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      Casualties in Trump’s war on the arts: the small museums keeping local history alive

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      For the past two years, a small arts non-profit has been telling stories about the communities living alongside the Los Angeles river, one voice at a time.The organization, called Clockshop, has collected the oral histories of nearly 70 local residents, activists and elected officials. Their knowledge is compiled in a vast cultural atlas – which contains videos, an interactive map and a self-guided tour exploring the waterway and its transformation from a home for the Indigenous Tongva people to a popular, rapidly gentrifying urban space.But in April, the future of the ever-growing atlas was thrown in uncertainty, when a three-year federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency that supports libraries, archives and museums, was terminated 17 months early. The grant, originally for $150,000, still had $20,000 left to pay out. “There is no recourse to recover the funds still in the grant project activities,” the organization said in a post on Instagram.Now, executive director Sue Bell Yank says their mission to preserve the stories of residents ousted by gentrification could lead to “erasure of the past, of cultural self-determination, and a lack of understanding about how communities can successfully advocate for the kinds of neighborhoods we deserve”.Clockshop’s post foreshadowed an alarming message that would eventually be delivered to hundreds of other arts and cultural institutions across the US. As the Trump administration directed federal agencies to cancel grants that did not support the president’s new priorities, which focused on funding “projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity” and targeted anything broadly deemed “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion), millions of dollars dedicated to preserving local history and culture suddenly disappeared.Shortly after IMLS grants were terminated, so too were those awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). By Friday 2 May, a spreadsheet created by writer and theater director Annie Doren was being passed around the internet, aiming to catalog every organization that had lost their NEA funding. With more than 500 organizations on the list, the question shifted from who lost their funding to who didn’t.View image in fullscreenWhile organizations of all kinds were impacted, it is the small and midsized institutions that lack endowments, prominent donors, and broad outreach whose futures are particularly in jeopardy. The cuts have affected a broad swath of projects – from a documentary film-maker in Fresno making a film about a woman who has played Harriet Tubman in civil war reenactments for 30 years; to a dance performance about south-east Asian mothers in New York City, to an organization that brings films, book clubs and other cultural events to rural Montana.Rick Noguchi who runs a non-profit called California Humanities, said he has seen the 112 NEH grants it awarded across the state suspended indefinitely by the Trump administration. “There are many newer immigrant communities that don’t have deep donors and struggle with being able to find individual donors that step in to tell their stories.”‘The country is abandoning its citizens’Back in Los Angeles, the cuts have blanketed cultural institutions with feelings of anxiety and urgency. But their leaders are also fighting back, vowing to continue the work of preserving local history in spite of the administration’s threats to revoke non-profit status if they continue to champion DEI programs.The Japanese American National Museum (JANM), an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution in LA’s Little Tokyo neighborhood that focuses on the history, culture and legacy of Japanese immigrants, initially lost grants that amounted to roughly $1.45m – though some have since been temporarily restored after a court order. Among those cut was a NEH landmarks of American history and culture grant, which funded a workshop helping teachers build a curriculum about the history of Japanese incarceration during the second world war. JANM CEO Ann Burroughs said that the program benefits approximately 20,000 students a year.“It was very much to ensure that the history was never forgotten,” Burroughs said about the museum’s mission and outreach. “It was also to ensure that what happened to Japanese Americans never happened to anybody else.”View image in fullscreenLos Angeles’s One Institute, which houses the largest queer archive in the world, also uses their collection to help educate others on queer history and marginalization. They lost a $15,000 NEA grant to support their upcoming annual festival in October, and now they are scrambling to hold fundraisers to keep the festival on track.Tony Valenzuela, the organization’s executive director, said that their event is important because it covers a gap in education. “Even in liberal states like California, only a fraction of students learn about the contributions of queer people to society,” Valenzuela said. “If the government abandons funding non-profits and other individuals and organizations providing a social good, this country will also be abandoning whole swaths of its citizens who greatly benefit from this work.”Another organization that was hit hard was the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), which operates the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, located just a few blocks north of the neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. They lost four grants administered by IMLS, NEH, and California Humanities, and are unlikely to receive an NEA grant that normally keeps the organization running – a total value of nearly $144,000 dollars, or 22% of the organization’s annual budget.Like Clockshop, the LAPD’s exhibitions, public programs and archives chart the ways Skid Row has been transformed – and nearly erased – due to development and gentrification. “Not everyone sees Skid Row as a community, let alone a thriving arts community,” said Henry Apodaca, LAPD’s media archivist. “This is a critical counter narrative to popular narratives that we’ve all been inundated with when talking about Skid Row.”View image in fullscreenOne of the terminated grants was an IMLS grant for small museums, which was being used to support a project called Welcome to the Covid Hotel. The project, named for the temporary medical treatment centers that popped up in vacant hotels during the pandemic to care for unhoused people, culminated in an exhibition and a series of theatrical performances based on interviews with patients, nurses and social workers.“There’s stories of people coming in blind and getting cataract surgeries,” explains LAPD’s co-founder and artistic director, John Malpede. “Someone with gangrene needed to have his legs amputated, and it saved his life. And most people got and accepted some form of next-step housing.”Malpede’s performance is a creative way for policymakers to notice the Covid Hotels’ impact and potentially make the sites into permanent fixtures. When the grants were canceled, LAPD was still waiting on more than $38,000 to come through: money that was supposed to pay venues, crew and performers for events that took place in April, as well as upcoming performances in May and June, and a forthcoming publication. While LAPD aims to move forward with their plans, they are uncertain on how to fund it.After going public on social media, private donors have since stepped up to help the JANM and Clockshop recoup their losses. LAPD and the One Institute, however, are still looking for support. Without this funding, not only could the non-profits disband, but also the communities that have flourished as a result of their work.As Malpede warns: “It’s only because of the neighborhood standing up and using its own history that it continues to be present.” More

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      Whatever happened to Elon Musk? Tech boss drifts to margins of Trump world

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      The Oval Office was crowded, with reporters cautioned not to collide with the Resolute Desk. Standing beside them, dressed in black, was Elon Musk, billionaire ally of Donald Trump and head of his government efficiency drive.“Elon is from South Africa – I don’t want to get Elon involved,” the US president told his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, during a discussion about crime against white farmers. “He actually came here on a different subject: sending rockets to Mars. He likes that better.”Musk’s silence during the fraught hour-long meeting was a small but telling reminder of his shift in Trump’s orbit. He remains close to the president and welcome in the West Wing. He also paid a second visit to the Pentagon this week. But a relationship that many forecast would end in an explosive collision of egos seems instead to be undergoing an inexorable tapering off.On Monday, the Politico website published an analysis under the headline “Why has Elon Musk disappeared from the spotlight?” It found a sharp drop in the number of times that Trump posted about Musk on his Truth Social platform, from an average of four times a week in February and March to zero since the start of April.In February, Politico said, Trump’s fundraising operation invoked Musk in fundraising emails almost every day, with one message reading: “I love Elon Musk! The media wants to drive us apart, and it’s not working. He’s great.” But such mentions abruptly halted in early March, with the exception of one email in May advertising a “Gulf of America” hat that Musk had worn.In addition, White House officials no longer fill their social media feeds with Musk-related content. Reporters seldom ask about him at the White House press briefing. Members of Congress are giving his name a wide berth.Musk seems to be taking the hint. This week, the Tesla chief executive confirmed that he had reduced his role as the unofficial head of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to just two days a week, and will also cut his political spending substantially – the latest public signal that he is shifting his attention back to his business empire amid growing investor concerns.It is a dramatic shift from the first weeks of Trump’s second term, when Musk attended the inauguration, was a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago, appeared alongside Trump in the Oval Office and gave a joint interview on Fox News full of mutual admiration. Doge dominated media headlines as it took a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy.It seemed that Trump was dazzled by the world’s richest person, who sends rockets into space and spent at least $250m to support his election campaign last year. In March, the president even turned the White House south lawn into a temporary Tesla showroom, displaying five of the electric vehicles and promising to buy one himself.View image in fullscreenBut the polls told their own story. Last month, a national survey by Marquette University Law School found approval of how Musk is handling his work at Doge at 41% with disapproval at 58%. About 60% of those polled had an unfavourable view of Musk himself, compared with 38% who were favourably disposed to him.Ro Khanna, a Democratic member of Congress who has known Musk for more than a decade, commented: “As his numbers declined, so did Trump’s interest. Trump discards people when their ratings fall and it’s very transactional. It’s nothing more than an initial fascination and a sense of being discarded.”Khanna, whose congressional district sits in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, had predicted from the outset that Musk was not going to last more than four or five months: “I said he’s going to get frustrated, exhausted and Washington will win – not him – in terms of how the town works.”At that time, Khanna was hoping that Doge would make cuts at the Pentagon. Instead, it flouted the constitution to slash the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Education, the Internal Revenue Service and other targets.“I said there’s no way he’s going to get anywhere close to $2tn of cuts; he didn’t even get close to a trillion; it’s about $81bn. He learned the lesson that a lot of very successful business leaders learn, that democracy is much tougher than they imagine and doesn’t bend to their will,” Khanna said.Indeed, Musk continues to hit roadblocks. On Wednesday, the US Institute of Peace retook control of its headquarters after a federal judge said the firing of its board and employees by Doge was illegal. On Thursday, a federal judge in San Francisco said Trump cannot restructure and downsize the US government without the consent of Congress and that she would probably extend her ruling blocking federal agencies from implementing mass layoffs.Even so, Doge has already enacted deep cuts to the workforce and spending and, in some cases, sought to shutter entire agencies, causing untold damage to the fabric of government.For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) “is not ready” for next month’s start of the hurricane season, according to an internal agency review reported by CNN. The disaster relief agency, which employs more than 20,000 workers, has lost roughly 30% of its full-time staff to layoffs and Doge buyouts.Khanna warned: “We’re going to be living with the consequences for years to come because unfortunately they’ve managed to totally destroy USAID, they’ve destroyed NIH [the National Institutes of Health], they’ve destroyed FDA [the Food and Drug Administration], they’ve destroyed EPA [the Environmental Protection Agency], they’ve hollowed out so much of the state department and it’s going to take a generation to rebuild.“I’m hoping that the damage will stop. We have to see what will continue but hopefully there’ll be no more sledgehammer to these institutions.”Even conservatives who believe in downsizing government share the concerns. Rick Tyler, a political strategist who has worked on Republican campaigns, said: “What they’re trying to do is make the government smaller, which I applaud, but they are not making it more efficient because there has been no vision, no plan to actually make the government operate with fewer people and less money. There is no redesign. This is just slash and burn.”Tesla, which is the major source of Musk’s wealth, has suffered significant brand damage and lost sales due to his political work, particularly with Trump. He has also expressed support for the far-right, anti-immigration AfD party in Germany. Tesla dealerships have become scenes of protest and vandalism in the US and beyond.It may be that Musk met his political Waterloo in Wisconsin. His spending of at least $3m helped make Wisconsin’s supreme court race the most expensive of its kind in US history. He even made a personal appearance in Green Bay the weekend before the election wearing a cheesehead hat – popular with fans of the NFL’s Green Bay Packers – and personally handed out cheques for $1m to supporters.View image in fullscreenBut the candidate he backed lost by 10 percentage points. Democrats had used his intervention to successfully mobilise voters in an election dubbed “People vs Musk”.This week, Musk told Bloomberg’s Qatar Economic Forum in Doha: “In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future.” The Wisconsin Democratic party chair, Ben Wikler, told the Associated Press: “The people have won. The biggest funder in Republican politics is taking his toys and going home.”Evidently, Musk and his chainsaw have become a political liability for Republicans seeking re-election in next year’s midterms. Democrats in races across the country are expected to use Musk as a political boogeyman in attack ads on their opponents.Tyler observed: “The polling numbers, Trump suffering politically, which would hurt his party, which is going to hurt his agenda, caused enough strife that I’m sure he heard from enough members to say, could we just not talk about Elon Musk any more?”Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, added: “It was a trial balloon on how they would reduce federal employees. If it worked and people thought it was great, maybe they would keep going with or without Musk, but they used him as the front person for it and the punching bag. When it backfired, they cut him loose. Not surprising at all.“There is nobody that you can sincerely believe Donald Trump thinks is important to his popularity or his standing in a positive way because he believes he generates all that himself. And I don’t think he’s wrong about that. But if you become a liability, you’re gone pretty quickly.” More

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      ‘An autoimmune disorder’: how Trump is turning American democracy against itself

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      View image in fullscreenThere is some mystery surrounding Donald Trump’s moves to dismantle many cherished principles of American history and its culture of governance: his globalization denialism; his romance with Russia; his demolition of universities; his contempt for European values and histories; his campaign to humiliate Canada. These are all known examples, but it can be hard to see across them to discern anything like a unified theory of Trumpism.There are two possibilities here. One is that there is no rhyme or reason to Trump’s actions. He is simply a randomizing generator of chaos. The other is that there is a method.I subscribe to the second possibility. I think Trump – and his advisers – know what they are doing.Other tinpot dictators – like Narendra Modi, Recep Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orbán – and their countries are distinct from the US in an important way. These autocrats around the world do not have comparable democratic institutions. They can capture, subvert or sabotage democratic traditions in their own countries, using their own means. In each of them, there are longstanding traditions of inequality (such as caste in India), vigorous and celebrated imperial histories (Turkey, Russia and China) and deep traditions of racial and religious nationalism (Hungary and India).But they do not have the special strengths of American democracy: a sturdy commitment to separation of church and state; the distribution of powers between legislature, judiciary and executive; and a deep antipathy towards tyrants, royal or otherwise.Trump thus comes to his dictatorship fantasy – evidenced by his compulsive impatience with advisers, media critics, political opponents or ordinary citizens who question him, and a bottomless appetite for praise and fealty – faced with a globally unmatched set of institutional powers that could theoretically stand in his way. To defeat them, he has hit upon an original formula: to reverse-engineer the liberal institutions designed as guardrails against people like him.View image in fullscreenThe institutions that require repurposing include the world’s most powerful judicial and legislative apparatus, which were designed to keep the executive restrained; a vast body of law and regulation; a massive federal bureaucracy to assure that federal policies are scrupulously enforced; and the world’s largest combination of military and police forces to help the state to assure domestic order and civility. Trump is turning these watchdogs into his personal pets.Trump’s scorched-earth approach to these institutions, their norms and powers, is not designed to improve the originals but to gut them, in part by turning their powers against themselves.The advanced civic infrastructure of the US could not easily be turned against itself. It required careful planning over the Joe Biden years by Trump-allied strategists, thinktanks, policy wonks and planners. During this period, every ideological cough from Trump was turned by these adjunct players into a menu of detailed executive actions.Trump and his supporters, spread across a hefty network of rightwing thinktanks as highbrow as the Heritage Foundation and as lowbrow as Breitbart, have been busy for at least a decade laying the foundations of the greatest democratic rollback in US history, designing a newly minted form of jiu-jitsu to undo the grand American democratic tradition. This form of jiu-jitsu puts law against law, police forces against other police forces, court against court, media campaigns against other media campaigns, science against science, religion against religion, and deals against markets.Thus Ice is ranged against more conventional police departments, the FBI has been internally polarized, pro-Israel evangelical Christians are turned against more liberal Christians, university trustees are turned against faculty, Robert F Kennedy’s lunatic science is turned against the scientific mainstream, and the supreme court is pitched against the lower courts willing to check Trump’s power.And of course there is Trump’s attack on US higher education, which has been widely dissected, turning universities into hostages of the federal government, and civil rights law into a tool to attack civil rights. It is precisely universities’ commitment to debate as a path to new knowledge that motivates Trump’s effort to take them apart.The very distinctive pillars of American democracy are being turned into fifth columns. Trump and his allies have created a massive autoimmune disorder – one in which the features of American democracy turn on themselves, re-engineering democracy to kill democracy.View image in fullscreenA new social orderIn the social science traditions of the west, the great thinker who built his entire sociology around the distinctive strengths of the western apparatus of government was Max Weber. He used his monumental knowledge of everything from Islamic law and Roman jurisprudence, to Mongol military genius and Puritan doctrines to show how a specific network of institutions came together in the modern west to combine economic, bureaucratic, scientific and governmental rationality.Weber’s ideas did not immunize him from many legitimate 20th century worries about how politics and science could lead to the death of the human spirit in the west. Detractors warned of the risk that science could be captured by the state; others of technological rationality turning into an iron cage that dilutes creativity and joy.But Weber did successfully demonstrate that it took many centuries to create the complex web of economic, political and scientific arrangements that persist today in liberal democracies. He was wrong about many things, such as the western monopoly over entrepreneurial capitalism, the special Puritan affinity for economic discipline, and the Hindu indifference to worldly wealth. But he was certainly right that Europe and the US (for which he had considerable admiration) were robust societies whose forms – during his lifetime – were the product of a long historical process that led to the creation of what we now understand as liberal modernity.However, the west is not exempt from the truism that it is much easier to destroy institutions than to build them. The rise of the 20th century’s most powerful dictators, such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Benito Mussolini and Pol Pot, show us that massive propaganda combined with brute violence can destroy democratic institutions, however recent, fragile and fledgling.The Trump version of this story is built on the back of 260 years of complex liberal institution-building. To be sure, there are gaping aberrations in this story: a devastating civil war, the persistent enslavement and disenfranchisement of African Americans, racial campaigns against migrants of every stripe and background, paroxysms of rage against organized labor, and virulent anti-communism throughout the 20th century. Nor should we forget the decimation of Native Americans, the crushing of organized labor, the ruthless energy of the open frontier, the rise of robber barons and the cynical abuse of the “right to bear arms”.Still, American liberal democracy retained a remarkable commitment to representative government and to the separation of powers. It also saw a series of constitutional amendments that moved the needle on the right to vote, on race, on women’s rights, and more. Precisely because of abuses, exemptions and deviations from its constitutional ideals, the civil and political institutions of American democracy looked, until recently, as if they were too resilient to easily destroy. Even Europe, with its monarchs from Britain to Greece, and its 20th-century tyrants such as Hitler, Mussolini and Francisco Franco, cannot boast as resounding a liberal institutional apparatus as the US.But today, Trump and his army of followers are turning the strengths of American democracy against itself.View image in fullscreenConsider the orgy of recent executive orders, which clearly diminish the scope of the relevant constitutional provisions that give Congress the power to legislate. But they are the first in a series of dominos. The use of every kind of lawfare, every form of legal loophole, delay and workaround by Trump’s army of lawyers, takes energy from this initial domino to chip away at the principles of the rule of law, using the law as an autoimmune weapon against all forms of due process. The case of Kilmar Ábrego García, among a multitude of others, shows the president’s readiness to use specious interpretations of the law to play chicken with the supreme court.Much of this assault can be explained by Trump’s poor education, contempt for liberals, megalomania, personal greed and his unselfconscious vulgarity and lack of any discernible moral compass. But the assaults run deeper than that. Trump wants to produce a new social order as far as possible from the liberal democratic order as he can envision.View image in fullscreenMore car salesman than capitalistThis brings me to Immanuel Kant, whom I invoke in spite of my knowledge that Trump reads virtually nothing, much less old books or even books about old books. Kant is the key figure who made the connection between Enlightenment universalism and early European liberalism, built around his ideas of reason, autonomy and individuality. The basic Kantian argument is that any rational person who makes judgements as a free individual can see that all human beings deserve to be equally autonomous in order for the overall system to be fair and just. What makes Kant an indispensable post-Christian philosopher is his idea of the categorical imperative, which he explained as follows: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” In other words, obey those rules that you think should apply to anyone and everyone.From Kant in the 18th century to John Rawls in the 1970s, the idea that both justice and ethics require what Rawls called the “veil of ignorance” – the principle that a just society requires people to imagine fair social arrangements without any special knowledge of their individual circumstances – has become widely accepted as a foundation for liberal politics, economics and ethics, because it prohibits any individual from making his personal preferences the basis of a collective social policy.Trump’s ethics (if we can use such a phrase) are diametrically opposed to this principle. His entire view of the social contract is based on his idea of “the deal”. His long-standing attachment to his self-image as a deal-maker has misled many observers to see him as a crude capitalist, as a speculator, or as a conman. But as a deal-maker, Trump is more like the proverbial American car salesman.In our capitalist commonsense, deal-making is viewed as a direct expression of market ideology, an instance of financial actors making a transaction based on the perceived value of their products, with the agreed price creating a momentary equivalence between the two parties. But it is in fact more akin to barter, which is an evolutionary precursor of the market. It is a primitive form of trade, and when trade broke down in earlier societies, it often led to war. Barter does not require any social contract between the parties, and even less does it require supply and demand, pricing or the invisible hand. It is a face-to-face, immediate transaction, akin to a poker game or an episode of The Apprentice. Markets, on the other hand, are impersonal, abstract, unforgiving. They are not about winners and losers.This is exactly why Trump’s tariff war feels highly belligerent. It has the tricky logic of barter, where there is no general law of demand or supply, no external source of general price information. It depends on face-to-face relationships, often between parties who may have prior hostilities, major cultural differences, and no shared monetary mechanism to serve as a mediator of value. In this case, mistrust and misunderstanding are ever present during a barter transaction, and any breakdown in communication can lead to conflict, even to war. Trump’s current dealings with many countries have this tense overhang, through which open conflict could break out at any instant.View image in fullscreenTrump loves wealth, ostentation and deals, but he hates markets, not because of their imperfections but because they, in principle, rest on religious mysteries – of the “invisible hand”, of supply and demand, of the rationality of prices, all of which are safeguards against political fiat, personal greed and efforts to cook up macro outcomes for micro reasons.This hatred of markets unites all of today’s autocrats, because markets make their oligarchies unstable and their nationalist fiscal policies responsive to global finance. Hitler was an enemy of market forces both because they could impede state control of the economy, and because he hated Jews whom he saw as the biggest commercial actors behind the market. Stalin despised markets because they thwarted his central planning ambitions. Today, Modi, Erdoğan and Orbán seek to micromanage their economies and have installed loyalists as central bankers, since they fear the power of global financial markets to shake their national economic goals.It’s not that Trump cares that capitalism enhances inequality, that it is the enemy of planetary sustainability and the most stubborn opponent of economic nationalism of any type. What he disdains is the market – because it obeys no master other than its own rules of price, volume and scale. His weapon against it is tariffs, which he wields in the hopes of bringing it under his control.The market relies on the social contract, that agreement between individuals and government that is based in trust and predictability. Since Trump despises the market, he must dismantle the social contract, in all its forms and guises.Any attack on the social contract evokes atavistic fantasies, a return to Thomas Hobbes’s vision of the state of nature, in which human life is nasty, brutish and short. Or it evokes the Nazi version of a pre-contract world, built on racial purity, naturism, savage territorial expansion. Or Stalin’s special brand of paranoid planning, dictated science, and socialist realism in art and culture. Or Pol Pot’s insane literalism in trying to destroy cities, money and intellectuals. Or Mao’s astonishing Great Leap Forward, with its steel furnaces in every backyard and its youth militias wrecking all forms of the class enemy. Each of these regimes hated the social contract, in any of its many Euro-American versions.But none of them could bring the full force of existing liberal institutions to bear on the pulverizing of the social contract, as Trump is doing today in the US. This is because the vast and interconnected force of law, bureaucracy, economy and state were simply not available in Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia and China when dictatorships took shape in these countries. And this was even truer of Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, whose young nations had barely achieved the rudiments of a durable liberal democracy when they were seized by autocrats.Trump’s twisted genius has enabled the reorganization of the core engineering of American liberal society, to turn its greatest protections against illiberal forces into the biggest weapons of illiberalism. His full-scale demolition of the American social order is based on a remarkable repurposing of the powers of the legislature, of the pesky independence of the courts and of the vaunted guardrails promised by the mass media to seduce many Americans into giving their consent to illiberalism.The jury is still out on the success of the judiciary in resisting Trump’s suborning of legal institutions, because the supreme court is playing its cards very cautiously. For now, a combination of Trump’s instincts and advisers continue to fuel a major assault on the American liberal democratic order by hot-wiring its basic components. The endgame is to repurpose them as carriers of a massive autoimmune disorder – whereby democracy destroys itself.Will Trump succeed? Are we doomed to an autocracy in democratic drag? Not necessarily. To resist Trump, we need to rewire democracy to revive democracy. This requires a move away from moral abstractions and liberal hand-wringing to local political campaigning, non-violent civil disobedience and active social mobilization. The clock is ticking and we must not allow the wrong man to be the last one standing.

      Arjun Appadurai, professor emeritus at New York University, is an anthropologist and former provost of the New School.

      Spot illustrations by Michael Haddad More

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      Now is the time for scientists to stand up against Trump’s repressive agenda | Daniel Malinsky

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      There is a stereotype that the natural political activists in academia are the humanities professors: literary scholars, social theorists and critics of culture are the ones who speak truth to power and fight back against oppression.Yet scientists also ought to stand up and organize against the Trump administration’s attacks – not only the attacks on scientific research and integrity, but also the attacks on immigrants, on political speech and on democracy. Scientists cannot see themselves as above the fray but rather in coalition with other workers resisting authoritarianism.History is replete with examples of scientists that have taken on great risks to resist authoritarianism. The Dutch neurologist GGJ Rademaker reorganized his laboratory into a base of resistance (complete with printing press, radio equipment and hidden weapons) against fascist forces in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Some German scientists, including the psychoanalyst John Rittmeister and biochemist Heinrich Wieland, opposed the Nazi regime by hiding Jews and distributing banned anti-fascist literature. Brave German scientists even aided the Allied forces during the second world war.At this year’s meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, the CEO of this research society, Margaret Foti, encouraged cancer scientists to take part in demonstrations and meetings with elected representatives. Professors from all corners of campus are already fighting back against funding cuts, the attempted deportations of our international students and usurpations of democratic governance. At Columbia, where I work, faculty have been organizing to urge our university leadership to provide real protections to students at risk of deportation and sue the Trump administration, among other demands. Contrary to the stereotype, much of the organizing work is being spearheaded by science faculty – psychiatrists, epidemiologists, astronomers, mathematicians, economists, statisticians, oceanographers – hand in hand with our colleagues in the humanities.Despite the notion that scientists are and should be cautious or apolitical, professors in the sciences are well-suited to political activism. The work of political organizing is not so different from the work of managing a research lab: skills in divvying up tasks, managing people with sensitivity and foresight, and creating clear, compelling narratives to communicate accomplishments (eg to peer reviewers reading our manuscripts) are all clearly transferrable to activism. All science professors were once science students, doing the typically monotonous labor of scientific work, spending hours carefully tinkering in the laboratory, debugging computer code, or meticulously collecting information on the human or natural world. Often political activity involves straightforward but time-consuming tasks such as printing leaflets or making phone calls to representatives. Sometimes there are simple logistics that need taking care of in organizing a protest march. Some activism involves strategizing in coalitions to distribute needed resources or build supportive institutions. None of this is as difficult as “rocket science” and it is in fact remarkably similar to the more banal parts of everyday science.Many recent actions taken by the Trump administration impinge quite obviously on the expertise of scientists: the attacks on federal research funding, the rollback of decades-long protections of our environment and human health, the excising of research specifically related to climate change or vaccine development. Robert F Kennedy Jr has recently promised to dedicate scientific resources to studying the alleged relationship between autism and vaccination – a question that has been addressed by dozens of studies and on which the scientific consensus to the contrary is clear – and thrown the weight of the government behind stigmatizing and dangerous initiatives related to autism, contested by experts and advocates. Donald Trump has also taken steps to sabotage congressionally mandated research on the climate crisis by dismissing expert authors of the National Climate Assessment. Opposing these moves and organizing against them as scientists is a no-brainer. Yet also scientists must fight tooth and nail against the secretive and seemingly baseless incarceration of immigrants, the usurpation of democratic checks and balances, and the reorganization of society along ever more hateful lines. These things affect all of us regardless of our job descriptions. It should go without saying that scientific inquiry cannot flourish in a society dominated by fear, censorship and hate.Scientists are drawn to the work we do for many different reasons, but I would venture that for most of us there is an underlying goal of advancing humanity – whether that is by finding cures to disease, new technology or more abstractly by pushing the boundaries of human knowledge so that future generations are better off. All of that is at risk if we remain “neutral” or “apolitical” at the wrong moment in history. Though there is a plausible argument for erring on the side of “apolitical” in normal times, to ensure trust and guard against undue politicization of scientific work, the argument stretches thin and breaks down given our current political environment and apparent slide toward fascism. Our scientific research itself must remain free from prejudice and aimed wherever the truth may lead, but the work before us is not only scientific research. We must also work to preserve the conditions of life that make both science and society flourish. In these times that means that scientists have a duty to dissent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University More

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      Trump news at a glance: don’t trade threats with us, EU warns

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      As he continued his on-again, off-again tariff war with much of the world, Donald Trump went on social media to complain that the EU was “taking advantage of the United States on trade” and not coming to the table about it. “Therefore I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025.”The EU’s trade commissioner had a call with the US trade representative Jamieson Greer and Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick. Maroš Šefčovič said afterwards: “The EU’s fully engaged, committed to securing a deal that works for both.”Here’s what’s been happening.‘We stand ready to defend our interests’The EU’s trade chief struck a defiant tone after Donald Trump threatened to place a 50% tariff on all goods from the bloc.Maroš Šefčovič said: “The European Commission remains ready to work in good faith. EU-US trade is unmatched and must be guided by mutual respect, not threats. We stand ready to defend our interests.”Read the full storyAmericans seek permanent British home During the 12 months leading up to March, more than 6,000 US citizens have applied to either become British subjects or to live and work in the country indefinitely – the highest number since comparable records began in 2004, according to data released on Thursday by the UK’s Home Office.American immigration lawyers say they are receiving an increasing number of inquiries. Some are pointing to the polarized political climate under Trump, whose administration is mounting an aggressive immigration-related crackdown.Read the full storyReturn to AlcatrazFederal prison officials visited Alcatraz last week after Trump’s announcement of plans to rebuild and reopen the infamous island prison, which has been closed for more than 60 years.David Smith, the superintendent of the Golden Gate national recreation area (GGNRA), told the San Francisco Chronicle that officials with the Federal Bureau of Prisons were planning to return for further structural assessments. “They have been out here. They’ll be coming out again to do assessments of the structure,” Smith told the news outlet.Read the full storyAmerica’s finest endure partisan rambleTrump told graduating West Point military academy cadets on Saturday that they were entering the officer corps at a “defining moment in the army’s history” in a commencement address that included political attacks and a discourse on the folly of older men marrying “trophy wives”.The president said US soldiers had in the past been sent “on nation-building crusades to nations that wanted nothing to do with us, led by leaders that didn’t have a clue about distant lands while abusing our soldiers with absurd ideological experiments here and at home … All of that’s ended, strongly ended. They’re not even allowed to think about it any more.”Read the full storyTrump administration ordered to return wrongly deported manA federal judge has ordered the Trump administration night to facilitate the return of a Guatemalan man it deported to Mexico, in spite of his fears of being harmed there, and who has since been returned to Guatemala.The man, who is gay, had applied for asylum in the US last year after he was attacked twice in homophobic acts of violence in Guatemala. He was protected from being returned to his home country under a US immigration judge’s order at the time, but the Trump administration put him on a bus and sent him to Mexico instead.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Republicans in Congress are trying to pass Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on tax and spending – but the biggest deductions will ultimately go to the wealthiest Americans.

      Donald Trump’s old friend Thomas Barrack, now serving as the US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, has praised Syria’s interim president for “counter-ISIS measures”.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 24 May 2025. More

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      Trump envoy praises new Syrian president for ‘counter-ISIS measures’

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      Donald Trump’s old friend Thomas Barrack, now serving as the US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, praised Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, after a meeting in Istanbul on Saturday.“I stressed the cessation of sanctions against Syria will preserve the integrity of our primary objective – the enduring defeat of ISIS – and will give the people of Syria a chance for a better future,” Barrack said in a statement, referring to actions taken on Friday by the Trump administration to temporarily suspend sanctions imposed on the government of the former president, Bashar al-Assad, who was deposed by rebel forces led by Sharaa late last year.Syria had been under US sanctions since 1979, which intensified after 2011’s deadly crackdown on peaceful protesters by Assad.“I also commended President al-Sharaa on taking meaningful steps towards enacting President Trump’s points on foreign terrorist fighters, counter-ISIS measures, relations with Israel, and camps and detention centers,” Barrack added.Those conditions put Sharaa in the position of cracking down on his former allies. Sharaa, an Islamist rebel, initially came to Syria from Iraq to fight Assad with the support of the Islamic State, but later broke with the group and pledged allegiance to al-Qaida. He broke with al-Qaida as well, in 2016.His militant group, the al-Nusra Front, rebranded twice, becoming Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, in 2017. HTS was designated a terrorist organization by the United States.“President al-Sharaa praised America’s fast action on lifting sanctions,” Trump’s envoy reported after the talks on Saturday.“This meeting was historic, putting the issue of sanctions – as President Trump has indicated – far behind us, and resulting in joint commitment of both our countries to drive forward, quickly, with investment, development, and worldwide branding of a new, welcoming Syria without sanctions.”Among the projects now possible is a Trump Tower Damascus, proposed as part of an effort to entice the US president into removing sanctions. Trump himself appears to have been impressed by a recent meeting with al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia; the US president told reporters that the former commander of al-Qaida’s franchise in Syria was a “young, attractive guy, tough guy, you know. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”Barrack, who was indicted by the justice department in 2021 and charged with “unlawful efforts to advance the interests of the United Arab Emirates” during the first Trump administration, was acquitted of all charges after a federal trial in 2022. More

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      US judge orders Trump administration to return wrongly deported gay man

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      A federal judge ordered the Trump administration late Friday night to facilitate the return of a Guatemalan man it deported to Mexico, in spite of his fears of being harmed there, and who has since been returned to Guatemala.The man, who is gay, had applied for asylum in the US last year after he was attacked twice in homophobic acts of violence in Guatemala. He was protected from being returned to his home country under a US immigration judge’s order at the time, but the Trump administration put him on a bus and sent him to Mexico instead.The US district judge Brian Murphy found the man’s deportation likely “lacked any semblance of due process”. In a declaration to the court, the man, identified by his initials OCG in legal filings, said that since he was returned to Guatemala two months ago, “I have been living in hiding, in constant panic and constant fear”.An earlier court proceeding determined that OCG risked persecution or torture if returned to Guatemala, but he also feared returning to Mexico. He presented evidence of being raped and held for ransom there while seeking asylum in the US.“No one has ever suggested that OCG poses any sort of security threat,” Murphy wrote in his order. “In general, this case presents no special facts or legal circumstances, only the banal horror of a man being wrongfully loaded onto a bus and sent back to a country where he was allegedly just raped and kidnapped.”Murphy’s order adds to a string of findings by federal courts against recent Trump administration deportations.Last week, Murphy, a Biden appointee, found that the Trump administration had violated an order he issued barring government officials from deporting people to countries not their own without first giving them sufficient time to object.In a hearing, the homeland security department said that seven immigrants had been deported Tuesday on a flight to a third country, but they refused to say where the men were going. It was later revealed that the men were told they were being sent to South Sudan.In that case, Murphy said that the government had given the seven men little more than 24 hours’ notice that they were being removed from the US, which he called “plainly insufficient”, and could result in a finding of criminal contempt.Other cases that have been spotlighted for rapid deportations include that of Kilmar Ábrego García, who was sent to El Salvador. The US supreme court ordered the government to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return, but the White House has said it is not within its power to do so.That case sparked a legal joust over the supreme court’s practicable meaning of “facilitate”.In his ruling, Murphy noted the dispute over the use of the verb, saying that returning OCG to the US is not that complicated.“The Court notes that ‘facilitate’ in this context should carry less baggage than in several other notable cases,” he wrote. “OCG is not held by any foreign government. Defendants have declined to make any argument that facilitating his return would be costly, burdensome, or otherwise impede the government’s objectives.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Trump’s West Point graduation address veers from US-first doctrine to politics

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      Donald Trump told graduating West Point military academy cadets on Saturday that they were entering the officer corps at a “defining moment in the army’s history”, in a commencement address that included political attacks and a discourse on the folly of older men marrying “trophy wives”.Referring to US political leaders of the past two decades who “had dragged our military into missions” that people questioned as “wasting our time, money and souls in some case”, Trump told the young leaders that “as much as you want to fight, I’d rather do it without having to fight”. He predicted that, through a policy of “peace through strength”, the US’s adversaries would back down. “I just want to look at them and have them fold,” he said.The president also said US soldiers had been sent “on nation-building crusades to nations that wanted nothing to do with us, led by leaders that didn’t have a clue about distant lands while abusing our soldiers with absurd ideological experiments here and at home”.“All of that’s ended, strongly ended. They’re not even allowed to think about it anymore,” Trump added.Making apparent reference to diversity, equity and inclusion programs that defense secretary Pete Hegseth has cancelled, Trump weaved together criticism of his predecessors with a new focus on curbing illegal immigration.“They subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes, while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars. We fought for other countries’ borders but we didn’t fight for our own borders, but now we do like we have never fought before,” he said.He later said that “the job of the US armed forces is not to host drag shows or transform foreign cultures”, a reference to drag shows on military bases that his predecessor Joe Biden halted in 2023 after Republican criticism.Wearing a red “Make America great again” campaign hat throughout, the president told the 1,002 graduating cadets that the US is the “hottest country in the world”, and boasted of his administration’s achievements.The president also returned, once again, to a cautionary tale he often tells young people about the danger of losing momentum in life, illustrated by an anecdote about what he called the unhappy retirement of the post-war housing developer William Levitt, the creator of Levittowns, planned communities on Long Island, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.Repeating a story he told at a Boy Scout jamboree in 2017, and at the University of Alabama three weeks ago, the president said that Levitt was unsatisfied by life without work, even though he married “a trophy wife” and bought a yacht. “It didn’t work out too well, and that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out,” the president told the young women and men. “But it made him happy for a little while at least.”Trump also used the occasion to repeat an unfounded accusation he first made in 2020: the claim that Russia had stolen US hypersonic missile technology during Barack Obama’s presidency. “The Russians stole it, something bad happened. But we’re now building them, lots of them,” Trump said, praising eight cadets who had built their own. “We are building them right now. We had ours stolen. We are the designers of it. We had it stolen during the Obama administration.”Outside the gates of West Point, protesters gathered with drums, banners and signs to condemn what they called the president’s attack on American democracy.At points during Trump’s address, he veered between praising the graduating military cadets and maintaining political criticism of the Biden administration.The graduation address, which ran to almost an hour long, comes before an expansive military parade in Washington on 14 June to celebrate the 250th anniversary celebration of the nation. The date is also the president’s birthday.Alongside the military parade featuring more than 6,700 soldiers, it will include concerts, fireworks, NFL players, fitness competitions and displays all over the National Mall for daylong festivities. The army expects that as many as 200,000 people could attend and that putting on the celebration will cost an estimated $25m to $45m.The Associated Press contributed reporting More