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      The Guardian view on Trump’s shock therapy: warehouse and transport workers are the first victims of a class war | Editorial

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      The White House, eager to win a trade war it barely understands, has yanked the emergency brake on China-US trade without checking who’s inside the vehicle. Donald Trump’s early April trade decree has taken a month to hit the economy – that’s how long Chinese containers need to reach Los Angeles. And on cue, US pacific ports registered a 45% drop in container bookings this week from China. When warehouses fall quiet and trucks idle in California, the silence will creep eastward. Unemployment will surely tick upwards.Even if Washington reverses course by the end of May, and Beijing plays nice, the best-case scenario is delayed damage. Some goods are being rerouted to avoid charges, but you can’t reboot global logistics overnight. This isn’t strategic decoupling – it’s economic self-harm. By the time the Trump administration notices, it will be too late. The consequences of the US president’s rash tactics will reverberate through Main Street. Mr Trump offers a flippant excuse: blame 11-year-olds with too many dolls – not his own tariffs – for rising hardship.US gross domestic product just shrank for the first time in three years – despite Mr Trump’s promise of a “golden era”. His tariffs are steering the world toward a downturn. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) knows it. According to its latest modelling, the fund now sees the probability of global growth falling below 2%, a threshold widely seen as equivalent to a global recession, as approaching one in four. That’s double the risk it estimated six months ago. Escalating US tariffs, says the IMF, are the main reason behind the darkening skies.What does this mean for the world? Below 2% global growth, much of the per capita gains vanish. Most of what’s left is soaked up by expanding giants in Asia and Africa – places with the people and industrial catch-up capacity to grow even in a weakened global economy. The UK does not have this. Britain is an ageing, post-industrial economy in a productivity slump without the momentum of demographics or the slack of underdevelopment. That’s why Labour can’t afford to sit back. Rising living standards and real economic security require government to invest, build and redistribute – because the market alone won’t.Commentators still blindly cling to David Ricardo’s 1817 theory of comparative advantage – as if today’s global capitalism mirrors Georgian England’s trade in wine and cloth. It doesn’t. Ricardo assumed nations specialise based on domestic costs. But in a world of mobile capital, it’s companies that specialise, not countries. That’s what the economist Dani Rodrik warned in the late 1990s: free capital flows undermine comparative advantage. Development now depends not on obeying trade patterns, but on shaping them – through industrial policy.But Maga protectionism isn’t rebuilding US industry – it’s shock therapy. Mr Trump engineers a trade crisis to hike prices, kill off “uncompetitive” firms and clear the way for a leaner, capital-heavy economy. Meanwhile, tax cuts hand America’s oligarchic tendency even more power to reshape markets in its image. Mr Trump’s narrative promises a revival for US workers – particularly the unionised holdouts in places such as Detroit – but what they will get is higher costs, stagnant wages and patriotic slogans. This isn’t industrial policy. It’s class politics disguised as economic nationalism – a controlled demolition of what remains of US labour’s bargaining power, sold as a populist renaissance.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trump says Biden caused the economic downturn. That’s malarkey | Steven Greenhouse

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      While Donald Trump delusionally asserts that “we’re celebrating the most successful first 100 days of any administration in American history”, last week’s economic news emphatically refutes that. Trump’s commerce department reported on Wednesday that the US economy – in a sharp and dismaying reversal – shrank in the first quarter of this year.That of course is when Trump returned to the White House, but Trump, true to form, denied that he was in any way responsible for the surprisingly bad economic news. Trump, who has spent his life blaming others and refusing to admit mistakes, was quick to blame Joe Biden for the downturn. The nation’s gross domestic product declined at a 0.3% annual rate in the quarter, after adjusting for inflation.At Wednesday’s cabinet meeting – where cabinet secretaries sounded like North Korean officials obsequiously extolling Kim Jong-un – Trump noted the bad first-quarter report and said: “This is Biden, and you can even say the next quarter is sort of Biden.” Later in the day in a speech to corporate executives, Trump continued to try to dodge responsibility, saying: “This is Biden’s economy.”Even the very careful New York Times said that Trump was full of it. The Times wrote that Trump “blamed his predecessor for handing him a bad economy, despite data showing that growth was strong when he took office”.When Biden left office, many economists had glowing words about the economy. “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The US economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than pre-pandemic.”With regard to the bad first-quarter GDP report, economists overwhelmingly agree that there was one overriding cause, and that cause was not Joe Biden. Rather, it was the huge uncertainty and fears stirred by the prospect of Trump’s tariffs. Eager to stock up on foreign goods before Trump imposed his wave of tariffs, US businesses rushed to increase their imports, and according to the formula used to calculate GDP, soaring imports have a downward effect on economic growth.Like the boy who would never admit he broke the cookie jar, Trump refused to admit that his tariffs had anything to do with the first-quarter downturn. For Trump, truth is a distant galaxy. It’s a foreign enemy that he is forever trying to repel. He stubbornly refuses to admit that the economy was in strong shape when he took office, just as he shamelessly refuses to admit that “MS-13” was Photoshopped on to the knuckles of Kilmar Ábrego García, an immigrant who was wrongly deported to a brutal prison in El Salvador. Far too often, Trump seems allergic to the truth. During an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News, he brazenly insisted that Moran accept Trump’s falsehood about Ábrego García, telling him: “Why don’t you just say: ‘Yes, he does’” have MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles.It’s as delusional for Trump to claim that “we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe”, as he did in a speech to a joint session of Congress in March, as it is for him to insist that Ábrego García’s knuckles say “MS-13”.When Biden left office, no economists were forecasting a recession anytime soon – that’s why Wednesday’s report that the economy shrank in the first quarter was such a surprising reversal. During last year’s fourth quarter, Biden’s last full quarter in office, the nation’s GDP grew at a solid 2.4% rate. Indeed, ever since the Covid-19 pandemic ended, economic growth in the US was considerably stronger than in Britain, Germany, France, Japan and other G7 nations. Several weeks before election day, the Economist magazine ran headlines saying the US economy was “the envy of the world” and had “left other rich countries in the dust”.When Biden’s term ended, the jobless rate was a low 4.0%. Not only that, during Biden’s four years, the average unemployment rate was lower than for any president since the 1960s. Trump won over many voters by attacking high inflation under Biden – and it was a serious problem – but by the time Biden left office, inflation had slid to just 2.9%, far below its 9% peak in 2022 and nearly down to the Federal Reserve’s inflation goal.As part of his economic disinformation efforts, Trump has repeatedly said that job growth was a disaster under Biden. Sorry, Donald, that’s a lie. The fact is that during Biden’s four years, the US added 16.6 million jobs, more than during any four-year term of any previous president. (Trump will never tell you this, but during his first term, the nation lost 2.7 million jobs overall, making his first-term presidency the first presidency since Herbert Hoover’s to suffer an overall loss in jobs. The pandemic was largely responsible for that.)As part of his never-ending effort to dodge responsibility, Trump blamed Biden for the stock market’s recent troubles. During Trump’s first 100 days, the S&P 500 fell 7%, making it the market’s worst beginning to a presidential term since Gerald Ford took office in 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal.Devious as ever, Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday: “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th.” What Trump failed to say was that the stock market didn’t begin to plunge until 2 April, when he announced his steep, worldwide “liberation day” tariffs. That was more than two months after Biden left office – so it’s absurd for Trump to blame him for that decline. And don’t expect Trump to ever acknowledge that Wall Street soared during Biden’s four years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 39% and the S&P 500 soared by 55.7%, including a 28% jump during 2024.Jared Bernstein, who was chair of the council of economic advisers under Biden, said on MSNBC on Thursday that it was ludicrous for Trump to blame Biden for the first-quarter downturn. “I have never seen a more direct connection to what we’re seeing in the economy and stock market to the action of one person, which is to President Trump and his trade war,” Bernstein said.Many economists warn that the US economy may sink further in the second quarter due to Trump’s tariffs as some supply chains break down, some imports dry up, prices rise on many goods and many consumers and business pull back on spending due to all the uncertainty and anxiety.John Kasich, a Republican and former governor of Ohio, sneered at Trump’s efforts to weasel out of responsibility. “You can’t blame Biden,” he said. “It’s like saying the dog ate my homework.”

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Trump’s tariffs get one thing right: capitalism is changing | Avram C Alpert

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      Trying to understand Donald Trump’s across-the-board tariffs based solely on economic theory won’t work. As the US president himself said: “Chronic trade deficits are no longer merely an economic problem, they’re a national emergency that threatens our security and our very way of life.” That may be why, as many economists have pointed out, there’s simply no good economic case for his plans.But few commentators have understood that facts and figures aren’t the whole point of the tariffs. As always, economics is part of a broader political vision. The tariffs help Trump make his claim that a way of life is under threat and he alone can protect it.Indeed, the political meaning of Trump’s tariffs is in the idea itself: “protectionism”. He is not just telling people that he’s going to improve the economy. He’s signaling that he’s going to protect a way of life, even – or especially – if it hurts others, by creating, in theory, good-paying factory jobs that could sustain local communities. (Never mind that the key to any industry’s ability to sustain communities are the practices of labor organizing Trump opposes.) On the campaign trail, he said: “Whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.” He’s now saying the same thing to the country as a whole.Such non-economic justifications for economic policy are nothing new. They are part of what the sociologist Max Weber called “the spirit of capitalism”. Weber argued that capitalists had to justify a claim unique in human history: profit is good. For millennia before, philosophers had argued the opposite. Jesus, for example, told his disciples that it was likelier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.But with capitalism, the pursuit of profit became good. How did it justify this? Weber said that’s where “spirit” comes in. He pointed to notions of work as a holy value in Protestantism and Calvinist ideas about how monetary success proved you were among God’s chosen few. These spiritual views engendered a work ethic and made capitalist excess palatable. At least for a time.When capitalist greed becomes unpalatable, new spirits emerge. To understand Trump’s protectionist spirit, we have to understand this preceding history.After the Great Depression, people saw that they might lose everything no matter how hard they worked and so the work ethic spirit lost its power. In its place, social democratic states gave a new collectivist spirit to capitalism. Social democracy limited excess and provided a moral logic by offering stability to all through a linked system of jobs and life-long public services.This collectivist spirit began to break down in the 1960s under the pressures of stagflation, oil shocks, and criticisms of a conformist, consumerist lifestyle. In response, capitalism’s spirit transformed itself again. According to two scholars of this transitional period, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, it did so by ingeniously incorporating the criticisms: it became about nomads, connections, flexibility, creativity.It was no longer the staid cubicle office man; it was now the exciting creative entrepreneur who knows no allegiances and is at home in the chaos of disruption. Hence Silicon Valley. Hence the destroyed manufacturing bases where jobs were converted to low-wage poverty traps and where Trump now finds many of his most loyal supporters. Hence his protectionist vision of a new spirit of capitalism.There is some merit in this desire to help those who lost out, but, as Weber noted, the spirits of capitalism can mask more sinister desires. By also pushing massive tax breaks for the wealthy, Trump is hoping that tariffs can provide rhetorical appeal without radically changing the social order.The tariffs say: we will protect your community by hurting those who profited off your pain and became rich through globalization. That’s why Trump blamed “globalists” for the dip in the stock market after the tariffs were announced: “A lot of [those selling stocks] are globalist countries and companies that won’t be doing as well … Because we’re taking back things that have been taken from us many years ago.” But that ignores the real ways in which jobs have been lost and communities upended. What the tariffs leave unsaid is that they won’t address the real issues underlying today’s economic pain: gutting welfare, failing to retrain workers, under-utilizing technology, and letting inequality rise relentlessly.Trump is right that capitalism, in a period of untrammeled greed and injustice, needs a new spirit to show it the way. But the trouble with a protectivist spirit is that it implies that some get protected while others get hurt. That will just create new cycles of dismay – as we are already seeing with the tariff whiplash and draconian immigration policies.What we need is a democratizing spirit, one that isn’t about protecting some and hurting others, but instead guides us to work collectively to ensure that all people can lead decent and meaningful lives even in a chaotic world. There are economic policies for this, such as fair trade, meaningful industrial policy, more worker representation on corporate boards, and more cooperatively owned businesses.But Democrats also need to learn from Trump and emphasize the spirit. They need to show that their democratic vision is not just technocratic, but as powerful and affirming as the feeling of being protected.The desire for this spirit may be why the rallies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have drawn record crowds. Most attenders say they aren’t there to hear the policies, which they already know. They’re there for the “community”, and to experience the “closest thing to a version of America you actually want to live in”, one that works for all of us. If the Democratic party can catch that spirit, they will not only win elections; they might just bring an end to decades of destruction.

      Avram Alpert is a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program. His most recent book is The Good-Enough Life More

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      Donald Trump’s cartoon-like chaos leaves US economy on unstable course | Heather Stewart

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      Ten days reporting from the US – in Pittsburgh, Washington DC, and just across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia – gave me a fascinating snapshot of what feels like the slow-motion unravelling of the world’s largest economy.So many conversations featured uncertainty and wariness; and weariness, too, as businesses and consumers weigh up every decision, against the backdrop of the chaos emanating from the White House.Even the president conceded last week that the economy was in a “transition period”, claiming he had warned of this during his campaign. (When challenged, the White House could not come up with any examples of when he had done so.)The problem for Trump and his supporters, many of whom remain staunchly loyal, is that the transition period in question is starting to resemble that felt by the classic Looney Tunes character Wile E Coyote between charging off a cliff into midair and plunging to the ground.So far, the hard data from the US economy is holding up well. Friday’s payrolls report was strong, and the negative first quarter gross domestic product reading, while worrying, was hard to take a clear reading from because of the rise in imports as companies stocked up ahead of tariffs.There is little sign of anything as dramatic as mass job cuts, or a sudden stop in consumer spending – although the recent crop of data mainly relates to the period before “liberation day”.Look at the forward-looking surveys, though, and there are clear signs of anxiety. The long-running Michigan consumer sentiment index just had its steepest quarterly decline since the 1990 recession.Spend any amount of time talking to US consumers and businesses, and it is abundantly clear why: there are so many sources of policy ambiguity as to make the future not just uncertain but completely unknowable.There is a cliche that “markets hate uncertainty”, but in truth the same applies to everyone in the real economy, too: the company wondering what size order to put in and how many people to hire and the family thinking about buying that fridge or booking that holiday.It is not surprising they are uncertain. No one, even inside the administration, can say with any confidence what the tariff rates on imports from specific countries will be in July.Even if the tariff policy was crystal clear, its impact on prices would be hard to gauge – depending, as it does, on how much of the cost companies are willing to bear (or “eat”, as the Americans have it) at the expense of reduced profits, and how much is passed on to consumers.For the moment, as the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has admitted, the tariffs on China, at 145%, are now so high as to amount to an effective trade embargo.Not every company will have the deep pockets and global reach of Apple to be able to bend its supply chain away from China to manufacture products for the US elsewhere (in the iPhone-maker’s case, India). Instead, many will be scrambling to find substitutes, which may be more expensive or not exist at all. Shortages of some products seem a distinct possibility.At the same time, sharp cuts in federal budgets, many of which have an ideological taint, including Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decimation of the National Institutes of Health, are raising short-term questions about unemployment and much longer-term worries about the US’s world-leading science base.Some of the most heartbreaking conversations I had were about aspects of Trump’s immigration policy: the man who said a Guatemalan friend’s six-year-old son had stopped going to school in case his mum was snatched by the authorities while he was there, and the restaurant manager who said it was becoming harder to hire Latinos because even fully documented workers feared they could face deportation anyway.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThese are first and foremost human tragedies, but clearly they also have an economic dimension. The credit rating agency Fitch warned in a report last week: “Risks associated with mass deportations could include potential worker shortages, production delays and increased wage inflation that hinders revenue growth, weakens profitability and lowers return on investment.”Of course, because the US economy’s abrupt gearshift has been driven by deliberate policy actions, it’s tempting to think: “It doesn’t have to be like this.”Much more of the real economy impact so far results from this widely shared uncertainty – or perhaps it is better to call it fear – than from the specifics of Trump’s policies.Business owners told me that if they just knew what the final tariffs on products from the various countries in their supply chain would be, for example, then over time they could adapt.It is not completely out of the question that a more settled policy position could arrive in the coming weeks.Certainly, Bessent appears to be trying to manoeuvre Trump towards striking a series of “deals” (in effect, promises of concessions in exchange for tariff carve-outs) with key economies.Yet the president appears to have such a love of political drama – and such an inability to choose a course and stick to it – that the unknowability of future policy seems to be the very essence of Trump 2.0.It seemed to be the mighty bond markets, driving up the cost of US borrowing, that checked Trump’s initial “liberation day” drive, prompting the “pause”.But if time drags on with no agreements in sight, the next wave of distress signals are likely to come not from Wall Street but from main street – in soaring prices and empty shelves. How Trump responds then is anyone’s guess. More

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      One hundred days in, Donald Trump faces a problem: he can rage, but he can’t govern | Jonathan Freedland

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      He says it’s the “best 100-day start of any president in history”, but you can file that along with his boast about crowd sizes and his claim to have won the 2020 election. In truth, the first three months of Donald Trump’s second presidency have been calamitous on almost every measure. The single biggest achievement of those 100 days has been to serve as a warning of the perils of nationalist populism, which is effective in winning votes but disastrous when translated into reality. That warning applies across the democratic world – and is especially timely in Britain.Start with the numbers that matter most to Trump himself. A slew of polls appeared this week, but they all told the same story: that Trump’s approval ratings have collapsed, falling to the lowest level for a newly installed president in the postwar era. He has now edged ahead of his only rival for that title: himself. The previous low watermark for a president three months in was set by one Donald Trump in 2017.Back then, 42% of Americans approved of the way Trump was doing his job. The latest Ipsos survey for the Washington Post/ABC News has Trump at just 39%. This, remember, is meant to be the honeymoon period, yet Trump is 10 points behind where Joe Biden stood at this point, 30 points behind Barack Obama and 44 points behind Ronald Reagan. Remember: US presidents tend to get less, not more, popular as time goes on.Perhaps most significant is that Trump is weak even in those areas where he’s meant to be strong. Confidence in his ability to handle immigration has tumbled and the same is true, even more critically, of his management of the US economy. On the latter, just 37% back Trump, a depth he never plumbed during his first term, even as the economy seized up under Covid. For the first time since 2001, a majority of Americans believe their economic situation is getting worse.With good reason. Because the economic data is almost as troubling for Trump as his poll numbers. This week, official figures showed that the US economy contracted by 0.3% in the first quarter of the year, further fuelling fears of a recession. Trump wasted no time in blaming the shrinkage on Biden, who was in charge for just 20 days of the first three months of 2025, an argument only slightly weakened by the fact that the last quarter with Biden in charge saw growth of 2.4%.It’s a precipitous drop, and the cause of it is hardly mysterious. Economists agree that the culprit is Trump’s tariffs, which prompted a surge in imports, as companies scrambled to buy in goods from abroad before the president’s on-again-off-again levies kicked in. Because those imported goods and services are not produced in the US, they’re subtracted from the headline GDP figure. Hence the contraction. Meanwhile, the chaos and volatility unleashed by Trump’s tariff policy has dented consumer confidence, now down to its lowest level since the recession of 1990, leaving Americans hesitant to spend money amid so much uncertainty. Even though the latest job numbers look healthy, analysts say the underlying picture is alarming. As Bloomberg reports, “corporate investment plans and expectations for growth and jobs have all plummeted – and the key reason is Trump’s trade war.”Trump knows that the warnings from retail giants Walmart and Target, of empty shelves as supplies from heavily tariffed China dry up, have cut through. He addressed that anxiety this week, but in a way that should make even Trump’s admirers, those who usually praise his ability to connect with ordinary folk, worry that he’s losing his touch.Asked about potential shortages of toys at Christmas, Trump said, “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.” Bit late in his career for Trump to don the saffron robes and preach a Zen flight from consumerist materialism. His two-toys remark – which strangely did not feature as one of his campaign pledges in 2024 – has already cast him as the Grinch set to ruin Christmas.“BE PATIENT!!!” he urges on his social media platform, as he insists that the vertiginous downward slide of the stock market either doesn’t matter or is all Biden’s fault. But the whiff of desperation is strong as Trump begins to see why the one idea he actually believes in and has believed in for decades – tariffs – is an object of near-universal contempt among economists. Yes, tariffs may have succeeded in persuading Apple to shift manufacturing away from China. But those jobs are not about to move to the US. Apple has announced instead that it will assemble its US-bound iPhones in India. Better restitch those red baseball caps with a revised slogan: make India great again.By now, you’ll recall, Trump was meant to have ended the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, indeed he promised to do that by 21 January. But after a brief ceasefire, Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has resumed, the Trump administration having apparently lost interest. As for Ukraine, Trump got to brag of a breakthrough this week, with an agreement that gives the US a stake in Ukraine’s mineral wealth. But it’s far from the deal he sought.The case he always made was that the US had to be reimbursed for the billions it had given Ukraine in military support under Biden – plucking the entirely bogus figure of $350bn out of the air. But this week’s arrangement includes no such payback. On the contrary, the deal is one Kyiv can look on with quiet satisfaction. It seems the Ukrainians could smell Trump’s need to have something to shout about in time for his 100th day, and they leveraged that eagerness to their advantage.As for his expansionist threats to gobble up Panama, Greenland and Canada, the only concrete result those have brought is defeat in Canada’s general election for the pro-Trump Conservatives and a back-from-the-dead success for the Liberal party that vowed to defy him. Such is Trump’s narcissism that he even boasted about that, citing it as evidence of how much he matters in the world. As he put it, just before Canadians voted: “You know, until I came along, the Conservative was leading by 25 points,” he mused. “I was disliked by enough of the Canadians that I’ve thrown the election into a close call.”The promise was that this second Trump term would be different, that the chaos and churn of Trump 1.0 would be gone. But on Thursday, we were back to the good old days, with the firing of his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, partly for his accidental admission of a journalist into a Signal group chat that discussed attack plans for Yemen, partly for advocating a tougher stance on Vladimir Putin, and partly for earning the hostility of far-right conspiracist Laura Loomer, who has the ear of the president.So it’s fair to say the 100 days have not gone as Trump would have wished. And thanks to those serial failures, you can see the first, small signs that his power to terrify is fading. Witness the handful of senate Republicans who voted with Democrats against his tariff policy. And note how the reliably rightwing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is now a fierce critic, slamming Trump as a “bully” and denouncing tariffs as “the biggest economic policy mistake in decades”. For a few short hours, even Jeff Bezos seemed ready to take a stand, amid reports that Amazon was about to itemise the cost of tariffs to US customers, before the company backed down.Of course, none of this should be a surprise. Trump’s conman promises and delusional dreams of turning the clock back were always bound to fail. This is the nature of nationalist populism, whether it wears a red cap in Michigan or a turquoise rosette in Runcorn. It is expert at turning grievance, division and nostalgia into votes. But when it comes to governing, it will always fail. It offers an outlet for complaint – and has no answers at all.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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      The truth is finally dawning on Britain: toadying to Trump has got us nowhere | Emma Brockes

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      It’s not funny, of course – livelihoods if not actual lives depend on reaching a workable accord. But the news that President Trump has probably stiffed the UK into a second- or third-tier boarding group for trade talks, behind South Korea and Japan, triggers at least a snort of recognition for anyone who has experienced versions of that dynamic. The phrase “British negotiators are hopeful” followed almost immediately by use of the word “disappointed” in heavy rotation takes you, with grim amusement, back to every toxic relationship in which you have played Britain to someone else’s America.We are talking, of course, about the wisdom or otherwise of appeasing a man many think of as a tyrant, and the main takeaway from the Guardian’s story on Tuesday is that no matter how the UK pretzels itself to fit Donald Trump’s requirements, none of it will make any difference. Or rather what difference it makes, beyond the immediate relief enjoyed before the flattery wears off, is likely to be negative. It’s a rule of extortion that demands will increase with each capitulation, as Columbia University is finding out to its cost. (After caving to Trump’s demands last month in return for the restoration of $400m in federal funding, the university has not, in fact, had its funding restored. Instead Trump officials have told Columbia its concessions only represent the “first step”.)And now the UK finds itself in a similar pickle to Columbia, with any goodwill generated by King Charles’s letter inviting Trump to Balmoral apparently thrown up in the air. (One thing I’ll say for the royals is that their use of passive-aggressive semiotics in the invitation are absolutely world class: Balmoral is a mid-list palace that, while superior to Blenheim, which Trump visited in 2018 and is basically an off-site for corporate events these days, is decidedly not Buckingham Palace – a subtlety we must assume the king and his cohorts are thoroughly enjoying and Trump has no idea about whatsoever.)Anyway, where does any of this leave the UK? For now, at least, belligerence seems to be getting the better results with Trump, at least for those negotiators who have something he wants. Trump has blinked repeatedly when faced with the negative consequences of his own erratic behaviour, be that from tech companies forcing him to exempt them from tariffs or business leaders persuading him, in the wake of his commitment to putting 145% tariffs on Chinese goods, to wobble and admit they’re not sustainable.The fact is that Apple, Target and Walmart all have greater leverage over Trump than the UK does, which is why watching this latest episode of the special relationship unfold brings on, at least in British viewers, feelings of something like pathos. How many times will we keep going back? Clearly the prime minister’s jolly humouring secures better outcomes than Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first approach at the White House, which has since been corrected to a necessary attitude of fealty. Meanwhile Canada, of all places, is now the nation telling the US in the most strident terms to take a step back and get stuffed.As in all these things, it’s the hope that kills you. Maybe if Britain says exactly the right words in the right order, keeps its breathing to a minimum, manages not to say anything annoying until we’re on the other side of the trade deal, lowers its eyes away from Europe or other allies that might trigger the rage of the aggressor, and continues to laugh at his jokes and listen to his stories, it will succeed in changing the pattern of Trump’s behaviour.The fact that this outcome is considered in any way achievable is perhaps the saddest thing of all. It’s an odd quirk of British-American diplomacy that, despite the vast disparity in power and wealth between the two countries, the sense of exceptionalism on both sides is probably equal. We really do believe we can talk our way out of anything, even when dealing with someone as capricious as Trump – a man for whom no amount of appeasement will hold longer than his mood. The king will be mobilised. The choice of Balmoral for Trump’s summer visit will rest in part on the fact that it’s harder for demonstrators bearing helium-filled balloons in the shape of Trump-as-a-baby to reach.And the diplomatic game will continue. Nothing Trump does seems strategic, but it seems both a calculated humiliation and a warning shot to steer clear of Europe to push the UK down the running order of trade talks. The question, then, becomes one of whether Britain’s poker face is a piece of canny diplomatic froideur and blithe UK negotiating or the uncertain actions of the party in an abusive relationship who understands that the moment of greatest danger is when you try to leave.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump hails achievements of first 100 days despite polls revealing American disapproval on economy – as it happened

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      Trump is speaking now at a rally in Warren, Michigan and he has fulsome praise for what he calls “the most successful 100 days of any administration in the history of our country”.A raft of opinion polls released this week shows that a majority of Americans disagree, strongly, expressing deep disapproval of his performance as president, and particularly his handling of the economy, which has been severely damaged by his chaotic imposition of tariffs against nearly even nation, except Russia.A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released on Tuesday shows that 45% of those asked to grade Trump’s performance as president gave him an F, 7% a D, 8% a C, 17% a B, and 23% an A.Half of independents said Trump deserves an F, and only a slim majority of Republicans gave him an A.This brings our coverage of day 100 of Donald Trump’s second term to a close. We will be back in the morning, as the next of 1,000-plus days dawn, but in the meantime we leave you with this list of the day’s developments:

      At Donald Trump’s rally in Michigan, his supporters reacted to the screening of a long video, set to ominous music, showing the harsh treatment of men he had deported from the United States to a prison in El Salvador without due process by chanting”: “USA! USA!”

      As Trump defended his broadly unpopular handling of the economy, he criticized Fed chair Jerome Powell, saying: “I have a Fed person who’s not really doing a good job, but I won’t say that.” The businessman president who used bankruptcy law to rescue his failed enterprises six times added: “I know much more about interest rates than he does”.

      Trump mistakenly attacked the Michigan representative John James, calling the Republican he had endorsed “a lunatic” for trying to impeach him. That was someone else.

      Trump supporters praised by the president at a rally included the former member of a violent cult who founded Blacks for Trump, and a retired autoworker who once told people to read David Duke’s “honest and fair” book about race.

      The US Department of Justice has begun the first criminal prosecutions of immigrants for entering a newly declared military buffer zone created along the border with Mexico, according to court filings.

      Trump called Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos on Tuesday morning to complain about a report that the company planned to display prices that show the impact of tariffs. Trump told reporters later that Bezos “was very nice, he was terrific” during their call, and “he solved the problem very quickly”.

      The Trump administration has reached one trade deal already but won’t tell us who with until that country’s prime minister and parliament approve the deal, the commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said told CNBC.

      The United States proposed sending up to 500 Venezuelan immigrants with alleged ties to the Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador as the two governments sought to reach an agreement on the use of the nation’s notorious mega-prison, according to emails seen by CNN.

      Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Tuesday that offers temporary relief to automakers from the 25% tariffs he imposed in March in a previous proclamation. The measure gives automakers a break for two years to give them time to move auto production back to the United States.

      Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, accused the Trump administration of turning “one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue”, after he and other Joe Biden appointees were removed from the board of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

      Pete Hegseth has abruptly banished the Pentagon’s Women, Peace and Security program as part of his crusade against diversity and equity, dismissing it as a “woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative” despite it being a signature Donald Trump achievement from his first term.

      Donald Trump surprised Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, by inviting her to speak during his address at Selfridge air national guard base on Tuesday afternoon.
      One notable feature of Tuesday’s Trump rally in Michigan is that it featured cameos from supporters of the president who have been fixtures of his campaign rallies for nearly a decade.Early in the speech, as he pointed to familiar faces, Trump recognized the Front Row Joes, a group of diehard supporters akin to groupies who have traveled the country to attend dozens of his rallies. He also shouted out Blake Marnell, a supporter who wears a “brick suit” in homage to Trump’s border wall and witnessed the assassination attempt last year in Butler, Pennsylvania.“There’s my friend, Blacks for Trump. I like that guy. He follows me”, the president said pointing into the crowd. “We love you, your whoile group has been so supportice over the years, I want to thank you”.“Everyone thinks I pay you a fortune”, Trump added. “I don’t even know who the hell he is, I just like him”.As I reported in 2020, the “Blacks for Trump” founder is Maurice Symonette, a.k.a. Michael the Black Man, a former member of a violent cult who posts anti-Semitic screeds and racist conspiracy theories online, and yet has been a featured member of the audience at Trump campaign events since 2016.Symonette was known as Maurice Woodside until 1992, when the black supremacist cult leader he followed, Yahweh ben Yahweh, was jailed for leading a conspiracy to murder 14 white people in initiation rites. Woodside was among the Miami-based Nation of Yahweh cult members charged in two of the murders, but he was acquitted. After the trial, he changed his last name to Symonette, which was his father’s surname, before eventually reinventing himself as Michael the Black Man.On his website, Symonette makes a variety of bizarre claims, including that Omar and other prominent Black Democrats, artists and athletes — including former President Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Spike Lee, Colin Kaepernick, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. — are “DECEVING [sic] FAKE BLACK PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY INDIANS!” In a sermon now deleted from YouTube, he claimed that the Senate is controlled by a secret underground of “Cherokee Mormons.”Later in the speech, Trump called to the stage another supporter who has been a figure at rallies since 2016: Brian Pannebecker, a retired auto worker who told the crowd, “We have the greatest President, probably not just in our lifetimes, but in the history of this country!”Pannebecker’s brief cameo was clipped and shared on social media by an official White House account, despite the fact that it was first reported a decade ago that he had written a glowing review of David Duke’s book, “My Awakening”, in which he called the former Klansman’s work “honest and fair”. After reading the book, Pannebecker wrote in his online review, people “will be able to discuss the issue of race without the fear of being labeled a racist because you will have the facts and the truth on your side”.A federal judge in New Jersey ruled on Tuesday that Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia graduate and Palestine solidarity activist who was detained on 8 March in his apartment building in New York and moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Louisiana, can move forward with his lawsuit claiming the government is unlawfully detaining him for his political views.“This Court has habeas jurisdiction over this case” Judge Michael Farbiarz wrote. “And as set out in this Opinion, that jurisdiction is intact. It has not been removed.”“As I am now caring for our barely week-old son, it is even more urgent that we continue to speak out for Mahmoud’s freedom, and for the freedom of all people being unjustly targeted for advocating against Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s wife said in a statement. “I am relieved at the court’s finding that my husband can move forward with his case in federal court. This is an important step towards securing Mahmoud’s freedom. But there is still more work to be done. I will continue to strongly advocate for my husband, so he can come home to our family, and feel the pure joy all parents know of holding your first-born child in your arms.”“The court has affirmed that the federal government does not have the unreviewable authority to trample on our fundamental freedoms,” Noor Zafar of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project said in a statment emailed to reporters. “This is a huge step forward for Mahmoud and for the other students and scholars that the Trump administration has unlawfully detained in retaliation for their political speech, and a rebuke of attempts by the executive to use immigration laws to weaken First Amendment protections for political gain.”The US Department of Justice has begun the first criminal prosecutions of migrants for entering a newly declared military buffer zone created along the border with Mexico, according to court filings, Reuters reports.At least 28 migrants were charged were charged in federal court in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on Monday for crossing into the 170-mile-long, 60-foot-wide militarized buffer zone patrolled by active-duty US troops.Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, visited the area last week and said it was the start of a plan to extend the buffer zone along the border.“The reason we are here today, at almost the 100-day mark of President Trump’s administration is because you’re standing on a National Defense Area, this may as well be a military base” Hegseth said in a defense department social media video posted online. “Any illegal attempting to enter that zone is entering a military base.”“As New Mexicans, we have deep concerns about the enhanced militarization of our borderlands communities” the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico in a statement last week. “The expansion of military detention powers in the ‘New Mexico National Defense Area’ – also known as the ‘border buffer zone’ – represents a dangerous erosion of the constitutional principle that the military should not be policing civilians.”The idea of militarizing the border has long been a dream of far-right politicians, like the failed Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters, who devoted a campaign ad to the idea in 2022.Trump has left the stage, and his supporters are filing out of the venue, which we are told by the pool reporter there has a capacity of 4,000, but was only about half or three-fifths full.One bizarre moment early in the speech that we would have heard a lot more about had the speaker been Joe Biden was when Trump tore into Representative John James, telling the crowd the Michigan Republican he had endorsed and campaigned with was “a lunatic”.“Some guy that I never heard of, John James. Is he a congressman? This guy? He said, he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to start the impeachment of Donald Trump”, Trump told the crowd. Many of his supporters in the room, and watching at home, were probably aware that the president, who celebrates his 79th birthday in six weeks, had confused James with Representative Shri Thanedar, the Michigan Democrat who did, in fact, introduce articles of impeachment against Trump on Monday.Trump has just finished speaking and departed to the strains of the Village People anthem YMCA. He spoke for about 90 minutes in what was a fairly typical rally speech and even told the crowd early on, “I miss you guys. I miss the campaign”.If there has been one constant theme throughout his time in office, it has been that he clearly loves the adulation of the crowd that comes from making campaign speeches far more than the work of governing.Trump just made the entirely false claim that, “for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction”.“For the first time ever, in, I think, ever, that they’re saying the country is headed in the right direction”, Trump added. “Has never happened before”.It is not clear why the president thinks this is true, or indeed if he does, but it is very clearly not true.In the latest nationwide poll, conducted from April 17-21 for the Associated Press by National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, the overwhelming majority of Americans said that the country is headed in the wrong direction (62% vs 37%).The latest Gallup poll, from earlier in April showed that just 34% were satisfied with the way things were going in the US, and 64% were dissatisfied. While those numbers were markedly better than last summer, when satisfaction was as low as 18% and dissatisfaction reached 80%, the majority still clearly says the country is headed in the wrong direction.It is also not true to say that American have never previously said the country was going in the right direction. Gallup found that 50% of the public said that things were going n the right direction at this point in George W. Bush’s first term in 2001. There was even more optimism in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, when the right direction number reached 70%.Defending his handling of the economy, which has been severely damaged by his trade war and the prospect of rising inflation, Trump just told his supporters in Michigan: “Inflation is basically down, and interest rates came down despite the fact that I have a Fed person who’s not really doing a good job, but I won’t say that. I want to be very nice. I want to be very nice and respectful to the Fed. You’re not supposed to criticize the Fed; you’re supposed to let him do his own thing, but I know much more about interest rates than he does, believe me.”At his rally in Michigan, Donald Trump’s supporters reacted to the screening of a long video, set to ominous music, showing the harsh treatment of men he had deported from the United States to a prison in El Salvador without due process by chanting “USA! USA”!”The video, first posted on Elon Musk’s social media platform X by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in March, shows 238 men accused of being members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, being taken from planes and confined in the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as Cecot.The images of the abusive treatment clearly delighted Trump, and his supporters. The fact that the men were not given an opportunity to contest the accusation that they are members of either Tren de Aragua or the Salvadoran gang MS-13, seemed not to trouble Trump.Instead, he accused Democrats of “racing to the defense of some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth”.“They’re racing to the courts to help them”, Trump claimed, ignoring the fact that his own administration has admitted in court that at least one of the man deported, Kilmar Ábrego García, was sent there by mistake, in violation of an order issued during hjis previous term in office. The families of other men seen in the video have pointed to multiple errors in the interpretation of their tattoos as proof that they are gang members.Trump is speaking now at a rally in Warren, Michigan and he has fulsome praise for what he calls “the most successful 100 days of any administration in the history of our country”.A raft of opinion polls released this week shows that a majority of Americans disagree, strongly, expressing deep disapproval of his performance as president, and particularly his handling of the economy, which has been severely damaged by his chaotic imposition of tariffs against nearly even nation, except Russia.A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released on Tuesday shows that 45% of those asked to grade Trump’s performance as president gave him an F, 7% a D, 8% a C, 17% a B, and 23% an A.Half of independents said Trump deserves an F, and only a slim majority of Republicans gave him an A.“Today, the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, spoke with the President of the United States, Donald J Trump”, a statement from the Canadian prime minister’s office said.“President Trump congratulated Prime Minister Carney on his recent election. The leaders agreed on the importance of Canada and the United States working together – as independent, sovereign nations – for their mutual betterment. To that end, the leaders agreed to meet in person in the near future.”Carney’s center-left Liberal party won Monday’s general election thanks to a wave of resentment about Trump’s threats to annex Canada and the imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports.“As I’ve been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country”, Carney said in his victory speech late Monday. As the crowd jeered and shouted “Never!” Carney agreed. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, never, ever happen”.As Canadian went to the polls on Monday, Trump posted what seemed like an endorsement of Carney’s rival, the Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre, suggesting that the pro-Trump politician would help bring about Canada’s absorption into the United States. When the votes were counted, however, Poilievre, who had a commanding lead in the polls before Trump started talking about annexing the country, had not only failed to lead the Conservatives to power, he had even lost his own seat.Despite Carney’s office claiming on Tuesday that he and Trump had agreed to work together “as independent, sovereign nations”, White House officials insisted that Trump is still serious about his stated desire to make Canada the 51st US state.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked during a briefing for rightwing influencers if Trump was “truthing or trolling” when he says that he wants to annex Canada, and Greenland. “Trump truthing, all the way”, she replied. “And the Canadians would benefit greatly, let me tell you that”.Donald Trump surprised Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, by inviting her to speak during his address at Selfridge air national guard base on Tuesday afternoon.Trump, who came to Macomb county, Michigan, for an evening rally to celebrate what he calls the historic accomplishments of the first 100 days of his second term, despite widespread disapproval of his actions by a majority of Americans in a series of polls, announced a new fighter jet mission for the base outside Detroit, easing fears that the installation would be closed.For decades, Trump said, the base has “stood as a crucial pillar of North American air defense”.“In recent years, many in Michigan have feared for the future of the base. They’ve been calling everybody, but the only one that mattered is Trump,” he said. “Today I have come in person to lay to rest any doubt about Selfridge’s future.”Whitmer’s political standing was damaged earlier this month when she was photographed hiding her face from photographers in the Oval Office after Trump invited her to be present as he signed executive orders, two of which demanded investigations of critics who had served in his first administration.On Tuesday, she was careful to begin her impromptu remarks by saying that she had not expected to speak, and then praised the decision as a boon for the local economy, but did not praise Trump, as Republicans he invited to make remarks did.Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Tuesday that offers temporary relief to automakers from the 25% tariffs he imposed in March in a previous proclamation.The White House confirmed to Fox Business earlier that the new measure would give automakers a break for two years to give them time to move auto production back to the United States.The proclamation outlines a series of technical changes to the tariff regime, “to modify the system imposed in Proclamation 10908 by reducing duties assessed on automobile parts accounting for 15 percent of the value of an automobile assembled in the United States for 1 year and equivalent to 10 percent of that value for an additional year”.As we reported earlier, the changes will allow carmakers with US factories to reduce the amount they pay in import taxes on foreign parts, using a formula tied to how many cars they sell and the price.Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, accused the Trump administration of turning “one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue”, after he and other Joe Biden appointees were removed from the board of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.Emhoff, who is Jewish and spoke passionately against the rising tide of antisemitism during his time as the second gentleman, said he was informed on Tuesday that he had been removed from the museum’s council.“Let me be clear: Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized. To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous – and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve,” he said.“No divisive political decision will ever shake my commitment to Holocaust remembrance and education or to combatting hate and antisemitism. I will continue to speak out, to educate, and to fight hate in all its forms – because silence is never an option.”The New York Times reported that the Trump administration also fired Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff; Susan Rice, national security adviser to Barack Obama, and Biden’s top domestic policy adviser; and Tom Perez, the former labor secretary who was a senior adviser to the former president.Trump defeated Harris, then the US vice-president, in November. Emhoff’s law firm recently struck a deal with the Trump administration to avert an executive order targeting its practice, a decision Emhoff is reported to have voiced his disagreement with.Pete Hegseth has abruptly banished the Pentagon’s Women, Peace and Security program as part of his crusade against diversity and equity, dismissing it as a “woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative” despite it being a signature Donald Trump achievement from his first term.In a post on X, the US defense secretary wrote: “This morning, I proudly ENDED the ‘Women, Peace & Security’ (WPS) program inside the [Department of Defense]. WPS is yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops – distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING.”Hegseth added that the program was “pushed by feminists and left-wing activists”, claiming: “Politicians fawn over it; troops HATE it.”But the decision is raising some eyebrows, as the initiative was established during Trump’s first administration when he signed the Women, Peace and Security Act in 2017, making the US the first country in the world to codify standalone legislation on the matter.The Trump campaign even courted female voters by citing the initiative as one of its top accomplishments for women on its website.Attempting to square this circle, Hegseth later claimed the Biden administration had “distorted & weaponized” the original program. “Biden ruined EVERYTHING, including ‘Women, Peace & Security,’” he insisted.The Senate has confirmed billionaire investment banker Warren Stephens to be ambassador to the UK, backing Donald Trump’s nominee by 59 to 39.Stephens is chair, president and CEO of Stephens Inc, a privately owned financial services firm headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is a longtime contributor to Republican candidates, including Trump, having donated millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaigns and 2025 inauguration fund.Asked about negotiations with Congress over tax legislation, Trump said: “The Republicans are with us. I think we’ve got the big beautiful deal that’s moving along, and I think we’re going to have it taken care of.” He added:
      A very important element that we’re working on now, more important than anything with the border in good shape, is the fact that we want to get, and very importantly, the big beautiful new deal. If we get that done, that’s the biggest thing … And I think we’re going to get it done. We have great Republican support. If the Democrats blocked it, you’d have a 60% tax increase. I don’t think that’s going to happen. We have great support from Republicans. …
      The next period of time, I think, my biggest focus will be on Congress, the deal that we’re working on. That would be the biggest bill in the history of our country in terms of tax cuts and regulation cuts, and other things. More

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      White House calls Amazon ‘hostile’ for reportedly planning to list tariff costs

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      The White House accused Amazon of committing a “hostile and political act” after a report said the e-commerce company was planning to inform customers how much Donald Trump’s tariffs would cost them as they shopped.The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was responding to a report in Punchbowl News, which, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that Amazon would begin displaying on its site how much the tariffs had increased the prices of individual products, breaking out the figure from the total listed price.“Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?” Leavitt asked during a press briefing.Trump himself called Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder, shortly after the report published to complain about the change, according to multiple reports.Amazon’s online marketplace has seen prices rise across the board since Trump announced sweeping tariffs at the start of April, particularly on China, where many products listed on Amazon.com ship from. In response, the company has pressured its third-party sellers to shoulder the burden of the extra import costs rather than pass them on to customers. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“This is another reason why Americans should buy American,” Leavitt continued, though Amazon is headquartered in Seattle.Amazon moved to distance itself from the report, saying the idea had been considered by Amazon Haul, the company’s recently launched low-cost shopping hub, but had been rejected.“The team that runs our ultra-low-cost Amazon Haul store considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products. This was never approved and is not going to happen,” said Tim Doyle, Amazon spokesperson.Online shopping has been upended by Trump’s trade policies. The day before the White House took aim at Amazon, discount retailers Temu and Shein, which ship from China, began displaying 145% “import charges” in customers’ totals to reflect the surcharge on Chinese goods.Asked if the strident statement from the White House signaled a rift between Trump and Bezos, who stepped down as CEO in 2021 and donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund earlier this year, Leavitt said: “I will not speak to the president’s relationships with Jeff Bezos.”Bezos and Trump endured a strained relationship during the president’s initial run for the White House. During the 2016 campaign, the Amazon founder publicly argued that some of Trump’s rhetoric, including threats to lock up his political opponents, damaged democracy, while Trump accused the tech giant of failing to pay enough taxes.Scrutiny of Trump’s first term by the Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos, angered the US president. He was further infuriated by Bezos’s apparent refusal to intervene. In a bid to pile pressure on Amazon, Trump threatened to block federal aid for the US Postal Service unless it hiked shipping rates for online firms.Since Trump’s return to power, however, Bezos has taken a noticeably different approach to the president. He attended Trump’s inauguration, alongside a string of other big tech founders, and Amazon donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund.Days before last November’s presidential election, the Washington Post announced its editorial board would not endorse a candidate for the first time in more than three decades – prompting an exodus of subscribers. Bezos insisted the move was a “principled decision” and claimed that “inadequate planning” had led to the last-minute call.The Post went a step further in February, announcing an overhaul of the newspaper’s opinion section to focus its output “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”, Bezos said. The decision angered readers and staff and prompted the resignation of the opinions editor, David Shipley.His actions drew a sharp rebuke from Marty Baron, the highly regarded former editor of the Washington Post, who told the Guardian that Bezos’s plan for the newspaper’s opinion section amounted to a “betrayal of the very idea of free expression” that had left him “appalled”.Amazon, meanwhile, is reportedly paying some $40m to license a documentary on the life of the first lady, Melania Trump. More