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      White House to take choice of Pentagon chief of staff out of Hegseth’s hands

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      Exasperated by the turmoil that has dogged Pete Hegseth’s office in recent weeks, the White House will block the US defense secretary’s choice of chief of staff and select a candidate of its own, according to two people familiar with the matter.Hegseth had suggested giving the chief of staff position to Marine Col Ricky Buria after the first person in the role, Joe Kasper, left last month in the wake of a contentious leak investigation that brought the ouster of three other senior aides.But the White House has made clear to Hegseth that Buria will not be elevated to become his most senior aide at the Pentagon, the people said, casting Buria as a liability on account of his limited experience as a junior military assistant and his recurring role in internal office drama.“Ricky will not be getting the chief position,” one of the people directly familiar with deliberations said. “He doesn’t have adequate experience, lacks the political chops and is widely disliked by almost everyone in the White House who has been exposed to him.”The White House has always selected political appointees at agencies through the presidential personnel office, but the move to block Hegseth’s choice at this juncture is unusual and reflects Donald Trump’s intent to keep Hegseth by trying to insulate him from any more missteps.The intervention comes at a time when Hegseth’s ability to run the Pentagon has come under scrutiny. It also runs into the belief inside Trump’s orbit that even the president might struggle to justify Hegseth’s survival if the secretary does not have a scandal-free next few months.The secretary is not expected to have to fire Buria after he agreed to a compromise: to accept the White House’s choice for a new chief of staff in exchange for keeping Buria as a senior adviser, the people said. The White House and Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.The internal staffing situation at the Pentagon has outsize consequences because Hegseth’s front office is involved in policy deliberations and sensitive decision-making at the defense department, which has a budget of more than $800bn and oversees more than 2 million troops.Hegseth’s office is currently operating at a fraction of the size it normally does, with roughly five senior advisers. “There’s so much that’s not happening because no one is managing the front office,” an official with knowledge of the situation said.View image in fullscreenThe possibility of Buria becoming chief of staff spooked the White House for multiple reasons. For one, the White House presidential personnel office previously declined Hegseth’s request to make him a political appointee, but Buria has been operating in such a capacity anyway, two officials said.Buria appears to be considered by the career civilian employees in the deputy defense secretary’s office as the acting chief, not least because he recently moved into the chief of staff’s office and has taken steps to redecorate by bringing in new furniture, the officials said.Buria also recently failed to pass a polygraph test that was administered as part of the leak investigation. The polygraph came back as inconclusive, the officials said, a result that would ordinarily require him to retake the test before he could be cleared.In an additional twist, Buria was identified as having sent some of the messages in at least one Signal group chat about sensitive and imminent US missile strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, the officials said. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported on Buria’s access to Hegseth’s personal phone.Buria, a former MV-22 pilot who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, started his ascent at the Pentagon as a junior military assistant (JMA) under Joe Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. In the prestigious but unglamorous role, a JMA is something of a personal aide but with access to high-level operations.When Hegseth arrived, Buria continued his role as the JMA and quickly became close with Hegseth and his wife, Jennifer, traveling with the secretary and spending time at the secretary’s residence at Fort McNair.Buria’s influence expanded after Hegseth fired his boss, the air force Lt Gen Jennifer Short, who had been serving as the senior military assistant. Buria stepped into the job, typically held by a three-star officer, and joined bilateral meetings with foreign dignitaries. The National Pulse reported he also attended foreign policy briefings.When Army Lt Gen Christopher LaNeve arrived as Hegseth’s permanent senior military assistant, it was expected that Buria would return to his JMA position. Instead, he told officials he would retire from the military to become a political appointee in Hegseth’s office and took advantage of the power vacuum resulting from Kasper’s departure. More

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      Trump news at a glance: military to immediately remove trans troops and use medical records to oust more

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      “No More Trans @ DoD,” Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, posted after the supreme court allowed the Trump administration’s ousting of transgender troops to go forward. As of Thursday, the orders have been issued to identify and involuntarily force trans people out of service.Department officials have said it is difficult to determine exactly how many transgender service members there are, but medical records will show those who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, show symptoms or are being treated. Those troops would then be forced out.Separately, Britain has become the first country to strike a trade agreement with Donald Trump since his announcement of global tariffs on what he called “liberation day”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Up to 1,000 trans troops to be removed The Pentagon will immediately begin moving as many as 1,000 service members who identify as transgender out of the military and give others 30 days to self-identify, under a new directive issued on Thursday.Buoyed up by Tuesday’s supreme court decision allowing the Trump administration to enforce a ban on transgender individuals in the military, the defense department will then begin going through medical records to identify others who have not come forward.Read the full storyUS and UK agree ‘breakthrough’ trade dealThe UK and US have agreed a “breakthrough” trade agreement slashing some of Donald Trump’s tariffs on cars, aluminium and steel. The UK prime minister said the deal would save thousands of British jobs.Keir Starmer said it was a “fantastic, historic day” as he announced the agreement, the first by the White House since Trump announced sweeping global tariffs last month.Read the full storyVance says Kashmir crisis ‘none of our business’JD Vance has said that the US will not intervene in the conflict between Pakistan and India, calling fighting between the two nuclear powers “fundamentally none of our business”.The remarks came during an interview with Fox News, where the US vice-president said that the US would seek to de-escalate the conflict but could force neither side to “lay down their arms”.“Our hope and our expectation is that this is not going to spiral into a broader regional war or, God forbid, a nuclear conflict,” Vance said. “Right now, we don’t think that’s going to happen.”Read the full storyTrump names Fox host to replace pick for DC’s top prosecutorDonald Trump on Thursday said he would look for a new candidate for the role of top federal prosecutor in Washington DC, after a key Republican senator said he would not support the loyalist initially selected for the job.He then named Fox News host and former judge Jeanine Pirro for the job.Read the full storyUS House approves Trump’s renaming of Gulf of MexicoRepublicans in the House of Representatives on Thursday approved legislation to codify Donald Trump’s policy of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”. The measure was sponsored by rightwing Georgia lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene and passed nearly along party lines, with all Democrats opposed and almost every Republican, with the exception of Nebraska representative Don Bacon, voting in favour.Read the full storyTrump invokes state secrets in case of wrongly deported manThe Trump administration is invoking the “state secrets privilege” in an apparent attempt to avoid answering a judge’s questions about its erroneous deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García to El Salvador.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Trump’s top trade adviser Peter Navarro told reporters that British consumers will like chicken and beef imported from the US despite the use of chlorine and hormones. “Let’s see what the market decides,” Navarro said, adding: “We don’t believe that once they taste American beef and chicken that they would prefer not to have it.”

      The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer track the cost of climate crisis-fuelled weather disasters, including floods, heatwaves, wildfires and more. It is the latest example of changes to the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government resources on climate change.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 7 May. More

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      US to begin immediate removal of up to 1,000 trans military members

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      The Pentagon is removing the 1,000 members of the military who openly identify as trans, and giving those who have yet to openly-identify as transgender 30 days to remove themselves, according to a new directive issued Thursday.The memo is fueled by Tuesday’s supreme court decision allowing the Trump administration to enforce a ban on trans military members. The defense department has said it will follow up by going through medical records to identify others who haven’t come forward.Officials have said that as of 9 December 2024, there were 4,240 troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria in active duty, national guard and reserve service, representing a tiny fraction – of the 2 million people in service, although they acknowledge the number may be higher.The memo released on Thursday mirrors one sent out in February, but any action was stalled at that point by several lawsuits. When the initial Pentagon directive came out earlier this year, it gave service members 30 days to self-identify. Since then, about 1,000 have done so.In a statement, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the 1,000 troops who already self-identified “will begin the voluntary separation process” from the military.Rae Timberlake, a spokesperson for Sparta Pride, is one of the 1,000 who chose to self-identify. Timberlake has served in the Navy for 17 years and said that trans service members who don’t take the current buyout offer could lose out on benefits that took years of service to build.“There’s no guarantee to access to your pension or severance or an honorable discharge,” Timberlake said.Despite Timberlake’s decision to leave, they said many trans troops would continue serving if allowed to.“This is not voluntary. This is a decision that folks are coming to under duress,” Timberlake said. “These are 1,000 transgender troops that would be serving if the conditions were not created to force them into making a decision for their own wellbeing, or the wellbeing of their family long-term.”The move is the latest by the Trump administration taking aim at trans members of the military and trans veterans. After Trump took office and issued a flurry of gender-focused executive orders, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) started cracking down on healthcare for LGBTQ+ veterans, starting with the rescinding of VA directive 1341, thereby phasing out treatments for gender dysphoria.The expulsion of trans service members comes in tandem with the secretary of defense Pete Hegseth’s past views that women are not suited for combat roles, at a time when military recruitment is profoundly struggling and veterans have voiced concerns that potential VA cuts could further hinder young Americans from enlisting.Announcing the removals on Thursday, Hegseth doubled down on his hardline approach. “We are leaving WOKENESS AND WEAKNESS behind. No more pronouns,” Hegseth wrote in a post on X on Thursday. “We are done with that sh*t.” More

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      US supreme court allows Trump trans military ban to take effect

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      The Trump administration can begin to enforce a ban on transgender troops serving in the military while a challenge to the policy plays out in the courts, the supreme court ruled on Tuesday, a significant decision that could lead to the discharge of thousands of military members.The court’s order was unsigned and gave no explanation for its reasoning, which is typical of decisions the justices reach on an emergency basis. The court’s three liberal members – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – all noted their dissent from the decision.Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which represented challengers in the case, called the decision “a devastating blow to transgender servicemembers”.“By allowing this discriminatory ban to take effect while our challenge continues, the Court has temporarily sanctioned a policy that has nothing to do with military readiness and everything to do with prejudice,” the groups said in a statement. “Transgender individuals meet the same standards and demonstrate the same values as all who serve. We remain steadfast in our belief that this ban violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection and will ultimately be struck down.”Immediately after coming into office, Donald Trump rescinded an executive order from the Biden administration that allowed transgender people to serve openly in the military. On 27 January, the president issued a second executive order that said transgender people couldn’t serve in the military.“It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity,” the order said. “This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.” The defense department began implementing the ban at the end of February.A defense department estimate from earlier this year said there were 4,240 people in the military with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria – roughly 0.2 % of the 2 million people currently serving.Seven transgender servicemembers and one transgender person who would like to join the military challenged the ban. Lawyers for the lead platiniff, navy pilot Emily Shilling, said the military had spent $20m on her training, according to SCOTUSBlog.Several lower courts had halted the ban. The case before the supreme court involved a ruling from US district court judge Benjamin Settle, who blocked the ban in March.“The government’s arguments are not persuasive, and it is not an especially close question on this record,” Settle, an appointee of George W Bush, wrote at the time. “The government’s unrelenting reliance on deference to military judgment is unjustified in the absence of any evidence supporting ‘the military’s’ new judgment reflected in the Military Ban.”Another judge, Ana Reyes, of the US district court in Washington DC, also blocked the ban, saying it was “soaked with animus and dripping with pretext”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration asked the supreme court to intervene last month. “The district court issued a universal injunction usurping the Executive Branch’s authority to determine who may serve in the Nation’s armed forces,” John Sauer, the US solicitor general, wrote in a brief to the court.Trump’s ban is broader than a similar policy enacted during his first term. The previous policy allowed those who had come out before the ban to continue to serve in the military. The more recent policy affects nearly all active serving transgender members.Pausing the order, Shilling’s lawyers said, would “upend the status quo by allowing the government to immediately begin discharging thousands of transgender servicemembers … thereby ending distinguished careers and gouging holes in military units”.A majority of Americans support allowing transgender people to serve in the military, according to a February Gallup poll. However, there is a sharp partisan split. While 84% of Democrats favor such a policy, only 23% of Republicans do. More

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      Trump news at a glance: president floats Pentagon budget boost; army may hold parade for his birthday

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      The Trump administration is considering cuts worth $163bn to departments including health and education as well as environmental schemes while increasing spending on defense, according to a White House budget blueprint.In contrast to the squeeze on discretionary social programmes, the administration is planning a 13% rise – to more than $1tn – in the Pentagon budget, a commitment at odds with Donald Trump’s frequent vows to end the US’s involvement in “forever wars” in the Middle East and elsewhere.The budget draft was circulated as reports emerged of a huge military parade planned to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US army as well as Trump’s birthday.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump plans $163bn cuts in non-defense spendingDonald Trump is proposing huge cuts to social programmes like health and education while planning substantial spending increases on defense and the Department of Homeland Security, in a White House budget blueprint that starkly illustrates his preoccupation with projecting military strength and deterring migration.Read the full storyUS army may hold parade on Trump birthdayDetailed army plans for a potential military parade on Trump’s birthday in June call for more than 6,600 soldiers, at least 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, seven bands and possibly a couple of thousand civilians, the Associated Press has learned.At the same time, Fox News reported that the parade was a definite go-ahead and would happen on 14 June, the 250th birthday of the US army as well as Trump’s own birthday, when he will turn 79.Read the full storyJudge rules Trump order targeting law firm Perkins Coie is unconstitutionalA federal judge on Friday permanently struck down Donald Trump’s executive order that targeted the firm Perkins Coie, which once worked with his 2016 presidential election rival Hillary Clinton, after declaring in an extraordinary ruling that the order was unconstitutional and unlawful.Read the full storySupreme court justice condemns Trump anti-law rhetoricThe US supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has condemned the Trump administration’s attacks on the judiciary in a cutting speech at a judicial conference.Without mentioning Donald Trump by name, Jackson spoke of “the elephant in the room” and rhetoric from the White House “designed to intimidate the judiciary”.“ Across the nation, judges are facing increased threats of not only physical violence, but also professional retaliation just for doing our jobs,” Jackson said on Thursday evening, according to the New York Times. “And the attacks are not random. They seem designed to intimidate  those of us who serve in this critical capacity.”Read the full storyTrump orders funding cut for public broadcastersThe US president has signed an executive order that seeks to cut public funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, accusing them of leftwing bias. The order, signed late on Thursday, directs the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which sends funds to NPR and PBS, to “cease federal funding” for the two outlets.Read the full storyTrump officials agree to halt school funding freeze in MaineThe Trump administration has agreed not to freeze funds to Maine schools, a win for a state that was targeted by the president over its support of transgender rights.Read the full storyTrump pardons cost public $1bn, ex-official saysThe justice department’s pardon attorney, who was recently fired, has claimed on social media that Trump’s recent wave of pardoning white-collar criminals has erased more than “$1bn in debts owed by wealthy Americans” to the public purse.Read the full storyUS jobs fare better than expected amid tariffsHiring in the US slowed in April, according to official figures, with the workforce adding 177,000 jobs as Trump’s aggressive trade strategy clouded the economic outlook. As the White House pressed ahead with sweeping tariffs on overseas imports, claiming this would revitalize the US economy, employers across the country continued to add jobs at a steady pace.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Marco Rubio is slated to keep his dual roles as secretary of state and national security adviser for at least six months and the positions could even become permanent, according to Politico. Rubio’s placement was not meant to be a temporary slot-in, reports Politico, which cites three senior White House officials.

      Photographs taken at Trump’s cabinet meeting this week have revealed that top White House officials are now communicating using an even less secure version of the Signal messaging app than was at the center of a huge national security scandal last month.

      The Trump administration has ordered the closure of 25 scientific centers that monitor US waters for flooding and drought, and manage supply levels to ensure communities around the country don’t run out of water.

      Trump said again on Friday that he would be “taking away” Harvard’s tax-exempt status as a non-profit in a legally questionable move that escalates his ongoing feud with the elite university.

      The White House plans to cut staffing at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by 1,200 positions while other intelligence agencies including the National Security Agency (NSA) will also shed thousands of jobs, the Washington Post has reported.

      A mother deported to Cuba reportedly had to hand over her 17-month-old daughter to a lawyer while her husband, a US citizen, stood outside unable to say goodbye.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 1 May 2025. More

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      UK launches Yemen airstrikes, joining intense US campaign against Houthi rebels

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      British fighter jets joined their US counterparts in airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels overnight, the first military action authorised by the Labour government and the first UK participation in an aggressive American bombing campaign against the group.RAF Typhoons, refuelled by Voyager air tankers, targeted a cluster of buildings 15 miles south of the capital, Sana’a, which the UK said were used by the Houthis to manufacture drones that had targeted shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.The British defence secretary, John Healey, said the attack was launched in response to “a persistent threat from the Houthis to freedom of navigation”. The Iran-backed group has attacked merchant shipping and western warships, leading to a sharp drop in trade flows.“A 55% drop in shipping through the Red Sea has already cost billions, fuelling regional instability and risking economic security for families in the UK,” Healey added in a social media post shortly after midnight.Further updates were expected from the UK later on Wednesday.Britain had joined with the US to conduct five rounds of airstrikes against the Houthis between January and May 2024, part of a campaign authorised by the Biden administration, but has not been involved in a fresh and more intense US effort until now.Since the launch on 15 March of Operation Rough Rider under the Trump administration, 800 targets have been struck resulting in the deaths of “hundreds of Houthi fighters and numerous Houthi leaders”, according to the US military’s Central Command.There have also been reports of higher civilian casualties. This week, the Houthis said 68 people were killed when a detention centre holding African migrants was struck in Saada, north-west Yemen, while 80 civilians were reported to have died in an attack on the port of Ras Isa on 18 April.Annie Shiel, the US director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict (Civic), said the “US strikes continue to raise significant questions about the precautions taken to prevent civilian harm, as required by both international law and US policy”, and noted that there appeared to have been a shift in policy under Donald Trump.Overnight on Tuesday, the UK said it had taken steps to minimise the risk of civilian casualties. The Houthi buildings were targeted with Paveway IV missiles once, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said, “very careful planning had been completed to allow the targets to be prosecuted with minimal risk to civilians or non-military infrastructure”.The MoD also emphasised that “as a further precaution, the strike was conducted after dark, when the likelihood of any civilians being in the area was reduced yet further”, though no damage assessment was offered.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere was little immediate comment from the US, though the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has emphasised that the American military must emphasise “lethality, lethality, lethality” and has cut programmes intended to minimise civilian harm.News agencies said the Houthis reported several strikes around Sana’a, which the group has held since 2014, but there were few other details immediately available. Other strikes hit the area around Saada.The Houthis are targeting shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in support of Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza, subject of a renewed offensive by Israel. Though the US boasts considerably more firepower than the group, a $60m (£45m) US navy F-18 Super Hornet jet was lost at sea on Tuesday.US officials said initial reports from the scene indicated the USS Harry S Truman aircraft carrier, on to which the F-18 was being towed, made a hard turn to evade Houthi fire. That contributed to the fighter jet falling overboard and sinking.The start of Operation Rough Rider caused controversy in the US over Hegseth’s use of the unclassified Signal messaging app to post sensitive details about the attacks, including a group containing a journalist. More

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      The uniting theme of Trump’s presidency? Ineptitude | Robert Reich

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      Some Democrats fear they’re playing into Donald Trump’s hands by fighting his mass deportations rather than focusing on his failures on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living.But it’s not either-or. The theme that unites Trump’s inept handling of deportations, his trampling on human and civil rights, his rejection of the rule of law, his dictatorial centralization of power, and his utterly inept handling of the economy is the ineptness itself.In his first term, not only did his advisers and cabinet officials put guardrails around his crazier tendencies, but they also provided his first administration a degree of stability and focus. Now, it’s mayhem.A sampling from recent weeks:1. The Pete Hegseth disaster. The defense secretary didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of the Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother and personal lawyer.He’s a walking disaster. John Ullyot, who resigned last week as Pentagon spokesperson, penned an op-ed in Politico that began: “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” Last Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers. His chief of staff is leaving. As Ullyot wrote, it’s “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” will come soon. The defense department “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership”.It’s not just the defense department. Much of the federal government is in disarray.2. The Harvard debacle. A Trump official is now claiming that a letter full of demands about university policy sent to Harvard on 11 April was “unauthorized”. What does this even mean?As Harvard pointed out, the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the US government – even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach – do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”Even though it was “unauthorized”, the Trump regime is standing by the letter, which has now prompted Harvard to sue.3. The tariff travesty. No sooner had Trump imposed “retaliatory” tariffs on almost all of the US’s trading partners – based on a formula that has made no sense to anyone – than the US stock and bond markets began crashing.To stop the selloff, Trump declared a 90-day pause on the retaliatory tariffs but raised his tariffs on China to 145% – causing markets to plummet once again.Presumably to stem the impending economic crisis, he declared an exemption to the China tariffs for smartphones and computer equipment. By doing so, Trump essentially admitted what he had before denied: that importers and consumers bear the cost of tariffs.Now, Trump is saying that even his China tariffs aren’t really real. Following warnings from Walmart, Target and Home Depot that the tariffs would spike prices, Trump termed the tariffs he imposed on China “very high” and promised they “will come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.”Markets soared on the news. But where in the world are we heading?4. The attack on the Fed chair fiasco. When Trump renewed his attacks on Jerome H Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve – calling him “a major loser” and demanding that the Fed cut interest rates – Trump unnerved already anxious investors who understand the importance of the Fed’s independence and feared that a politicized Fed wouldn’t be able to credibly fight inflation.Then, in another about-face, Trump said on Wednesday he had “no intention” of firing Powell, which also helped lift markets.An economy needs predictability. Investors won’t invest, consumers won’t buy, and producers won’t produce if everything continues to change. But Trump doesn’t think ahead. He responds only to immediate threats and problems.Who’s profiting from all this tumult? Anyone with inside knowledge of what Trump is about to do: most likely, Trump and his family.5. The Kilmar Ábrego García calamity. After the Trump regime admitted an “administrative error” in sending Ábrego García to a brutal Salvadoran torture prison, in violation of a federal court order, Trump then virtually ignored a 9-0 supreme court order to facilitate his return.To the contrary, with cameras rolling in the Oval Office, Trump embraced Nayib Bukele – who governs El Salvador in a permanent state of emergency and has himself imprisoned 83,000 people in brutal dungeons, mostly without due process. Trump then speculated about using Bukele’s prisons for “homegrown” (ie, American-born) criminals or dissidents.Meanwhile, after the Trump regime deported another group of immigrants to the Salvadoran prison under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law, the supreme court blocked it from deporting any more people under the measure.6. Ice’s blunderbuss. Further illustrating the chaos of the Trump regime, immigration officials have been detaining US citizens. One American was held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Arizona for 10 days until his relatives produced papers proving his citizenship, because, according to his girlfriend’s aunt, Ice didn’t believe he was American.Last week, the Trump regime abruptly took action to restore the legal status of thousands of international students who had been told in recent weeks that their right to study in the United States had been rescinded, but officials reserved the right to terminate their legal status at any time. What?Freedom depends on the rule of law. The rule of law depends on predictability. Just like Trump’s wildly inconsistent economic policies, his policies on immigration are threatening everyone.7. Musk’s ‘Doge’ disaster. Musk’s claims of government savings have been shown to be ludicrously exaggerated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRemember the claim that taxpayers funded $50m in condoms in Gaza? This was supposed to be the first big “gotcha” from the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), but as we know now, it was a lie. The US government buys condoms for about 5 cents apiece, which means $50m would buy 1bn condoms or roughly 467 for every resident of Gaza. Besides, according to a federal 2024 report, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) didn’t provide or fund any condoms in the entire Middle East in the 2021, 2022 or 2023 fiscal years.Then there have been the frantic callbacks of fired federal workers, such as up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration who work on sensitive jobs such as reassembling warheads. Four days after Doge fired them, the agency’s acting director rescinded the firings and asked them back. Similar callbacks have occurred throughout the government.Trump and Musk are threatening the safety and security of Americans – for almost no real savings.8. Measles mayhem. As measles breaks out across the country, sickening hundreds and killing at least two children so far, Trump’s secretary for health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, continues to claim that the measles vaccine “causes deaths every year … and all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera”.In fact, the measles vaccine is safe, and its risks are lower than the risks of complications from measles. Most people who get the measles vaccine have no serious problems from it, the CDC says. There have been no documented deaths from the vaccine in healthy, non-immunocompromised people, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.Kennedy also says: “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the [measles] vaccine wanes very quickly.” In fact, the measles vaccine is highly protective and lasts a lifetime for most people. Two doses of the vaccine are 97% effective against the virus, according to the CDC and medical experts worldwide. The US saw 3m to 4m cases a year before the vaccine. Today it’s typically fewer than 200.9. Student debt snafu. After a five-year pause on penalizing borrowers for not making student loan payments, the Trump regime is about to require households to resume payments. This could cause credit scores to plunge and slow the economy.Many of the households required to resume paying on their student loans are also struggling with credit card debt at near-record interest rates and high-rate mortgages they thought they would be able to refinance at a lower rate but haven’t. Instead of increasing education department staffing to handle a work surge and clarifying the often shifting rules of its many repayment programs, the Trump regime has done the opposite and cut staff.10. Who’s in charge? In the span of a single week, the IRS had three different leaders. Three days after Gary Shapley was named acting commissioner, it was announced that the deputy treasury secretary, Michael Faulkender, would replace Shapley. That was the same day, not incidentally, that the IRS cut access to the agency for Doge’s top representative.What happened? The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, told Trump that Musk had evaded him to install Shapley.Meanwhile, the Trump regime is cutting the IRS in half – starting with 6,700 layoffs and gutting the division that audits people with excessive wealth. These are the people meant to keep billionaires accountable. Without them, the federal government will not take in billions of dollars owed.At the same time, the trade adviser Peter Navarro has entered into a public spat with Musk, accusing him of not being a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla relies on parts from around the world. This prompted Musk to call Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, later posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks”.The state department has been torn apart by the firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling USAID, by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state. Career officials charged that Marocco, a Maga loyalist, was destroying the agency; Trump’s Maga followers view Marocco’s firing as a sign that Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.Worse yet, Trump has fired more than a half-dozen national security officials after meeting with the far-right agitator Lara Loomer, who was granted access to the Oval Office and gave Trump a list of officials she deemed disloyal.Bottom line: no one is in charge. Trump is holding court but has the attention span of a fruit fly. This is causing chaos across the federal government, as rival sycophants compete for his limited attention.Incompetence is everywhere. The regime can’t keep military secrets. It can’t maintain financial stability. It can’t protect children from measles. It cannot protect America.While we need to continue to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, we also need to highlight his utter inability to govern America.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      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