Trump, Donald J

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      I’ve Covered Authoritarians Abroad. Trump’s Actions Look Familiar.

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      President Trump’s second term dizzies many Americans, but I find it oddly familiar — an echo of the time I lived in China as a reporter.Americans sometimes misperceive Trump’s actions as a fire hose of bizarre and disparate moves, a kaleidoscope of craziness. Yet there is a method to it, and I’ve seen parallels in authoritarian countries I’ve covered around the world over the past four decades.It’s not that I offer a unified theory of Trumpism, but there is a coherence there that requires a coherent response. Strongmen seek power — political power but also other currencies, including wealth and a glittering place in history — through a pattern of behavior that is increasingly being replicated in Washington.But let’s get this out of the way: I think parallels with 1930s Germany are overdrawn and diminish the horror of the Third Reich; the word “fascism” may likewise muddy more than clarify. Having covered genuinely totalitarian and genocidal regimes, I can assure you that this is not that.Democracy is not an on-off switch but a dial. We won’t become North Korea, but we could look more like Viktor Orban’s Hungary. This is a question not of ideology but of power grabs: Leftists eroded democracy in Venezuela and Nicaragua, and rightists did so in Hungary, India and (for a time) the Philippines and Poland. The U.S. is the next test case.When authoritarians covet power, they pursue several common strategies.First, they go after checks and balances within the government, usually by running roughshod over other arms of government. China, for example, has a Supreme Court and a National People’s Congress — but they are supine. Here in the United States, many Republican members of Congress have similarly been reduced to adoring cheerleaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Opinion Today: Decoding the Chaos of Trump’s America

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      Where America Stands: Donald Trump’s reckless and illegal campaign to remake the government crossed more lines in Week 4, but we’re seeing the emergence of heroes and fresh demonstrations of courage.What Times Opinion Is Doing: “The actions of this presidency need to be tracked,” our editorial board wrote last weekend, as Trump tries to overwhelm people so he can blaze ahead unchecked. We are sorting through the chaos by identifying what matters most in columns, guest essays and podcasts, and we are rolling out ways to track Trump’s moves and the good work of others. Today’s newsletter is one way — looking at where Americans can’t afford to turn away from.Trump Abhors Independent Voices, Part I: Danielle Sassoon and Hagan Scotten are new names to many of us, and they are among the heroes of the Southern District of New York for standing up to Trump’s Department of Justice and its farcical orders to dismiss the Eric Adams case. Read The Times’s annotations of Sassoon’s letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi for insight into what courage and duty look like, and Justice’s Emil Bove’s letter of reply for the plain purpose of this administration: Crush anyone, even appointees and friends, who stakes out independence from Trump.Worth reading: Two deeper articles about Bove in The Times and The Wall Street Journal.Trump Abhors Independent Voices, Part II: The administration is trying to redefine free speech into state-permitted speech, with the Federal Communications Commission going after NPR, CBS and now NBC-owned Comcast, and the Trump White House penalizing The Associated Press for not using the president’s new name for the Gulf of Mexico. Keep an eye on this: Trump has long labeled facts as “misinformation,” but now he’s escalating a crackdown on disfavored speech. What happens when he renames the Panama Canal “the American Canal”?A Notorious Science Denialist Takes Power: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed Thursday as health and human services secretary — a dark day for the Senate, where many Republican members would have voted against Kennedy on a secret ballot. America will need watchdogs and whistle-blowers to protect public health from Kennedy.Worth reading: A Post examination of Kennedy’s public statements.A Terrible Message for Europe and Ukraine: Trump started negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine — with Vladimir Putin, and initially without Ukraine — at the same time Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Europe that the United States is no longer the guarantor of European security. So Putin can take any part of Europe he wants (except maybe Greenland)?Musk in the Oval: While he wasn’t quite behind the Resolute Desk, Elon Musk held forth in the Oval next to Trump, whose moments of assent made clear for anyone who wondered if Musk was at the wheel. “The fraudsters complain the loudest,” Musk said of the brave people standing up to illegal efforts to disband agencies and cut off grants and funds authorized by Congress.Worth reading: Three closer looks at Musk from my colleagues David Brooks and Tressie McMillan Cottom (or watch her TikTok) and from The Post.Heroes in the Land: And I’d like to end with a few more heroes to read about: Brian Driscoll at the F.B.I.; Chrystia Freeland, former deputy prime minister of Canada; and the federal judge John McConnell and other judges who have issued temporary restraining orders against Trump actions. Some of these folks are heroes simply for doing their duty — a great American value that is no small thing in Trump’s America.With contributions from M. Gessen, Binyamin Appelbaum, Mara Gay, Michelle Cottle and Serge Schmemann of Times Opinion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Every 100 Years America Produces a Robert Kennedy Jr.

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      The wrestling champion Bernarr Macfadden loved raw milk and cold plunges. He hated vaccines and despised white flour, which he called “dead food.” His greatest enemy after white flour was the American Medical Association. He thought that the sedentary weakness of the American people was a crime and that overeating was wicked, writing, “Hardly a home exists that is not made unhappy, to a greater or less extent, by this habit,” in a book called “Strength From Eating.”“Strength From Eating” features a photograph of the muscleman flexing his veiny, highly articulated arm right before the preface, with the phrase “yours for health,” written in Macfadden’s distinctive cursive underneath the photo. Mr. Macfadden was a genius of self-promotion — he understood that flooding the zone with his ideas and his own scantily clad body via tabloids, magazines and radio was key to spreading his gospel.A fit body like his own, his thinking went, was a moral body. A person could ward off all manner of deadly diseases without medical intervention as long as they took care of their individual health. According to a biography of Mr. Macfadden called “Mr. America” by Mark Adams, “Vaccination, or as Mr. Macfadden saw it, the unnecessary pumping of dead germs into the bloodstream, was lunacy.”Mr. Macfadden’s ideas are served to millions of people every day via social media health influencers in the year 2025, but he is not of the internet era. He was born in 1868, and he was arguably the most prominent proponent of alternative health practices from around 1900 until after World War II. He found common ground with politicians like Franklin Roosevelt and Hollywood celebrities like Rudolph Valentino. It is impossible to read about Mr. Macfadden — who was using the term “medical freedom” in 1920 — without thinking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our new secretary of health and human services, and the raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-skeptical, psychedelic-loving Make America Healthy Again movement that has coalesced around him.On the first day of his confirmation hearings, Mr. Kennedy described battling the ill health of our nation’s children in much the same way Mr. Macfadden did, as a moral crusade: “It is a spiritual issue and it is a moral issue. We cannot live up to our role as an exemplary nation, as a moral authority around the world, and we’re writing off an entire generation of kids.”For a long time, I thought the MAHA movement was simply anti-institutional. But that explanation falls apart upon examination, because the medical establishment has long argued for clean air, clean water and better access to healthy food. I have never met a doctor who doesn’t stress regular exercise. Many people have pointed out that Michelle Obama was concerned about childhood obesity just as Mr. Kennedy is and used her platform to encourage Americans to eat healthily and move their bodies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Refuses to Immediately Reinstate Inspectors General Fired by Trump

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      A federal judge denied eight former inspector generals who were fired by President Trump immediate reinstatement to their jobs on Friday and excoriated their lawyers, saying that their emergency request had wasted the court’s limited time.The ruling by Judge Ana C. Reyes of the Federal District Court in Washington marked a rare victory for the Trump administration in the barrage of lawsuits that has followed its attempts to slash the federal work force, freeze funding, dismantle agencies and install officials loyal to the president. But it is not necessarily permanent: Judge Reyes criticized the case more on procedural than substantive grounds and allowed it to proceed on a less urgent schedule.Still, in a roughly 10-minute hearing scheduled just hours before it was held via a conference call, she repeatedly berated the plaintiffs’ lawyers for the manner in which they brought the case. She also faulted what she considered to be their weak arguments for immediately reinstating the eight inspectors general, who performed oversight of the Departments of Defense, State, Education, Agriculture, Labor, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services, as well as the Small Business Administration.At one point Judge Reyes, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., went as far as to threaten the plaintiffs with court sanctions if they did not immediately withdraw their emergency request so the case could proceed on a slower timeline. The plaintiffs initially refused, but eventually assented after further criticism from Judge Reyes.President Trump has moved swiftly to purge federal agencies in his first weeks in office, targeting many executive branch officials whose positions are supposed to be protected from being fired without cause. Inspectors general, who monitor their assigned agencies for fraud, waste and other misbehavior, are among those officials who have statutory restrictions on how they can be fired, ones that Congress tightened after Mr. Trump dismissed some inspectors general during his first term.The inspectors general in this case had argued that a judge’s order this week to temporarily reinstate another government watchdog — Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel — while that court challenge progresses had supported their own request to have the inspectors general immediately reinstated while their case proceeds.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Zelensky Says Ukraine Is Unlikely to Survive the War Without U.S. Support

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      His comments came on the first day of the Munich Security Conference, where anxious European officials had hoped to learn more about U.S. plans to broker peace talks.President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an excerpt from an NBC interview published Friday night that Ukraine had a low chance of surviving Russia’s assault without U.S. support.In the excerpt from “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” Mr. Zelensky said: “Probably it will be very, very, very difficult. And of course, in all the difficult situations, you have a chance. But we will have low chance — low chance to survive without support of the United States.”The full interview is set to be broadcast on Sunday, according to NBC.His comments were aired on the first day of the Munich Security Conference, where hundreds of anxious European diplomats and others gathered expecting to hear Vice President JD Vance speak about President Trump’s strategy to broker peace negotiations with Russia to end the war in Ukraine.But Mr. Vance mentioned Ukraine only in passing and offered no road map for negotiations or even any strategic vision of what Europe should look like after the most devastating ground war being waged on the continent in 80 years. Instead, he urged European nations to stop isolating their far-right parties, saying the biggest security threat was the suppression of free speech.Earlier in the week, Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, jolted Kyiv and European allies of Ukraine by saying in a meeting with NATO and Ukrainian defense ministers in Brussels that the United States did not support Ukraine’s desire to join NATO as part of a peace plan. He also described a return to Ukraine’s borders before 2014 — when Russia annexed Crimea — as “unrealistic.”Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested trading U.S. aid for Ukraine’s critical minerals, telling Fox News earlier this month that he wanted “the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earths,” a group of minerals crucial for many high-tech products, in exchange for American aid. Ukraine had “essentially agreed to do that,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Vance Tells Europeans to Stop Shunning Parties Deemed Extreme

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      Vice President JD Vance told European leaders on Friday that their biggest security threat was not military aggression from Russia or China, but their own suppression of free speech — including efforts to block hard-right parties from joining governments.An audience that was largely expecting Mr. Vance to lay out the Trump administration’s priorities for the trans-Atlantic alliance, NATO military spending and negotiations with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, instead received a lecture on what Mr. Vance described as the continent’s own failures in living up to democratic ideals.Those failures, Mr. Vance said, included efforts to restrict so-called “misinformation” and other content on social media and laws against abortion protests that he said unfairly silenced Christians.Perhaps most strikingly, the vice president called on Europeans to drop their opposition to working with anti-immigration parties, calling them a legitimate expression of the will of voters angered by high levels of migration over the last decade. Those parties include the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, parts of which have been classified as extremist by German intelligence.Supporters of the Alternative for Germany party at a campaign launch event in Halle, Germany, last month.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesAll other parties in Germany refuse to join with the AfD in forming governments, an effort known as a “firewall” against extremism in a country where memories of the Nazis still dominate its political culture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Trump’s Plan to Relocate Gazans Is Untenable for Jordan

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      President Trump’s plan would send a huge number of refugees to Jordan, adding new frictions to the kingdom’s often tense, sometimes violent history with displaced Palestinians.President Trump’s proposal that the United States take over the Gaza Strip while other countries take in the Palestinians who live there is a deal King Abdullah II of Jordan cannot make.The monarch rebuffed Mr. Trump gently, telling him at the White House on Tuesday that the American president was essential to peace in the Middle East and pledging that Jordan would host more Palestinians in need of medical care. And the approach seemed to convince Mr. Trump to walk back threats made before the visit about withdrawing aid to Jordan if it rejected his plan.Still, the notion has laid bare dilemmas for King Abdullah, whose family — and the land they have ruled for generations — has a complex relationship with Palestinians that has at times turned violent.Here’s what to know about the president’s plan and the history informing the king’s rejection.Here’s what you need to know:What is the plan?Why is the plan problematic for Jordan?What has been Jordan’s relationship to Palestinians?When did Jordan clash with Palestinians?Are there personal concerns for the king?What is the plan?The Tel al-Zaatar area east of Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip, on Thursday.Saher Alghorra for The New York TimesThe president’s proposal is vague and came as a surprise to even his advisers when he presented it last week. Mr. Trump has not been consistent or clear about what it entails except insofar as his plan certainly appears to rely on Jordan and Egypt, among others, accepting a huge influx of Palestinian refugees.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump and Modi Shove Disputes Into Background in White House Visit

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      Hours after President Trump paved the way for upending the United States’ trade relationship with India with broad “reciprocal” tariffs, he and Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented a united front during a news conference on Thursday at the White House.Mr. Modi became the latest head of state to seek to placate an increasingly power-flexing Mr. Trump by trying to accommodate his demands — even as Mr. Trump’s promised tariffs hung over the White House meeting. Mr. Modi heaped praise on Mr. Trump, using his motto “Make America Great Again” in English, despite mostly speaking through a translator, and applying the motto to India. “Make India Great Again,” Mr. Modi crowed.The warm greetings also extended to Elon Musk, the constant Trump companion barreling through the federal government as the head of an initiative to reshape and cut down the federal government: The two had a meeting and photo op. Mr. Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, owns a number of companies, including Starlink, a high-speed internet service, that have sought to make an entry in India.All the flattery concealed a number of tensions between the two nations, including on two of Mr. Trump’s signature issues, trade and immigration. Mr. Trump hinted at the biggest thorn when he said at the news conference that the United States had a nearly $100 billion trade deficit with India, though he inflated the number — in 2024, the figure was nearly $50 billion.Just hours earlier, Mr. Trump had directed his advisers to devise new tariff levels for countries around the world that take into account a range of trade barriers and other economic approaches adopted by America’s trading partners. India is among the nations that could face particularly significant consequences from the tariffs.At the news conference, Mr. Trump said that he had toyed with that idea during his first term, and noted that he could not get India to lower tariffs against the United States then. Now, “we’re just going to say, ‘whatever you charge, we charge,’” Mr. Trump said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More