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      Maga star Katie Miller’s new podcast reeks of toxic femininity. I listened so you don’t have to | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Want to hear a cute little story about JD Vance and a Dutch baby? Don’t worry, he didn’t deport it, he cooked one for breakfast. Then he sat down with Katie Miller to tell her all about his baking skills in the very first episode of her brand-new podcast. Which, by the way, I have heroically listened to all 44 excruciating minutes of so that you don’t have to.Miller, for the uninitiated, is a Maga bigwig and married to Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s far-right chief of staff and a man so odious his own uncle once wrote an article calling him a “hypocrite”.A Trump loyalist, Miller has form when it comes to surrounding herself with odious men: she held top communications jobs during Trump’s first term and, earlier this year, became a spokesperson for Elon Musk’s pet project, the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).In May, she absconded to a mysterious role at Musk’s private ventures. I imagine that she was attracted to Musk’s views on free speech (summed up as: I can say whatever I fancy but you can’t) because it’s been reported that when Miller was in university she once stole and threw away student newspapers because she didn’t like the politician they endorsed.Now, she’s launched the Katie Miller Podcast, the first episode of which came out on Monday. Why jump from the highest echelons of government into podcasting? According to Miller, it’s because “as a mom of three young kids, who eats healthy, goes to the gym, works full-time, I know there isn’t a podcast for women like myself”.In a promo video, in which she sits cross-legged on an armchair (with shoes on!) in front of a bookshelf with three books on it, including The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird, she explains that “there isn’t a place for conservative women to gather online” and she wanted to create a space to have “real honest conversations” about what matters to women.Apparently what matters to women is the minutiae of vice-president Vance’s life: the first 44-minute episode, which I suggest she rename Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, was devoted to fawning over a man who has said professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over children.Miller, who is not a natural host, awkwardly serves softball questions (“is a hotdog a sandwich?”) while Vance drones on about what a great daddy and vice-president he is and how much he loves ice-cream and joking around with Marco Rubio. The closest they get to a controversial topic is Vance talking about all the memes he’s inspired and saying that one of his favourites features the pope, Usha Vance and a couch. (There have been online jokes that Vance was intimate with a couch and that he killed the pope.) There is also light mockery of Late Show host Stephen Colbert, whose show recently got cancelled.Other than the memes, the most memorable moment of the episode is when Miller seems to imply that her husband subsists entirely on a diet of mayonnaise, like some sort of anaemic vampire. Stephen Miller also apparently runs around his house with his shoes on, as does JD. Usha, sensibly, takes her shoes off at the front door. All of this is exactly the sort of content I’m sure the busy mums are desperate for.Miller has said she thinks there is a gap in the market for podcasts aimed at conservative women, but the market says otherwise. While young women in the US tend to be progressive, there is a thriving “womanosphere” of anti-feminist media aimed at conservatives. Some of these outlets don’t explicitly cater to young conservative mums in the way that the Katie Miller Podcast says it does, but they’re still aiming for the same general demographic.Gen Z commentator Brett Cooper, for example, who has 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, looks at pop culture with a rightwing slant and her show attracts conservative female listeners. In between hot takes on Justin Bieber, Cooper argues that feminism’s goal is to “make men angry and dominate them”, a worldview that recently got her a gig at Fox News. Then there’s Candace Owens, a conservative conspiracy theorist who recently turned on Maga over the Jeffrey Epstein files fiasco. Owens has 4.57 million subscribers on YouTube and her streams get millions of views. Bari Weiss also has a successful podcast and is currently in talks to sell her “anti-woke” media startup The Free Press for more than $200m to CBS News. The Financial Times recently reported: “Weiss has won over [CBS owner David Ellison] partly by taking a pro-Israel stance … as well as her ability to build a younger, digitally savvy audience.”Then, of course, you’ve got all the trending “tradwife” content on TikTok, where creators such as Estee Williams and Gwen the Milkmaid glorify traditional gender roles. Beyond tradwives, there’s an ecosystem of lifestyle content aimed at young women that camouflages rightwing messages. Think: makeup tutorials with a running commentary about how feminism will make you miserable. Canadian media outlet Global News recently obtained a report prepared by Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre that warns female “extremist influencers” are using popular online platforms to radicalize and recruit women.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“A body of open-source research shows that women in extremist communities are taking on an active role by creating content specifically on image-based platforms with live streaming capabilities,” the report says. “These women foster a sense of community and create spaces that put their followers at ease, thereby normalizing and mainstreaming extremist rhetoric.”While Miller’s podcast may not exactly be revolutionary, it is yet another reminder that Republicans are doing a far better job of spreading their talking points on new media than the Democrats. Sure, the Katie Miller Podcast isn’t an “official” White House podcast, but the humanizing interview with Vance, along with Miller’s deep Maga ties, suggest it is very much Trump-approved. In an interview with the Washington Post published on Tuesday, Miller also insinuated that her podcast is a voter recruitment drive for 2028. “In order to cultivate the future of Maga, we have to talk to women,” she said.As the Republicans stretch their tentacles further into the world of podcasting and TikTok, Democrats are still desperately jumping on cringe memes to appeal to a younger audience while flailing around writing long policy documents about how they can spend millions of dollars manufacturing a “Joe Rogan of the left”. The Katie Miller Podcast may not end up being a hit, but it’s just one small part of a very effective Republican messaging strategy.Of course, the really important issue here – the question I’m sure you’re pondering right now – is whether the veep thinks a hotdog is a sandwich? The answer is: definitely not. Which, coincidentally, is also my answer to the question: will you ever voluntarily listen to the Katie Miller Podcast again? More

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      Trump’s DC takeover harkens back to a dark incident 33 years ago – when crime was far worse

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      Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington DC’s police department and decision to deploy the national guard was sparked by the assault of a former Doge staffer who nicknamed himself “Big Balls”. Thirty-three years ago, a fatal attack on a congressional staffer also provoked an effort by the federal government to impose law and order on the nation’s capital – but in that case, it came from Capitol Hill.On Monday, Trump said he was taking “a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in DC and we’re going to take our capital back.”In 1992, it was the death of 25-year-old Tom Barnes, a staffer for Senator Richard Shelby, a Democrat of Alabama, that prompted the senator to introduce legislation to legalize the death penalty in the district. Shelby, a conservative Democrat who would become a Republican two years later, acknowledged that many DC community leaders had historically been opposed to the death penalty, but argued that the tide had changed – using similar dystopian language as Trump.“The terror that comes with living in a war zone has prompted many residents to reconsider the appropriateness, ethically and legally, of a death penalty,” Shelby wrote in a March 1992 Washington Post op-ed. “… People are using guns to settle arguments about clothes and girlfriends. They are ‘smoking’ others because they feel like it. They will even ‘bust a cap in you’ if they don’t like the way you look at them.”In announcing the police takeover on Monday, Trump cited the attack on Edward Coristine, whom he said was “savagely beaten by a band of roaming thugs” and was “left dripping in blood”. He also referenced the June slaying of Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, an intern for the Republican representative Ron Estes, of Kansas, who was killed by crossfire in a drive-by shooting. Last week, his mother, Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym, told ABC News that she supported Trump’s idea of a federal takeover, which he had threatened in a social media post.There was one key difference between then and now: Trump is painting an exaggerated picture of crime in DC, where violent crime is at a 30-year low. But back in January 1992, Washington really was a crime-plagued city. It was coming off a year that saw 482 murders in 1991, earning it the ignoble title of the murder capital of the US. By contrast, there were 187 homicides last year and the city is on pace for a lower number this year.According to the book Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington DC by Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Barnes, the Shelby staffer, left his home on a Saturday night in January 1992 to go to the corner store to get coffee grounds for the next morning. A group of teenagers approached him and demanded his money or they’d “put a cap” in him. “Leave me alone,” Barnes replied, and turned up the street. One of them shot him in the head, landing him in a coma. He died four days later, marking the 22nd homicide of the new year.A Capitol Outrage, ran the headline on a Tuscaloosa News editorial two days later. “Beset by drug-related violence,” the newspaper declared, “Washington has become a national disgrace, an American embarrassment.”“Tom’s death was the catalyst for my involvement in trying to find solutions to the violent crime that plagues our city,” said Shelby, who had known Barnes since he was a toddler.His bill to impose the death penalty on DC failed, but he did get Congress to vote to force the city to hold a referendum on that fall’s ballot asking Washingtonians to authorize capital punishment. “The criminal justice system is out of control in this city and Congress is not going to turn its back on this issue,” Shelby said. Even some home-rule champions on the Hill voted with Shelby, such as Leon Panetta, a Democratic representative from California.“I really think the District of Columbia ought to handle its own affairs,” said Panetta, who would go on to serve as chief of staff to Bill Clinton, CIA director and defense secretary. “But crime continues to be a very serious problem in the district. Part of it is the urban crisis that is part of every city’s social and economic problems. But I don’t get the sense that the district has a strong commitment to confront this issue.”The DC council had repealed the death penalty in 1981, but the last execution in Washington took place in 1957, years before the city won home rule in 1973.This week, Washington leaders bristled at Trump’s takeover of the police. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a non-voting delegate representing DC in the House of Representatives, called it “an historic assault on DC home rule”, while the mayor, Muriel E Bowser, described it as “unsettling and unprecedented”.There was a similarly visceral reaction to Shelby’s death penalty referendum.“There is something approaching rage among the voters of the district about their disempowerment, about Congress forcing this on us,” said Norton, who was in her first term in Congress at the time. “When you mandate a death penalty vote, you engage that issue directly.”Leading up to the referendum, dozens of ministers denounced it at Sunday sermons, the Washington Post reported.On 3 November 1992 – the same day Democrat Bill Clinton won his first presidential election – Washingtonians rejected the death penalty referendum by a 2-1 margin.“Today the voters sent a powerful message to every member of the US Congress that we are citizens of this country,” the then mayor, Sharon Pratt Kelly, said after the vote, while Norton said the vote showed the city “will not tolerate this interference from the outside”.But the climate of fear around crime had won some support for capital punishment.“In neighborhoods across the city, among rich and poor, black and white, some residents have argued that violence has become so random and brutal that convicted killers should be punished with the ultimate act of retribution, regardless of whether it serves as a deterrent,” the Post reported. But others cited concerns that it would be used unfairly against Black defendants, or didn’t like Congress interfering in the city’s affairs, in their votes against it.Even the city council chair, John Wilson, who supported the death penalty, urged a no vote as a signifier of DC’s independence. (Today, the city hall is named for him.)“It’s not that they didn’t favor the death penalty,” Jaffe and Sherwood wrote of DC voters. “Many black Washingtonians are quite conservative, law-and-order advocates … They just resented a white senator from Alabama telling them that they needed a death penalty to make their streets safe.”Today, there is definitely some resentment at a white president from New York who says he wants to clean up the city streets. And Bowser is using it as a way to rally support for the long-held goal of DC statehood.“My message to residents is this: we know that access to our democracy is tenuous,” she said at a news conference after Trump’s takeover. “That is why you have heard me and many, many Washingtonians before me advocate for full statehood for the District of Columbia. We are American citizens. Our families go to war. We pay taxes, and we uphold the responsibilities of citizenship.”

      Frederic J Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications More

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      ‘Censorship’: over 115 scholars condemn cancellation of Harvard journal issue on Palestine

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      More than 115 education scholars have condemned the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal dedicated to Palestine by a Harvard University publisher as “censorship”.In an open letter published on Thursday, the scholars denounced the abrupt scrapping of a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review – which was first revealed by the Guardian in July – as an “attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation and dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies.”The writers note that the issue’s censorship is also an example of “anti-Palestinian discrimination, obstructing the dissemination of knowledge on Palestine at the height of the genocide in Gaza”.The special issue of the prestigious education journal was planned six months into Israel’s war in Gaza to tackle questions about the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US, as the Guardian previously reported.“The field of education has an important role to play in supporting students, educators, and policymakers in contextualizing what has been happening in Gaza,” the journal’s editors wrote in their call for abstracts – which came against the backdrop of the devastation of Gaza’s educational infrastructure, including the shuttering of hundreds of schools and destruction of all of the territory’s universities.More than a year later, the special issue was just about ready – all articles had been edited, contracts with most authors had been finalized, and the issue had been advertised at academic conferences and on the back cover of the previous one. But late in the process, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, a division of the Harvard Graduate School of Education which publishes the journal, demanded that all articles be submitted to a “risk assessment” review by Harvard’s general counsel – an unprecedented demand.When the authors protested, the publisher responded by abruptly cancelling the issue altogether. In an email obtained by the Guardian, the group’s executive director, Jessica Fiorillo, cited what she described as an inadequate review process and the need for “considerable copy editing” as well as a “lack of internal alignment” about the special issue. She said that the decision was not “due to censorship of a particular viewpoint nor does it connect to matters of academic freedom”.The authors and editors flatly rejected that characterization, telling the Guardian that the cancellation set a dangerous precedent and was an example of what many scholars have come to refer to as the “Palestine exception” to academic freedom.“The decision by HEPG to abandon their own institutional mission – as well as the responsibilities that their world-leading stature demands – is scholasticide in action,” the dozens of scholars who signed the recent letter also wrote, using a term coined by Palestinian scholars to describe Israel’s “deliberate and systematic destruction” of Palestine’s educational system.“It is unconscionable that HEPG have chosen to publicly frame their cancellation of the special issue as a matter of academic quality, while omitting key publicly-reported facts that point to censorship.”Arathi Sriprakash, a professor of sociology and education at the University of Oxford and one of the letter’s signatories, told the Guardian that the special issue’s cancellation has mobilised so many education scholars “precisely because we recognise the grave consequences of such threats to academic freedom and academic integrity”.“The ongoing genocidal violence in Gaza has involved the physical destruction of the entire higher education system there, and now in many education institutions around the world there are active attempts to shut down learning about what’s happening altogether. As educationalists, we have to remain steadfast in our commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and learning without fear or threat.”‘Assault on academic freedom’The ordeal around the special Palestine issue played out against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s crackdown on US higher education institutions’ autonomy on the basis of combating alleged antisemitism on campuses.Harvard is the only university that has sued the administration in response to it cutting billions of dollars in federal funds and other punishing measures it has unleashed on universities. But internally, Harvard has pre-empted many of the administration’s demands, including by demoting scholars, scrapping initiatives giving space to Palestinian narratives and adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism that critics say is antithetical to academic inquiry.In conversations with the Harvard Educational Review editors, the journal’s publisher acknowledged that it was seeking legal review of the articles out of fears that their publication would prompt antisemitism claims, an editor at the journal said.Harvard is reportedly close to finalizing a settlement with the Trump administration along the lines of those reached by other top universities.Thea Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American anthropologist of education at Barnard College and one of 21 contributors to the cancelled special issue, criticized the university’s handling of the matter as yet another sign of institutional capitulation.“If the universities – or in this case a university press – are not willing to stand up for what is core to their mission, I don’t know what they’re doing,” she told the Guardian last month. “What’s the point?”A spokesperson for the Harvard Graduate School of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest letter but in an earlier statement to the Guardian wrote that the publisher “remains deeply committed to our robust editorial process”.Last month, the free speech group PEN America also condemned the special issue’s cancellation as a “blatant assault on academic freedom”.“Canceling an entire issue so close to publication is highly unusual, virtually unheard of,” Kristen Shahverdian, the program director for the group’s Campus Free Speech initiative, said in a statement.“Silencing these scholarly voices robs academics, students, and the public of the opportunity to engage with their insights. It also sends a chilling message in the context of the Trump administration’s unrelenting pressure on Harvard University and mounting political interference in higher education, including efforts that target scholarship on Palestine.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: president eyes ‘long-term’ DC police takeover; warns Putin of consequences if no ceasefire reached

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      After deploying the national guard to the streets of the American capital, Donald Trump is now eyeing longer-term powers over authorities, saying on Wednesday that he is seeking to extend his temporary powers over Washington DC’s police department.Trump earlier this week invoked a never-before-used clause of the law that sets out the federal district’s governance structure to take temporary control of the police department, but will need Congress’s permission to extend it beyond the 30 days allowed under the statute.“We’re going to need a crime bill that we’re going to be putting in, and it’s going to pertain initially to DC,” Trump said. He alluded to other options for extending control of the police department, saying “if it’s a national emergency, we can do it without Congress”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump suggests other Democratic-led cities follow suit on crime legislationDonald Trump said on Wednesday he would ask Congress for “long-term” control of Washington DC’s police department and signaled he expected other Democratic-led cities to change their laws in response to his deployment of national guard troops and federal agents into the capital.The president’s comments came as the White House took credit for dozens of arrests overnight in Washington as part of Trump’s campaign to fight a “crime crisis”, which its leaders say does not exist.Read the full storyTrump: Putin to face ‘severe consequences’ if he doesn’t agree ceasefireVladimir Putin will face “very severe consequences” if he does not agree a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine at his summit with Donald Trump in Alaska, the US president said on Wednesday.Speaking after a call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Trump also suggested he would push for a second summit if his meeting with Putin goes well – this time including his Ukrainian counterpart.Read the full storyTrump says he will host Kennedy Center awardsDonald Trump announced on Wednesday that he will host the Kennedy Center honors this year and said he had been heavily involved in choosing who to nominate, rejecting people he thought were too liberal.Read the full storyTrump official led thinktank that promoted lies about Tren de AraguaA senior official appointed to the defense department led a thinktank that promoted fake news about the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, according to InSight Crime, a non-profit analyzing organized crime.Read the full storyHealth professionals call for RFK Jr to be removedA grassroots organization of health professionals has released a report outlining major health challenges in the US and calling for the removal of Robert F Kennedy Jr from the US Department of Health and Human Services.Read the full storyTrump revokes signature Biden order promoting economic competitionDonald Trump on Wednesday revoked a 2021 executive order on promoting competition in the US economy issued by Joe Biden, the White House said.Biden signed a sweeping executive order in July 2021 to promote more competition in the US economy as part of a broad push to rein in what his administration described as a pattern of corporate abuses, ranging from excessive airline fees to large mergers that raised costs for consumers.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A US judge ordered the Trump administration to restore a part of the federal grant funding that it recently suspended for the University of California, Los Angeles.

      Veteran climate scientists are organizing a coordinated public comment to a US Department of Energy report which cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the climate crisis.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 12 August 2025. More

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      Trump revokes Biden order promoting competition in the US economy

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      Donald Trump on Wednesday revoked a 2021 executive order on promoting competition in the US economy issued by Joe Biden, the White House said.The move by the Republican US president further unwinds a signature initiative by his predecessor, a Democrat, to crack down on anti-competitive practices in sectors from agriculture to drugs and labor.The justice department welcomed Trump’s revocation of the order, saying it was pursuing an “America first antitrust” approach focused on free markets instead of what it called the “overly prescriptive and burdensome approach” of the Biden administration.It said it was also making progress on streamlining the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act (HSR) review process of mergers and reinstating more frequent use of targeted and well-crafted consent decrees.Biden signed a sweeping executive order in July 2021 to promote more competition in the US economy as part of a broad push to rein in what his administration described as a pattern of corporate abuses, ranging from excessive airline fees to large mergers that raised costs for consumers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe initiative, which was very popular with Americans, was championed by top Biden economic officials, many of whom had previously worked for or with the senator Elizabeth Warren, who played a key role in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Barack Obama.Trump has attacked that agency since taking office, announcing plans to shrink its workforce by 90%.Those moves have cost Americans at least $18bn in higher fees and lost compensation for consumers allegedly cheated by major companies, according to an analysis released in June by the Student Borrower Protection Center and the Consumer Federation of America.Biden’s order said it aimed to “enforce the antitrust laws to combat the excessive concentration of industry, the abuses of market power, and the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony”, focused on areas such as labor and healthcare. More

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      ‘Severe’ staff shortages at US veterans’ hospitals, watchdog finds

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      The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is experiencing “severe” staff shortages at all its hospitals, with the number of shortages increasing by 50% this fiscal year, according to a new report from the agency’s independent watchdog.The report, released on Tuesday, came a day after the Guardian revealed the department had lost thousands of healthcare professionals deemed “core” to the system under Donald Trump, without which, the agency said, “mission-critical work cannot be completed”.The inspector general found 94% of VA facilities faced a “severe” shortage of doctors, while 79% faced a severe shortage of nurses. Psychology was “the most frequently reported clinical occupational staffing shortage”. A majority of VA facilities also reported severe shortages of police officers, who keep veteran patients and staff safe.The VA operates the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, serving 9 million veterans annually. The report is required under two laws, one signed by Trump in 2017, which require the agency’s inspector general annually to determine the extent of staffing shortages within each medical center.In a statement, Congressman Mark Takano of California, the ranking Democrat on the House committee on veterans’ affairs, said the report “confirms our fears” that shortages of medical staff were leading to “decreased access and choice for veterans”.The VA press secretary, Peter Kasperowicz, told the Guardian the congressionally mandated watchdog report was “not a reliable indicator of staffing shortages” and that it was “completely subjective, not standardized and unreliable”.The report is based on a survey of VA medical centers in April. Since then, a Guardian review of agency staffing records found, the VA has continued to lose doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers and other frontline medical professionals.Kasperowicz did not dispute the fact that the agency had lost thousands of “mission-critical” healthcare workers under Trump – including after the watchdog’s survey period concluded.The VA is in the midst of a department-wide reduction of 30,000 workers, which the secretary of veterans affairs, Doug Collins, said could be accomplished by September through a combination of attrition, a hiring freeze and deferred resignation program.The staff cuts, Collins said, would not affect patient care, but were “centered on reducing bureaucracy and improving services to veterans”.In May, the Guardian reported that staff losses at the VA had led to unit closures, reduced hours of operations and exam backlogs across the hospital system. More

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      And here is your host … Trump casts himself for Kennedy Center honours

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      “There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts,” are among the words inscribed in marble at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The age of Elizabeth was the age of Shakespeare, it says.The age of Donald Trump is the age of Trump’s ego. Trump the president, commander-in-chief and master builder. Trump the supremo of the upcoming Olympics, football World Cup and America’s 250th birthday. Trump whose self-aggrandisement is the size of a planet: on Wednesday not even the Kennedy Center’s cavernous Hall of Nations could contain it.The president announced that he will host this year’s Kennedy Center Honors – after all, he used to be on The Apprentice, so how hard can it be? He unveiled this year’s honourees – screened by him to veto “wokesters” – and grumbled that he had never been one. He reminded everyone that he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Nearby, the giant bust of Kennedy may have shed a tear or two as Trump, wearing dark suit, white shirt and red tie, strode into the marble-walled, red-carpeted Hall of Nations to continue his hostile takeover of the nation’s capital – and the country’s cultural life.The 100ft-high arts complex on the banks of the Potomac River and its annual arts awards might seem trivial in the scheme of Trump’s authoritarian crusade. But there are few better measures of how his second term is proving more ambitious, intentional and effective than his first.View image in fullscreenTrump 1.0 never set foot in the Kennedy Center. Each year the Honors took place without him, with recipients including his critics such as as Cher, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Sally Field. And there were diverse lineups: Gloria Estefan, LL Cool J, Lionel Richie, Debbie Allen, Berry Gordy, Gladys Knight and Queen Latifah.Trump 2.0 has been a very different proposition in his targeted approach to immigration and crime, his vendettas against political opponents and his bullying of law firms, media companies and universities. Suddenly the Kennedy Center, like the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, finds itself in the line of fire of Trump’s war on woke.Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, who feigns reluctance to take the throne as a tactic to appear more virtuous, Trump claimed he didn’t really want to take on hosting responsibilities when his staff asked.“I said: ‘I’m the president of the United States! Are you fools, asking me to do that?’ ‘Sir, you’ll get much higher ratings.’ I said: ‘I don’t care, I’m president of the United States. I won’t do it.’”But then, in his telling, his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, intervened. “I said, OK, Susie, I’ll do it. That’s the power she’s got. So I have agreed to … They’re going to say: ‘He insisted.’ I did not insist but I think it will be quite successful actually. It’s been a long time. I used to host The Apprentice finales and we did rather well with that.”The Kennedy Center Honors were established in 1978 and recipients have included George Balanchine, Warren Beatty, Aretha Franklin, Tom Hanks, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim and Barbra Streisand. Trump remarked: “I wanted one. I was never able to get one.”A group of Trump lackeys sitting stage left burst into laughter then realised he wasn’t joking and fell silent. “It’s true, actually. I would have taken it if they would have called me. I waited and waited and waited and I said: ‘To hell with it, I’ll become chairman and I’ll give myself an honour. Maybe next year we’ll honour Trump, OK?”All right, now that time he was joking. Wasn’t he?Trump announced a characteristically white male-heavy list for this year’s honourees: actors Michael Crawford and Sylvester Stallone, singers George Strait and Gloria Gaynor, and members of the rock band Kiss. As he spoke of each, a curtain was pulled back on their photo in very retro, low-tech style.Crawford, he noted, was born in England in 1942 and made his Broadway debut in 1967. “I was there. I shouldn’t say that but I was there. It seems like a long time ago, and he became an international sensation in the 1980s for his original portrayal of the Phantom of the Opera – one of the greatest ever, ever, ever, ever.”It was hardly surprising from a man whose cultural tastes refuse to acknowledge the existence of the 21st century, though there was no mention of the 70s British sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em in which Crawford played accident-prone Frank Spencer, known for the catchphrase “Ooh Betty!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStallone’s characters Rambo and Rocky are more Trump’s style: macho, muscular, primal, violent, taking no prisoners. The kind of great white hopes that he would now like to see policing the streets of Washington. The president mused: “Rocky, Rambo – if you did one, you’re good. You do two?“I’ll never forget I was a young guy and I went to see a thing called Rambo and it had just come out. I didn’t know anything about it but I was in a movie theatre – like we used to go to movie theaters a lot – and I said: ‘This movie is phenomenal! What the heck?’ And that turned out to be a monster.”Trump described Stallone as one of the biggest names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but then remembered this is supposed to be all about him. “In fact, the only one that’s a bigger name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they say, is a guy named Donald Trump. I’m on the Hollywood Walk of Fame too, if you can believe that one.”Strait, Gaynor and Kiss met with his approval too. Trump might have stopped five wars in the past six months, by his own estimate, but he still had time to handpick the Kennedy Center honourees and make sure no agitators, dissidents or subversives slipped through the net. The role of the artist is the worship of Trump.“I would say I was about 98% involved,” he remarked. “They all went through me … I turned down plenty. It went too woke. I turned I had a couple of wokesters. Now, we have great people. This is very different than it used to be. Very different.”The Oscars, he said, now gets “lousy ratings” because “it’s all woke” and “all they do is talk about how much they hate Trump.”Just as he is vowing to make Washington DC beautiful again, Trump has big plans for the Kennedy Center, which at least one Republican in Congress has proposed renaming after him. Trump promised to “fully renovate” the entire infrastructure, ripping out and replacing all the seats, and make it a “crown jewel” of arts and culture in the US. “The bones are so good,” he cooed.But if his White House desecration is anything to go by, expect the Kennedy Center to become a monument to dictator chic, dripping in rococo gold and festooned with garishness. Another Kennedy quotation inscribed on the exterior marble wall says: “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.” More

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      Scientists rush to bolster climate finding Trump administration aims to undo

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      Veteran climate scientists are organizing a coordinated public comment to a US Department of Energy (DOE) report that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the climate crisis.The report, published late last month, claimed concerns about planet-warming fossil fuels are overblown, sparking widespread concern from scientists who said it was full of climate misinformation; it was an attempt to support a proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to undo the “endangerment finding”, which forms the legal basis of virtually all US climate regulations.“A public comment from experts can be useful because it injects expert analysis into a decision-making process that might otherwise be dominated by political, economic, or ideological considerations,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University who is organizing the response to the report. “Experts can identify technical errors, highlight overlooked data, and clarify uncertainties in ways that improve the accuracy and robustness of the final policy or report.”The response comes as part of a broader wave of experts’ attempts to uphold established climate science as the Trump administration promotes contrarian and unproven viewpoints.The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Nasem), the country’s top group of scientific advisers, has launched a “fast-track” review of the latest evidence on how greenhouse gases threaten human health and wellbeing – a move announced following the proposed endangerment-finding rollback.Nasem, which advises the EPA and other federal agencies, plans to release their findings in September, in time to inform the EPA’s decision on the endangerment finding. The initiative will be self-funded by the organization – a highly unusual practice from the congressionally chartered group, which usually responds to federal bodies’ calls for advice.“It is critical that federal policymaking is informed by the best available scientific evidence,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, in a statement.Trump administration efforts to block access to data have also inspired pushback. This month, the president ousted the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after baselessly saying the data it publishes is “rigged”.In earlier weeks, federal officials have also deleted key climate data and reports such as the national climate assessments and the US Global Change Research Program from government websites. The administration has changed 70% more of the information on official environmental websites during its first 100 days than the first Trump administration did, according to a report the research group Environmental Data and Governance Initiative published last week.In light of these actions, research organizations such as the Public Environmental Data Project and Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative have worked to safeguard and publicize data that the federal government is hiding from the public.“Attacks on science are dangerous because they erode one of society’s most effective tools for understanding the world and making decisions in the public interest,” said Dessler. “When political or ideological forces undermine scientific institutions or discredit experts, they weaken our ability to harness this powerful tool.”Asked for comment about the Nasem review, an EPA spokesperson repeated a comment offered earlier this month: “Congress never explicitly gave EPA authority to impose greenhouse gas regulations for cars and trucks.”The Clean Air Act authorizes the EPA to set emission standards for cars if the EPA administrator determines that their emissions endanger public health or welfare. That includes greenhouse gas emissions, due to the endangerment finding.Asked for comment on the DOE report supporting the EPA’s position, Department of Energy spokesperson Ben Dietderich also repeated an earlier comment. “This report critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence – not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous presidential administrations,” he said.The UN and the US have regularly convened top scientists to produce scientific climate reports, which warn that urgent action to curb emissions is needed.Dietderich also said officials “look forward to engaging with substantive comments” on the report.However, “the real question is whether they’ll listen to us”, said Dessler. More