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      in US Politics

      Trump 100 days: ‘unpredictable’ US alienates allies and disrupts global trade

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      For US foreign policy, Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office were the weeks when decades happened.In just over three months, the US president has frayed alliances that stood since the second world war and alienated the US’s closest friends, cut off aid to Ukrainians on the frontlines against Vladimir Putin, emboldened US rivals around the world, brokered and then lost a crucial ceasefire in Gaza, launched strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and seesawed on key foreign policy and economic questions to the point where the US has been termed the “unpredictable ally”.The tariffs Trump has unleashed will, if effected, disrupt global trade and lead to supply chain shocks in the United States, with China’s Xi Jinping seeking to recruit US trade allies in the region.The pace of the developments in the past 100 days makes them difficult to list. Operating mainly through executive action, the Trump administration has affected nearly all facets of US foreign policy: from military might to soft power, from trade to immigration, reimagining the US’s place in the world according to an isolationist America First program.“The shake-up has been revolutionary, extraordinary. It’s upended 80-some years of American foreign policy,” said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to Nato.The Trump presidency has ended the relative peace in the western hemisphere since the end of the second world war underwritten by US economic, military and diplomatic influence, Daalder said.“The foundation of the Pax Americana was trust, and once you break trust, it’s extraordinarily difficult to restore,” he said. “And restoring trust – trust in America, trust in American institutions, trust in American voters – it takes a long time to rebuild.”The US’s key foreign policy and national security making institutions are in crisis. The Pentagon is mid-meltdown under the leadership of Pete Hegseth, whose erratic and unsteady leadership has been reflected in score-settling among his senior staff, while a leaked Signal chat embroiled the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and others in scandal. The state department under Marco Rubio is undergoing a vast shake-up, and the US’s diplomats are being sidelined in favour of envoys such as Steve Witkoff with little background in foreign policy. Critics say the gutting of USAID will cut back on US soft power for generations.“There’s no better way to get us into a war, perhaps a catastrophic war, than essentially poking out your eyes and numbing your brain, and you’re left with Donald Trump and a few people sitting in the White House winging it, and they’re not competent to wing it,” said Steven Cash, a former intelligence officer for the CIA and Department of Homeland Security, and the executive director of the Steady State, an advocacy group of former national security professionals. “And so we’ve seen that with the tariffs. We’ve seen that with Nato. We’ve seen that with Ukraine, and we’re gonna see a lot more of it.”After assuming office in 2021, Joe Biden declared: “America is back.”“The world now knows America is not back,” Daalder said. “America is gone again.”In a recent interview with the Zeit newspaper, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, expressed similar sentiments, saying: “The west as we knew it no longer exists.”View image in fullscreenIn Munich, JD Vance delivered a landmark speech openly pandering to Europe’s far right, accusing European leaders of “running from their own voters” and saying: “America can do nothing to help you.”A backlash has begun. Last month the EU presented an €800bn ($913bn) plan on the future of European defense, a putative step in what would be a herculean task to overcome internal divisions and onshore European defense manufacturing. The UK and other US allies have considered other efforts, such as limiting intelligence-sharing with the US. “We still need America now, but there is a vision [of a time] when we won’t any more,” said one European diplomat.Meanwhile, the Trump effect is beginning to sway elections as well – though not as he might hope.In the western hemisphere, Trump has terrorised US neighbours and tacitly declared what some have compared to a new Monroe doctrine, saying the White House planned to “take back” the Panama canal and annex Greenland, while regularly calling Canada the future 51st state.In an extraordinary bit of election-day meddling, Trump wrote a social media post suggesting that he was on the ballot in Canada’s vote, repeating that Canada should become the 51st state in order to avoid tariffs and reap economic awards.Canadians responded by duly electing the liberal candidate Mark Carney, completing a 30% swing in polling that has largely been explained by opposition to Trump’s tariff war and territorial menaces.In Europe, populist parties seen as Trump’s ideological allies are also on the defensive. While Trump was popular in terms of his ideological and anti-woke agenda, the trade war has made him “quite toxic, just in the last month or two, with a lot of the populist voting bases”, said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former special adviser to the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.Nowhere has the shift in US foreign policy been felt more acutely than in Ukraine, where the sudden cutoff in US military and intelligence sharing confirmed the Trump administration’s goals of pressuring Ukraine to accept a deal with the Kremlin, rather than the other way around. Those frustrations boiled over into an Oval Office meltdown fueled by Vice-President JD Vance that one former US official close to the talks called “disgraceful”.Trump has swung wildly on the war, on certain days targeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and then quickly pivoting to call out Putin for continuing to rain down missiles on Ukrainian cities. His theatrics have produced symbolic moments, including a sudden recognition that “maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war” after speaking with Zelenskyy this weekend in the baptistry of St Peter’s Basilica. But in terms of hard results, Trump has not fulfilled a promise to end the war within 24 hours or produced a clear path to peace many months later.View image in fullscreenThe Russians have said they largely tune out what he says in public.“We hear many things coming from President Trump,” said Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a television appearance this weekend. “We concentrate, as I said, on the real negotiations which President Trump supports and instructed his people to continue to engage in these negotiations.”Key among those people is Witkoff, a neophyte diplomat who has spent hours in conversation with Putin, often with no other adviser present. One person close to the Kremlin said that Witkoff was viewed as a reliable negotiator in Moscow with “a chance to make an agreement”, but added: “There is a chance it will pass by.”Much of the burden of international diplomacy now rests on Witkoff, who is also running point on other key negotiations. Trump has tasked him with reaching a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, in effect renegotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that he scuttled in 2018. Both the US and Iran have played up the talks, although “differences still exist both on major issues and on the details”, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told state television this week.And then there is the Middle East, where the Trump administration scored its greatest early success by negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza but then failed to prevent its collapse, with Israel cutting off new aid to Gaza as the fighting continues.“There now seems to be less focus on ending the devastating conflict,” wrote Stefanie Hausheer Ali, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs. “Trump’s threat in February to Hamas to release the hostages or ‘all hell is going to break out’ has, in practice, meant Israel restarting the war and blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Without an alternative to Hamas rule, the militant group may hang on and continue to fight as an insurgency, replenishing its ranks by recruiting desperate people.”Trump’s most extreme remarks have turned out to be bluster: he stunned the world when he claimed that he would turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront condos and said that the local Palestinian population would be forcibly removed. Months later, the initiative is largely forgotten.While attempting to close three landmark negotiations at once, the Trump administration has also launched a trade war with the entire world, establishing sweeping tariffs on all foreign imports before abruptly reversing course and cutting tariffs to 10% save for those against China.With so many major efforts ongoing, observers say that the government is largely paralysed to deal with smaller but still crucial issues in foreign policy and national security. As part of a blanket ban on refugees, tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted US troops against the Taliban are left waiting for relocation to the United States, a promise that was extended by previous administrations.“The lack of clarity and the chaos are the things that are causing so much pain,” said Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, a group that works with the state department to help resettle Afghans.He said he was critical of both the Biden and Trump administrations for failing to relocate the tens of thousands of Afghans who were far enough along in the vetting program to be relocated before Trump came into office.“The truth is, is that when America makes a promise, you should be able to trust our word,” he said. “If our flag waving over an embassy in Tunisia or Baghdad or Kabul, or Kyiv doesn’t mean this is the place where there’s truth, where there’s justice … well, then what are we even doing here?” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump 100 days: Trump’s whirlwind start to his second presidency

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      Law-abiding migrants sent to foreign prisons. Sweeping tariffs disrupting global markets. Students detained for protest. Violent insurrectionists pardoned. Tens of thousands of federal workers fired. The supreme court ignored.The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term have shocked the United States and the world. On the eve of his inauguration, Trump promised the “most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history”, and what followed has been a whirlwind pace of extreme policies and actions that have reshaped the federal government and the US’s role in the world.Let’s look at what he has achieved and destroyed.Shattering alliancesView image in fullscreenThe end of the postwar orderTrump’s first 100 days has been marked by arguably the biggest shake-up in US foreign policy since 1945. He has feuded with Nato and turned on Ukraine, slapped tariffs on US allies around the globe, ignored international institutions and publicly admired dictators from Vladimir Putin to El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele.‘The EU was invented to screw us over’Trump has called European allies “freeloaders” who have relied on the US to pay for their defense and said he would not defend allies who didn’t meet a spending threshold of 2% of GDP. He has accused European allies of conspiring to “screw over” the US by forming the European Union. “The west as we knew it no longer exists,” the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said.Video-2: To view this video please download this article it in our appA new Monroe doctrine?As Trump has retreated from Europe, he has increasingly thrown the US’s weight around the western hemisphere. He said Canada should become the 51st state, threatened to annex Greenland, and proposed in his inaugural speech that the US “take back” the Panama canal. Some have compared his foreign policy to that of James Monroe, the former president who in 1823 declared a US sphere of influence in North and South America.View image in fullscreenTariffs and ChinaTrump’s haphazard imposition of tariffs has angered US allies from Europe to Asia, where longtime trade partners such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have scrambled to try to negotiate new deals to protect their economies from severe shocks. China’s Xi Jinping has toured south-east Asia, seeking to promote Beijing as the world’s protector of rules-based trade and calling on countries to “jointly oppose unilateral bullying”.View image in fullscreenJD Vance, Elon Musk and the court of TrumpIf Trump has seemed transactional toward Europe, then his top advisers have appeared downright hostile. JD Vance made waves in Munich when he portrayed European leaders as ideological tyrants and accused them of “running in fear of your own voters”. Musk has backed far-right movements from the UK’s Reform to Germany’s AfD.Attacking rule of lawPardoning January 6 protestersTrump issued more than 1,500 pardons or commutations to people convicted in connection to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.View image in fullscreen‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’– Trump in a February post on X, underscoring that he believes he can justify breaking the lawView image in fullscreenDefying court ordersIn March, the Trump administration ignored an order from the US district judge James Boasberg to turn around a plane headed to El Salvador containing people alleged to be gang members. It was a staggering act of defiance.View image in fullscreenThreatening judgesTrump and allies have threatened judges who have ruled against them. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!,” Trump said in an 18 March post on Truth Social. Elon Musk, a top Trump adviser, has also called for impeaching judges and supported Republicans who champion doing so.View image in fullscreenAttacking lawyersTrump has used executive orders to punish law firms connected to rivals or that have taken on causes averse to his administration. Several firms have settled with Trump to avoid being punished. Others have successfully sued the administration.Trade
      warsView image in fullscreenThreatsTrump did not wait to return to the White House before threatening China, Canada and Mexico with sweeping tariffs. These would be implemented on the first day of his second term, he declared. This was the first of many times Trump would attempt to use the threat of an economic assault to force countries to bend to his will.View image in fullscreenDelaysFor Canada and Mexico, the supposed deadline for threatened tariffs shifted from January, to February, to March. When tariffs were imposed, it was barely 48 hours before all goods covered by a previous trilateral trade deal were spared. Companies caught in the crossfire struggled to keep up.Video-4: To view this video please download this article it in our app‘Liberation’Trump and his aides sought to bill 2 April 2025 – the day he presented sweeping tariffs on much of the world, including China – as “liberation day”. The plan lasted all of a week before it was watered down. All of the countries in the administration’s sights except China now face a blanket tariff of 10%, rather than the higher rates, after a global market sell-off and warnings of recession.Markets crashingView image in fullscreenTrade warWhile Trump has repeatedly pulled back from the brink of all-out economic war with most countries, China is the exception. When Beijing retaliated against US tariffs, Trump hiked them further – leaving the world’s two largest economies spiraling into a tit-for-tat dispute. US tariffs on Chinese goods stand at 145%.View image in fullscreenConfusion ​Amid mounting concern over the impact of Trump’s volatile trade strategy on the economy, and the risk of recession, businesses of all sizes are attempting to grab a moving target. “Nobody knows what’s coming next,” John Cochrane, an economist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, observed recently.Government ‘efficiency’View image in fullscreenMusk ushered into governmentOn day one, Trump signed an executive order creating the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) – a novel initiative chaired by Elon Musk. In the weeks that followed, Doge staff, many of whom are former employees at Musk’s companies and lack government experience, embedded themselves in federal agencies large and small, directing sudden and disruptive cuts to programs and payrolls.View image in fullscreenFederal workers targetedThe Trump administration moved to dramatically shrink the federal workforce, first by proposing buyouts. About 75,000 employees opted to leave, as did thousands more in the weeks that followed. But the numbers were fewer than the White House hoped, so cabinet secretaries fired tens of thousands more, while Trump approved the termination of about 25,000 employees on their probationary periods. The supreme court refused to hear a challenge to the latter firings in April.View image in fullscreenAgencies shuttered, perhaps illegallyTrump moved to dismantle USAID, which has administered Washington’s foreign aid agenda for more than six decades, and fold it into the state department. He also directed the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to oversee the closure of her department. The offensives against these and other agencies quickly wound up in the courts.View image in fullscreenDoge rattles Trump’s cabinetDoge has left few corners of the federal government untouched. But reports have emerged that Musk’s initiative is grating some of Trump’s newly confirmed cabinet secretaries, who see him as unhelpfully disrupting their departments. In March, Trump reportedly stopped Musk from seeing the defense department’s secret plans for a potential war with China during his visit to the Pentagon, noting that the Tesla boss had extensive business interests in China.Musk takes a stand in Wisconsin – and losesMusk was a major financial supporter of Trump’s campaign to return to the presidency. But his foray into the race for a Wisconsin supreme court seat in April was not as successful. Although he spent about $20m supporting the former Republican attorney general Brad Schimel, voters instead choose the Democratic-backed Susan Crawford, preserving the 4-3 liberal majority on the state’s highest court.Information warView image in fullscreenFlooding the zoneTrump has been everywhere all the time, dominating the “attention economy” like no other public figure. He takes questions from reporters far more often than his predecessor Joe Biden. He posts frequently on his Truth Social platform. He has attended the Super Bowl, Ultimate Fighting Championship and other sporting events.View image in fullscreenSidelining the ‘lamestream’ mediaThe White House banned the Associated Press from events in the Oval Office and Air Force One over the news agency’s refusal to obey Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The AP sued over access to presidential events and won a court ruling, though it was unclear if and when the White House would put it into effect.View image in fullscreenPlatforming Maga mediaThe White House took over deciding which outlets are allowed to take part in the press pool, a group that acts as the eyes and ears of the media covering the president up close, and included more fringe outlets. Rightwing journalists also became more prominent at press briefings.View image in fullscreenChallenging state fundingMore than 1,300 Voice of America journalists, producers and assistants were placed on leave, crippling a broadcaster that was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda and operates in almost 50 languages. Grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia were terminated. A judge recently ordered the restoration of Voice of America’s operations, but the administration is likely to appeal.Executive ordersTrump increasingly relies on executive ordersTrump has signed 140 executive orders in his first 100 days, including 36 in his first week in office. His use of the presidential pen is unprecedented in modern US history. Below are the number of executive orders presidents signed in their first 100 days.View image in fullscreen‘Invasion’ at the borderTrump’s day one border emergency declaration deployed 1,500 active-duty troops alongside 2,500 national guard members to the southern border. Framing migration as an “invasion”, the order militarized immigration enforcement and redirected defense resources to border control, raising serious legal and humanitarian concerns about the use of the military for domestic enforcement.View image in fullscreen‘Deep state’ purgeThe reinstated “Schedule F” executive order has stripped tens of thousands of federal employees of civil service protections, allowing the administration to fire career officials deemed disloyal.View image in fullscreenPro-Palestinian targetsA week after the Columbia graduate and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil was detained in March, Trump signed an order called “Securing American Values” to target visa holders who have participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The order directs immigration agencies to authorize visa revocations of demonstrators linked to organizations accused of hate speech, and detain and expedite deportations for those involved in activity the administration deems antisemitic.View image in fullscreenBirthright citizenship attackTrump’s unconstitutional day one executive order aimed to end automatic citizenship for babies born on US soil to undocumented immigrants or those on temporary visas – directly challenging the 14th amendment’s guarantee that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens. The order remains blocked by courts pending litigation.View image in fullscreenGlobal aid freezeThe administration’s foreign aid freeze has halted thousands of humanitarian and development programs worldwide. The executive order targeting USAID has disrupted even life-saving health initiatives like HIV treatment in Africa, even though the administration says they have not been affected.Fortress AmericaVideo-1: To view this video please download this article in our appRefugee admission suspendedTrump has suspended all refugee resettlement into the United States, leaving tens of thousands of people in an overseas limbo. The indefinite pause on the resettlement program has made it nearly impossible for refugees fleeing war and violence to seek safe haven in the US. The order is subject to ongoing legal action.Arrests ramp upUS Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) arrests in February outstripped not just the same period under Biden but even the figures from Trump’s first term.View image in fullscreenAlien Enemies ActThe Trump administration used an 18th-century wartime law to deport scores of Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they are being held in a draconian mega-prison known as Cecot. Trump’s use of the law faces legal challenges. Onboard one of the deportation flights was a Maryland father with protected legal status mistakenly deported in what the administration called an “administrative error”. The supreme court has ordered the US to “facilitate” his return.View image in fullscreenFree speech crackdownIn an extraordinary crackdown on free speech, the Trump administration has tracked down and detained international students involved in pro-Palestinian protests, among them Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and lawful permanent resident.View image in fullscreenSchools and churches no longer out of boundsThe Trump administration now allows immigration authorities to make arrests in schools, healthcare facilities and places of worship. But on 7 April, federal agents were denied entry to two Los Angeles area elementary schools after they alleged the children entered the US without documentation.Opposition and protestView image in fullscreenProtesters take to the streetsAfter a slower start than Trump’s first term, protests have erupted across the country, including in small towns in Republican areas, standing up against his overreach. Established groups have joined together with a decentralized protest movement around broad messages against oligarchy and dismantling democracy.View image in fullscreenMusk is targetedElon Musk proved a potent target for the opposition, given his prominent role leading Doge as it slashed through the federal government. As Doge cut through agency after agency, people turned up outside federal offices in opposition. “Tesla Takedown” protests at local dealerships went after his publicly traded company, tanking the stock.View image in fullscreenDemocrats take a standAfter a bruising electoral loss, Democratic officials struggled to find their voices as an effective resistance to an emboldened Trump, but some have found a footing. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez launched an anti-oligarchy tour, drawing huge crowds. Some Democrats, including Congressman Al Green, disrupted a joint session of Congress. Cory Booker gave a record-breaking 25-hour speech on the Senate floor. Meanwhile, the party announced a new effort to funnel money into critical state races.Video-3: To view this video please download this article in our appLawsuits put brake on Trump agendaA strategy that worked well in the first Trump term remained a major plank of the opposition: endless lawsuits. A coalition of Democratic attorneys general have brought handfuls of suits, often successful, to stop his actions. Outside groups have filed lawsuits over his unconstitutional plans. But his administration is defying court orders in some instances, a sign that the courts alone won’t be enough to stop him.Trump’s approval flippedNet approval ratingTrump’s first 100 days were largely designed to make a statement, and they achieved that goal. But it’s clear that within this time period there have been consequences to the executive orders, policy making and budget cuts that could continue to spiral out of the president’s control. The impacts will crystallize in the lives of the American public, and abroad, in the more than 1,300 days to come. More

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      Trump promised peace but brings rapid increase in civilian casualties to Yemen | Dan Sabbagh

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      “I am the candidate of peace,” Donald Trump declared on the campaign trail last November. Three months into his presidency, not only is the war in Ukraine continuing and the war in Gaza restarted, but in Yemen, the number of civilian casualties caused by US bombing is rapidly and deliberately escalating.Sixty-eight were killed overnight, the Houthis said, when the US military bombed a detention centre holding African migrants in Saada, north-west Yemen, as part of a campaign against the rebel group. In the words of the US Central Command (Centcom), its purpose is to “restore freedom of navigation” in the Red Sea and, most significantly, “American deterrence”.A month ago, when US bombing against the Houthis restarted, the peace-promising Trump pledged that “the Houthi barbarians” would eventually be “completely annihilated”. It is a highly destructive target, in line perhaps with the commitments made by Israeli leaders to “eliminate” Hamas after 7 October, and certainly in keeping with statements from Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, that the US military must focus on “lethality, lethality, lethality”.Photographs from Almasirah, a Houthi media organisation, showed a shattered building with bodies inside the wreckage. TV footage showed one victim calling out for his mother in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia. It is not immediately obvious they were material to the Houthi war effort, in which the group has attacked merchant shipping in the Red Sea and tried to strike targets in Israel.That the Houthis have sought to fight on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza is not in dispute but what has changed is that the US military response – joint US and UK airstrikes when Joe Biden was in the White House – has escalated. The data clearly suggests that previous restraints on causing civilian casualties have been relaxed.Approximately 80 Yemeni civilians were estimated killed and 150 injured in a bombing raid on Ras Isa port on 18 April, according to the Yemen Data Project, a conflict monitor. The aim, Centcom said, was to destroy the port’s ability to accept fuel, whose receipt it said was controlled by the Houthis, and, the US military added, “not intended to harm the people of Yemen” – though the country is already devastated by 11 years of civil war. Half its 35 million people face severe food insecurity.So far, the Trump administration bombing campaign, Operation Rough Rider, is estimated to have caused more than 500 civilian casualties, of whom at least 158 were killed. Compare that with the previous campaign, Operation Poseidon Archer, which ran under Biden from January 2024 to January 2025: the Yemen Data Project counted 85 casualties, a smaller number over a longer period.Parties in war are supposed to follow international humanitarian law, following the principle of distinction between military and civilian targets, and respecting the principle of proportionality, where attacks that cause excessive civilian casualties relative to any military advantage gained are, in theory, a war crime.The clear signs from the US campaign in Yemen are that it is following a looser approach, mirroring the unprecedented level of civilian casualties in the Israel-Gaza war. It is hardly surprising, given that Hegseth has already closed the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation office, which handled policy in the area, and the related Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, responsible for training.That could make it difficult for traditional allies to assist. Whereas the UK participated in Poseidon Archer, British involvement in the latest operation has gone from minimal to nonexistent. No air-to-air refuelling was provided in the most recent attacks, the UK Ministry of Defence said, unlike in March.In justification, Centcom says that after striking 800 targets, Houthi ballistic missile launches are down 69% since 15 March. But one figure it does not cite is that transits of cargo ships in the Red Sea during March remain at half pre-October 2023 levels, according to Lloyd’s List. A broader peace in the region may prove more effective in restoring trade than an increase in demonstrative violence. More

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      Trump’s second term will be the worst presidential term ever | Steven Greenhouse

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      In his first 100 days back in office, Donald Trump has made a strong case that his second term will be by far the worst presidential term in US history. So many of his flood-the-zone actions have been head-spinning and stomach-turning. His administration seems to be powered by ignorance and incoherence, spleen and sycophancy. Both he and his right-hand man, Elon Musk, with their resentment-fueled desire to disrupt everything, seem intent on pulverizing the foundations of our government, our democracy, our alliances as well as any notions of truth. Tragically, Trump’s second term is already more lawless and more authoritarian than any in US history.The worst and most dangerous part of Trump’s agenda is his war against our democracy and constitution – defying judges’ orders, deporting people without due process, suggesting he will run for a third term, calling to impeach judges who rule against him, pardoning hundreds of January 6 criminals, gutting federal agencies and firing thousands of federal employees in flagrant violation of the law, and banning books from military libraries. (One wonders: will book burning be next?) Underlining just how dangerous and lawless Trump is, he is talking publicly about disappearing US citizens to foreign countries where they could be locked in prison forever. For those who care about democracy and basic freedoms, this is Defcon 1 stuff.From Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, every president since the second world war has worked hard to build alliances to promote peace and prosperity and deter aggression. But right out of the box, Trump 2.0 has rushed to blow up our alliances and cavalierly alienate our allies. Trump quickly rejected the US’s traditional foreign policy and ideals by warmly embracing Vladimir Putin, a brutal dictator, and turning against Ukraine and its noble fight against Putin’s aggression. Trump sounded like a rapacious 19th-century imperialist when he threatened to take over the Panama canal and, ditto, when he talked of using force to seize control of Greenland, which belongs to our longtime Nato ally, Denmark. Then there’s Trump’s astoundingly idiotic talk – and taunt – that Canada should be our 51st state. What a way to anger and alienate a nation that has long been the US’s best friend.Then there is the disaster – or should we say clown show – of Trump’s on-again, off-again, on-again, who-knows-what’s-going-to-happen-tomorrow tariffs. His “liberation day” tariffs were put together by a clown-car crew, just three hours before he announced it, and Trump and company seemed to have zero idea that his hodgepodge of tariffs would send the world’s stock markets into a nervous breakdown. Trump’s team was stupid enough to think that China was too feeble to respond effectively to Trump’s trade war – treasury secretary Scott Bessent said China had “a losing hand” with just “a pair of twos”. Trump and his clown car failed to realize that China had the ability to retaliate in devastating ways – by clamping down on rare earth exports that American manufacturers and tech companies desperately need, and perhaps by selling off hundreds of billions of dollars in US bonds. Former treasury secretary Janet Yellen was appalled, saying: “This is the worst self-inflicted policy wound I’ve ever seen in my career inflicted on our economy.”Moving beyond his bombastic rhetoric, Mr Make America Great Again has been showing the world that the US is not so great. Because of Trump’s incoherent policies, bond investors are souring on the US and the dollar as never before as they question America’s reliability with such an unstable man at its helm. Investors are even questioning whether the US under Trump will make good on its debts – a fear that has caused interest rates to soar on treasury bonds. For the first time in modern history, they are questioning the dollar’s primacy and whether it should remain the world’s reserve currency. To the world’s investors, it’s clear that Trump is dragging America down, not lifting it up.Indeed, Trump’s economic stewardship has been so astonishingly inept that we went from economists saying early this year that there was no way the US would have a recession anytime soon to many economists predicting a recession this year.

      Steven Greenhouse is a labor reporter. More

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      Donald Trump, beware – this is what a global liberal fightback looks like | Timothy Garton Ash

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      Liberals of all countries, unite! Just as anti-liberal powers outside the west are becoming stronger than ever, the assault on everything we stand for has been joined by the United States. Against this massed onslaught of anti-liberal nationalists we need a determined fightback of liberal internationalists. Canada’s election this week can contribute a strong mounted brigade.A core insight of liberalism is that, if people are to live together well in conditions of freedom, power always needs to be dispersed, cross-examined and controlled. Faced with the raw, bullying assertion of might, whether from Washington, Moscow or Beijing, we now have to create countervailing concentrations of power. In the long history of liberalism, a free press, the law, labour unions, a business community kept separate from political power, NGOs, truth-seeking institutions such as universities, civil resistance, multilateral organisations and international alliances have all served – alongside multiparty politics and regular free and fair elections – to constrain the men who would be kings.In rallying everyone who believes in equal individual liberty to this fight, we liberals have a problem of our own making. Policies associated in many people’s minds with liberalism over the last 40 years have themselves fed the reservoirs of popular discontent from which nationalist populists continue to draw support. Neoliberalism, hypercharged through a globalised financialised capitalism, has led to levels of inequality not seen for a hundred years. An identity politics intended to remedy the historic disadvantages of selected minorities has left many other members of our societies – especially white, male, working and middle class – feeling themselves culturally as well as economically neglected. Both these approaches reneged on liberalism’s central promise, lucidly summarised by the philosopher Ronald Dworkin as “equal respect and concern” for all.Neoliberalism has also turned the world’s most powerful democracy into something very close to oligarchy. The separation of private wealth and public power – a precious and fragile innovation of modern liberal democracy – has been reversed. Insatiable plutocrats such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are now supporters of Donald Trump’s political power, while he promotes his own and his rich pals’ economic interests. With the help of the media and platforms the plutocrats control, Trump persuades many ordinary Americans that their suffering is entirely due to foreigners (immigrants, China), while in reality it is more likely to be the fault of people such as Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg.So we have to fight simultaneously on two fronts: with the enemies of liberalism and the problems created by liberalism itself. Unity will be strength. If we each try to negotiate separately with the bullies, be they in Washington, Moscow or Beijing, they will pick us off one by one.These coalitions of counter-power will be composed of states, but also of civil society actors and active citizens. At least half the population of the United States is with us. Electoral authoritarian states such as Turkey and Hungary also have lots of would-be-free citizens. The world’s largest example of applied liberal internationalism, the 27-country European Union, will be crucial to the fightback. So will major individual democracies including Britain, Canada, Japan and Australia.We need to do many things at once. Promoting free trade against Trumpian beggar-thy-neighbour protectionism is an obvious starting point. It’s also easier said than done, since mutually beneficial trading arrangements take time to craft. Yet there are some accessible immediate wins. A trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur group of Latin American states only awaits ratification by all relevant parties. Britain and the EU should be more ambitious at their upcoming summit on 19 May. The EU doesn’t need anyone else’s involvement for it to create a single digital space and unified capital markets, nor to build up European defence industries, which would also be a neo-Keynesian economic stimulus.The monopolistic platforms and mega-wealth of the American oligarchs are a danger to all other countries. If the EU were prepared to use its regulatory superpower, coordinated with the efforts of other liberal democracies, we could do more to curb them. But regulation and taxation alone are not enough.Whether in Europe, Canada, Australia or Japan, our entire digital infrastructure is effectively American. Imagine one day your iPhone and iPad stopped working, along with your cloud provider, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter (AKA X-itter). What would be left? TikTok! “And Bluesky”, you may add, referencing the liberal social platform of choice. But that too is American. This is not only about infrastructure. It’s about how we create the digital public sphere essential for the future of liberal democracy.Civil society initiatives can also help. Why, for example, haven’t we already seen a major statement of solidarity with embattled US universities from universities across the liberal world?So can consumer protests. The impact of a largely spontaneous boycott of Tesla cars is pushing Musk to return to his business activity, cutting the leisure time he can spend on vandalising his country’s administrative state. Canadians now have the BuyBeaver app on their phones, so they can avoid US-made goods. (I hope they boycott Russian ones too.)It’s also a matter of fighting style. Anti-liberal nationalists use the bludgeon, we the rapier. When they go low, we go high. When they go ape, we stay cool. When they lie through their teeth, we stand by the facts.In foreign policy, the most urgent challenge is to save Ukraine, which Trump is throwing under the bus. The fact that he is pressing the Ukrainians to abandon even their legal claim to Crimea being part of Ukrainian sovereign territory shows how supporting Ukraine is now essential to defending fundamental principles of liberal international order.What emerges after this hurricane will not be the same as before. It will be transformed both by us learning from our own mistakes, so as to build back better, and by the revolutionary impact of Trump. A liberal democratic constellation that is not fundamentally secured by the US “liberal leviathan”, in the Princeton scholar John Ikenberry’s striking phrase, will be something very different from what we knew between 1945 and 2025.Even the geography will change. Canada, for example, which once seemed – in the nicest possible way – somewhat peripheral to world affairs, comfortably tucked up there between a friendly America and a frozen Arctic, now suddenly looks like a frontline state. One of the world’s most liberal countries is, beside Ukraine, one of the most directly threatened by Trump’s anti-liberal assault. And the thawing Arctic is a major new theatre of international competition. Fortunately, it looks as if Canada is going to have a government that is not just Liberal in name but also combatively liberal in nature.A quarter-century ago, when the United States was attacked by Islamist terrorists on 11 September 2001, the editor of Le Monde wrote a famous banner headline: “We are all Americans!” Today, friends of liberty the world over should say: “We are all Canadians!”

      Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More

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      US treasury secretary says ‘there is a path’ with China over tariff negotiations

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      The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said “there is a path” to an agreement with China over tariffs after he had interactions with his Chinese counterparts last week in Washington.“I had interaction with my Chinese counterparts, but it was more on the traditional things like financial stability, global economic early warnings,” Bessent told ABC News’s This Week on Sunday, explaining that he had spoken to the Chinese during International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington. “I don’t know if President Trump has spoken with President Xi,” he added.On Friday, Donald Trump asserted in an interview that tariff negotiations were under way with China, comments he repeated on his way to Rome to attend the funeral of Pope Francis, but were later denied by China’s foreign ministry, which said the US “should stop creating confusion”.A day later, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said Beijing abides by international rules on US-imposed tariffs and would seek solidarity with other countries.“Certain countries adhere to their own priorities, engage in bullying pressure and coercive transactions, and provoke trade wars for no reason, exposing their extreme egoism,” Wang said on the sidelines of a regional meeting in Kazakhstan.On Sunday, Bessent attempted to weave through the conflicting signals over what progress was being made to de-escalate a trade war threatening to sap global growth.“The Chinese will see this high tariff level is unsustainable for their business,” he said. He added that Beijing’s denial that negotiations are ongoing was for a Chinese audience.“I think they’re playing to a different audience,” Bessent said. “We have a process in place and, again, I just believe these Chinese tariffs are unsustainable.“The first path will be, again, a de-escalation, which I think the Chinese are going to have to have. Then I think there can be an agreement in principle, these 17 or 18 important trade deals that we’re negotiating.”But Bessent warned that “a trade deal can take months” and said negotiations with other significant US trading partners were progressing. “Some of those are moving along very well, especially the – with the Asian countries,” he said, praising Trump’s negotiating strategy.“In game theory it’s called strategic uncertainty,” he said. “So, you’re not going to tell the person on the other side of the negotiation where you’re going to end up. And nobody’s better at creating this leverage than President Trump.”The treasury secretary’s comments come as top US retailers have reportedly warned the White House that tariffs will cause empty store shelves and price hikes within weeks.Bloomberg reported that Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein raised US prices of its products from dresses to kitchenware on Friday ahead of imminent tariffs on small parcels. The average price for the top 100 products in the beauty and health category increased by 51%, and more than 30% for home and kitchen products and toys, including a 377% increase in the price of a 10-piece set of kitchen towels.Trump predicted on Sunday that tariffs would ultimately benefit US taxpayers and boost employment. “When Tariffs cut in, many people’s Income Taxes will be substantially reduced, maybe even completely eliminated,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.“Focus will be on people making less than $200,000 a year. Also, massive numbers of jobs are already being created, with new plants and factories currently being built or planned.” He called it a “bonanza” for Americans and said “the external service is happening”.Separately on Sunday, US agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said the US was holding daily conversations with China over tariffs. “Every day we are in conversation with China, along with those other 99, 100 countries that have come to the table,” Rollins said on CNN’s State of the Union.Rollins said the president was prepared to bail out American farmers if the trade war continues squeezing commodity exports, particularly soybean and pork sales to China.“First of all, the prayer is that that doesn’t need to happen – but secondly, if it does, for the short term, just as in Trump 1, we are preparing for that,” Rollins said.Rollins said it could take months before it is known whether a bail-out is needed.“I don’t think we’re going to need it, but if we do, it will be there,” Rollins said. More

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      Trump disdains conservatism. His governing philosophy is absolute power | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump issued his declaration of war against his “enemies within” at the Department of Justice on 14 March. Thus the president launched a constitutional crisis that encompasses not just a group of migrants snatched without due process and transported against federal court orders to a foreign prison, but a wholesale assault on virtually every major institution of American society.“We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. We will expose, and very much expose, their egregious crimes and severe misconduct,” he pledged. “It’s going to be legendary.”Trump’s speech condensed his mission to its despotic essence. While he distilled his contempt, Trump also marked his disdain for the traditional conservatism of limited government, respect for the law and liberty. He defined his project, built on his executive orders as substitutes for the law, to crown himself with unrestrained powers to intimidate, threaten and even kidnap. His political philosophy is a ruthless quest for absolute power.Trump hailed his appointees for being “so tough” – the enthusiastically compliant attorney general, Pam Bondi, and the irrepressible flunky FBI director, Kash Patel. He attacked lawyers whose firms he would issue executive orders against to eviscerate their work – “really, really bad people”. He claimed Joe Biden and the former attorney general Merrick Garland “tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third-world country”. And he described “people that come into our country” as “stone-cold killers. These are killers like – they make our killers look nice by comparison. They make our killers look nice. These are rough, tough people with the tattoos all over their face.” Trump’s accusations are invariably projections of his own malice that he manufactures into politically pliable paranoia.No staff attorneys within the department were invited to the speech, as people at the justice department told me. The senior lawyers from the Public Integrity Section had already resigned when Trump attempted to coerce them to participate in dropping the prosecution of New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, for corruption in exchange for his support of Trump’s coming roundup and deportation of migrants. After Trump, a convicted felon, concluded by comparing himself to Al Capone, the mafia boss convicted of tax evasion – “the great Alphonse Capone, legendary Scarface, was attacked only a tiny fraction of what Trump was attacked” – Trump’s theme song from his political rallies, YMCA, blared out of the loudspeakers in the department auditorium.The next day, Trump announced his executive order citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1789, a wartime measure, to incarcerate members of the Tren de Aragua gang he asserted were coordinating with the Maduro government of Venezuela to commit “brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking”. (On 20 March, the New York Times reported: “The intelligence community assessment concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders, according to the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.”)The 238 men abducted were taken without any due process to a maximum-security prison operated by the Salvadorian strongman Nayib Bukele, who calls himself “the coolest dictator” and whose government is being paid at least $6m in an arrangement with the Trump administration.In a hearing on 24 March before the US court of appeals for the DC circuit, Judge Patricia Millett, criticizing the absence of due process, said: “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.” She asked the deputy assistant attorney general, Drew Ensign, arguing the administration’s case: “What’s factually wrong about what I said?”“Well, your Honor, we certainly dispute the Nazi analogy,” he replied.Trump’s assertion of emergency power under the Alien Enemies Act is more than a bit analogous to the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the chief legal scholar and apologist of the Nazi regime, “crown jurist of the Third Reich”. The falsity, according to the intelligence community, of Trump’s claim about the men underlines the analogy of Trump’s argument to Schmitt’s. “Authority, not truth, produces law,” Schmitt wrote. “Sovereign is he who decides on invocation of the state of emergency.” And then: “Der Ausnahmefall offenbart das Wesen der staatlichen Autorität am klarsten” – “The State of Emergency reveals most clearly the essence of the authority of the state … The exception is thus far more important that the ordinary rule. The normal state of affairs shows nothing; the emergency shows everything; it confirms not only the rule, rather the rule derives strictly from the emergency.”The ACLU filed a lawsuit on 15 March before Chief Judge James Boasberg of the US district court of the District of Columbia to halt the flight to El Salvador. The judge issued an order for the planes to return to the US, but the Trump administration defied it.Trump’s defiance has set in motion a flurry of legal challenges and court cases heard in district courts and circuit courts of appeals, as well as the supreme court. On 7 April, the court ruled that the detainees had the right to due process, which they were denied. On 11 April, the justices unanimously ordered the administration to facilitate the return of one wrongly taken individual, Kilmar Ábrego García, a legal resident of Maryland who was identified by his family and had no criminal record. On 19 April, the court temporarily blocked a new round of deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.CBS’s 60 Minutes reported: “We could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans.” Bloomberg News reported that about 90% had no criminal records.On 14 April, Trump welcomed Bukele to the White House. Trump has turned the Oval Office into his small stage with cabinet secretaries and staff seated on the couches as his chorus. Bukele was dressed in black casual wear, but not admonished, as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy was admonished, for supposedly showing disrespect to Trump by not appearing in a suit and tie.Trump and Bukele played the scene as a buddy movie, kidding each other, but not kidding, about repression. “Mr President,” said Bukele, “you have 350 million people to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That’s the way it works, right?”“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” said Trump. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”“Yeah, we got the space,” Bukele said.When the question of Ábrego García was raised by a reporter, Bondi said: “That’s not up to us,” and that it was “up to El Salvador”.“Well, I’m supposed – you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist in the United States, right?” Bukele replied. Trump reassured him: “It’s only CNN.” Bukele called the question “preposterous”.“Well, they’d love to have a criminal released into our country,” said Trump. “These are sick people. Marco, do you have something to say about that?” It was another test of the secretary of state’s sycophancy. Marco Rubio rose to the occasion. “No court in the United States has a right to conduct a foreign policy of the United States,” he said. “It’s that simple. End of story.”Standing behind Rubio, Trump’s most influential aide and the architect of his immigration policy, Stephen Miller, chimed in: “To Marco’s point, the supreme court said exactly what Marco said. That no court has the authority to compel the foreign policy function in the United States. We won a case 9-0. And people like CNN are portraying it as a loss, as usual, because they want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children.”A reporter attempted to point out that the court had in fact ruled it was illegal to deprive the captives of due process. “Well, it’s illegal to, so I just wanted some clarity on it,” he asked. Trump jumped in: “And that’s why nobody watches you anymore. You have no credibility.”On 17 April, the day the supreme court ruled on Ábrego García, Trump said: “I’m not involved in it,” though he had signed the executive order that authorized his kidnapping. Trump was reverting to the tactic of denial, however patently ludicrous, that he had been schooled in originally by Roy Cohn, the Republican power broker and mafia lawyer who had been his private attorney. The Trump administration continues to claim it has no control over the captives in the Salvadorian prison and they cannot be returned.Trump’s disavowal of responsibility made the visit to the prison by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to tape a video on 26 March problematic on several levels. If Trump has no control, then how was Noem allowed the run of the place? If the prisoners were combatants under the Alien Enemies Act, then their status made her appearance a violation of the Geneva convention’s Article 1 that outlaws “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment”, and Article 13 that prohibits “acts of violence or intimidation” and “insults and public curiosity” – that is, using prisoners for propaganda purposes.If Schmitt’s argument is not Trump’s argument, the difference has certainly not confused the judges handling the cases. Boasberg ruled that the Trump administration had acted with “willful disregard” for his order and, while contempt proceedings were paused, threatened to appoint a special prosecutor if the Department of Justice declined to do so.The Maryland federal judge Paula Xinis, who ordered the administration to return Ábrego García, said on 15 April she had seen no evidence of progress. She ruled on 22 April that such stonewalling “reflects a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations … That ends now.”She also stated: “Defendants must supplement their answer to include all individuals involved as requested in this interrogatory.” That discovery process might range into stranger precincts of Maga depths than imagined. The New Yorker reported on “a Maga salon” at a tech billionaire’s Washington residence to which a Republican lobbyist, Andrew Beck, brought Trace Meyer, self-described as the “Babe Ruth of bitcoin”, where they discussed with state department staffers the “work-in-progress plan” for abducting migrants to El Salvador. The officials had reached “an impasse in the negotiations. Meyer, through his crypto connections, was able to help reopen the conversation.” Add to the discovery list: Beck, Meyer and the state department officials.In denying the Trump administration’s motion for a halt in the Xinis ruling, Judge J Harvie Wilkinson III, of the court of appeals for the fourth circuit, issued a thunderous opinion on 17 April, marking a historic break between principled conservatism and Trump’s regime. Wilkinson is an eminent conservative figure within the judiciary, of an old Virginia family, a clerk to Justice Lewis Powell, and a Ronald Reagan appointee revered in the Federalist Society.“The government,” Wilkinson wrote, “is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”Wilkinson concluded with a siren call about Trump’s threat. “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”Wilkinson has defined the stark conflict headed toward an unstoppable collision. Against Trump’s appropriation of Schmitt’s authoritarian logic, the conservative jurist has thrown down the gauntlet of American constitutional law. Trump’s disdain for that sort of conservatism moves the cases again and again toward the conservative majority of the supreme court, which must decide its allegiance, either like Wilkinson, to the constitution, or instead to Trump’s untrammeled power that would reduce the court itself to a cipher.

      This article was amended on 27 April 2025; an earlier version stated that JD Vance admonished Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit to meet Donald Trump. In fact, it was Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice.

      Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      Tyrants like Trump always fall – and we can already predict how he will be dethroned | Simon Tisdall

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      Tyrants come to a sticky end, or so history suggests. Richard III and Coriolanus made bloody exits. More recently, Saddam Hussein went to the gallows, Slobodan Milosevic went to jail, Bashar al-Assad went into exile. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was run to ground in a sewer. Tyranny, from the Greek túrannos (“absolute ruler”), is typically fuelled by hubris and leads ineluctably to nemesis. Tyrants are for toppling. Their downfall is a saving grace.Tyranny, in its many forms, is back in vogue, and everyone knows who’s to blame. To be fair, to suggest similarities between the aforementioned abominable individuals and Donald Trump would be utterly wrong. In key respects, he’s worse. Measured by willingness and capacity to harm the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, wreak global economic mayhem and threaten nuclear annihilation, Trump is uniquely dangerous – and ever more so by the day.In any notional league of tyranny, Trump tops the table, with Russia’s Vladimir Putin following closely in his rear. If these two narcissists formed a partnership (a scary but not wholly improbable thought), it could be called Monsters R US. Across a disordered globe, wannabe “strongmen” queue to join their club.Yet like every tyrant, old and new, Trump must fall. How may nemesis be peacefully and swiftly attained? As he marks 100 days back in power next week, such questions gain urgency. Can the 47th president’s premeditated swinging of a wrecking ball at US democracy, laws, values and dreams be halted? How may what remains of the international rules-based system be salvaged? Who or what will dethrone him?Policy failures and personal misconduct do not usually collapse a presidency. The US constitution is inflexible: incompetence is protected; cupidity has a fixed term. Trump is in power until 2029 unless impeached – third time lucky? – for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, or else deemed unfit under section 4 of the 25th amendment. With JD Vance, his yes-man Veep, playing Oval Office bouncer and Congress awash with Maga converts, such procedural defenestration appears unlikely.Public backing is certainly slipping. Last week’s nationwide demonstrations, worries about inflation and savings, and anger over federal funding cuts, cultural war-making and mass firings reflect deepening alarm about threats to an entire way of life. Polls show Trump losing the middle-of-the-roaders whose votes ended the Biden interregnum. Yet despite a royal resemblance to another “tyrant”, King George III, a second American revolution is a long way off.Many look to the courts for rescue. Judges continue to challenge Trump’s diktats on deportations and other issues. It was a New York jury that convicted Trump of 34 felonies last year, but sadly failed to jail him. His businesses are repeatedly accused of fraud. Now it is suggested the supreme court-tested “major questions doctrine” could bring him to heel. This requires the government to demonstrate a “clear congressional authorisation” when it makes decisions of great “economic and political significance”, explained US law professor Aaron Tang. It’s restraint of sorts.In the land of Watergate, will the media bring the tyrant low? It’s a fond hope. Major news organisations, undercut by social media and tsunamis of official lies, are derided from on high as liberal purveyors of “fake news”. They face costly legal challenges and outright bans, as in Trump’s malicious “Gulf of America” vendetta with Associated Press. Basic concepts of objective reporting are torched as the White House favours rightwing, pro-Trump outlets. The free press, perforce, is not so much cowed as cautious.This fight has moral and ethical aspects, too – and, given this is the US, prayer is a powerful weapon in the hands of those who would slay evil-doers. Of the seven deadly sins – vainglory or pride, greed or covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth – Trump is comprehensively, mortally guilty. In Isaiah (13,11), the Lord gives fair warning: “I will put an end to the pride of the arrogant and humiliate the insolence of tyrants.” God knows, maybe he’ll listen. Miracles do happen.Of all the tools in the tyrant-toppling toolbox, none are so potentially decisive as those supplied by Trump’s own stupidity. Most people understand how worthless a surrender monkey “peace deal” is that rewards Putin and betrays Ukraine. Does Trump seriously believe his support for mass murder in Gaza, threats to attack Iran and reckless bombing of Yemen will end the Middle East conflict and win him a Nobel peace prize?By almost every measure, Trump’s chaotic global tariff war is hurting American consumers, damaging businesses and reducing US influence. It’s a boon to China and an attack on longtime allies and trading partners such as Britain. Trump’s big tech boosters know this to be so, as do many Republicans. But they dare not speak truth to power.And then there’s his greed – the blatant, shameless money-grubbing that has already brought accusations of insider trading, oligarchic kleptocracy, and myriad conflicts of interest unpoliced by the 17 government oversight watchdogs Trump capriciously fired. His relatives and businesses are again pursuing foreign sweetheart deals. Corruption on this scale cannot pass unchallenged indefinitely. Avarice alone may be Trump’s undoing.All this points to one conclusion: as a tyrant, let alone as president, Trump is actually pretty useless – and as his failures, frustrations and fantasies multiply, he will grow ever more dangerously unstable. Trump’s biggest enemy is Trump. Those who would save the US and themselves – at home and abroad – must employ all democratic means to contain, deter, defang and depose him. But right now, the best, brightest hope is that, drowning in hubris, Trump will destroy himself.

      Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

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