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      ‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word

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      I got into my one and only physical fight when I was in seventh grade. It was right after school let out, the other boy was called Nathan, and moments before I launched at him, he knocked the books out of my brother Casey’s hands and called him “retarded”. More than 20 years after that scuffle, I still wonder how often Casey, a now 35-year-old autistic man, is called that word. Given the current political landscape, I’m certain he’s going to start hearing it more often.The R-word is in a new era of prominence in rightwing, chronically online circles – especially on 4chan and X. A favorite of those who currently hold power or stand to gain power under Donald Trump’s second administration, the slur is being used with gleeful relish to belittle and mock ideological enemies.In the past year, Elon Musk has used the R-word at least 16 times on X. He thought Ben Stiller was one for endorsing Kamala Harris; so was the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz for comparing Tesla to Enron.Elsewhere, brash, right-leaning personalities such as the political commentator Dave Rubin, and Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan of the podcast Red Scare, frequently throw the word around with provocative irreverence, attempting to discredit those who don’t align with their politics.Trump reportedly used the word to denigrate both Joe Biden and Harris in private conversations during the 2024 election. When Trump won in November, a “top banker” told Financial Times: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.” (Interestingly, this banker chose to remain anonymous.)I’ve spent my life on the lookout for this word: how it shrinks people with intellectual disabilities down to a caricature, incorrectly depicting them as incapable of coherence and, ironically enough, social decorum; how it communicates a lack of respect for their humanity. It’s just something that you do when you have an autistic brother. And while the slur was certainly more prevalent when we were teenagers in the early 2000s, this resurgence is still menacing, not least because I can’t fight Musk after class.Right now, the right wants a word that stings, and the R-word does the trick, according to Dr Kelly Wright, an experimental sociolinguist, lexicographer and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. In the 2000s, disability advocates waged a moderately successful social campaign to stop kids (and everyone else) from using the slur. Now, its proponents cling to it because of its taboo nature, lauding it as a victory over censorship by the woke mob (like the insults “libtard”, “fucktard” and “gaytard” before it).“Conservatives are empowered … People struggle with holding back what they actually want to say, so there’s something psychologically ‘freeing’ for this group of empowered people to be able to be like: ‘I’m going to punch up my words with something edgy and get attention,’” said Wright, whose work focuses on self-censorship, or the ways we limit ourselves when speaking.“[It is used] in a ‘please see me’ way.”They are getting seen. A recent study from Montclair State University found that Musk’s use of of the slur in early January correlated with a 200% spike in usage of the word by users on X, the platform Musk owns, in the days following.“There’s this whole generation of people who did use it in a more neutral way in the beginning, especially when we were younger,” Wright said. Now, “it’s like, ‘Oh, this other person who I identify with is using it.’ It gives people permission.” Cut to inauguration weekend, when the tech right and Maga youth descended on DC, throwing around the slur as they celebrated their win over the left. Just this week, Musk responded to a critical post on X: “I’m tempted to call this guy a retard, but I won’t because I’ve used that word too many times.” (Ironically enough, X’s own AI chatbot outlined the slur’s offensive history in the replies.)But the R-word isn’t just a rallying cry. It’s an attack on someone’s personhood.We’ve seen this before. Starting in 1910, the term “mental retardation” was used to diagnose those who were “feeble-minded”, failed to develop on the average timeline, and were deemed by some doctors as “incurable”. Around the same time, the belief that undesirable traits – specifically intellectual disabilities, and eventually race and sexual orientation – could be “bred out” of existence was growing in popularity in the US. This eugenics movement was endorsed by political powerhouses and substantial research on eugenics was bankrolled by the likes of the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.View image in fullscreenAdvocates of eugenics suggested people with disabilities should be institutionalized and separated by gender, so as to discourage “bad breeding”. It was the popularity of the eugenics movement that served as inspiration for the Nazi party: in 1939, the Third Reich began systematically murdering Germans with disabilities in institutions; an estimated quarter of a million people were killed during this “euthanasia” program, at least 10,000 of them children. Stateside, tens of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities were forcibly sterilized from the turn of the century and into the 1970s. People with disabilities didn’t secure sweeping civil rights, including equal access to employment and housing assistance, until the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 – just one generation removed from present day.“[The use of the R-word] is absolutely historically linked to the understanding that ‘retarded’ children are defective children and that we can eliminate defective children for the good of society,” said Topher Endress, a reverend in Missouri who holds a doctorate in philosophy from Vanderbilt University. His focus is disability theology, including the words used to describe people with intellectual disabilities, and he spends much of his days working with this community. “I mean, that’s the basis of eugenics. I’m a little fearful of seeing this word pop back up because it does have such a strong eugenic connotation,” he continued.Today, approximately 7.4 million people in the US have an intellectual or developmental disability. Vocational services have connected them to employment in service, healthcare and food industries. Madeline Stuart, a model with Down syndrome and autism, walked her first runway in 2015 after falling in love with modeling at a fashion show. The chef Adam Libby, who has Down syndrome, treats his 2.6 million TikTok followers to cooking demos and recipes (pizza sauce and dough, all from scratch). Stories like these are everywhere, chipping away at the stigma around intellectual disabilities. But this is a highly vulnerable community, and their recent successes have hinged in part on government support systems put in place to foster growth and independence. This progress is still so fragile.Musk, a man who launched a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration festivities, has aligned himself dangerously closely with eugenicist thinking. Musk, who has said he is on the autism spectrum himself, also wields oligarchic power as he attempts to eliminate “unnecessary spending” in the federal government with Trump’s blessing. Early on, Musk set his sights on Medicaid, which was created in part to ensure people with disabilities had access to affordable healthcare. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are looking to slash Medicaid spending to support Trump’s tax cuts. When the Trump administration temporarily froze federal funds in its second week, programs like vocational rehabilitation and disability housing assistance were put into jeopardy, according to the American Association of People with Disabilities, which condemned the move. One source told ProPublica that even one more spending freeze could keep their organization from delivering hot meals to people with disabilities.Trump, who has used eugenicist language to describe undocumented immigrants, implied that February’s deadly plane and helicopter crash was linked to the FAA’s hiring of people with “severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions”, dragging disability into his anti-DEI crusade.And Trump’s pick to run the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, could be disastrous for children with disabilities, reports the New Yorker, as the department helps fund special education programs across the US. It’s also likely that McMahon would advocate for school choice, redirecting tax dollars to private schools that are not legally required to accept students with intellectual disabilities.According to Endress, people who use the slur “understand at a deep level that there is a bottom rung to our social hierarchy, and that is intellectually disabled people. And so because the word ‘retarded’ still links to them and pretty much to them alone, it becomes the worst insult you could give somebody,” Endress says.If the government were to withhold care from our most vulnerable, leaving them unhoused and uneducated and without healthcare or employment, it would make it easier to point a finger at them and say: “What a burden.”“It [suggests] you are the worst of the worst … You don’t deserve to be part of our social fabric,” Endress said.Casey works at a Wendy’s in our hometown – he’s been employee of the month twice (I have to brag about him when I can). We talk on the phone weekly, and he recently told me that, unfortunately, someone called him a “retard” late last year. One of his coworkers jumped over the counter and laid into the guy. Again, one person in the right place at the right time.In that way, I see the rise of the R-word as a gauge for how far society is willing to let people like Musk and Trump go. And while I believe that in most reasonable environments, it’s still very much taboo to say the word aloud, the fact that it’s being said by some of the most powerful people in the world, with no recourse, says enough. More

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      Trump has utterly changed the rules of engagement. World leaders must learn this – and quickly | Simon Tisdall

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      It’s not only about Donald Trump. It’s not just about saving Ukraine, or defeating Russia, or how to boost Europe’s security, or what to do about an America gone rogue. It’s about a world turned upside down – a dark, fretful, more dangerous place where treaties and laws are no longer respected, alliances are broken, trust is fungible, principles are negotiable and morality is a dirty word. It’s an ugly, disordered world of raw power, brute force, selfish arrogance, dodgy deals and brazen lies. It’s been coming for a while; the US president is its noisy harbinger.Take the issues one at a time. Trump is a toxic symptom of the wider malaise. For sure, he is an extraordinarily malign, unfeeling and irresponsible man. He cares nothing for the people he leads, seeing them merely as an audience for his vulgar showmanship. His undeserved humiliation of Ukraine’s valiant leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was, he crowed, “great television”. As president, Trump wields enormous power and influence. But Potus is not omnipotent. America’s vanquished Democrats are slowly finding their voice. Connecticut senator Chris Murphy shows how it should be done. Don’t bite your lip. Don’t play by rules Trump ignores. When Trump tried to blame diversity hiring policies for January’s deadly Potomac midair collision, Murphy hit back fiercely.“Everybody in this country should be outraged that Donald Trump is standing up on that podium and lying to you – deliberately lying to you,” Murphy fumed. Trump was at it again when he mugged Zelenskyy last week. But it is not passing unchallenged. Street protests in Britain and the US followed. A campaign gathers pace to block Trump’s planned UK state visit. Opinion polls show growing opposition.It seems strange to talk about “resistance”, as if a Nazi-style wartime occupation is under way. Yet resisting Trump is what our leaders must do. The world’s most admired democracy is held hostage by a far-right clique of thugs and chancers. Its leader calls himself “king” and talks of a presidency for life. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon raise stiff-armed salutes. European neofascists drool adulation from afar.Trump’s minions attack or subvert the agencies of government, the judiciary and free press, terrorising and intimidating those whose loyalty they impugn. Their propagandists, so-called tech barons, have a reach Joseph Goebbels would envy. And just like Vladimir Putin, Russia’s dictator, JD Vance, Trump’s loudmouth hitman, fights a regressive, anti-democratic culture war for “Christian values” and a narrow, bigoted orthodoxy.Ukraine, despite Trump’s betrayal, remains the epitome of resistance. The Ukrainian people are fighting for freedom, sovereignty and democratic self-determination. The issue is simple. Since the US cannot any longer be relied upon, Europe’s leaders know what they must do: supply more and better weapons for Kyiv, such as Taurus missiles; provide more humanitarian aid and finance, obtained by seizing $300bn in frozen Russian funds; and collectively raise their defence spending. From leaders such as Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, we need less polite subservience and more honest defiance.To be effective, European leaders need to put concerted pressure on the US government to provide credible, long-term security guarantees for Ukraine and a backstop for any force that the UK and Europe deploy to monitor the ceasefire. It’s reasonable to expect the US to support a European peace initiative. If it does not, an open rupture with Washington should not be dodged. Equally, they need to put more pressure on Russia, too, to halt its daily slaughter and bombing in Ukraine’s cities. Putin could stop this war today – after all, he alone started it. The fact he refuses to do so is proof, if it were needed, of Zelenskyy’s contention that he cannot be trusted in anything he says. He must be squeezed further.Right now, the opposite is happening. Military analysts warn that a gleeful Kremlin, encouraged by western discord, may step up its offensive in the east and try to capitalise on Ukraine’s demoralisation, perhaps even reinstating Putin’s original plan to seize the whole country. To deter such scenarios, EU leaders, meeting again in Brussels on Thursday after their London weekend talks, must finally bury their differences and draw a line.Starmer says that he and Macron are now developing a plan. Good. The leading European Nato powers should demand an immediate halt to all fighting in Ukraine and Kursk. They should launch a peace process inclusive of all interested parties, without preconditions or prior concessions. If Putin balks, they must withdraw their diplomats, close borders with Russia, move to interdict its exports, mobilise their armed forces – and set a deadline for providing defensive air cover for all unoccupied Ukrainian territory. Russia must be reminded that the west has teeth, too – and will, if forced, resist Putin’s unlawful aggression with everything it has got. Enough of Trump’s scaremongering nonsense about a third world war. Putin is a mass murderer, not a mad murderer. He’s also a coward.Given Trump’s treachery and threats to cut military aid, only a strong, united Europe stands a chance of preventing Ukraine’s defeat on the battlefield. Were Ukraine forced to capitulate to a Kremlin deal and lose its sovereignty, it would set a disastrous precedent for free people everywhere, from Taiwan and Tibet to Moldova, Estonia, Panama and Greenland.Marco Rubio, Trump’s obsequious secretary of state, spoke revealingly last month about his vision of a 21st-century world dominated by the US, Russia and China, and divided into 19th-century geopolitical spheres of influence. It was necessary to rebuild US relations with Moscow, Rubio argued, to maintain this imperious tripartite balance of power. This is the partitioned future that awaits if Trump’s surrender strategy prevails and he and Putin carve up Ukraine.Such a global catastrophe was foretold. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a nightmare world divvied up between three great empires or superstates, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, which deliberately stoke unceasing hostilities. Their shared characteristics: totalitarianism, mass surveillance, repression, immorality, gross inhumanity. Sound familiar? Annalena Baerbock, foreign minister of Germany, a country that knows much about fascism, past and present, recently said that a “new era of wickedness has begun”. Ukrainians, under occupation, are only too familiar with the evil that has descended upon their heads. This is the violent, lawless dystopia towards which the Americans in the Oval Office are leading us. Unless they are stopped. Unless we fight. Unless Europe resists.

      Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator More

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      Trump administration briefing: Israeli hostage to visit White House; Russia admires US foreign policy

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      The freed Israeli hostage Eli Sharabi has been invited to meet Donald Trump on Tuesday in Washington, his brother Sharon has said.When Sharabi and two other hostages, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami, were released on 8 February after nearly 500 days in captivity, their physical condition outraged Israelis, which Trump echoed. Sharabi has since told Israeli media of the severe hunger and violence he endured in captivity.Excerpts from Sharabi’s interview on Israel’s Channel 12 “were shown to Trump, with English subtitles, and he was shocked once again, but also expressed great sympathy for those who survived captivity”, Sharon said, according to a translation from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.Israeli hostage recalls pain and hunger during captivityIn the Israeli television interview, Sharabi recalled being tied up, losing consciousness and experiencing extreme hunger. “I remember not being able to fall asleep because of the pain,” he said. “The ropes are already digging into your flesh, and every movement makes you want to scream.”Sharabi’s brother said the freed hostage was flying to the US aboard a plane provided by Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and a major Trump donor.“Tomorrow morning, we’re boarding the plane with Mrs Adelson’s kind help. We’ll arrive to see Trump and explain to him up close the urgency of continuing the first stage or beginning the second stage – it doesn’t really matter,” said Sharon Sharabi, referring to the tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.Read the full storyEurope scrambles in wake of Trump rowAt the weekend, there was a very real sense of Europe reshaping its defence and diplomatic priorities on the hoof after Donald Trump and JD Vance’s public dressing-down of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. At a UK summit, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, sought to walk the fine line of mending ties with Trump while assembling a “coalition of the willing” to devise their own peace plan for Ukraine.And yet it was telling that Zelenskyy was offered a chat with King Charles not at a royal palace, but at Sandringham, a family residence. Trump is delighted with his own royal invitation, but will also be aware that Zelenskyy was on the receiving end of a more personal, intimate and revealing gesture.Read the full storyKremlin praises US foreign policy visionThe pivot in US foreign policy “largely” coincides with Russia’s own vision, a Kremlin spokesperson has said, with Donald Trump described as showing “common sense”.Dmitry Peskov told state media: “There is a long way to go, because there is huge damage to the whole complex of bilateral relations. But if the political will of the two leaders, President Putin and President Trump, is maintained, this path can be quite quick and successful.”He made the comments on Wednesday but they were only made public on Sunday, two days after Trump defended Putin during a fiery clash with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at the Oval Office on Friday.Read the full storyTesla pays price for Elon Musk’s hard right turnFilipos described himself as a “true Tesla fanboy”, saying a Cybertruck would be the third vehicle he’d buy from the company. But he has opted instead for a Ford F-150 Lightning and traded in his Model 3 Performance Tesla. The turning point came when Musk did back-to-back Nazi-style salutes during an inauguration day celebration for Donald Trump in January.Filipos is part of a growing movement of Tesla enthusiasts who are turning their backs on the company – selling their cars, dropping their leases and getting rid of Tesla stock. Many say that while they still love the cars, they can’t square the CEO’s politics and behaviour with their own. Musk is synonymous with Tesla; his vehicles, the Cybertruck in particular, are his calling cards.Read the full storyUS Postal Service faces a murky future Defenders of the US Postal Service (USPS) are concerned that the 249-year-old institution could soon experience the slice and slash of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”.Donald Trump is reportedly preparing to dissolve USPS’s bipartisan board of governors and place the agency under the control of the commerce department secretary, Howard Lutnick, the Washington Post has reported.Trump has made no secret of his desire to reform the federal agency, once calling it Amazon’s “delivery boy”. But it employs 637,000 people and 91% of Americans view it favourably, according to a Pew Research survey taken when USPS was perhaps the most visible federal agency during the Covid pandemic and came close to running out of cash entirely.Read the full storyUS immigration policy turns Central America into dumping groundLittle more than a month since his inauguration day, Donald Trump is strong-arming Central American leaders into collaborating with his hardline immigration agenda, forcing their countries to act as a dumping ground for immigrants whom the US can’t simply deport back to their home countries.“In Trump’s first term, it was said that it was a transactional logic,” said Ana María Méndez-Dardón, Central America director for the Washington Office on Latin America. “In this case, I would say that it’s one of imposition, a logic of threats.”The threats, such as to take back the Panama canal or impose tariffs, have forced a flurry of deals between Washington and Central American countries that have little to gain from cooperation, but potentially much to lose.Read the full storyTariff Tuesday loomsThe commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said US tariffs on Canada and Mexico would go into effect on Tuesday, but whether they would be set at 25% remained unclear.“That is a fluid situation,” Lutnick said. “There are going to be tariffs on Tuesday on Mexico and Canada. Exactly what they are, we’re going to leave that for the president and his team to negotiate.”Lutnick said the two countries had “done a reasonable job” securing their borders with the US, though he maintained the deadly drug fentanyl continued to flow in.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Tim Walz says he regrets how much time he spent during the election campaign addressing the false, racist rumours of pets being abducted and eaten in Springfield, Ohio. “They sucked me in,” said Walz said in an episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast.

      Donald Trump’s “border tsar”, Tom Homan, and far-right media personality Tucker Carlson talked about a bizarre range of extremist and racist conspiracy theories in an interview a few weeks before Homan took office. While the interview has been fleetingly reported previously, the details of Homan’s far-fetched conversation with Carlson have not.

      Aside from his work laying waste to US federal agencies, Elon Musk is also getting involved in a relatively obscure election in a state of six million people. He is spending millions to tip the scales in favour of a Republican candidate running for a seat on the highest court in Wisconsin. Critics regard it as a statement of intent by Musk to expand his political power. More

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      Trump invites freed Israeli hostage to White House

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      Freed Israeli hostage Eli Sharabi has been invited to Washington to meet Donald Trump this week, his brother told Israeli media on Sunday.Sharabi, who was released from Gaza after 16 months in captivity, expects to meet Trump with other freed hostages on Tuesday, after the US president watched him describe the severe hunger and violence he endured on Israeli television.Excerpts from Sharabi’s moving interview on Israel’s Channel 12 “were shown to Trump, with English subtitles, and he was shocked once again, but also expressed great sympathy for those who survived captivity”, his brother Sharon said, according to a translation from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.Israeli advocacy groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), have posted subtitled versions of the interview online.When Sharabi and two other hostages, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami, were released on 8 February alongside after nearly 500 days in captivity, their physical condition outraged Israelis, and Trump. Sharabi was at home in Be’eri kibbutz with his British-born wife and their two teenage daughters when Hamas attacked on 7 October 2023.In the Israeli television interview , Sharabi recalled being tied up, losing consciousness and experiencing extreme hunger.“I remember not being able to fall asleep because of the pain,” he said. “The ropes are already digging into your flesh, and every movement makes you want to scream.”Sharabi’s brother said the freed hostage is flying to the US aboard a plane provided by Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and a major Trump donor.“Tomorrow morning, we’re boarding the plane with Mrs Adelson’s kind help. We’ll arrive to see Trump and explain to him up close the urgency of continuing the first stage or beginning the second stage – it doesn’t really matter,” Sharon Sharabi said, referring to the tenuous ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.During the 7 October attack, after the armed group kidnapped Sharabi from his home, they shot the family dog, locked his wife Lianne and their daughters in a safe room, and set it on fire, according to Lianne’s parents, who spoke to the BBC. Sharabi only learned that his wife and daughters had been killed that day after his release.Sharabi’s other brother, Yossi, was also taken hostage that day. He died early last year in Gaza, Israel’s military said, when the Israeli army bombed a building near where he was being held.The Trump administration continues to support Israel amid the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. On Friday, it approved a nearly $3bn arms sale to Israel, bypassing congressional review to supply more 2,000lb bombs used in the war against Hamas.Following Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement of a blockade on humanitarian aid to Gaza on Sunday, the White House said it “supports” Israel’s decision.At a demonstration in Tel Aviv on Sunday, the families of Israelis still being held in Gaza urged their government to stop violating the ceasefire/hostage deal that puts the lives of their loved ones at further risk. More

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      US tariffs on Canada and Mexico coming Tuesday but may not be 25%, commerce chief says

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      Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said on Sunday that US tariffs on Canada and Mexico will go into effect on Tuesday, but the president would determine whether to stick with the planned 25% level.“That is a fluid situation,” Lutnick told the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures.“There are going to be tariffs on Tuesday on Mexico and Canada. Exactly what they are, we’re going to leave that for the president and his team to negotiate.”Lutnick’s comments were the first indication from Trump’s administration that it may not impose the full threatened 25% tariffs on all goods from Mexico and non-energy imports from Canada.He said the two countries have “done a reasonable job” securing their borders with the United States, though he maintained the deadly drug fentanyl continues to flow into the country.Trump sowed confusion last week when he mentioned a possible 2 April deadline in connection with tariffs on Canada and Mexico. But he later reaffirmed the Tuesday deadline and said he would add another 10% tariff on Chinese goods that day, effectively doubling 10% duties imposed on 4 February.Lutnick said Trump was expected to raise tariffs on China on Tuesday unless the country ends fentanyl trafficking into the US. More

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      Starmer struggles to remain upright under the weight of his contradictions | Zoe Williams

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      If I were Volodymyr Zelenskyy, I’d be thinking, either Keir Starmer has a fiendishly intelligent and subtle mind, or he is bananas. Starmer channelled the giants of British history (everyone we’re not embarrassed of; basically, Winston Churchill) on Sunday. He said we were at a “crossroads in history”.He used the phrase “we are gathered here today”, which I suppose was literally true, as they were, but also had a strange church-y overtone, as if he were trying to borrow the actual authority of God, and he explicitly yoked together the peace and security of Ukraine with that of everyone – all of Europe, but also “us” – Justin Trudeau was there, so presumably Canada’s, too. Pictures of him hugging Zelenskyy ahead were almost tear-jerkingly sincere.He was then asked by journalists following Saturday afternoon’s statement – who came at the question from many directions – whether he considered the US to be inside or outside his plan for a durable peace, and he was trenchant.“Europe and the US have to stand together and that position must be strong”; “I do not accept that the US is an unreliable ally”. It was an absolute head-scratcher – because the US does not seek a sovereign Ukraine, safe in perpetuity from Russian aggression.Donald Trump and JD Vance showed the world what they think of this war on Friday, and they are in an opposite world, Zelenskyy is the one risking the lives of ordinary people, and the war is for him to end – while giving up his nation’s mineral rights to the US and thanking them for the privilege.That meeting in the White House was easily the most gruesome display of bullying and manipulation that televised geopolitics has ever put on. So in what world does the guy you just hugged get to walk away proud and sovereign, with US backing? In what conceivable world is Trump on the same team as these assembled leaders?Starmer was under considerable pressure in his short speech, which we have to hope was just because history had its eyes on him, and not because he’s overwhelmed by the weight of his own contradictions.Words were mangled into non-words, “step” became “stet”, “presume” got funked with “preserve”. And yet, his lawyerly clarity remained. He had five points, they were all different, they all made sense, he said them all in the right order.“We will keep the military aid flowing … to strengthen Ukraine now,” he said, adding that the £2.2bn loan to Zelenskyy would come from frozen Russian assets, and the £1.6bn of UK export finance would be channelled straight back into the UK economy via the air defence industry in Belfast.“Any lasting peace,” he continued, “must ensure Ukraine’s sovereignty and security and Ukraine must be at the table”. It’s a simple and defensible point, but it also goes head to head against Trump, who has argued throughout that all it’ll take for a peace deal is him, Putin, a copy of The Art of the Deal and a box of cigars.Third, “in the event of a peace deal, we will keep boosting Ukraine’s own defensive capabilities”, Starmer said, which, again, sounds fair enough and yet at the same time runs directly counter to any of the noises coming out of Washington.Fourth, he will assemble “a coalition of the willing, to defend a deal in Ukraine. Not every nation will feel able to contribute but that can’t mean that we sit back.” Here’s the kicker: “this effort must have US backing”.Well, OK, but who on earth would assume that backing? And what would it cost? Do we have to watch Zelenskyy get beaten up live on air, for the US to fall in with the crowd but still feel like it won?Peter Mandelson had told ABC News earlier that “President Zelenskyy [must give] his unequivocal backing to the initiative that President Trump is taking to end the war and to bring a just and lasting peace to Ukraine,” and seriously, all we can do in the face of that counter-messaging is hope that Mandelson’s forgotten he’s the UK’s diplomat to the US and thinks he’s just a guy on a podcast.Starmer’s fifth point was a bit muddled: “Leaders must meet again very soon. We are at a crossroads in history today. This is not a moment for more talk.” What are they going to do at the meeting, if not talk more? Never mind. Don’t pick holes. We need to believe there’s a grand plan behind all this, because the alternative is just horrendous. More

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      Starmer’s diplomatic flurry puts him at centre of attempts to shape Ukraine-Russia deal

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      As Keir Starmer and his aides huddled to discuss their response to Friday’s calamitous White House meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the prime minister’s team pondered whether to issue a statement on social media.Already messages of support were flooding in for the Ukrainian president from other European leaders, including Emmanuel Macron of France and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.But the prime minister decided to stay silent and instead display his backing with action rather than words. After a series of phone calls on Friday night, Starmer brought forward a planned visit by Zelenskyy to London, giving him the opportunity for a symbolic meeting at Downing Street followed by an audience with King Charles.“I picked up the phone to President Trump, and I picked up the phone to President Zelensky,” Starmer told the BBC on Sunday. “That was my response.”Starmer’s flurry of diplomatic activity has resulted in a Franco-British peace effort which puts the prime minister at the centre of European attempts to shape any deal between Moscow and Kyiv.“Starmer’s was a big gesture,” said Bronwen Maddox, the director of the Chatham House thinktank. “Having Zelenskyy here, having that meeting, mattered. There is no need to go rushing around tweeting. He’s now trying to be a bridge between the US and Zelenskyy and Europe, which is a reasonable ambition.”Some even believe this could be Starmer’s “Falklands moment”, referring to the way Margaret Thatcher took on Argentina over the Falkland Islands and in doing so rebooted her flagging premiership. By Sunday morning, Starmer was being backed by the leaders of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.“It’s really important that this summit the prime minister is having today goes well and we support him in that,” the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, said on Sunday.Starmer’s calls with Trump and Zelenskyy on Friday night focused on trying to get the minerals deal between the two countries back on track.One Downing Street official said: “We need to ensure there is a minerals agreement and there is a plan for stopping the fighting and giving Ukraine the security guarantees it needs. The minerals deal is still on the table.”View image in fullscreenOfficials rejected reports that Starmer’s call with Zelenskyy had been “emotional”, but said the Ukrainian president had clearly found his encounter with Trump “bruising”. The two men agreed that Zelenskyy would visit London 24 hours earlier than planned, allowing him time for a longer meeting in Downing Street before a trip to Sandringham on Sunday to meet King Charles.Officials said the visit to see the king was a deliberate message to Washington, where Trump is eagerly awaiting his own audience with the monarch, with US officials pushing for a state visit as soon as this year.Starmer then spent Saturday around the cabinet table in discussions with Jonathan Powell, his national security adviser, and other senior officials. They had come to the conclusion there was little they could do to restart US-Ukrainian talks, so decided to come up with an alternative plan to help shape the peace deal.The plan they hit upon was a separate set of discussions, this time involving Britain, France, Ukraine and potentially one or two others, to formulate their own prospective deal to present to the US. The talks would provide a counterbalance to those between the US and Russia which have excluded Ukraine and European countries.Starmer called Macron, who welcomed the idea. But there was one more hurdle to clear: the prime minister had to call the US president for the second time in two days to make sure he was not opposed.Officials briefed on the call would not say what Trump’s reaction to the idea was, or even whether he indicated he would not stand in the way. But the prime minister was sufficiently emboldened by the conversation that he decided to announce the talks on the BBC on Sunday morning.“The second Trump call was much more focused on not wanting to go back over what has happened, but saying, if we move forward with this other plan, would you be interested in us doing that?” said one British official. “There is no point in us doing this if the US didn’t feel there was space for that. Clearly we are doing it, so we thought it was a worthwhile exercise.”Saturday evening culminated with Starmer’s Downing Street talks with Zelenskyy. In front of the assembled press, the prime minister took the unusual step of leaving No 10 to greet Zelenskyy from his car, before walking him back down the street again after their meeting.View image in fullscreen“And as you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom,” Starmer told his Ukrainian counterpart. “We stand with you, with Ukraine, for as long as it may take.”Sunday was yet another intense day of diplomacy for the prime minister, who began by speaking to the leaders of all three Baltic states and then hosted the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, at Downing Street. Meloni, who arguably has the best relations with Trump of any European leader, has called for an immediate summit between the US, EU and other allied countries to discuss Ukraine.From there, Starmer travelled to Lancaster House for his defence summit, which was attended by representatives from across Europe, as well as officials from Turkey and Nato.British officials are aware that all this activity may result in very little. They have yet to secure their main objective – a promise from Trump to offer military backing to any British and European troops posted to secure a new border between Russia and Ukraine.But for now, Downing Street is delighted that the prime minister has managed to navigate the turbulent geopolitics of a Trump-led US, and in doing so prove that post-Brexit Britain can still play a global leadership role.“It’s a testament to the relationship the prime minister has with the presidents of both America and Ukraine that he was able to host Zelenskyy and speak to Trump not once but twice over the days,” said one official.Additional reporting by Angela Giuffrida in Rome More

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      Trump said Zelenskyy ‘does not have the cards’. But how well is he playing his own hand? | Olga Chyzh

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      The White House meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be remembered as far more than just a diplomatic disaster. It marked the end of international politics as we know it, and was a harbinger for the sunset of Pax Americana. Zelenskyy, reeling from the meeting, arrived in London on Saturday to attend a defence summit with other European leaders. Thanks to Trump’s performance, those leaders now have clarity on where the US government stands on the war in Ukraine – and, more broadly, on how US foreign policy may look in future.It is hard to overstate what a departure this is. Since the end of the second world war, the US has been the primary architect and guarantor of an intricate network of global institutions anchored by Nato, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund. Together, these partners crafted a security umbrella whose benefits far outweighed its expense. It produced political stability and provided US and European companies with unrivalled access to markets and resources. The US was all too happy to share the gains of this order with its allies, and, to a lesser extent, with its rivals and adversaries.True, the US reaped the greatest benefits: it set the terms of trade and projected its influence on to the globe. But the order was inclusive, since its institutions were designed to deliver benefits that everyone could enjoy, even if access was unequal. It had plenty of critics, drawing envy and ire from adversaries such as Russia and China, whose leaders regularly grumbled about unfairness and demanded their seats at the table. Over time, the US and its allies grew accustomed to the status quo, comfortable and complacent to the point of letting their military stockpiles deplete and degrade. By contrast, Russia and China cultivated networks of propagandists, corrupt officials and saboteurs, who shared a common goal: to identify the west’s weak points, amplify political instability and undermine western unity.They could hardly have hoped for a more vulnerable and divided west. From the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, to rising nationalist movements across Europe and, most consequentially, Trump’s ascendance to the presidency, the last decade has been marked by events that have weakened transatlantic ties and eroded security arrangements. Trump’s criticisms of Nato and other longstanding alliances have helped to convince American voters that US allies are more of a burden than a benefit.In this context, the meeting with Zelenskyy, when Trump told the Ukrainian leader “make a deal or we’re out”, was not entirely surprising. The president has consistently framed foreign policy in transactional terms, prioritising one-time payouts over the long-term dividends that arise from international stability and cooperation. His approach reflects a total indifference to defending democratic principles or countering authoritarian influence, whether in Russia or elsewhere. His foreign policy is defined by unpredictability, quick gains and self-interest.Trump is also uninterested in confronting aggressors. In fact, he’s not averse to trading other’s security for his own gain. As Zelenskyy pointed out, the US is shielded from Russian aggression by an ocean, a luxury that Europe does not enjoy. Trump appears content to let Europe manage its own security, ignoring the reality that European stability is intrinsically linked to US economic and strategic interests. In his willingness to work with Vladimir Putin, he is ignoring the fact that the existing international system has overwhelmingly benefited the US. Ironically, the world order that Putin advocates for – one shaped by imperial spheres of influence, rather than collective security – would come at significant costs to the US.In his exchange with Zelenskyy, Trump invoked a metaphor of a card game. Yet his own cards are spread across the table. He will probably use the fallout from the meeting to convince domestic Republican holdouts to halt sending decommission-ready military equipment to Ukraine and lift sanctions against Russia. He and Putin will probably extol the dubious economic opportunities that America could seize in Russia, trading secure and lucrative European markets for the higher risk, smaller Russian market, which his Maga-aligned elites may embrace.Europe can either stand back, accept this new reality, and hope that Russia’s imperial ambitions stop at Ukraine. Or it can adapt to a world without US support, where it has to take a more assertive role in its own defence and strategic decision-making. Historically, cohesion across the continent has been difficult to achieve. The stakes are now higher than ever.For Ukraine, the path forward remains difficult. This meeting did not cost it US support – that was set in motion by Trump’s re-election. Zelenskyy was right not to be bullied into a ceasefire on Russia-dictated terms. Without security guarantees, such an agreement would be disastrous for Ukraine. Trump would claim an easy diplomatic victory, using it as a justification to cut military aid and lift sanctions on Russia. But as Zelenskyy noted, Putin has a history of breaking ceasefires. With sanctions eased, Russia would simply rearm and prepare for another offensive against a weakened Ukraine. By resisting Trump’s pressure, Zelenskyy may still face the same outcome, but at least Ukraine remains unshackled from a one-sided truce.Even without US support, Ukraine is in a stronger position militarily and diplomatically than it was in early 2022. As dire as things look at the moment, international politics is rarely static, and Trump himself is known for reversals. It remains possible that he could again shift course, signing the minerals deal with Ukraine and mending relations with European allies. There is always a small chance that the meeting was just an embarrassing and emotional mishap. But with its sovereignty at stake, chance is not something Ukraine can count on.

      Olga Chyzh researches political violence and repressive regimes. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto More