanitize the nation’s history taken by the Trump administration since Donald Trump signed an executive order in March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”.In recent months, Hegseth has reverted the names of several US army bases back to Confederate-linked names, monuments to the Confederacy and Confederate figures have been restored, and he renamed a US navy ship that honored gay rights activist Harvey Milk.The Trump administration has also gone after cultural institutions like Smithsonian museums for exhibits it considers “unpatriotic”, purged and rewritten federal webpages related to topics including slavery, diversity and discrimination (some of which were later restored), and cut funding to grants to institutions that honor the lives of enslaved people.Some historians took to social media to denounce the administration’s latest move.“Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a ‘battle’ rather than what it truly was,” Columbia University history professor Karl Jacoby posted on Bluesky.Jacoby added: “Fortunately, history does not work as Hegseth seems to believe. It is never “settled” and the government cannot (at least for now!) impose its interpretation of events on the rest of us.” More

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      Pentagon demands journalists sign pledge not to gather certain information

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      The US military has issued new media restrictions demanding that journalists pledge not to gather any information – including unclassified documents – that has not been authorized for release or else risk revocation of their press passes.In a memo issued Thursday, the Pentagon stated that “it remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust”. However, using an abbreviation for the recently rebranded Department of War headed by the Trump administration’s Pete Hegseth, the memo added: “DoW information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”It went on to say: “Only authorized persons who have received favorable determinations of eligibility for access, signed approved non-disclosure agreements, and have a need-to-know may be granted access to [classified national security information].”Journalists reporting from the Pentagon are now required to sign a pledge agreeing to restrict their movements within the building and not to access any unauthorized materials. If they refuse to sign the pledge, their Pentagon press passes will be revoked.In a post on X, Hegseth said Friday: “The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon – the people do. The press is no longer allowed to roam the halls of a secure facility. Wear a badge and follow the rules – or go home.”The latest memo follows the announcement by Hegseth in May regarding new press restrictions at the Pentagon. These restrictions limit reporters’ movements within the building to specific areas including the press pens, food court and courtyard. This is a departure from the usual practice under previous presidential administrations where reporters typically had more freedom of movement within the Pentagon.Hegseth has severely limited media access after facing backlash for sharing sensitive information about US strikes in Yemen in March in a Signal group chat where a journalist was accidentally included.Since he assumed office, Hegseth has maintained a hostile attitude towards major media networks. He ordered the removal of various longstanding news organizations including the New York Times, CNN, Politico and NPR from their dedicated offices in the Pentagon.The Pentagon’s latest memo has drawn criticism from journalists and free press advocates, with the National Press Club’s president Mike Balsamo saying: “This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the US military.“If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.”Similarly, Freedom of the Press Foundation said “this policy operates as a prior restraint on publication, which is considered the most serious” violations of the press freedoms guaranteed by the US constitution’s first amendment.“The government cannot prohibit journalists from public information merely by claiming it’s a secret,” the foundation said.Meanwhile, Thomas Evans, editor in chief of National Public Radio (NPR), said his outlet was “taking this very seriously”.“We’ll be working with other news organizations to push back,” Evans remarked. “We’re big fans of the first amendment and transparency, and we want the American public to understand what’s being done in their name.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Pentagon’s restrictions on media access come as Trump suggested recently that TV networks should be punished for “negative coverage”. That statement followed widespread backlash over ABC’s indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show, on which the veteran comedian said that many in Trump’s Make America Great Again movement “are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk”, referring to the 10 September killing of the rightwing activist.Speaking on Air Force One on Thursday, Trump said – without providing evidence – that “97% [of major US networks are] against me”.“They give me only bad press,” he said, adding that he believed broadcasters should have their licenses “taken away” as a result.Among those to endorse Trump’s argument was the US senator Cynthia Lummis. The Wyoming Republican recently told the US news website Semafor that such licenses are “a privilege” rather than a “right” – and she said to the outlet that she no longer believes the first amendment is “the ultimate right”.“I feel like something’s changed culturally,” Lummis said, in part. “And I think there needs to be cognizance that things have changed.” More

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      ‘The devil is not gonna win’: how Charlie Kirk became a Christian nationalist martyr

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      Christian nationalists in the US are positioning Charlie Kirk as a martyr for their movement, one that has grown in popularity and whose rise was intertwined with Kirk’s own political ascent.After Kirk’s killing, his widow, Erika Kirk, wrote on social media that the “world is evil”, but God “so good.” The “sound of this widow weeping [echoes] throughout this world like a battle cry,” she said. “They have no idea what they just ignited within this wife.”While Erika Kirk’s private sorrow is no doubt very real, her public remarks are telling, said Jeff Sharlet, the author of several books on Christian nationalism and the far right. “That’s holy war, that’s accelerationism, and it’s incredibly powerful,” he said, particularly in the emotional context of a grieving widow.Sharlet noted that although Kirk was best known for his non-religious political organizing, conservative eulogizing has overwhelmingly emphasized that he was a man of faith. Some people have gone further, and characterized Kirk’s death as martyrdom for conservative Christian values.“We know that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” Sean Feucht, a pastor who worked with Kirk and is known for his Christian nationalist views, said in an emotional video on social media. “The devil is not gonna win. The forces want us to be silent; they want us to shut up … We need to be more bold.”Matt Tuggle, a megachurch pastor, posted a video of Kirk’s death with the caption: “If your pastor isn’t telling you the left believes a evil demonic belief system you are in the wrong church!”The rise of Trump-era Christian nationalismKirk’s meteoric career as a pundit and far-right activist was in some ways a microcosm of the rise of Trump-era Christian nationalism. Kirk started as a publicly secular young Republican in the Alex P Keaton mold but came to embrace a strident Christian culture war, speaking of a “spiritual battle … coming to the West” that would pit “Christendom” and “the American way of life” against leftism and Islam.Similarly, Turning Point USA, which Kirk founded in 2012, started as a pro-free market organization downstream of the late-2000s Tea Party movement against “big government”, but by the time of his death he had leaned into ideas associated with the Christian right. The organization may have done so because it spotted an opportunity.Shortly before Donald Trump won his first election to the presidency, the mainstream Christian right was demoralized and open to more extreme and anti-democratic ideas, noted Matthew D Taylor, a scholar of contemporary Christianity and the author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy.View image in fullscreenChristian nationalism is the belief that the US is and should be an explicitly Christian nation. Experts tend to view the ideology as existing on a continuum that ranges from relatively mainstream cultural conservatism to extreme religious supremacy. Defining it is difficult because Christian nationalism is less an organized movement than a tendency or way of thinking, Taylor and others said.For many years, the Christian right was dominated by groups such as the Moral Majority, which emphasized the idea of organizing Christian voters to democratically achieve conservative outcomes, as well as efforts to train and elevate conservative jurists to influence the federal judiciary.Yet two electoral victories by Barack Obama and the US supreme court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country, left Christian conservatives feeling that all their efforts were for nothing. Because of changing demographics and the ongoing secularization of society, the number of Americans who identified as Christian was also dropping – meaning that majoritarian democracy was no longer a reliable political tool for the Christian right.“The early summer of 2015 … was a low point for them,” Taylor said. “There was this sense of, ‘What we’re doing is not working. We need someone strong. We need a fighter.’ And it just so happened that Trump kind of appeared on the scene at that moment, and I think that was, in part, the rocket fuel behind his appeal to evangelicals; he said: ‘I will speak for you. I will defend you. I will give you more power.’”Despite occasional misgivings, the Christian right soon enthusiastically aligned with Trump. But when he came into office, Trump did something new: he surrounded himself with Christian advisers from outside the traditional leadership of the Christian right. Led by Trump’s longtime adviser, the pastor Paula White-Cain, his new consiglieres tended to be megachurch preachers who had big followings in their spheres of influence but were viewed as B-list – or C-list, or D-list – figures by the conservative Christian political establishment.White-Cain “was an independent, charismatic televangelist and megachurch pastor and was on her third marriage, a female preacher, and preached the prosperity gospel,” Taylor said – in other words, someone with many markers “that people in the conventional evangelical world would have either labeled heresy or just low-brow”.‘He drew the church into Maga’After this changing of the guard, there were “some pretty wild and extreme theologies” that gained access to the Trump administration and conservative centers of power, Taylor said, including a far-right movement, popular in some charismatic and Pentecostal circles, that is sometimes called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The NAR advocates for modern-day apostles and prophets to lead conservative Christians in turning the US into a dominion of Christ on Earth.The NAR leaders who “attached themselves to Trump and the Maga movement very early on,” Taylor said, “had a vision of social change, of societal conquest, that was far more aggressive than some of the old frameworks of the religious right.” That vision was exciting and politically potent to people including Kirk, who adopted theories and language associated with the NAR.The NAR has a distinctly minoritarian and anti-democratic valence. Rather than a Christian public lobbying to make government and society reflect its values, NAR ideas argue for Christians to take positions of power and push their values from the top down. A key NAR concept is something called the “seven mountains mandate” – the idea that “spiritual war” will not succeed until Christians have scaled and conquered seven summits of influence in public life, commonly identified as religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment, and business.“The seven mountains, as an ideology, is deeply ambivalent about democracy,” Taylor said. “If democracy works, and gets you to positions of power, great, but if not, well, God’s will is still for Christians to take over the seven mountains, and they need to do it by whatever means they can.”The concept of the seven mountains has existed since the 1970s but was popularized in the 2000s, according to Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia and the author of the forthcoming book The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy.Kirk had been an evangelical Christian since childhood but earlier in his career expressed reluctance at politicizing his religious views. That changed during the peak of the early pandemic, when Kirk made the acquaintance of several charismatic megachurch pastors protesting church lockdowns. He began to traffic in ideas influenced by the NAR, including the seven-mountain mandate. Turning Point USA also began to forge partnerships with churches.View image in fullscreenKirk’s own evolution was striking: he went from saying, in 2018, that it was important that Christians respect the separation of church and state to denying that any such separation existed in the US constitution.Kirk never used the exact phrase “seven-mountain mandate”, Boedy said, but at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2020 Kirk praised Trump by saying: “Finally, we have a president who understands the seven mountains of cultural influence,” which was one of the most prominent mentions of the concept in the conservative mainstream. Kirk also attended conferences organized around the theme of the seven-mountain mandate.“‘Seven mountains’ is a kind of weird, wonky theology,” Sharlet said; Kirk “normalizes it and mainstreams it and smooths it out”.Kirk understood “the political and religious baggage that comes with the idea of Christian dominionism, of theocracy,” Boedy believes, and was trying to gently popularize Christian nationalist ideas while avoiding their more negative connotations.The “Appeal to Heaven” flags seen at the January 6 riot and elsewhere are often an NAR symbol. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, has ties to NAR circles and flies an Appeal to Heaven flag at his congressional office. Ché Ahn, the Republican candidate for governor of California and a charismatic preacher, is an adherent of NAR and “seven-mountain” ideas.Kirk was an activist more interested in uniting conservative Christians than representing any one faction or denomination. Yet the NAR might be understood as one of three main currents of hardline contemporary Christian nationalism in the US, Taylor said. The other two streams are radical traditionalist Catholics and a certain aggressively “masculine” reformed Protestantism embodied in Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense.In contrast to the Catholic and reformed Protestant camps, which tend to be very white and male in their leadership and intellectually influential but not widely popular, the NAR has roots in a rapidly growing international charismatic movement that is multi-ethnic, open to women in leadership, and viscerally exciting to rank-and-file churchgoers.Yet the symbolism and rhetoric of Christian nationalism are also attractive to broad swathes of conservative Americans, including those who are not actively religious, Sharlet noted. Although the Christian nationalism of popular imagination is a strict, Handmaid’s Tale-style piety, he said he often encounters Maga conservatives who are intensely dedicated to Christian nationalist ideas despite the fact that they do not attend church.“It wasn’t so much that [Kirk] joined the church as he drew the church into Maga,” Sharlet feels. “And I think he made a kind of influencer-lifestyle Christian nationalism that was appealing, that you could adopt [as a] kind of performance without having to change your life too much.”“No civilization has ever collapsed because it prays too much,” Kirk declared not long before he died. But he also gestured at a broader and more potent theme: that “a civilization that abandons God will deteriorate and ultimately collapse from the inside out.” More

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      Donald Trump’s ‘Department of War’ will just deliver bloodshed and destruction | Judith Levine

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      On Friday, Donald Trump signed an executive order restoring the Department of Defense to its original name, the Department of War.That name “had a stronger sound”, Trump told reporters in August. “As Department of War we won everything,” he added, “and I think we’re going to have to go back to that.” In June, at the Nato summit, he called Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, his “secretary of war”.In the Department of War, Trump and Hegseth see the embodiment of a revived “warrior ethos” purportedly lost to overweening “woke-ness” in the armed forces. Hegseth has opined that women don’t belong on the battlefield and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) has rendered American fighting forces “effeminate”. Introducing a bill last week to the same effect as Trump’s order, Greg Steube, a Florida Republican senator, said the new-old name would “pay tribute” to past fighters’ “renowned commitment to lethality”.And the president, who fashions himself a dealmaker for peace, now has a department named to reflect his excellence as warrior king.In a way, an administration that habitually calls things the opposite of what they are – the 20 January executive order Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government; the waste-and-chaos-generation “department of government efficiency” – is, for once, speaking truth. The Department of War, created in 1789, became the defense department in 1949, with an amendment to the National Security Act of 1947 unifying the branches of the military. But the Department of Defense has never been a department of defense. It is a department of war.The last time the US declared war – or had to defend itself, for that matter – was in 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Still, since it’s been the “defense” department, the Pentagon has waged at least four undeclared wars. Trump is right: we haven’t won much. The Korean War was a draw. In Vietnam, we lost outright. And after hundreds of thousands of deaths, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan left those countries and the region more unstable and plagued by terrorism. The US has engaged in more than 200 military interventions, more than half of them since the end of the cold war in 1989.Trump was going to be the peace president. “I’m not going to start a war,” he promised in his 2024 victory speech. “I’m going to stop the wars.” It didn’t take long to break that vow and keep totting up those interventions.Ten days into his second term, Trump undertook the next chapter of the war on terror, launching airstrikes in north-western Syria and, a day later, in Somalia. In March, he initiated strikes in Yemen against Houthi militants, who had taken control of shipping routes in the Red Sea. The operation – blemished by the inadvertent deaths of dozens of immigrants in a detention center and the loss of a $67.4m fighter jet, which fell off an aircraft carrier into the sea – was halted 51 days later. The Houthis, Trump allowed, didn’t “want to fight anymore”, an allegation a Houthi leader disputed soundly.In late June, after Israel shot missiles into Iran and Iran responded in kind, the US bombed three Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities. The president, who had withdrawn the US from the multilateral – or, as he put it, “one-sided” – 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement during his first term, had weeks earlier entered into new nuclear negotiations with that country. Over bipartisan objections, he attacked anyway.Hours later, in a televised address from the White House, Trump claimed that the objective of the strikes had been the “destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity”, and pronounced the salvo a “spectacular” success. At the same time, he warned on Truth Social that any Iranian retaliation that killed Americans would “BE MET WITH FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT”. While the world braced for a region-wide conflagration, Trump boasted to Nato: “Now this incredible exercise of American strength has paved the way for peace with a historic ceasefire agreement late Monday.” July clocked in as the deadliest month of the Gaza war. In August, as Israel continued to starve the Palestinians, UN-backed experts declared Israel’s “man-made famine” engulfing northern Gaza.A few weeks after the attacks, US intelligence concluded that they had barely made a dent in Iran’s nuclear capability. Needless to say, this displeased the commander-in-chief, and in August, Hegseth fired the general whose agency made those assessments.This summer, the US “war on drugs” was unofficially militarized, including incursions into other countries. Last week, the president announced that a navy ship – one of three deployed to waters outside Venezuela – had “shot out” a vessel originating there, carrying narcotics and piloted by members of the Tren de Aragua trafficking gang. Eleven people were killed. Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president, whom the US has charged as a narco-trafficker, called the ships an “extravagant, unjustifiable, immoral, and absolutely criminal and bloody threat”, and put his own military on alert for attacks closer to home. Last month, Trump directed the military to pursue drug cartels inside Mexico, which Claudia Sheinbaum, the president, called an “invasion”. And then there’s Greenland, which Trump has vowed to annex, one way or another.To realize “peace through strength”, Trump’s 2026 budget proposed more than $1tn for defense, a 13% increase from the previous year. Even the defense department requested less: a mere $961.6bn. The $831.5bn war chest Congress finally approved includes funding for the project closest to Trump’s, um, heart – the continent-wide Golden Dome space defense system, which he said last week would protect the “homeland” for “hundreds of years”. Talking it up in May, Trump and Hegseth said the system could be built in three years and cost $125bn; Congress allocated about $13bn for initial development. But other calculations put the figure between $2.5tn and $6.2tn. And aside from its dubious feasibility and cost, experts warn that the project would accelerate the arms race. Strength, maybe. Peace, not so much.In a 1936 speech justifying his reluctance to join the war in Europe, Franklin Delano Roosevelt insisted that the US “could best serve the cause of a peaceful humanity by setting an example”. FDR had served as assistant secretary of the navy during the first world war, and the trauma was fresh in memory. He had seen “blood running from the wounded”, “cities destroyed”, “children starving”, “the agony of mothers and wives”, he said: “I hate war.”By contrast, Trump, who takes credit for ending seven wars and believes he deserves a Nobel prize, skirted military service and has seen war only on television. Yet he relishes it – and, most of all, revels in being commander-in-chief. His first military self-celebration – which marked the ceremonial birth of a new American fascism – was a bust, so now he’s planning another one.Trump’s Department of War burnishes his vanity, but it is not just a vanity project. It is extravagantly expensive. It will occupy US cities. And now, in word as in deed, it celebrates the nation and the president as aggressor, conqueror, unrestrained international lawbreaker and flouter of anything so “woke” as peace.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More