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    The Guardian view on Trump and media: attention is power. Can Democrats grab it? | Editorial

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    Donald Trump won the White House not with money, though he spent plenty of it, but by dominating the conversation. He hasn’t stopped campaigning. He uses attention to bolster his political power, and uses his office to make sure that everyone keeps watching.He was barred from leading social media platforms after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, but four years later, their owners attended his inauguration. Many of his key hires appear picked for their media presence as well as their ideological bent and sycophancy. Tuesday’s interminable address to Congress was garnished with the kind of wild claims or outright lies that he knows take off on social media. For him, posting online ultimatums to Hamas and a disturbing AI-generated “Trump Gaza” video is all part of foreign policy. One of the most chilling, and telling, moments of last week’s attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy was Mr Trump’s remark: “This is going to be great television.”Strikingly, key members of the Trump circle have consistently championed the self-styled misogynist Andrew Tate, one of the rightwing influencers who drove young men towards Mr Trump. Romanian authorities allowed Mr Tate and his brother to fly to the US last week, despite outstanding charges including rape, human trafficking and money laundering, all of which they deny. (The brothers are also wanted by UK authorities over allegations of sexual aggression in a case dating back to 2012, and four British women are pursuing a civil case against them.) Though Romania denies any US pressure, and the president claimed to know nothing, the travel ban was lifted days after Mr Trump’s special envoy, Richard Grenell, raised the case with Romania’s foreign minister.The Tate brothers are part of the far-right disinformation networks that not only promote vile and extreme views but also undermine reputable sources of information. Mr Trump embraces this, and far-right media activists are invited to “report” from the Oval Office while the Associated Press is shut out for referring to the Gulf of Mexico. The White House press operation has reinvented itself as a social media machine, spewing out endless memes, attack lines and deliberate provocation to drown out rival voices. “They’re all offence, all the time,” said Steve Bannon approvingly.Like a social media algorithm made flesh, the president himself serves up an endless but unpredictable (and increasingly extreme) stream of material. It keeps admirers coming back for more and overwhelms critics, who don’t know where to focus. This strategy may offer diminishing returns, not least because it requires a constant ratcheting-up of content. Mr Trump can only do so much to bend reality: administration failures, U-turns and the costs of policies such as tariffs will probably temper voters’ enthusiasm.But even without commanding political leadership or control of any branch of government, Democrats can’t just sit back and wait to find out. The political commentator and author Chris Hayes notes that they have been defined by risk aversion, preferring no attention to critical coverage. Finding ways to seize the initiative is essential. Mr Trump’s lies must be challenged. But fact‑checking his provocations, without compellingly promoting political alternatives, will not be enough. Procedural and legal responses are essential, but so is the ability to grab back the megaphone – or find another one.

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      French far-right leader cancels CPAC speech over Steve Bannon’s ‘Nazi’ salute

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      The French far-right leader Jordan Bardella on Friday morning cancelled a scheduled speech at the US Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, after Donald Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon flashed a fascist-style salute there hours before.Bannon, who helped Trump win office in 2016 and is now a popular rightwing podcast show host, finished his CPAC speech on Thursday with an outstretched arm, fingers pointed and palm down – a sign that echoed the Nazi salute and a controversial gesture made by the tech billionaire Elon Musk at the US president’s second inauguration in January.Bardella, of the far-right National Rally party in France, pulled out of CPAC citing Bannon’s allusion to “Nazi ideology”.The salute during Bannon’s speech brought cheers from the audience at the US gathering.Bardella, who was in Washington ahead of his appearance and had said he intended to talk about relations between the US and France, issued a statement saying: “Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers, out of provocation, allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology. I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon.”The National Rally party was bested in France’s snap election last summer by a leftwing alliance.Bannon on Thursday night fired up the CPAC crowd, where he spoke directly after Musk, the man who has eclipsed him in Trump’s circle and with whom Bannon is not on good terms.“The only way that they win is if we retreat, and we are not going to retreat, we’re not going to surrender, we are not going to quit – we’re going to fight, fight, fight,” Bannon said of opponents, echoing Trump’s exhortation to supporters following the assassination attempt on him.Bannon then flung out his right arm at an angle with his palm pointing down. The Nazi salute is perhaps more familiar, especially from historical footage of Adolf Hitler, with the arm pointing straight forward – but the fascist overtone of Bannon and Musk’s signals has been unmistakable.The Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns against antisemitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down”.“Steve Bannon’s long and disturbing history of stoking antisemitism and hate, threatening violence, and empowering extremists is well known and well documented by ADL and others,” the Anti-Defamation League wrote on X in response, adding: “We are not surprised, but are concerned about the normalization of this behavior.”Bannon, speaking to a French journalist from Le Point news magazine on Friday, said the gesture was not a Nazi salute but was “a wave like I did all the time”.“I do it at the end of all of my speeches to thank the crowd,” Bannon said.However, from video, when he shoots his arm in the brief, straight-arm gesture, then nods sharply with a smile, to audience cheers, and says “amen”, it looks distinctly different from the very end of his address, when Bannon walked about the stage saluting the audience, throwing first his right arm out, then his left arm out, in a looser gesture that looked much more like conventional post-speech acknowledgment of a crowd.Online, some far-right users suggested Bannon had made the gesture purposely to “trigger” liberals and the media. Others distanced themselves.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNick Fuentes, a far-right influencer and Trump ally who uses his platform to share his antisemitic views, said in a livestream that Bannon’s salute was “getting a little uncomfortable even for me”.Bannon’s gesture, like Musk’s, has been characterized by some as a “Roman salute” – though some historians argue that is a distinction without a difference. Some rightwing supporters have argued, without evidence, that the Roman salute originated in ancient Rome. Historians have found, instead, that it was adopted by the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the 1920s, and then Hitler’s Nazi party in Germany.However the ADL concluded that in that group’s view Musk had “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute”.The Bannon speech showcased CPAC’s evolution from a traditional conservative conference to an all-out Trump-centric rally. Bannon also spoke about the forthcoming election in 2028, prompting cheers of “We want Trump,” and saying himself: “We want Trump in 28.”The statement echoed those of Trump himself, who on Wednesday asked a crowd if he should run again, was met with calls of “four more years”, and called himself a “KING” in a post on social media. US presidents are limited to two terms.Meanwhile, Musk on Thursday brandished a chainsaw at CPAC, gloating over the slashing of federal jobs he is overseeing across multiple departments, in the face of legal challenges and protests. He called it “the chainsaw for bureaucracy”.It was handed to him on stage by Argentina’s rightwing president, Javier Milei. More

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      While Trump blathers about tariffs and Gaza, Musk is executing a coup d’état | John Naughton

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      Way back in 2019, Steve Bannon, then a Trump consigliere, outlined in a TV interview a strategy for managing information. “The opposition party is the media,” he said, “And because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time… All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang.”Since his re-election, Donald Trump has been following this script to the letter, and the media, not to mention the entire world, are feeling punch-drunk. Which is, as Bannon pointed out, enabling other members of the Trump crew to get their stuff done. Really bad stuff too, to which the world has not been paying enough attention.Prime suspect in this respect is Elon Musk, whom Trump has chosen to slash $2tn off US government spending. Late on Friday 31 January, he and a few of his goons gained access to the Department of Treasury payments system – the system that processes the federal spending that makes up more than a fifth of the US economy. More importantly, Musk and a 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who has previously worked for two of his companies, were given the ability to make changes to the payments system, thereby enabling them to stop disbursements of taxpayers’ dollars to recipients that the Trump crowd decide are illegitimate – for example a $367m payment to an outfit called Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service Inc.It’s conceivable, of course, that this payment was an example of the wasteful federal spending that Musk and co are pledged to root out and eliminate. But that is not the point. The point is that all the spending passing through the system constitutes expenditure that has been authorised by Congress. Traditionally, the system was run by apolitical civil servants who had no authority to decide whether a particular payment was unwise or unacceptable. Now, suddenly, that power has been appropriated by an unelected billionaire who spent a quarter of a billion dollars to ensure that Trump was elected.But the Treasury coup is just one part of a bigger story. Musk is not just going after payments, he’s also going after jobs, salaries and the employment status of federal employees. And his strategy mirrors what he did to Twitter after being forced to buy it. At around 5pm on 28 January, millions of US government employees received an email from Musk with the subject line “Fork in the Road”. The message in the email was stark: accept a sweeping set of workplace changes or resign within nine days. It was more or less a replica of the email that Twitter employees received in November 2022 and it signals an intention to do to the federal bureaucracy what he did to Twitter in 2022: hollow it out and subject it to intensive personal control.It’s worth pondering the immensity of what’s happening while Trump blathers on about tariffs, acquiring Gaza, buying Greenland, trolling Justin Trudeau and generally “flooding the zone” with crap. As Mike Masnick, a distinguished tech commentator, puts it: “A private citizen with zero constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. The constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power – a requirement Musk has simply ignored as he installs his loyalists throughout the government while demanding access to basically all of the levers of power, and pushing out anyone who stands in his way.”Musk’s arrival at the heart of American power signals a new, sinister kind of technocracy – an obnoxious blend of obscene wealth, narcissism, arrogance, determination, IQ and the kind of “solutionism” that believes there is no problem that cannot be solved by technology. He reminds Masnick of “a toddler ‘fixing’ a grandfather clock by removing its pendulum. Yes, the clock needed maintenance – but now it can’t tell time at all. The federal government absolutely needs reform, but what we’re seeing isn’t reform – it’s vandalism dressed up as innovation.”The strange thing is that what most people expected from Trump 2.0 was his usual performative chaos: perhaps a bit less than last time, but chaos nonetheless. What no one saw coming was a tech bro who spotted an opportunity to use AI to re-engineer the US government in the name of the “efficiency” that Silicon Valley worships, and was able to pay hundreds of millions to get into the driving seat. In the bad old days, insurgent colonels would surround the presidential palace with tanks and capture the radio station. Thanks to Trump, Musk didn’t have to worry about the palace, and he already had his own radio station (X), so he went straight to the heart of the matter – the Treasury. What we’re watching is nothing less than a thoroughly modern coup d’état.What I’ve been readingLLMs and a flawed paradigm
      An astute essay by Erik J Larsen on his Substack, Colligo, about the large language models that the tech industry calls “AIs”.How to raise your artificial intelligence
      A fascinating conversation with psychologist Alison Gopnik and AI scientist Melanie Mitchell in the LA Review of Books.The Musk junta Nice satirical piece by Garrett Graff on Doomsday Scenario, imagining how foreign correspondents would report on current events in Washington DC.

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      Trump allies float extreme ideas, including Trump third term, at gala

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      Donald Trump’s allies have become increasingly emboldened to float their most audacious ideas as Trump prepares to return to office, suggesting he run for an unconstitutional third term in 2028 and accusing the news media of having engaged in a criminal conspiracy with prosecutors against him.Those suggestions, by Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, came at a self-congratulatory gala dinner for conservatives in New York on Sunday. At times the remarks seemed like the product of the euphoria that permeated attendees.The underlying message was clear: with Trump back in the White House and with Bannon renewing his influence with the president-elect, the most extreme and polarizing proposals at the very least were up for consideration.“The viceroy Mike Davis tells me, since it doesn’t actually say consecutive, that maybe we do it again in ’28?” Bannon said of Trump possibly running again in his remarks at the New York Young Republican Club gala dinner that also saw a Trump adviser keel over the lectern and fall off the stage.Riding the wave of self-congratulatory sentiment in the room, Bannon, who ignored the black-tie dress code with a wax jacket and black-collared shirt, doubled down on pursuing a campaign of retribution against Trump’s perceived enemies in the news media and at the justice department.“We want retribution and we’re going to get retribution. You have to. It’s not personal, it’s not personal,” Bannon said to the raucous room. “They need to learn what populist, nationalist power is on the receiving end.“I need investigations, trials and then incarceration. And I’m just talking about the media. Should the media be included in the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump? Should Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and all of them?“We want all your emails, all your text messages, everything you did. You colluded in a conspiracy with Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi, Lisa Monaco and Jack Smith,” Bannon said, name checking the attorney general, former Democratic House speaker, the deputy attorney general and the Trump special counsel.The threatening rhetoric, and especially the concept of using a criminal conspiracy statute against Trump’s political enemies, has been permeating through Bannon’s orbit for some time since the election. But Sunday night’s gala was the first time it was floated outside of the Maga ecosystem.The remarks also turned bizarre at various points as Bannon segued into talking about the importance of the bond market, perhaps in a nod to his previous life as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and questioned whether the New York mayor, Eric Adams, was a QAnon conspiracy adherent.In a night of unexpected turns, the most dramatic moment came earlier when senior Trump campaign adviser Alex Bruesewitz keeled over the lectern and collapsed off the stage in an apparent medical episode. Organizers later said he was treated on-site and speculated he had a seizure.The gala then had a further bizarre twist when Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino took to the stage to fill the moment, but was interrupted when he got a phone call from the president-elect himself, who apparently was asking about Bruesewitz.Scavino put the call on speakerphone and had Trump address the gala in real time, but Trump mostly ended up delivering praise for Bruesewitz instead. “I guess the show goes on,” one bemused Bannon associate said to his seat neighbor as he watched the situation unfold.The gala dinner at Cipriani on Wall Street drew the same Trumpworld figures as it has for several years, including Trump’s in-house counsel Boris Epshteyn, Nigel Farage, Trump legal adviser Mike Davis, and a cast of Bannon allies including the emcee, Raheem Kassam. Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, was invited to attend but did not make an appearance.Sitting at the table directly in front of the stage and next to Farage, the other guest of honor, Epshteyn was singled out by Bannon for orchestrating Trump’s legal victories including the dismissal of the criminal cases against him. “Boris, I don’t know how you did it,” Bannon said. More

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      ‘Incredibly harmful’: why Trump’s FBI and DoJ picks scare civil liberties experts

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      By tapping two combative ultra-loyalists to run the FBI and the justice department, Donald Trump has sparked fears they will pursue the president-elect’s calls for “revenge” against his political foes and sack officials who Trump demonizes as “deep state” opponents, say ex-justice department prosecutors.Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, who Trump has nominated to run the FBI and Department of Justice, respectively, have been unswerving loyalists to Trump for years, promoting Trump’s false claims that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was due to fraud.Patel was a top lawyer on the House intelligence panel under rightwing member Devin Nunes for part of Trump’s first term and then held a few posts in the Trump administration including at the national security council advising the president.Bondi, a recent corporate lobbyist and an ex-Florida attorney general, defended Trump during his first impeachment and was active on the campaign trail during the late stages of his 2024 run.Patel and Bondi have each echoed Trump’s calls for taking revenge against key Democrats and officials, including ones who pursued criminal charges against Trump for his aggressive efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat and his role in inflaming the January 6 attack on the Capitol that led to five deaths.Trump has lavished praise on both picks, calling Patel a “brilliant lawyer” and “advocate for truth”, while hailing Bondi as “loyal” and “qualified”. But critics say their rhetoric and threats are “incredibly harmful to public trust” in the two agencies undermining the integrity of the FBI and justice department, and potentially spurring violence.Patel promised last year on Steve Bannon’s show to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections”.Patel, 44, who last year published a “deep state” enemies list as part of a book, added:“We’re going to come after you … Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”At the end of his first term as Trump scrambled aggressively to block Biden’s win, he briefly tried to install Patel as number two at the FBI or the CIA for support, but the idea died when the then attorney general, Bill Barr, vowed “over my dead body”.Meanwhile, Bondi, 59, told Fox News last year that when Trump wins “you know what’s going to happen: the Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state … they were hiding in the shadows.”Bondi added: “But now, they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated, and the House needs to be cleaned out. Because now we know who most of them are; there’s a record of it, and we can clean house next turn. And that’s what has to happen.”Fears about the two nominees were compounded by Trump’s comments on Meet the Press on Sunday when he said he wouldn’t tell the justice department to prosecute his political enemies, but added threateningly that the House members on the panel that investigated the January 6 insurrection “should go to jail”.Ex-justice department prosecutors worry that Trump’s two picks will exact retribution against Trump foes, undermining the independence of both the justice department and the FBI and damaging the rule of law.“The rhetoric of Bondi and Patel is incredibly harmful to public trust in our government institutions and the reputations of individual public servants,” said Barbara McQuade, a former top prosecutor in eastern Michigan who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. “There’s absolutely no public evidence of wrongdoing to ‘rig’ the 2020 election.“Pledges to prosecute the prosecutors and investigate the investigators based on the complete absence of evidence is reckless because even if investigations do not materialize, unhinged members of the public will hear these bombastic accusations as a call to action.”Similarly, the former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich said: “Bondi and Patel are election deniers, in the face of the adjudication of more than 60 cases rejecting claims of election fraud in 2020. This is alarming.“Members of the Senate judiciary committee have a duty to explore the basis of those often-repeated beliefs. If Bondi and Patel maintain that the election was stolen, they either are liars – and lying under oath is a crime – or they are so detached from reality that they shouldn’t be trusted to run a two-person convenience store, much less the DoJ and the FBI.”The former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman likens Trump’s nominees to his heavy reliance in his real estate career on Roy Cohn, the late mafia lawyer and chief counsel to rightwing senator Joseph McCarthy.“Still casting about for a Roy Cohn replacement, Trump has gone to people like Bondi and Patel whose loyalty comes from their utter dependence on his favor,” Richman said.Richman added: “But their lack of experience with the agencies he wants them to lead promises a rocky road ahead, both for them and the agencies.”Richman noted: “Presidents can pardon and otherwise kill cases and his loyal minions can disrupt agency operations, but I suspect they will soon be railing at what they call ‘resistance’ and what everyone else calls rule-following.”Such concerns about both nominees have been reinforced by their eager echoing of Trump’s conspiratorial obsession of going after “deep state” foes, as well as their old ties to Trump and backgrounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPatel, who lacks experience leading an agency, shares Trump’s obsession and vindictiveness towards political critics and the press who Trump has branded an “enemy of the people”.Last year in his book Government Gangsters, Patel went further in an appendix where he included 60 “members of the Executive Branch Deep State” that consisted largely of top Democrats and Trump critics. Patel also wrote that Trump “must fire the top ranks of the FBI”.“Then, all those who manipulated evidence, hid exculpatory information, or in any way abused their authority for political ends must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Patel said.Patel’s incendiary comments and writings could lead to confirmation problems by the US Senate during hearings. Chris Wray, who Trump appointed as director after firing James Comey in 2017 and who Trump has often criticized, has three years left in his 10-year term, so he would have to resign or be fired to make way for Patel.“Kash Patel is manifestly unqualified,” said the ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “Given his intemperate support for retribution against the deep state and Trump’s political ‘foes’, he is temperamentally unqualified for the job.”While Bondi is an equally staunch Trump loyalist, she is expected to have fewer confirmation problems. Trump tapped her for the post within hours of his first candidate for AG, the ex-Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, dropping out after serious allegations arose of sexual misconduct that led to a House ethics inquiry while he was in office.Still, Bondi’s vociferous election denialism and attacks on the so-called “deep state” represent a sharp break historically with the rhetoric of attorneys general which critics are raising strong fears about.After Trump’s defeat in 2020, Bondi co-chaired the law and justice section at the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute, which has supplied a few of Trump’s new picks, including billionaire Linda McMahon for education secretary.Bondi also spent several years as a lobbyist for the powerhouse Florida firm led by the Republican fundraiser Brian Ballard, where her clients included Amazon, General Motors, and the government of Qatar.Often seen as a political operator, Bondi has ties to Trump that go back further and have raised some red flags. When Bondi was Florida’s attorney general in 2013, Trump donated $25,000 to a Pac backing her re-election. The donation’s timing drew scrutiny given that Bondi’s spokesperson told a newspaper just days before the donation that the AG’s office was reviewing a class-action lawsuit by New York which had been filed against Trump University for fraud.Veteran prosecutors warn that if the Senate confirms Bondi and Patel they could create a climate for violence against Trump’s foes.“I’m more worried about threats, harassment and political violence than I am in the success of baseless investigations,” McQuade said. “Bondi and Patel will be unable to get bogus charges past a grand jury, a judge or a trial jury, but someone who believes this deep state nonsense could decide to take matters into their own hands.”Looking ahead, Bromwich stressed too that if Patel and Bondi pursued baseless inquiries, they could boomerang.“Lawyers and investigators who willingly participate in the pursuit of a revenge and retribution agenda risk losing not only the respect of their peers but their future livelihoods. In particular, lawyers who initiate investigations and pursue prosecutions without factual predicates risk being the subject of ethics complaints and the loss of their law licenses.” More

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      Trump cabinet picks shaped by new power centers in his orbit

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      Donald Trump’s picks for the incoming administration are being shaped by a combination of different power centers including one-man influences like top Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and combined groups led by chief of staff Susie Wiles and vice-president-elect JD Vance.The president-elect appears to have settled on a number of cabinet nominees himself without being aggressively pushed by advisers, including Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget.But for other cabinet roles or major White House positions for which Trump did not have a clear preference or a frontrunner in mind, a handful of individuals with outsized influence have come to dominate the decision-making in meetings and interviews being held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.There are still factions, according to half a dozen people involved in transition planning, though they have been nowhere near as concrete as they were in 2017, when there were clear demarcations between Trump’s family, the Republican National Committee, establishment Republicans and people allied with Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon.And in recent months, the previously distinct camp informally led by Wiles, who has had influence over West Wing picks and some cabinet roles, and the other camp led by Vance have combined and engulfed the wider Trump orbit, the people said.“It’s ever-shifting sands of allegiance. The people who you think are your friends may not be the case in 24 hours. We’re all friends but none of us are friends,” said one person adjacent to the Trump team.Although there are people in Trump’s orbit who disagree with Epshteyn, there is universal acknowledgment that he has had significant influence in the first weeks of the presidential transition, a reflection of Trump’s appreciation for his help in coordinating the defeat of the criminal cases against him.When Trump floated the idea of having the congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Epshteyn was supportive of him during a round-trip flight from Palm Beach, Florida, to Washington when the president-elect announced he was nominating Gaetz.View image in fullscreenAfter the Gaetz nomination sank in the face of holdout Senate Republicans refusing to confirm him over sexual misconduct allegations, Trump nominated as a replacement former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi – who has been friendly over the years with Epshteyn.Epshteyn has also played key roles in finalizing the leadership at the justice department, recommending that Trump keep his personal lawyers in key jobs: Todd Blanche for deputy attorney general, Emil Bove for the principal deputy position and John Sauer for solicitor general.One through-line about those lawyers was that they were successful in delaying until after the election the federal criminal cases against Trump, which were dismissed on Monday. But the other was that they were all recruited by Epshteyn.Epshteyn, whose physically imposing presence is regularly fitted into a navy three-piece suit, has flexed his power away from the department as well, recommending Bill McGinley to be the next White House counsel.Epshteyn has told associates that the choices are for Trump to make. Some of the picks he has suggested have been names endorsed by other allies or people who have appeared on his longtime friends Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.From the outside, Bannon pushed for McGinley to be White House counsel and may yet get another victory if Trump picks Kash Patel, a regular guest on War Room, for the FBI director or the deputy FBI director roles for which he remains in the running, the Guardian has reported.Bannon lobbied for Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget and, in a particularly audacious play, managed to get Sebastian Gorka, the deeply polarizing national security aide from the first Trump administration, into the incoming team as the senior counter-terrorism director.He also played an instrumental role in bringing Scott Bessent to the fore, according to a person directly familiar with the matter. Bannon made the first introduction to Trump years ago, while his allies have advocated for him at Mar-a-Lago and pushed his agenda.View image in fullscreenBut a main power center for cabinet picks is widely seen to rest with JD Vance’s crew, which pushed for Bessent to be named as treasury secretary and Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission, among others.The Vance crew is informally said to involve Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr – who pushed for Vance to be his father’s running mate – and Don Jr’s close advisers including Arthur Schwartz and Andrew Surabian, as well as former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.In addition to being seen as getting Bessent the nod when Trump still had his doubts, the Vance crew have earned additional juice with Trump in probably securing enough Republican votes for Hegseth to be confirmed as defense secretary, despite another set of sexual misconduct allegations.For West Wing picks, the incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has extended her personal influence with Trump. Wiles has mostly been able to get the staff of her choosing without having to fight against competing interests.Wiles’s top aides have landed in deputy chief of staff roles, including James Blair for legislative policy, Taylor Budowich for presidential personnel and Steven Cheung as communications director – although the factions are amorphous and Budowich and Cheung are also close to the Vance crew.Then there are individuals – relative newcomers to the Trump orbit – who have been in transition meetings at Mar-a-Lago as a result of their unique situations: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, who is also the co-chair of the Trump transition team.By weighing in on major cabinet picks, Musk has gotten on the nerves of some Trump loyalists, including Epshteyn, who have complained that the billionaire knows little of the Trump agenda they are trying to bring about and has little idea about who would be best placed to enact it.Lutnick has retained his authority through his transition co-chair role, although he recently engaged in some accidental self-sabotage by pushing too hard to be treasury secretary and appeared to have been caught in a leak investigation over the nominee for secretary of agriculture.Trump was irritated by Musk’s post on X pushing Lutnick for treasury secretary, which gave an opening for his main rival Bessent to secure the job instead. Still, Lutnick has continued to be close to Trump and last week was named commerce secretary.Musk, who is staying off-site in Palm Beach, has become more judicious with his interactions with Trump since that episode and after he secured himself his own role to lead the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”. More

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      Steve Bannon released from prison a week before US election

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      Steve Bannon, the longtime Donald Trump acolyte, was released from prison on Tuesday, following a four-month sentence for defying a congressional subpoena in an investigation of the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack.The far-right firebrand’s release from federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, comes just one week before election day. Bannon, 70, surrendered to prison on 1 July after the US supreme court rebuffed his effort to postpone this sentence pending appeal.“I’m not broken, I’m empowered,” Bannon said upon leaving the lockup at about 3.15am local time, according to the New York Times. Bannon wasted little time in resuming his position as a pro-Trump demagogue, implying that political unrest would unfold after the election.“If people think American politics has been divisive before, you haven’t seen anything,” Bannon said, according to reports.He also insisted that serving time behind bars was “1,000%” worth the price of refusing congressional testimony. “If you’re not prepared to go to prison to fight for your country,” Bannon said, “you’re not prepared to fight for your country.”Bannon was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress in July 2022. Federal prosecutors argued that Bannon thought himself “above the law” in refusing to sit before the January 6 House select committee and rejecting demands for documents in his work to subvert 2020’s election results – which saw Joe Biden besting Trump.The prosecution said that Bannon “chose to show his contempt for Congress’s authority and its processes” in flouting these subpoenas. Bannon has insisted that the convictions against him were politically motivated, similar to Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that law enforcement actions against him stemmed from a nefarious Democratic conspiracy.David Schoen, Bannon’s lawyer, claimed that this case prompted “serious constitutional issues” that needed to be examined by the supreme court.“Quite frankly, Mr Bannon should make no apology. No American should make any apology for the manner in which Mr Bannon proceeded in this case,” Schoen said.Bannon’s legal team has also argued that there was a “strong public interest” in permitting him to remain out on bail in advance of the 2024 US presidential elections.Hours after his release, Bannon returned to his political proselytizing, with a live War Room podcast where he peddled election conspiracy theories.At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, about 12 hours after his release from prison, Bannon railed against Nancy Pelosi, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, and Harris, again claiming that he was a “political prisoner”.“The system is broken,” Bannon said, claiming the justice department was “weaponized” to punish Trump’s backers and gut his popular podcast.Bannon also insisted that he met a lot of “working-class minorities” behind bars, saying he listened to, and learned from, them. They disliked Harris, Bannon said, calling the former prosecutor as the “queen of mass incarcerations”.Doubling down on his War Room claims on Tuesday morning, in which Bannon insisted that prison had empowered him, he also quipped: “Nancy Pelosi, suck on that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBannon also thanked the prison for providing an opportunity for him to teach civics to about 100 students, pointing out that he had Puerto Rican and Dominican pupils. Bannon discussed his work with persons of color at several points, in a seeming effort to downplay attention on anti-Latino commentary from Trump supporters.He also toyed with the idea that Democrats would try to steal the election from Trump; Biden won the 2020 election and there is no credible evidence of misconduct that undermines the legitimacy of his win.“We’re going to have a reprise of 2020 where they’re going to do everything humanly possible to nullify” Trump’s victory and “delegitimize his second term”, Bannon claimed.“The working-class people in this country that support Donald John Trump are not going to let that happen.“The 2020 election was stolen,” Bannon also said later.During a question-and-answer session with Bannon, an apparent interloper – it appears that he is a comedian – asked “when’s the next insurrection, and can we storm the Burger King after this?” This person seemed to have been escorted out of the press conference.Bannon still faces state-level charges in New York over his alleged tricking of donors who contributed to building a US-Mexico border wall. Bannon maintains his innocence; trial in this case is scheduled for December.With reporting from the Associated Press More

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      Samuel Alito accepted concert tickets from conservative German aristocrat

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      Samuel Alito, the US supreme court justice, accepted $900 concert tickets from a Catholic German aristocrat known for her unabashed conservative views and ties to rightwing activists, his latest financial disclosure form reveals.Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis reportedly gifted the tickets to Alito and his wife to allow them to attend the Regensburg castle festival, an annual summer music extravaganza hosted at her 500-room castle in Bavaria.The princess, a descendant of princes of the Holy Roman empire, is noted for ties with Steve Bannon, a key supporter and former aide of Donald Trump, and connections to figures in the Catholic hierarchy opposed to Pope Francis.Her donation to Alito is set out in the justice’s annual financial disclosure report, which he filed late after requesting an extension.The declaration follows a series of controversies over the ethics of supreme court justices amid revelations that some, including Alito himself and Justice Clarence Thomas, have accepted gifts from wealthy benefactors without disclosing on mandatory forms.Alito has been at the centre of reports that he accepted a private jet free travel gift for a luxury salmon fishing trip from a conservative billionaire who had cases pending before the supreme court.He previously met von Thurn und Taxis along with fellow justice Brett Kavanaugh when she visited the supreme court in 2019 along with Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who was dismissed from his position as head of the Catholic’s church’s doctrinal body by Pope Francis, and Brian Brown, a leading anti-LGBTQ+ activist.Von Thurn und Taxis’s palatial castle in Regensburg – the venue for the concert attended by Alito and his wife – has been mooted by Bannon as a potential venue for a European network of finishing schools for rightwing conservatives.Once nicknamed Princess TNT by Vanity Fair for her supposedly combustible personality, the princess previously affected a less traditional persona and was known for associating with the likes of Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall and Michael Jackson.A Tatler profile featuring a 1980s photo of her sporting a luxuriantly punk hairstyle, described her as “equal parts Helena Bonham Carter and Princess Diana”, adding: “She struck the socialite community with her outgoing personality and her rambunctious punk aesthetic.”After he reinvention as a conservative Catholic activist, she drew criticism in 2001 after saying on a television talkshow that the high rate of Aids in Africa was due, not to a lack of safe sex, but because “the Blacks like to copulate a lot”. She later tried to amend her remarks, saying Africans had a lot of sex due to the continent’s hot climate. More