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    Trump’s Ice raids recall a painful past for these Americans: ‘I see myself in those children’

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    Mass expulsion, babies born behind barbed wire, intrusive medical exams for newcomers, families torn apart: these aren’t scenes from Donald Trump’s promised second-term immigration crackdown, but from the US’s extensive history of xenophobic immigration policy.While so many Americans watched in horror at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s military-like raids across Los Angeles this summer, US cruelty and violence towards immigrants is nothing new, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the mass deportation of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression. As the Trump administration escalates its attacks on immigrants – or those perceived to be immigrants – survivors of previous eras of xenophobia say it’s more important than ever to remember the past. The harms done to them and their families have lasted generations, and what’s happening now threatens to do the same.The Guardian spoke with four Californians who have lived through, or whose parents lived through, some of these dark moments in US history. They shared how these episodes shaped their lives, what it’s like to see these chapters of history repeat themselves today – and what gives them hope.Christine ValencianaView image in fullscreenWhen Christine Valenciana, 75, watched footage of armed, masked Ice agents in unmarked vehicles snatching people off the streets across southern California this summer, rounding up gardeners, car wash workers, veterans and US citizens, it recalled a familiar time in her own family’s history.In the 1930s, under the economic pressures of the Great Depression, nearly 2 million Mexican Americans – more than half US citizens – were forced out of their homes and unconstitutionally deported to free up jobs for “real Americans”. Valenciana’s mother’s family was among them.“The raids that took place at the time were not unlike now,” said Valenciana, 75.Mexican “repatriation”, which Valenciana prefers to call “expulsion”, consisted of military-style raids, mass deportations, scare tactics and public pressure that terrorized Mexican communities and broke up countless families. For American children like Valenciana’s mother, who was born in 1926 in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, the trauma was layered: leaving their home and country, adjusting to a new culture in Mexico and eventually returning to the US years later.Emilia Castañeda, Valenciana’s mother, was seven when her own mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died less than a year later on the day of Emilia’s first communion. “She told me what bothered her the most about having to leave was that she wouldn’t be able to visit her mother’s grave,” remembered Valenciana, now an associate professor emeritus at the department of elementary and bilingual education at California State University, Fullerton. “They went to the train station and she and other people were crying.”She told Valenciana that the girls in her school in Mexico referred to her as “repatriada”, which was meant as a put-down. “My mom was pretty miserable,” said Valenciana. By age 12, Emilia worked as a live-in babysitter, but at times she was not paid or given a decent bed or blanket, according to her daughter. Emilia was desperate to come back to Los Angeles once the repatriation period ended. During the second world war, she made the journey alone by train right before her 18th birthday with the help of her godmother, who gave her a place to live.View image in fullscreenAlong with Valenciana’s husband, Francisco Balderrama, who co-authored a seminal book on Mexican repatriation, Emilia eventually went on to become an advocate for others to learn about this previously hidden chapter in US history. In her 70s, she helped pass legislation that led to a formal apology from the state of California in 2005 and a monument in downtown Los Angeles in 2012. Emilia passed away in 2020 at age 94.While Valenciana sees parallels between the 1930s and today, there’s one big difference, she says: “There’s much more support for people who are being kidnapped and tortured today as opposed to the 1930s where people either didn’t know or care.” She says she better understands what her mother and others like her experienced when she sees members of her community leaving the US voluntarily or living in hiding, fearful of going to church or the market because of Ice.“I’m not just heartbroken,” she said. “I’m sad and angry. Racism is deeply rooted in this country.”Felicia LoweView image in fullscreenGrowing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Felicia Lowe, 79, was never taught about Chinese American history. She had plenty of questions, but no answers. Her immigrant parents refused to talk about how they came to arrive in the US from China.Lowe’s curiosity inspired her to become a television reporter and filmmaker, whose work has revealed the impact of Chinese exclusion, a series of racist immigration laws from 1882 to 1943 that restricted Chinese immigration to the US in response to growing anti-Chinese sentiment and competition for jobs.After reading the book Island about the Angel Island immigration station in the San Francisco Bay, which opened in 1910 to enforce exclusion and prevent “undesirable” immigrants from entering the US, Lowe knew she had to share this little-known story. In 1988, she released a film about it, Carved in Silence.“For all the immigrants, there was a very intrusive physical examination,” Lowe said. “Angel Island was built to jail people, to interrogate them and make them feel so unwanted.”View image in fullscreenImmigrants were detained for months and years at a time in crowded, prison-like dorms with locked doors and separated by race and sex. The station processed up to 1 million Asian and other immigrants, including 250,000 who were Chinese, from 1910 to 1940. Since Chinese people were effectively barred from entering the US, “paper sons” and “paper daughters” circumvented exclusion by purchasing documents that falsely identified them as the children of Chinese Americans.It wasn’t until after Lowe made Carved in Silence that she discovered a shocking secret about her own family’s history: her father had been detained for three weeks at Angel Island, according to transcripts from the National Archives.“Every time people were interrogated, they had to sign their names,” she said. “On one of those documents, my father’s handwriting was very shaky and I thought he must have been really scared that day.” She realized her father, who died of a sudden heart attack at 58, had been a “paper son” himself, which gave Lowe an even deeper understanding of the trauma and cost of leaving one’s homeland, and entering a country that did not want you because of your ethnicity. “The risks taken required courage and hope, that the payoff would be a greater opportunity for himself and his future family,” she said.Unlike the Angel Island era, where the public was largely unaware of detainees’ conditions and experiences, many of today’s immigration actions are being recorded on phones in real time and circulating online (the Trump administration has broadcast raids and regularly runs commercials encouraging people to “self-deport and stay out”). Lowe said people in 2025 have more evidence of their experiences and she believes that Ice’s hypervisibility has united people who may not have been activists to be more supportive of immigrants.“What we’re witnessing today is wholesale harassment, arrests with little to no acknowledgement of a person’s legal status,” said Lowe, who has been a leader in the preservation and restoration of Angel Island as a national historic landmark. “Rights are being ignored and innocent immigrants and/or those who have proper paperwork to be here are being locked up and, in some cases, sent to jails in other countries.“I don’t care what color you are – we need to understand how much we share humanity and pain. We cannot be afraid to tell our stories.”Satsuki InaView image in fullscreenDuring the first Trump administration, Satsuki Ina made multiple visits to family immigration detention centers, where she met with Central American mothers and children who were being held by the US government after fleeing horrific violence.“Mothers poured their hearts out about what was happening to their kids and I couldn’t help but see myself in those children,” she said. That’s because Ina, 81, herself was born behind barbed wire in a US concentration camp where she was formally listed as an “enemy alien” by the US government.It was the second world war, and the US had rounded up and unconstitutionally imprisoned more than 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry based on unfounded national security fears over their race. Ina’s parents, who were US citizens, were first sent to California’s Tanforan racetrack in San Bruno, where the smell of horses and manure lingered, then to Topaz prison camp in Utah.After failing a loyalty questionnaire, the Inas were sent to the Tule Lake segregation center, a maximum-security concentration camp with 28 guard towers, 1,000 military police officers and tanks patrolling the perimeter. Overcrowded barracks were useless protection against choking dust storms, searing heat and snow.View image in fullscreenWhile at Tule Lake, Ina’s father, Itaru, spoke out about his civil rights, which led to him being sent to a separate Department of Justice camp in Bismarck, North Dakota, that was less chaotic and filled with almost 4,000 German and Japanese men, leaving Ina’s mother, Shizuko, to raise two young children alone. After the war ended in 1945, the family was reunited at a camp in Crystal City, Texas, before finally being freed after four years of captivity. Ina had spent the first two years of her life imprisoned.Her parents’ San Francisco home and property were seized in 1942, and the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Satsuki became Sandy. Years later, when Ina said she wanted to be called by her real name, her mother repeatedly said: “Don’t do it. Bad things will happen.”“When I was a child, my mother tried to protect me from the stigma that was directed towards people who were resisters, so she would just say things like: ‘Don’t say you were born in Tule Lake. Just tell them you were born in Newell,’ which is nearby,” Ina remembered. “The message we were getting from our parents was: ‘You have to keep us safe. Don’t get into trouble, don’t cause problems.’ ”Decades later, Ina, who is now a psychotherapist and a professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, started connecting her experience with the expansion of family immigration detention first under the Obama administration and then during the first Trump administration, imprisoned children and separated Central American and South American families seeking asylum on a larger scale.Together with activist Mike Ishii, she co-founded the group Tsuru for Solidarity to help end detention sites and support immigrant and refugee communities under attack. “We felt like we had the moral authority to stand up and protest,” said Ina. “I never set out to be an activist. I just mostly saw myself as someone who was pissed off about what was going on.”It was only in the last half of Ina’s 40-year career as a psychotherapist that she started studying the effects of trauma and how it could be passed down to subsequent generations. She found that many Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated as children struggled with anxiety and depression as adults. Last year, she published a memoir, The Poet and the Silk Girl, which follows the Ina family’s agonizing journey through incarceration, based on her mother’s diary and censored letters her parents exchanged while held at separate prison camps.“It’s more than 80 years since our incarceration and the effects of it are still impacting my community,” said Ina. “The mass incarceration solution is the most dehumanizing, long-term impact for whole communities. To imprison children, in particular, is inhumane and damaging. I think about the children I interviewed, and the amount of anxiety and depression that they’ve been filled with doesn’t get erased when you’re freed. It lies in you with each stage of life.”Eliseo MedinaView image in fullscreenAfter growing up in Huanusco, Zacatecas, in Mexico, Eliseo Medina, 79, came to the US with his family in 1956. His parents worked in the fields of Delano, California, an agricultural area in the San Joaquin valley known for its grapes, while he attended school. When he was a boy, immigration raids, arrests and deportations were commonplace. He recalled hearing loud knocks at the front door of their modest home in the middle of the night. “We’d get up and go to the door and find lights shining on our faces,” said Medina, whose family were legal immigrants. “These guys in uniform were there asking for our papers – we had no idea we had any rights.” Like today, these farm workers were mostly immigrants and their wages were often lower than US-born counterparts and workers in other sectors.Medina left school at 15 to join his parents and sisters working in the fields. In 1965, when Medina was off work due to a broken leg, he heard that Filipino farmworkers in Coachella had walked out on strike demanding $1.40 an hour and that they were coming to Delano next. He grabbed his crutches, got in his car and drove to 11th Avenue, where he saw about 200 people with signs shouting: “Huelga! Strike!” Although he was scared, Medina attended his first union meeting inside a local church just days after the historic Delano grape strike and boycott began. It happened to be Mexican Independence Day, which felt symbolic, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.“Every seat was taken, people were standing around the walls and there was electricity,” he recalled. “Cesar Chavez walked out and he talked about how we had rights even though we were poor, that we deserved to be treated with respect and dignity, that we sold our labor, not our souls.” Chavez called for a strike, and the whole hall erupted, chanting: “Huelga, huelga, huelga!” Exhilarated by what he had witnessed, Medina went home, broke open his piggy bank and joined the union and grape strike the next morning.“We went against some of the biggest growers and I saw them being scared for the first time and I got hooked,” he said. Dolores Huerta took a shine to the 19-year-old and recruited him to represent United Farm Workers (UFW) at rallies. Over the next 13 years, he worked alongside Chavez, leading boycotting efforts and organizing fundraisers and rallies around the country, and eventually became UFW’s national vice-president.View image in fullscreen“It was the most exciting thing that any person could have ever experienced for me,” he said. Medina later worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), pushing for equal labor and civil rights protections for workers. In 2013, the labor leader participated in a 22-day hunger strike on the National Mall, where he was visited by Barack Obama, to draw attention to the need for immigration reform.Medina, who lives just outside Los Angeles, sees sustained protests against Ice and other Trump administration policies as building the foundation for maintaining democracy and modernizing the immigration system. “It’s dark right now, but it’s also a great opportunity for organizers because people are paying attention across our society,” said Medina. “People are asking: ‘Who am I? Who is this country? What do I care about? What are my values?’”Some California farm workers are on strike following immigration raids at several farms, calling for an end to raids and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers (the United Farm Workers has not yet called for a strike or boycott). “I certainly understand and support their right to be heard and respected,” he said. “They are striking against a cruel and unusual government. In the end, they may lead the way for a broader worker response.”He said that the diversity of the anti-Trump coalition, and the public image of Ice as armed, masked soldiers terrorizing people, is helping to radicalize a new generation of activists. “I’ve been doing this almost 60 years. I saw the farm workers win, civil rights, a war ended. I saw women make huge impacts. I saw gay rights,” he reflected. “When you change minds, you also change policies and the laws, so I have hope.” More

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      Six great reads: rebels in Nazi Germany, how creativity works and Europe’s biggest pornography conference

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      1. The astonishing story of the aristocrat who hid her Jewish lover in a sofa bed – and other German rebels who defied the NazisView image in fullscreenFrom a diplomat who embraced the exiled Albert Einstein to a schoolteacher who helped “non-Aryan” students flee, these remarkable individuals refused to bend the knee to Hitler – only to be dramatically betrayed. What, asked Jonathan Freedland, in this extract from his new book, The Traitors Circle, made them risk it all?Read more2. The unconscious process that leads to creativity: how ‘incubation’ worksView image in fullscreen“One of the most marvellous properties of the brain,” wrote Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis in this fascinating piece from Well Actually, is its ability to continue working unconsciously when the conscious mind has moved on to something else.Read more3. Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go?View image in fullscreenAfter leaving the New York Times, Weiss turned her Substack into an unshakable pro-Israel voice. Now as Paramount eyes acquisition of her company, David Klion profiled a writer who is poised to become Trump’s ally among media elites.Read more4. Israel is forcing us to leave Gaza City. We know they may never let us returnView image in fullscreenIn this deeply personal piece, Gaza reporter Malak A Tantesh wrote about her family’s decision to leave northern Gaza, the area they call home, for the tents of the south where they had also endured last year’s winter. The family has stayed in 10 locations since they were first forced out of their prewar home in Beit Lahia.Read more5. Boom times and total burnout: three days at Europe’s biggest pornography conferenceView image in fullscreenIn this powerful feature, Amelia Gentleman, alongside photographer Judith Jockel, reported from the biggest pornography conference in Europe, where she spoke to entrepreneurs who were excited about AI and soaring profits, and creators who were battling burnout and chronic illness due to the industry’s gig-economy structure.Read more6. ‘I wasn’t terrified of dying, but I didn’t want to leave my kids’: Davina McCall on addiction, reality TV and the brain tumour that nearly killed herView image in fullscreenWhen the TV presenter was offered a free health screening, she thought it was pointless: she was “the healthiest woman you’ve ever met”. But then came the shocking diagnosis. Now fully recovered, she told Simon Hattenstone, she’s re‑evaluating everything.Read more More

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      Manzanar teaches about Japanese American incarceration in the US. That’s in jeopardy under Trump

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      At the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, more than 200 miles (320km) outside Los Angeles, in what feels like the middle of nowhere, is Manzanar national historic site. It marks the place where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during the second world war, crowded into barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with searchlights, and patrolled by military police.Since then, Manzanar, which now has a museum and reconstructed barracks that visitors can walk through, has been transformed into a popular pilgrimage destination for Japanese Americans to remember and teach others about this history. (Manzanar was one of 10 concentration camps where the US government forcibly relocated and held more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent during the second world war.)But recently, under the direction of the Trump administration, National Park Service (NPS) employees have hung new signs at Manzanar that historians and community advocates say will undermine these public education efforts. The notices encourage visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features” via a QR code. The signs, which have been posted at all national parks, monuments and historic sites, were displayed in support of Donald Trump’s executive order Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.Historians, national park advocates and community leaders say they’re alarmed by the move, in what they see as the most recent example of the Trump administration’s attempt to “whitewash” US history.View image in fullscreen“Any attempt to constrain or sanitize the stories that are told at Manzanar should concern every American,” said Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, executive director of Densho, an organization that documents the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were held in concentration camps. “I’m incredibly disappointed that this is happening in the United States because museums, monuments and memorials are public spaces where we can explore difficult history, confront our past, engage with what’s uncomfortable and then be able to imagine the future that we want to collectively share.”Earlier this year, government agencies compiled hundreds of words to be erased from federal recognition such as “diversity”, “cultural heritage”, “marginalized”, “racial inequality” and “ethnicity”.“I think the sign is clearly trying to create a chilling effect in the telling of these stories,” said Dennis Arguelles, the southern California director of the National Parks Conservation Association, which supports national parks and opposes planned changes to alter historical facts. “These are moments in our history and it’s very dangerous for us to try to pretend it didn’t happen.”The NPS, which has already been under pressure due to funding cuts, hiring freezes and forced resignations, has a legal mandate to preserve, protect and interpret American history. By posting the new signs across all 433 parks, monuments and historic sites, park visitors can act as government informants, although Arguelles said he has heard anecdotally that people have used the QR code to express support for Manzanar and ask that the administration let park rangers do their jobs.View image in fullscreenNPS units have been tasked with reviewing all “inappropriate content” on display by 18 July, and parks will receive direction about what to do with it by 18 August.Arguelles said that fears of public education at Manzanar being stifled are not unfounded. The park service has already stripped the contributions of transgender people from the Stonewall national monument’s website. And the US army deleted a webpage dedicated to the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the nation’s most decorated military unit, which was composed of thousands of Japanese Americans whose families were forcibly incarcerated by their own government. After public outcry, the page was partially restored.The Trump administration has also threatened funding for colleges and universities offering ethnic studies programs as part of their DEI purge. Cultural institutions such as the Japanese American National Museum that focus on education, culture and storytelling have lost grants (some have since been temporarily restored). Among the cuts was a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that funded a workshop that helped teachers build a curriculum about the history of Japanese incarceration that benefitted roughly 20,000 students a year.“As a historian, you can see a pendulum swing between a very narrow and exclusive vision of America as a white Christian nation and a more open, multi-ethnic America,” said Duncan Ryūken Williams, director of the University of Southern California’s Shinso Ito Center and co-founder of of the Irei Project, which, for the first time, compiled the names of 125,284 people of Japanese ancestry who were unjustly incarcerated during the second world war. “We’re obviously in one part of that spectrum now.”The preservation of this part of Japanese American history is about more than remembering the past. In March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act – the very law that served as the basis for some of the arrests and roundups of Japanese Americans during the second world war – against Venezuelan nationals as young as 14 whom the administration claims are members of the Tren de Aragua gang. In cases challenging the executive order, every judge except one has found the Trump administration’s use of the act to deport people without due process to be illegal.When the US last invoked the Alien Enemies Act, it began a period of escalation that resulted in the supreme court deferring to unsubstantiated claims from the executive branch, which led to everyday people, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, losing their families, jobs, homes and freedoms. (It wasn’t just the Alien Enemies Act; most people of Japanese descent were detained, under the auspices of martial law in Hawaii and otherwise under Executive Order 9066.)Williams said that, like today, the way the Alien Enemies Act was used during the second world war was prejudicial since people of Japanese heritage were seen at the time as being “unassimilable racially and religiously”, recalling racist tropes from the era of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.View image in fullscreen“Currently, we are seeing people being picked up and detained and moved immediately away from their families,” said Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, one of 60 Asian American organizations that filed an amicus brief supporting the fight against Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act. “We’re hearing reports of even green card holders having been deported without any process, without a hearing. It’s really, really disturbing.”She connects the lack of due process many immigrants are experiencing today to what most Japanese Americans experienced during the second world war. “This is the same playbook,” Kohli said. “The government suppressed evidence and made false claims to justify incarceration in WWII and today’s administration is doing the same thing. They’re invoking this law with no evidence.”While it remains to be seen how the courts will rule on the Alien Enemies Act and how the NPS will handle complying with the administration’s orders about the content at sites like Manzanar, Japanese American community organizations are determined to teach the lessons of the past to show how quickly civil liberties can be taken away, particularly for communities of color.“The slogan Make America Great Again is sort of calling back to the past that didn’t exist,” said Densho’s Kawamura. “We’re going to do our best to protect and safeguard this history so that young people still have access to it even if the federal government itself is making it more difficult for us to do our work.” More

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      Trump is deeply obsessed with US history – but he has learned all the wrong lessons from it | David Reynolds

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      Today the US army will parade in style along the National Mall in Washington DC to celebrate its 250th anniversary. This also just happens to be the 79th birthday of President Donald J Trump. As commander-in-chief, he will take the salute from a viewing platform on Constitution Avenue.But this is not a mere vanity project, as some critics have claimed. History really matters to the US’s 47th president. One of Trump’s last acts before reluctantly leaving the White House in January 2021 was to publish a report by his “1776 Commission”, created to “restore understanding of the greatness of the American Founding”. Deliberately, the commissioners included few university historians because universities were described as often being “hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country”.The 1776 Commission demanded a return to truly “patriotic education”, declaring: “We must resolve to teach future generations of Americans an accurate history of our country so that we all learn and cherish our founding principles once again. We must renew the pride and gratitude we have for this incredible nation that we are blessed to call home.”In this spirit, on 2 May this year, the president posted that he was renaming 8 May and 11 November respectively as “Victory Day for World War II and Victory Day for World War I” because “we won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance”, and it was time for the US to “start celebrating our victories again!”The parade on 14 June is also intended to raise the curtain on a spectacular nationwide celebration of the 250th anniversary of US independence, extending right across the country and culminating on 4 July 2026. According to the White House website, one feature will be a video history series that “tells the remarkable story of American Independence. It will highlight the stories of the crucial characters and events that resulted in a small rag-tag army defeating the mightiest empire in the world and establishing the greatest republic ever to exist.”History on parade, indeed. As is often the case, Trump does start with a valid point. After he witnessed the extravaganza of Bastille Day in 2017, where French and American troops marched down the Champs-Élysées to celebrate the centenary of the US’s entry into the first world war, he was determined to stage a parade of his own. So what’s wrong with that? Shouldn’t countries be proud of their past?OK (if you don’t mind the cost). But pride should be rooted in honesty, especially when Nato in Europe is engaged in a proxy war in Ukraine against Vladimir Putin, a systematic falsifier of history. And if we’re trying to be honest, world wars aren’t like the World Series with one country trumping all the others and winning almost single-handedly.Take the second world war. On 3 May this year, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev dismissed Trump’s claims as “pretentious nonsense”, asserting that “Victory Day is ours and it is 9 May. So it was, so it is, so it will always be!” Medvedev is now an obedient Putinist, but he and other Russians rightly point to their huge losses in 1941-45 – roughly 27 million people. Stated differently, in the three years from June 1941 to June 1944, between Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the D-day landings in Normandy, more than 90% of the German army’s battle casualties (killed, wounded, missing and prisoners) were inflicted by the Red Army. That puts Alamein and Tunis, Anzio and the liberation of Rome into a different perspective.View image in fullscreenYet Americans can rightly say that they were in a league of their own as a “superpower” – a word coined in 1944 to signify “great power and great mobility of power”. Their huge C-47 transport planes and the B-17 and B-24 bombers allowed the US to wage war right across the world. Their modern fleets of aircraft carriers, built to avenge Pearl Harbor, island-hopped across the Pacific to Japan itself. The Pacific war ended with the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or consider the speed of the remarkable breakout from Normandy that enabled allied armies to liberate Brussels on 3 September 1944, occupying positions they had not expected to reach until May 1945. When an astonished Winston Churchill asked how the GIs were being fed and supplied, US general Omar Bradley said he was running trucks up to the front “bumper to bumper, 24 hours a day”. Ford delivered the goods.But Britain also played a crucial part in victory. Had our embattled island gone the same way as Scandinavia, France and the Low Countries in the summer of 1940, Hitler would have thrown all his resources against the Soviet Union, while Roosevelt’s US would probably have turned in on itself and concentrated on defending the western hemisphere. Instead, a combination of Churchillian leadership, modern fighters linked to the new Chain Home system of radar and the courage of the RAF pilots managed to keep Hitler at bay. Eventually, Britain became the essential supply base and launchpad for the liberation of Hitler’s Fortress Europe.And so in 1944-45, the allied armies converged on Germany from east, west and south. Of course, it was an unholy alliance, animated by divergent aims and values. But the extermination of nazism was a goal all the allies shared.With this in mind, let’s glance back to the US’s most important victory: independence. Yes, this was in large measure a David v Goliath story of “a small rag-tag army defeating the mightiest empire in the world”. The US’s independence was indeed testimony to George Washington’s leadership and his troops’ courage and resilience (reinforced by his insistence on inoculation against the smallpox epidemic). But this was also a world war as the British empire battled against its global foes. Crucially, by the 1780s Britain lost naval supremacy because (unusually) three rival seapowers had combined against it: France, Spain and the Dutch. It was blockade by the French fleet that forced Lord Cornwallis’s historic surrender at Yorktown in 1781 and British acceptance of American independence.The purpose of historical research is to set events in context, not to boost national pride. The story of the US’s founding, like that of Hitler’s defeat, reminds us that allies matter – in the past, the present and the future. That should not be forgotten when history goes on parade.

      David Reynolds’s most recent book is Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the leaders who shaped him. He co-hosts the Creating History podcast More

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      Michelle Obama 2.0 – the reinvention of the former first lady

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      Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I review Michelle Obama’s new podcast, IMO, which is surprising in the ways it breaks with the Michelle of the past.I came to sneer – and stayed to cheerView image in fullscreenFirst, a disclaimer: I had never fully bought into the Michelle Obama hype. I felt her now legendary line “When they go low, we go high” encapsulated a troubling and complacent form of respectability politics, in which Black people have to maintain coolness and grace under fire to be taken seriously. As the first lady, Michelle often seemed like a sanitising presence, wheeled out so that her national treasure status could serve as a smokescreen to obscure more honest and damning assessments of Barack Obama’s political record.Also, I am not a huge fan of the celebrity podcast genre, which is a vehicle for high-profile figures to chat to their friends in return for huge pay packets. So I was sceptical when Michelle’s podcast was launched in March. Yet when I listened to it, I was immediately charmed and hooked. In truth, I came to sneer and stayed to cheer. She is honest, reflective and vulnerable in ways that are profoundly resonant of a universal Black female experience, something that her icon status had rarely spoken to previously. The irony is that just as Michelle is finding her voice, her popularity appears to be falling – the podcast received poor ratings on launch, though it’s arguably the best thing she’s ever done.A great orator has the conversation of her lifeView image in fullscreenThe most arresting thing about IMO, despite the genuinely interesting high-profile Black guests such as Keke Palmer and the Wayans brothers, is Obama herself. She has always been one of the great orators in US politics – one of the superpowers that made her and Barack, another impressive public speaker, such a compelling couple on the world stage. In her podcast, Michelle uses this talent to reflect on her life and the challenges of ageing, losing her parents and the constant demands placed upon her.The fact that she co-hosts the show with her brother, Craig Robinson – a genial and down-to-earth foil for her confessions – gives the podcast such an intimate air that you feel like you’re in the presence of everyday people, not celebrities. I found myself listening not to hear any snippets of political gossip or insight into the Obamas’ lifestyle, but to receive some exceptionally articulated wisdom from an older Black woman who has seen a lot and gone through milestones we will all experience.She is also funny. Her account of how differently men and women socialise is familiar and hilarious. Michelle describes catching up with her female friends as a “multiday event”, something that leaves Barack perplexed as to why it takes two days for a basic meetup.There is pathos and uncertainty, too. In a recent episode, Michelle talks about the death of her mother, who lived in the White House during the Obamas’ tenure. Michelle says that, at 61, only now does she feel that she has finally become an adult, having had to reckon with her own mortality after the loss of her parents. The former first lady has revealed that she is in therapy, and that she is still trying to navigate this phase of her life.And, in a striking segment, she speaks with barely restrained annoyance about her reasons for not attending Trump’s inauguration, an absence that triggered divorce rumours that have been swirling for months. She says “it took everything in [her] power” to choose what was right for her in that moment. Yet that decision was met with “ridicule” because people couldn’t believe she was saying no to the inauguration for any other reason than she just did not want to be there – they had to “assume my marriage was falling apart”. Oof. It caught my breath.Beyond Black Girl Magicskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThis Michelle is worlds away from the Michelle of the 2010s. The publishing juggernaut and icon of Black social mobility, who rose to first lady from a bungalow in the south side of Chicago, was the product of a particular moment in feminist and racial discourse.The start of that decade brought the rise of Black Girl Magic, a cultural movement that focused on the exceptional achievements and power of Black women. It intersected with Black Joy, which moved away from defining the Black experience primarily through racism and struggle. Both unfolded against the backdrop of “lean in” feminism, which glorified hard graft, corporate success and having it all. The result was the marketing of women such as Michelle to promote popular narratives of inspiration and empowerment.That energy has since dissipated, losing steam culturally and overtaken by more urgent battles. The gains of the Black Lives Matter movement triggered a rightwing backlash against diversity and inclusion that is spearheaded by Trump. Now the Obamas seem like relics of a naively optimistic and complacent time.‘We got out of the White House alive – but what happened to me?’View image in fullscreenBut all that change and disappointment seems to have freed Michelle from the expectation that she should project graceful power and guru-like wisdom at all times. The podcast may not be the runaway hit it might have been 10 years ago, but that speaks to its authenticity and refreshing lack of a cynical big marketing campaign. Michelle is not trying to catch a moment – she even looks different. Gone is the silk-pressed hair, the minimalist jewellery and the pencil dresses. She now embraces boho braids, long colourful nails and bold gold jewellery. In an episode of IMO, she asks herself: “What happened that eight years that we were in the White House? We got out alive; I hope we made the country proud. But what happened to me?” There is so much urgency in her voice. And though her high-octane political experience may not be relatable to the average person, that question is one that I and many women of a certain age are asking as we emerge, blinking into the light, from the tunnel of navigating racism, establishing careers against the odds and having families. What happened to me?To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here. More

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      A crack in the manosphere: Joe Rogan’s guests are revolting | Sam Wolfson

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      Sam Harris is the kind of guest Joe Rogan loves to have on his podcast: he dresses awkwardly in a sport coat with jeans; he undertook a PhD in neuroscience after a transformative experience with MDMA; his tone is accessible yet patronising; he has a sense of academic authority which belies a set of controversial views that include calling Islam “uniquely uncivil” and almost unfettered support for Israeli attacks on Gaza; he made an app called Waking Up, which promises to be “a new operating system for your mind”. Rogan has hosted Harris on his podcast many times and the pair call each other good friends.But even Harris seems perturbed by Rogan’s more wholehearted embrace of Musk and Maga. “He’s in over his head on so many topics of great consequence,” Harris told his listeners of his own podcast last week. “He’ll bring someone in to shoot the shit on ‘how the Holocaust is not what you think it was’ or ‘maybe Churchill was the bad guy in world war two’ … or he’ll talk to someone like Trump or Tucker Carlson, who lie as freely as they breathe, and doesn’t push back against any of their lies … It is irresponsible, and it’s directly harmful.”Joe Rogan’s podcast success has in large part been about building a community of regular guests from the worlds of comedy, wrestling, psychedelics and non-fiction publishing, a kind of Rogansphere that has begun to feel like a subculture. He hosts his favourite guests time after time, with many of them building entire careers off their appearances on the show.But recently, various members of the Rogansphere have started to turn against their leader. They can’t understand how the host of the most popular podcast in the world seems to have gone from examining both sides to defending Elon Musk at every turn and providing a platform for second world war revisionists.View image in fullscreenIn the past few months, Rogan has called people who thought Elon Musk’s hand gesture was a Nazi salute “dumb”, “crazy”, “illogical and weird” and defended it by saying it’s how Americans used to give the pledge of allegiance in the 1940s. Weeks later, he gave a very sympathetic interview to the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who has previously called Winston Churchill the main villain of the second world war and tweeted an image of Nazis in Paris, saying it was “infinitely preferable” to the drag “Last Supper” scene at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony.Rogan wasn’t always like this. Over the past decade he has built his podcast into by far the most successful in the world, weathering numerous controversies. He spent much of his career being mislabelled as ideologically rightwing or misogynistic when in fact he’s more of a simpleton who agrees with almost everyone who comes on his show, even when the things they’re saying are contradictory. He has been a staunch believer “in just asking questions” but not so much in listening to or processing the answers. He has supported both Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr, and has taken conflicting views on everything from trans rights to Ye, sometimes hilariously so.The best thing you could say about Rogan is that he is distrustful of all mainstream narratives, in an indiscriminate way. That’s led to him promoting a number of conspiracy theories that fly in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence about vaccines and the climate crisis, but also vocally criticising the war in Gaza and the influence of lobbyists in Washington DC.But his outlook has shifted since Trump was elected for the second time, a victory many credit to a good performance on Rogan’s podcast and Rogan’s subsequent endorsement. On Saturday night at a UFC fight, Rogan ran into Trump, warmly embraced him and said: “I’m so happy for you sir.” Many of his biggest fans, those that discuss episodes in detail on Reddit and Discord, are complaining that he has become a shill for the elites he used to claim to distrust.Rogan has tended to brush off these critiques in the past, saying he’s just an interested comedian asking questions. But even Rogan’s comedy friends have started to bristle at his unwavering support for Musk. Rogan values comedy above all else, investing much of the riches from his podcast in the Austin comedy scene, buying up clubs and appearing regularly as a panellist on Kill Tony, the open-mic standup podcast that takes shots at perceived wokeism. Rogan has a regular cast of comedians on his podcast including Shane Gillis, Kyle Dunnigan and Tim Dillon. These comedians give Rogan his street credibility, and he in turn has given them a huge platform.While they haven’t turned on Rogan yet, they are incredibly disparaging about Musk. Dillon called Musk’s White House press conference “the grossest and cringiest shit anyone has seen for a long time … I disagree with close friends of mine who think Elon Musk is the new Jesus.” Gillis laughed about Musk’s salute on his podcast, and said he thought Musk was “psychotic” and “fucking weird” for lying about how good he is at video games.Rogan meanwhile has recently called Musk “a super genius that’s been fucked with” and “one of the smartest people alive”.This emerging divide between Rogan and his comedic milieu came to a head last month at the recording of Kill Tony’s first special for Netflix (filmed at Rogan’s Comedy Mothership club in Austin). Both Dunnigan and Rogan were on the panel together but Dunnigan was in character, hilariously, as Musk. It was a brilliant and vicious send-up of Musk’s bizarre humour and minimal intelligence that had everyone laughing except Rogan, who avoided making eye contact or saying almost anything for the entire episode. It seemed as though he didn’t want to give any impression to Musk that he was was mocking him.There are no simple ideological lines being drawn between Rogan and the guests that are turning on him. Douglas Murray, for example, is an incredibly conservative pro-Israel historian who supports the withdrawal of visas from students who demonstrated on college campuses last year and has said he wants to ban “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries”. In many ways he is to the right of Rogan, and used much of his appearance losing a debate on the podcast with his fellow guest Dave Smith over Gaza. Yet he also used his time to admonish Rogan for having too many amateur and conspiracy theory-minded historians on the podcast. “I feel you’ve opened the door to quite a lot of people. You’ve now got a big platform and have been throwing out counter-historical stuff but a very dangerous kind.”Rogan had very little in the way of a meaningful defence. Defending why he had the conspiracy theorist and Pizzagate proponent Ian Carroll on his program, Rogan replied: “I just think I’d like to talk to this person … I brought him on because I want to find out, like, how does one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business? Because his whole thing is just conspiracies.”There are no smart guys here; both Murray and Rogan have tendency to use circuitous straw man arguments that suit their specific brand of politics. But it does show cracks in the cultural wing of Trumpism.Rogan himself seems to be backing down from a full-throated endorsement of the president’s policies, calling the Venezuelan deportations “horrific” and “bad for the cause”, and calling Trump’s feud with Canada over tariffs “stupid”. Last month he said healthcare should “100% should be socially funded” and was celebrated by Bernie Sanders for doing so.Yet these acknowledgements of bad policies haven’t translated into a lack of enthusiasm for either Trump or Musk, yet. But with Rogan it only takes one convincing guest to change his mind.What’s more, Rogan’s main constituency of listeners, young men, appear to be feeling buyer’s remorse about Trump, with new polling suggesting the group is swinging away from the president. Where his audience go, Rogan tends to follow.On his podcast, Harris told his listeners: “Our society is as politically shattered as it is in part because of how Joe [Rogan] has interacted with information.” Rogan might revel in criticism from progressives, but barbs from his friends are likely to sting. How long Trump can count on Rogan’s cuddles and warm wishes might depend on whether his favourite guests begin to ostracize him. More

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      Trump chose the wrong hill to DEI on | Stewart Lee

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      In the second world war, Navajo code talkers transmitted sensitive US military information in their own undocumented language. Which was nice of them, as their immediate ancestors had been dispossessed and destroyed by white settlers, and then had all their water poisoned with uranium. “Were it not for the Navajos,” concluded major Howard Connor, at the time, “the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” And that famous photo of the American soldiers raising a flag would just have shown some Japanese boy scouts letting off a party popper.But last month Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said: “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength’.” Predictably, some Navajo code talkers had to have bodyguards to protect them from white American servicemen who thought they were Japanese. Plus ça change, as they say over there in that Europe.The Navajos’ efforts went unrecognised. When the son of one of the code talkers got to live the American dream by opening a Burger King in Kayenta on Navajo lands in 1986, he made the building a partial museum of his father’s unit. I visited it 30 years ago, with the comedian Kevin Eldon (Narvi the dwarf smith in TV’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), and it remains the most edifying fast food restaurant I ever ate in. It was even better than that KFC near Bletchley Park that does that delicious Alan Turing chicken strips and alphabetti spaghetti meal deal ™ ®.The Kayenta Burger King also has a more extensive archive of code talker artefacts than any official government repository. Especially since, last week, videos, photos and stories of the Navajo code talkers were temporarily removed online as part of Trump’s assault on diversity. A page commemorating corporal Ira Hayes, a Pima of the Gila River Indian Community, and one of the servicemen photographed raising that Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima, also disappeared for a while in Trump’s thwarting of the woke. Boris Johnson must be delighted. But I wonder if Trump’s actions please the British daytime TV treasure Lorraine Kelly?Kelly’s interview in the Times on 14 March, culled from a book promotion appearance on Times Radio, seemed to suggest she believed gender and racial diversity are wrongly prioritised in the workplace at the expense of offering opportunities to the (presumably white) working class. The headline spoke for itself: “Lorraine Kelly: Diversity push is leaving working-class people behind.” Was our Lorraine an unexpected supporter of Trump’s anti-diversity agenda?Probably not. This is the rightwing press, or the press as I call it, that we’re talking about, and Kelly didn’t quite espouse the view the headline implies. Even the elements of the radio interview that the paper chose to transcribe show a Lorraine Kelly principally concerned about how the cost of living affects working-class access to media jobs, and she made explicit that she hoped to see diversity initiatives tackle exclusion on the basis of class in addition to concentrating on gender and race. It’s a subtly different position and an example of the nuanced thought that has made Kelly the Socrates of the sofa, while her competitor Richard Madeley stares out of his kitchen window at a donkey in a field while thinking about bread.But this is how papers work. For two decades I was lucky enough to review records (remember them?) for the Sunday Times. So when they asked me, 20 years back, to write an insider comedian’s view of attempts to boycott the Edinburgh comedy awards because the sponsor, Perrier, was owned by Nestlé, which pushed unsafe formula milk initiatives to the developing world, what could possibly go wrong? And the money didn’t hurt either!I wrote a balanced piece about how the boycott was morally the right thing to do, with the appended caveat that high-profile supporters were asking a lot of young broke performers to walk away from a cash bung of £10,000 that might shift at least some of their debts. The headline? “‘Emma Thompson needs to grow up’, says comedian Stewart Lee”, which wasn’t anything I said, but perhaps fitted the paper’s agenda better, and left me apologising, cap in hand, to the charity Baby Milk Action and Miss Thompson herself, who has conspicuously failed to cast me in any of her hit films since.Despite the fun-size fascism we’re seeing across the Atlantic, the woke folk panic still sells papers and farms online engagement. The Times got what it wanted out of massaging Kelly’s quotes, and in the US the fourth estate is finished, jeopardising democracy worldwide. Maybe it’s time for writers to work out what they believe and stand up for it. But the British press is staffed by a class of professionals happy to drift between the Times, the Telegraph, the New European and yes, even the last liberal papers, refining their opinions as required by their offshore billionaire employers. It’s as easy as changing the look of your byline photo from sensible suit and tie to a beatnik polar neck jumper and beard. And that’s just the women. These days.Ironically, some wag at the Times has chosen to illustrate Kelly’s interview with an old photo of her GMTV colleague, the black fitness expert Mr Motivator, holding her aloft on the roof of a building. Presumably there were dozens of more motivated white working-class Mr Motivators, but the woke agenda meant they never got the opportunity to lift a Scottish woman. Let’s see if we can’t see a white working-class TV fitness instructor raising Lorraine Kelly high above their head by the end of 2025, but ideally let’s do it without playing into the divisive playbook of Trump, Musk, Vance and Farage, apportioning blame to the disadvantaged, while consolidating their own chrome-plated futures. More

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      Presidents at War: how battle has shaped American leaders

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      In his new book, Presidents at War, Steven M Gillon considers how the second world war shaped a generation of presidents, a span that takes in eight men – but not all of them served in uniform between 1941 and 1945.Gillon likes to “ask people, ‘There are seven men who served in uniform in world war two and who went on to be president: who are they?’ And most people think Jimmy Carter did, and they forget Ronald Reagan.”Carter was born in 1924 and came of age in wartime. But the submariner turned peanut farmer turned politician, who died aged 100 in December, graduated the US Naval Academy in 1946, the year after the war. Reagan, meanwhile, joined the Army Reserve in the 1930s and spent the war years enlisted – but stayed at home in Hollywood, where he made his name as an actor, narrating films and joining fundraising drives.“Reagan was the most fascinating for me,” says Gillon, emeritus professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and scholar-in-residence at the History Channel. “I once bought the story about: ‘Oh, he wanted to go and fight but his eyes were too bad.’ In fact, there’s all these machinations going on behind the scenes that keep him from going overseas, to make sure he stays in California so he can make movies, while at the same time creating this public image of a guy who has been off to war, and he comes home to his wife [Jane Wyman], and there’s a picture of him in his uniform, kissing his wife – who in fact he slept with every night during the war.”Gillon focuses on how the war affected men who led their country through the cold war with Russia, into the quagmire of Vietnam, and eventually into the first Iraq war. To Gillon, “those presidents who came closest to combat were the ones who were most restrained in their use of force afterwards,” meaning Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded Allied forces in Europe, and John F Kennedy and George HW Bush, who flirted with death in the Pacific, JFK as a torpedo boat captain, Bush as a navy flier.“Reagan is the exception of so many of these things,” Gillon says. “Reagan never sees war. He thinks he saw the Holocaust camps, but he didn’t. He just makes stuff up, and he thinks it’s true. But what I did not know was how he came out of the war with the real fear of nuclear weapons, and he belonged to an organization for international control of atomic weapons, largely a liberal organization, as he was involved in other liberal organizations like Americans for Democratic Action.“While he shed all the other liberal ties, he never shed that fear of nuclear weapons. And despite all his bombastic language, he was very restrained in the use of force. I mean, the only thing he did was create a phony war in Grenada [in which 19 Americans died] and see 241 Americans killed in Lebanon [both in 1983], and that was a peacekeeping mission.”View image in fullscreenIn response to the Beirut embassy bombing, Reagan launched limited strikes. He also bombed Libya, in 1986, and funded and fueled conflicts elsewhere, his efforts in Nicaragua creating the Iran-Contra scandal. But on the global scene, Gillon “was surprised at how restrained Reagan was. And then his fear of nuclear weapons made him open to [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s overtures” for detente and arms control “during his second term … this was where Reagan followed his own instincts and in this case his instincts were right, and he was the right person to do it because he had such strong anti-communist credentials. So that was a twist I had not appreciated before.”Gillon’s book contains more twists. Many involve Lyndon Baines Johnson, like Reagan no stranger to distorting facts for political gain. A congressman when the US entered the war, LBJ got himself into uniform for a Pacific fact-finding tour. Hitching a ride on a bomber, he survived an attack by Japanese fighters.“There’s controversy over whether that took place the way he described it,” Gillon says. “There was an article written by some aviation historians who said it never could have happened. And then, years later, the Japanese pilot who had actually led the attack against the American planes said he remembered Johnson’s plane. He remembered crippling it, and he said the plane was so wounded that he knew it wasn’t going to do any damage, so he broke off and went back into the main attack.”Johnson’s plane made it back to base, leaving him alive to tell tales of his own bravery on the campaign trail. Gillon shows how those tales grew more shameless but thinks the basic story “is definitely true”, including how a bathroom break meant Johnson lost a spot on a plane which was shot down, killing all onboard.“Yeah, Johnson was just cool as a cucumber. And I’m sure he was thrilled when he landed.”Gillon was born in working class Philadelphia in 1956, in the shadow of the war. Too young for the Vietnam draft, fascinated by the presidency, he graduated from Widener and Brown and then taught at Yale and Oxford. Recent books include America’s Reluctant Prince, about his late friend John F Kennedy Jr, and The Pact, about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, a Democratic president and a Republican House speaker whose relationship resonates loudly today.With his latest book, Gillon focuses on the major lessons of the second world war, particularly the cost of appeasement, Hitler’s triumph at Munich in 1938 a constant ghost at the feast. Such lessons, he says, “some forgot, like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, while others, like Kennedy and Bush, those who really saw battle and the horrors of war, you see them thinking about world war two all the time when they’re making big decisions, whether it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis for Kennedy or it’s the invasion of Iraq with George Bush”.View image in fullscreenLooking to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Gillon describes how both served but did not see battle. Both were in the navy. Ford’s closest brush with action involved a fire aboard his ship during a Pacific typhoon. Nixon was posted to tropical islands, working logistics and supply, failing to reach the front line.Vietnam dominates Gillon’s book. US involvement began under Eisenhower, accelerated under Kennedy, swirled into nightmare under Johnson and finally ended under Nixon – though he had lengthened the horror by thwarting peace talks for his own political gain. Gillon retells the extraordinary Anna Chennault affair, in which a Washington socialite acted as a go-between with the government of South Vietnam, relaying Nixon’s urge to boycott talks till the 1968 election was done. When Johnson learned of it, he told a senior Republican: “This is treason.” The senator agreed. Johnson called Nixon, who denied it. Gillon writes: “According to some reports, after hanging up, Nixon collapsed with laughter.”In 1968, Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. The war did not end until 1973. Reading Presidents at War, it is striking to realize that no future president who was of an age to serve in Vietnam did so.Bill Clinton opposed the war, studied abroad and denied accusations of dodging the draft. Joe Biden secured student deferments then was exempted on account of teenage asthma. George W Bush, the son of a war hero, went into the Texas Air national guard, which, Gillon notes, “is a place notoriously where rich, powerful people put their kids during war”. Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain did go to Vietnam – but lost presidential elections.As so often, Donald Trump is a whole other matter. He obtained student draft deferments but also found a doctor to say “bone spurs” in his heels rendered him unfit for service. He has also said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating in New York was his “personal Vietnam”, making him feel like “a great and very brave soldier”. It’s not a line to endear him to Gillon, who says he cast his first vote for a Republican president, Ford, but whose epilogue to Presidents at War makes clear his distaste for Trump, his view of military matters and his reported negative comments about those who serve.“I have my political point of view but when I write history, I try to be really fair-minded,” Gillon says. “And I can’t be fair-minded toward Trump. I just dislike him so much that I don’t think I could write a book about him. I wrote a book about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, and what made me happy was that both Clinton and Gingrich liked it. I take great pride in being fair of mind towards someone like Newt Gingrich, who I have no political affinity for, but I just can’t get to that point mentally with Trump. I can’t write a book that I feel I can’t be fair.”

      Presidents at War is out now More

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      D-day: Biden calls for supporting Ukraine in struggle against ‘dark forces’

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      Joe Biden has marked the 80th anniversary of the D-day landings in Normandy with an impassioned call to western allies to continue supporting Ukraine in the face of the “unending struggle between dictatorship and freedom”.Speaking on Thursday at a ceremony at the Normandy American cemetery attended by his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, and dozens of surviving veterans from the second world war, Biden drew parallels between the Allied troops who fought to free Europe and the alliance of nations that came together to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression.The president warned that democracy was under great threat than at any time since the end of second world war. Describing Vladimir Putin as a “tyrant bent on domination”, Biden said the Russian leader and “the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine, to see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked.“To surrender to bullies, to bow to dictators, is simply unthinkable,” Biden said. “If we do, Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there, Ukraine’s neighbours will be threatened, all of Europe will be threatened.”Biden honoured the American second world war veterans who, alongside allied soldiers, stormed the beaches of Normandy to drive out the forces of Nazi Germany.“We know the dark forces that these heroes fought against 80 years ago. They never fade,” he said.This D-day milestone carried particular significance as it was likely the last major ceremony attended by significant numbers of veterans, many of whom are aged 100 or more.“On behalf of the American people and as commander-in-chief, it’s the highest honour to be able to salute you here in Normandy,” Biden told them.Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, greeted the veterans one by one and thanked them for their service. During the ceremony, Macron bestowed the Legion of Honour, France’s highest award of merit, to 11 American veterans and one from Britain in recognition of their sacrifice. The ceremony was attended by more than 150 members of Congress and dozens of members of the French parliament.On Wednesday, Biden arrived in Paris for the start of a five-day visit in France, during which he will underscore the US’s steadfast commitment to European security and contrast his foreign policy vision with his 2024 election opponent, Donald Trump.“Isolationism was not the answer 80 years ago and is not the answer today,” Biden said, in a veiled reference to Trump’s American First doctrine. “Real alliances make us stronger, a lesson that I pray we Americans never forget.”While in Normandy, Biden will hold talks with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to discuss “how we can continue and deepen our support for Ukraine”, the White House said. Biden is also expected to visit a cemetery where American soldiers who died in the first world war are buried. Trump opted not to visit the same site during a 2018 trip to France, citing bad weather, a move that drew intense criticism at the time.More than 25 heads of state are attending D-day commemorations in Normandy, including the Ukrainian president, Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Britain’s prime minister Rishi Sunak and members of the royal family, as part of Europe is in the grip of the largest war since 1945. Russia will not be represented at Thursday’s ceremonies. More