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      Trump 100 days: delusions of monarchy coupled with fundamental ineptitude

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      He has blinged it with gold cherubim, gold eagles, gold medallions, gold figurines and gilded rococo mirrors. He has crammed its walls with gold-framed paintings of great men from US history. In 100 days Donald Trump has turned the Oval Office into a gilded cage.The portraits of Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan and other past presidents gaze down from a past that the 47th seems determined to erase. Trump is seeking to remake the US in his image at frightening speed. The shock and awe of his second term has challenged many Americans’ understanding of who they are.In three months Trump has shoved the world’s oldest continuous democracy towards authoritarianism at a pace that tyrants overseas would envy. He has used executive power to take aim at Congress, the law, the media, culture and public health. Still aggrieved by his 2020 election defeat and 2024 criminal conviction, his regime of retribution has targeted perceived enemies and proved that no grudge is too small.Historically such strongmen have offered the populace a grand bargain: if they will surrender some liberties, he will make the trains run on time. But Trump’s delusions of monarchy have been coupled with a fundamental ineptitude.His trade war injected chaos into the economy, undermining a campaign promise to lower prices and raising the spectre of recession; his ally Elon Musk wreaked havoc on the federal government, threatening health and welfare benefits for millions; his foreign policy turned the world upside down, making friends of adversaries and turning allies into foes.Having promised so much winning, Trump is losing. Just 39% of respondents approve of how he is handling his job as president, according to an opinion poll by ABC News, the Washington Post newspaper and Ipsos, while 55% disapprove. For the first time Trump is even under water on his signature issue of immigration.“Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president have been 100 days from hell for the American people,” Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, wrote in a letter to Senate colleagues. “His first 100 days have been the worst for any president in modern history, and unsurprisingly, he has the lowest 100-day job approval any president has seen in 80 years.”The scale of the disaster is hard to comprehend for anyone who expected a repeat of Trump’s first term. His first 100 days in 2017 were consequential enough: a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, an order for construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border and the firing of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, over undisclosed contacts with Russia. But while America’s guardrails bent, they did not break.View image in fullscreenFrom the moment he was sworn in on 20 January 2025, with the tech oligarchs Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg looking on, it was clear that Trump’s second presidency would be of a different magnitude. Instead of the conservative stalwart Mike Pence as vice-president, there is the Maga isolationist JD Vance. Instead of the retired four-star general Jim Mattis as defence secretary, there is the former Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth.And instead of experienced hands ready to curb Trump’s impulses, there is a cabinet of sycophants eager to indulge them, including in ostentatious displays for the TV cameras. Trump, 78, told the Atlantic magazine: “The first time, I had two things to do – run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.”Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and White House chief of staff, said: “In the first term there were some guardrails and individuals that were able to restrain him before he took action. In the second term he doesn’t have any guardrails and deliberately selected a cabinet in which loyalty was the primary quality that he was after.“The problem is that he goes ahead and takes actions that can cause tremendous disruption. The only check that I can see is when something he does could very well lead to an economic disaster of one kind or another. It’s only when that seems clear that he basically pulls back.”Trump and his allies had four years in political exile to plot and plan a disruptive agenda laid out in Project 2025, a set of proposals by the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank in Washington. Yet its execution has been undermined by the president’s mercurial nature, cabinet infighting and leaks, especially at the Pentagon, reportedly now in disarray.Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “I’m struck by this weird combination of a focused and very well-planned agenda on the one hand and reckless incompetence on the other. You have Russ Vought [director of the office of management and budget] and the Project 2025 folks who clearly had a blueprint for action ready to go and yet you also see this pattern of dysfunction running through agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense.”For Trump’s diehard supporters, his key strength is his success as a businessman and promise to run the economy accordingly. As president he has imposed tariffs on trading partners including Mexico, Canada and China, with Chinese goods facing a combined tax of 145%.The impact has been profound, with consumer confidence plummeting, stock markets convulsing and investors losing confidence in the credibility of Trump’s policies. In the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, 72% said they thought it was very or somewhat likely that his economic policies would cause a recession in the short term.View image in fullscreenTrump, who promised be a dictator only on “day one”, has signed more than 135 executive orders, well ahead of any other president in their first 100 days, bypassing Congress. He tapped Musk to lead the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, aimed at reducing government waste with a Silicon Valley-inspired “move fast and break things” mentality.Doge has been slashing programmes, jobs and entire agencies, including the Department of Education, that by law receive funding under the purview of Congress. Musk and his team have combed through tax, social security and health records, putting private data at risk. While Musk initially aimed for $1tn in budget cuts, analysts predict that he will fall dramatically short.Doge has caused turmoil in medical research by firing doctors and scientists working to cure diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. It has frozen funding for military veterans’ facilities and fired critical workers at hospitals serving disabled veterans. Musk has also described health and social welfare programmes as “the big ones to eliminate” and social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”.Even long-term political observers are aghast at Trump’s acts of self-sabotage. Paul Begala, a former White House adviser and Democratic strategist, said: “I expected him to be stupid. I expected him to be chaotic. I expected his team to be a bunch of sycophants and nincompoops. I expected the tariffs and trade war.“Here’s what I didn’t expect. For me, the defining word of these 100 days has been betrayal. A good politician takes office and tries to expand beyond his base; an average politician tries to reward his base; Trump is the first politician who’s screwing his base, betraying his base. I honestly don’t understand it.”View image in fullscreenIn keeping with his campaign promise, Trump has implemented some of the hardest-line immigration policies in the nation’s history, driving a sharp decline in illegal border crossings.He invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants without due process, including sending alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador in defiance of a court order. The action was met with legal challenges and judicial rebuke. Trump also pledged to end birthright citizenship and proposed “gold cards” for millionaires to buy US citizenship.Another defining theme of the first 100 days is retribution. On his first day in office, Trump pardoned virtually everyone who took part in the 6 January 2021 insurrection. He has actively targeted prosecutors who investigated him, former officials who criticised him and universities whose policies he disliked. He ordered the justice department to investigate Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity director who refuted unfounded claims of election fraud in 2020.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “This will truly be known as the administration of revenge and retribution. No one’s ever done these things before. Even Richard Nixon, who kept an enemies list and was full of anger and resentment, couldn’t hold a candle to Trump.“It’s frightening and has the effect of intimidating people. He loves to bully and he has done more than any other president, certainly in a short period of time. There’s just nothing like this in all of American history. I’ve had so many people my age say, can I survive this? Because it’s stressful.”Trump’s executive orders have faced more than 150 lawsuits and judges have blocked the administration numerous times. The president called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him, prompting a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. Last week agents arrested Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities at her courtroom.Trump is also waging a culture war. Funding for arts and cultural institutions has been cut, and leaders ousted, with the president declaring them fronts for a “woke” agenda. The administration has gone after the media, fighting against news organisations in court and seeking to dismantle the Voice of America broadcaster. Access for some outlets has been restricted while “Maga media” have been platformed.PEN America, which defends writers worldwide against autocratic regimes, said the opening weeks of the Trump White House were unlike anything seen since the red scare McCarthy era of the 1950s. It warned of a “five-alarm fire” for free speech, education, the right to protest and a war against ideas and language themselves.The events – along with outlandish statements about annexing Greenland, retaking the Panama canal and making Canada the 51st state – have hurt America’s reputation around the globe.View image in fullscreenPatrick Gaspard, a former official in the Barack Obama administration, said: “Donald Trump has been radically successful in demonstrating that in 100 days you can destroy a brand that’s been built up over nearly 250 years. If that’s a success then congratulations.”He added: “We’re in DefCon 1 in a democracy where the president is radically consolidating power, politicising non-partisan agencies, attacking civil society and private firms, and literally disappearing people from our streets. Tragically, those with influence only seem to be moved by the volatility in the stock market because of tariffs, failing to see that the entire edifice that makes their success possible is being dismantled.”Trump’s political honeymoon appears to be over. Even among Republicans, polling shows that there is ambivalence about his priorities, with only about half saying he has focused on the right things. Street protests are growing across the country, judges continue to hand him defeats and Harvard University stood its ground against him. As the Democratic party tries to regroup, Trump could find his second 100 days heavier going than his first.In 2021 Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist, told the Guardian that history would remember Trump as by far the worst president ever on the basis of his first term. “I was wrong,” he acknowledged last week. “This is the worst presidency in American history.“The ignorance was actually our ally in the first Trump term. He didn’t know what he was doing and now, unfortunately, while he still doesn’t know what he’s doing, he knows more than he did. Trump believes he is infallible. He’s going to burn out with the public long before the end of this term.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: children targeted in immigration crackdown

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      As part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, unaccompanied minors are now being targeted for deportation, with the Department of Homeland Security engaging in “welfare checks” on children who arrived in the US alone, usually across the US-Mexican border.The moves have sparked fears of a crackdown and prompted alarm about what one critic called “backdoor family separation”.The president has also signed two executive orders related to immigration, including one targeting so-called “sanctuary cities” that “obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration laws”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Unaccompanied immigrant children could be deported or prosecutedImmigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials are seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with a view to deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US, according to sources and an Ice document.Read the full storyTrump signs executive order requiring list of sanctuary cities and statesDonald Trump signed two new executive orders on Monday afternoon related to immigration, according to the White House, including one targeting so-called “sanctuary cities” and another the administration says will strengthen law enforcement.Read the full storyPeace Corps to undergo ‘significant’ cuts after Doge reviewThe Peace Corps is offering staff a second “fork in the road” buyout, according to a source familiar with the matter. Allison Greene, the chief executive of Peace Corps, sent an email to staff on Monday with an update about the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) assessment of the agency.Read the full story Doge conflicts of interest worth $2.37bn, Senate report saysElon Musk and his companies face at least $2.37bn in legal exposure from federal investigations, litigation and regulatory oversight, according to a new report from Senate Democrats. The report attempts to put a number to Musk’s many conflicts of interest through his work with his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), warning that he may seek to use his influence to avoid legal liability.Read the full storyTrump’s justice department appointees remove leadership of voting unitDonald Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice have removed all of the senior civil servants working as managers in the department’s voting section and directed attorneys to dismiss all active cases, according to people familiar with the matter, part of a broader attack on the department’s civil rights division.Read the full storyDemocrats warn cuts at top US labor watchdog will be ‘catastrophic’Democrats have warned that cuts to the US’s top labor watchdog threaten to render the organization “basically ineffectual” and will be “catastrophic” for workers’ rights. Elon Musk’s Doge has targeted the National Labor Relations Board for cuts and ended its leases in several states.Read the full storyJB Pritzker’s fiery speech urging mass protests sparks talk of 2028 runIllinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, scorched Donald Trump’s administration, calling for “mass protests” and declaring that Republicans “cannot know a moment of peace” during a fiery speech in New Hampshire that immediately sparked presidential speculation.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      An Irish woman who has lived legally in the US for four decades has been detained by immigration officials because of a criminal record dating back almost 20 years.

      Senior British government officials have asked golf bosses to host the 2028 Open championship at Donald Trump’s Turnberry course after repeated requests from the US president, sources have said.

      A host of CBS’s 60 Minutes rebuked the show’s corporate owners as part of a dispute over journalists’ independence amid a lawsuit from Trump and attempted sale.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 27 April 2025. More

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      Ice seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children to deport or prosecute

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      Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials are seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with a view to deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US, according to sources and an Ice document.The moves are sparking fears of a crackdown on such children and prompting alarm about what one critic called “backdoor family separation”.In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Ice have begun engaging in “welfare checks” on children who arrived in the US alone, usually via the US-Mexico border, to “ensure that they are safe and not being exploited”, according to a DHS spokesperson.Although DHS is characterizing the welfare visits as benevolent, an internal Ice document accessed by the National Immigration Project advocacy group and then shared shows Ice is also seeking out children who came into the US alone as immigrants – and their US-based sponsors – for immigration enforcement purposes and/or to pursue criminal prosecutions. The recent operations and document confirm a February report from Reuters, that the Trump administration has directed Ice to track down and deport this group.Meanwhile, in Donald Trump’s second term, legal services provided to unaccompanied minors have been slashed and funds are not flowing despite court intervention. And the federal agency monitoring unaccompanied immigrant children has begun sharing sensitive data with Ice.The Ice document shows “ it’s not just about checking in on kids, making sure that they can account for them and that they’re not being exploited”, said Michelle Méndez, the director of legal resources and training for the National Immigration Project. “It shows they have other goals, and the goals are criminalization of the kid or criminalization of the sponsor. It’s backdoor family separation.”In addition to verifying that the children are not trafficked or exploited, the Ice document shows officials are also gathering intelligence to see whether the children are a “flight risk” or a “threat to public safety” or whether they are viable to be deported. Immigration experts and attorneys say such “fact finding” operations by Ice to track unaccompanied minors are still in their early stages.“It’s enforcement. It’s in the name of saying that they’re pursuing children’s welfare. They seem to be actually trying to conduct an enforcement operation,” said Shaina Aber, the executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice. “It seems very clear that what they are actually doing is gathering intelligence on the family.”For advocates, one of the most troubling aspects, as stated in the document, is that Ice officials will target children with alleged “gang or terrorist ties/activities”. In recent months, the Trump administration has been engaging in arrests, expulsions and deportations of immigrants – mostly Salvadorians and Venezuelans – accused of having links to gangs deemed to be terrorist organizations. The administration has used flimsy evidence to justify many of the expulsions and deportations under the controversial, rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act, or AEA, leading to a showdown between the administration and the judiciary and a threat to the rule of law.“As long as the government has some nebulous allegation, they know an immigration judge will likely order the person removed,” Méndez said.Earlier this month, Ice officials visited a 16-year-old girl in Washington state for a “welfare check”. During the visit, which was first reported by the Spokesman-Review, the frightened girl messaged and called Samuel Smith, the director of immigrant legal aid at Manzanita House, the organization that is representing the girl in her immigration case.“Both the text messages sent and the tone of communication when talking on the phone, was of a child who was incredibly scared,” Smith said. “She had no idea what was going on and was worried that her life would be flipped upside down.”The Washington Post reported this month that other federal agencies have also been conducting welfare checks and reporting information to Ice.“I can appreciate the publicly stated goal, but I don’t necessarily believe it,” Smith said.According to the Ice document and a federal law enforcement source with knowledge of the operations, two offices within Ice are conducting the unaccompanied immigrant children operations: enforcement and removal operations (ERO) and homeland security investigations (HSI). The former, ERO, runs Ice’s deportation system while HSI runs mostly international criminal investigations into drug smuggling, human trafficking and fraud, but they are increasingly working together in this administration.According to the Ice document, officials from ERO and HSI will coordinate “on pursuing UAC”, which stands for “unaccompanied alien children”, while ERO will verifiy that “immigration enforcement action is taken”, if necessary.“ERO officers should remember they are to enforce final orders of removal, where possible, and HSI will pursue criminal options for UAC who have committed crimes,” the document says.Becky Wolozin, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, finds it “difficult to reconcile the alleged well-meaning intention of these visits with the reality of the terror and trauma they have caused for children and families across the country”.“Given the intent articulated in this memo, families have well-founded fear surrounding these visits,” Wolozin added.Unaccompanied immigrant children who reach the US border are apprehended by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and then placed in custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR), under the department of Health and Human Services (HHS), while their immigration case proceeds. ORR will place children in shelters and later, if there is a sponsor available, children are placed under a sponsor’s care. Typically, sponsors are the children’s relatives in the US; at times, they are unrelated adults. The sponsors complete an assessment process and undergo a background check, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.For years, ORR has operated independently of DHS, in an attempt to address the immigration of children in a humane manner, rather than through law enforcement.Unaccompanied minors then go through lengthy proceedings and in the meantime enroll in school.Some children released to ORR sponsors have been found to have been trafficked and exploited.“There are instances of trafficking in the United States,” Smith said. “But it’s the exception, not the rule here. The vast majority are in placements that are supportive, in a good place for them to be able to live.”For years, Trump allies have pushed the narrative that unaccompanied immigrant children have been trafficked, placing blame on the Biden administration. They have pointed to a DHS inspector general report that found that Ice was not able to adequately track unaccompanied minors under their care. Experts point to a bureaucratic paperwork backlog by Ice, saying most of those children are safe, with relatives or sponsors.“The previous administration allowed many of these children who came across the border unaccompanied to be placed with sponsors who were actually smugglers and sex traffickers,” the DHS assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement. “Unlike the previous administration, President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem take the responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to reunite children with their families.”Since the Trump administration returned to office, HHS has cut legal services for unaccompanied children. There is currently a legal fight at play, in an attempt to restore legal resources for unaccompanied minors who are attempting to stay in the US.During the first Trump administration, ORR began to share data with Ice regarding immigrant children and their sponsors. Similarly at that time, immigration officials arrested 170 undocumented immigrants who tried to become sponsors for children in government custody.Although the Biden administration stopped the data-sharing practice, the new Trump White House has again begun the process of information sharing between agencies. A new Trump-era change now also allows for ORR to share the legal status of children’s sponsors with Ice, sparking fears that the information will be used to arrest and deport undocumented sponsors.ORR did not respond to a request for comment.“I worry about the trauma the kids are going through. There is a climate of fear for immigrants in this country right now,” Aber said. “The amount of trauma that this administration seems willing to put kids through is really upsetting.”The new acting director of ORR is Angie Salazar, a former Ice agent under HSI. Salazar took over the role in March after the prior acting director of ORR, another Ice official, was ousted from the role. More

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      The FBI’s arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan is a bid to silence dissent | Moira Donegan

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      On Friday, the Trump administration dramatically escalated its assault on the courts when the FBI arrested Hannah Dugan, a county circuit court judge handling misdemeanors in Milwaukee – allegedly for helping an undocumented man avoid abduction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents outside her courtroom. The arrest, a highly publicized and dramatic move from the Trump administration, seemed designed to elicit fear among judges, government bureaucrats and ordinary Americans that any effort to slow, impede or merely not facilitate the administration’s mass kidnapping and deportation efforts will lead to swift, forceful and disproportionate punishment by Donald Trump allies. Her arrest may be the opening salvo of a broader Trump assault on judges.Even if you believe the FBI’s allegations, their account of Dugan’s alleged misconduct is trivial and flimsy, wholly undeserving of the administration’s sadistically disproportionate response. The FBI claims that earlier this month, on 17 April, when an undocumented man was in Dugan’s Milwaukee courtroom charged with misdemeanor battery, she learned that Ice agents were waiting in a public hallway to arrest him. Later, in her courtroom, when she saw the defendant moving toward a main exit, she told the man, “Wait, come with me,” and directed him towards a side door instead. (He was captured by Ice shortly thereafter.) The FBI arrested her in her courtroom and has indicted her on two federal felony charges: obstruction and “concealing an individual”.The presence of Ice agents looking to abduct, detain and deport various undocumented people has long been a problem in local courthouses, keeping municipalities from interacting officially with their residents and slowing the pace of court business as undocumented people have become reluctant to show up at courthouse buildings, be it to face criminal charges, as the man in Dugan’s case was doing; to tend to civil matters; or to report crimes or pursue restraining orders against abusers. As a result, many local judges and administrators have criticized Ice’s operation policies, alleging that the agency’s aggressive tactics to enforce federal immigration law have obstructed their own ability to enforce local law. This is a distinct issue from the legality of Trump administration’s immigration crackdown tactics, which have also been challenged by a number of judges at the state and local level. The justice department has reportedly encouraged federal prosecutors to press charges against state and local officials who oppose the administration’s immigration policies.At the Milwaukee courthouse where Dugan works, Ice agents had already made two high-profile arrests of undocumented persons there to conduct official business, actions that sent a chilling effect through the local community. (The defendant in question in Dugan’s court that day was there on a domestic violence charge; because Ice decided to appear there to arrest him on civil immigration charges instead, the proceedings had to be abruptly halted. The victims, who were present in the courtroom, did not get their chance to see justice served.) When she learned of the presence of Ice agents outside her courtroom door, the FBI alleges, Judge Dugan asked the Ice agents to leave, and pointed out that they did not have the correct warrants. She also allegedly called the situation “absurd”.The absurdity was only beginning. After capturing Dugan’s defendant, the Trump administration evidently sought to make an example of Dugan, and concocted the trumped-up felony charges in order to criminalize her objection to their presence in her courthouse. After orchestrating her arrest, the FBI’s embattled chief, Kash Patel, tweeted gloatingly about Dugan’s capture; then, he quickly deleted the post, only to put it up again later. The FBI seems to have procedurally expedited the charges against her, having her indictment issued by a magistrate judge rather than a grand jury, and arresting Dugan rather than giving her the opportunity to turn herself in. They seem to have been going for maximum drama. For her part, Dugan – a well-known progressive in Milwaukee legal circles who spent much of her career working as a public-interest legal aid attorney – said nothing at her arraignment on Friday. Her attorney told the press, “Judge Dugan wholeheartedly rejects and protests her arrest,” adding: “It was not made in the interest of public safety.”Indeed it was not. Instead, Dugan’s arrest was made in the interest of shoring up the Trump administration’s depictions of itself as lawless, fearsome and impervious to constitutional checks on its own power. It was made in the interest of intimidating the administration’s critics and opponents. And it was made in the interest of silencing dissent.The Trump administration has been rapidly accumulating political prisoners. It began with immigrants who voiced opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza: Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, the graduate students who had their legal status revoked in retaliation for their pro-Palestinian opinions and who were kidnapped by the Ice secret police and shipped off to faraway prisons without process, are political prisoners. Dugan’s, too, is a political prosecution: what is at stake is not so much the law that that meager little comment – “Wait, come with me” – supposedly broke. Instead, it is that Dugan opposes the Trump mass deportation project, and she voiced that opposition in public. Her arrest is an expansion of the Trump regime’s determination into who can be made a political prisoner: with Dugan, that designation extends, in public fashion, to citizens, and even to judges. You should expect that it can expand to you.Dugan’s example is meant to frighten Americans into submission. But I think it might be more likely that she inspires us to subversion. Legality and morality are different things, and what Dugan allegedly did, whether or not it was technically legal, was supremely moral, and not a little bit brave: she refused to cooperate with a secret police force that was there to violate her courtroom, disappear her defendant, and interfere with her own distribution of justice. Doing the morally right thing – opposing Ice and mass deportations with our actions, in practical terms – will require courage from more and more of us, and a greater and greater willingness to face consequences for it.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Two suspects arrested for theft of Kristi Noem’s purse, Secret Service says

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      Two suspects have been arrested in connection with the theft last week of the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s purse as she ate at a Washington DC restaurant, officials said Sunday.Noem’s purse was nabbed on Easter Sunday and reportedly contained about $3,000 in cash and her keys, driver’s license, passport and homeland security badge. The homeland security department said Noem had cash in her purse to pay for gifts, dinner and other activities for her family on Easter.A suspect was taken into custody without incident in Washington after an investigation by the US Secret Service and the Metropolitan police department, according to a statement from Matt McCool, a Secret Service agent in Washington.That suspect was arrested on Saturday, the police department said.In a prepared statement, McCool called the suspect a “serial offender” and said there was no evidence Noem had been targeted because of her position.The Metropolitan police department said the suspect was connected to two other purse thefts in Washington restaurants earlier this month through video evidence. The suspect was charged with robbery for the other incidents.The Secret Service referred questions to the US attorney’s office, which did not respond to emails seeking more information.Noem thanked law enforcement agencies “for finding and arresting the criminal who stole my bag on Easter Sunday as I shared a meal with my family”.“This individual is a career criminal who has been in our country illegally for years,” Noem said in a prepared statement. DHS did not immediately respond to an email requesting further detail on the suspect’s immigration status.Later on Sunday, the Secret Service said a second suspect, believed to be a co-conspirator in the theft of Noem’s bag and other robberies, had been arrested in Miami with assistance from Miami Beach police and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. More

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      What is Tren de Aragua and has the group ‘invaded’ the United States?

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      The Trump administration has fixated on portraying a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, or TdA, as a state-sponsored international terrorist organization that has invaded the US.Donald Trump uses the argument to justify extreme enforcement measures against Venezuelan immigrants and cast a cloud across the Venezuelan diaspora, especially communities in the US.The US president claims the criminal group “is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare” here, which in turn should allow agents to arrest Venezuelans and exile them to Guantánamo Bay or El Salvador’s Cecot prison without even a court hearing.Yet experts say the claims do not reflect reality and, instead, Donald Trump has concocted a bogeyman to fuel his extreme immigration crackdown.What is Tren de Aragua?TdA is a gang that originated in Venezuela but has since expanded its reach to other countries in Latin America, alongside a more general mass diaspora of more than 7.7 million Venezuelans fleeing autocratic rule under the president, Nicolás Maduro.Some scholars track the group’s early days to 2005, when a trade union’s members started to embezzle funds and extort contractors while working on a railroad project – hence the “tren”, or “train”, in the Aragua region.TdA then took off in Venezuela’s Aragua state around 2014, within the Tocorón prison, where members had access to restaurants, a swimming pool, a zoo, a nightclub and other amenities atypical of a lock-up. The penitentiary became TdA’s headquarters – where leaders on the inside directed criminal activity on the outside – until 2023, when the Venezuelan government raided Tocorón and the gang began to fragment.One scholar wrote: “The TdA is of modest prominence and is nowhere near as established as other gangs in Central and South America.” Some of those more influential criminal organizations, such as MS-13 and Mexico’s cartels, have long had a foothold in – or even have their origins in – the US.That said, TdA has been powerful enough to torment and exploit other Venezuelans at home and abroad, preying particularly on vulnerable women, who are forced into the sex industry to pay off their debt after the gang smuggles them to nearby countries such as Chile, Colombia or Peru.TdA members have also started working with Mexican cartels, infiltrating groups of immigrants and then colluding with Mexico’s organized crime networks to extort them.Has Tren de Aragua ‘invaded’ the US?Tren de Aragua does have a presence in the US, but that presence is diffuse, uncoordinated, and on a smaller scale than the Trump administration’s repeatedly sounding the alarm and citing TdA in immigration-related arrests might make it seem. Three experts put it bluntly when they wrote for the New York Times: “Tren de Aragua is not invading America.”That’s not to say that individual TdA members – or people purporting to be TdA members for clout – haven’t caused real harm and suffering for many communities across the US. In Miami, a former Venezuelan police officer was reportedly abducted and murdered by a TdA member. Another supposed gang member allegedly shot two New York police officers. And the criminal organization has seemingly imported its sex-trafficking model, exploiting Venezuelan women who owe them for transportation into the US.Even so, InSight Crime, a thinktank that studies organized crime across the Americas, has said that TdA is growing weaker, not stronger, and “now operates more as a loose collection of franchises than a cohesive organization”.Earlier this month, US authorities revealed federal charges of racketeering, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, firearm offenses and robbery against 27 alleged current or alleged former TdA members and associates, indictments and arrests that attorney general Pam Bondi said would “devastate TdA’s infrastructure”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy late last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was looking into more than 600 immigrants in the US suspected of having some connection to TdA, though whether they were victims, witnesses or gang members remained unclear.That number represents fewer than 0.09% of the 700,000 Venezuelans who have resettled in the US, many of whom feel they are being smeared.The criteria cited as justification for alleging detainees or people being removed from the US without due process are TdA members include suspects making hand signs, wearing Chicago Bulls paraphernalia or similar, or having certain tattoos, which prominent researchers of gangs have said are not strong indicators, or indicia at all, of gang membership.Meanwhile, several federal judges say essentially that Trump’s using the AEA and claims of “war” and “invasion” are invalid, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed lawsuits across the country challenging its use to skirt due process.Is Tren de Aragua working with Venezuela’s government?Trump is relying on highly controversial measures, chiefly the wartime 1798 Alien Enemies Act, or AEA, to summarily deport people the administration alleges are TdA members, many of whom have not been charged with crimes. His justification is that the gang is acting “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela”.That’s unlikely. TdA was protected by the Venezuelan government in the past, according to InSight Crime. But that agreement no longer stands, with the raid on the criminal organization’s prison headquarters a case in point.The Washington Post reports that a recent National Intelligence Council internal assessment – which relied on information from the US’s 18 intelligence agencies – determined that while TdA has some low-level contacts in Maduro’s government, it is in no way commanded by Maduro. This makes Trump’s using the invasion argument to bypass due process flimsy – and contrary to the US supreme court’s insistence of the right for individuals to challenge the government. 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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      Americans, including Republicans, losing faith in Trump, new polls reveal

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      Americans, including some Republicans, are losing faith in Donald Trump across a range of key issues, according to polling released this week. One survey found a majority describing the president’s second stint in the White House so far as “scary”.Along with poor ratings on the economy and Trump’s immigration policy, a survey released on Saturday found that only 24% of Americans believe Trump has focussed on the right priorities as president.That poll comes as Trump’s popularity is historically low for a leader this early in a term. More than half of voters disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, and majorities oppose his tariff policies and slashing of the federal workforce.The scathing reviews come as Trump next week marks 100 days of his second stint office, and suggest Americans are already experiencing fatigue after a period that has seen global financial market nosedives and chilling deportations, including of documented people.A poll by the Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research published this weekend, found that even Republicans are not overwhelmingly convinced that Trump’s attention has been in the right place.A narrow majority, 54%, of Republicans surveyed said that Trump is focussed on the “right priorities”, while the president’s numbers with crucial independent voters are much weaker. Just 9% of independents said that the president is focussed on the right priorities – with 42% believing Trump is paying attention to the wrong issues.About four in 10 people in the survey approve of how Trump is handling the presidency overall, and only about 40% of Americans approve of Trump’s approach to foreign policy, trade negotiations and the economy.Meanwhile, a New York Times/Siena College poll of registered voters on Friday found that Trump’s approval rating is 42%, and just 29% among independent voters. More than half of voters said Trump is “exceeding the powers available to him”, and 59% of respondents said the president’s second term has been “scary”.While Republican leaders typically receive strong scores on economic issues, Americans have been underwhelmed by Trump’s performance. The Times survey found that only 43% of voters approve of how Trump is handling the economy – a stark turnaround from a Times poll in April 2024, which found that 64% approved of Trump’s economy in his first term.Half of voters disapproved of Trump’s trade policies with other countries, and 61% said a president should not have the authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval, while the Times reported that 63% – including 40% of Republicans – said “a president should not be able to deport legal immigrants who have protested Israel”.Further on immigration, a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll on Friday found that 53% of Americans now disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration matters, while 46% approve. In February the majority was the other way, with half of those surveyed approving of Trump’s approach on that issue.The Post reported that as support has drained away on this topic, at this point 90% of Democrats, 56% of independents and 11% of Republicans dislike the way Trump is dealing with immigration.The poor reviews have dogged Trump all week. An Associated Press poll on Thursday found that about half of US adults say that Trump’s trade policies will increase prices “a lot” and another three in 10 think prices could go up “somewhat”, and half of Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the possibility of the US economy going into a recession in the next few months.Polling conducted by the Trump-friendly Fox News has brought little respite. A survey published on Wednesday found that just 38% of Americans approve of Trump on the economy, with 56% disapproving.The Fox News poll found that 58% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s performance, and 59% disapproved on inflation. Just three in 10 Americans said they believed Trump’s policies were helping the economy, and only four in 10 said Trump’s policies will help the country.Among generation Z, generally regarded as those born between 1995 and 2012, a staggering 69% told pollsters for an NBC Stay Tuned survey that they don’t approve of Trump’s handling of the economy and the cost of living. Gen Z participants complained of struggling to even pay the rent in some places, let alone buy a home, and they worry about inflation.A minority of gen Z people polled thought the country would be stronger if more people lived by traditional binary gender roles and more than 90% of those polled said they believed foreign students with visas or green cards should have the same due process protections as US citizens. This comes amid the Trump administration declaring there are only two genders, male and female, and arresting and detaining some pro-Palestinian student activists without due process. More